Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [14]
But his attention was focused on the power-supply junction just ahead of them, its location easily identifiable by the little door set flush with the bulkhead. It was the second such junction they had passed since leaving the turbolift.
Ulelo’s previous assignment had been on the Copernicus, an Oberth-class vessel. The Copernicus had had twelve power-supply junctions on each deck.
“You’ll work the graveyard shift, of course.” Paxton smiled sympathetically at him. “Just as I did when I was low man on the totem pole. But just for a few weeks. Then we’ll all take turns.”
“Of course,” said Ulelo.
“So what do you like?”
Ulelo looked at him. “Like?”
“You know,” said Paxton. “Food, hobbies, interests . . . ?”
“Ah.” Ulelo thought for a moment, but nothing came to mind. “I don’t have any real preferences.”
Paxton seemed surprised. “Really?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“Most people have pretty distinct likes and dislikes. Me, for instance, I’m a coffee man. Can’t wake up without it. And when it comes to hobbies, I’m a medieval history buff.”
“I like to try new things,” Ulelo said, hoping that would assuage his superior’s curiosity.
Paxton nodded. “Then you’re going to like it here even more. We’ve got some really exotic tastes on board. Take Vigo, for instance—our weapons officer. He eats this Pandrilite stuff that looks like beach sand mixed with ground glass. Swears by it. Personally, I have trouble even looking at it.”
He laughed. Ulelo took that as his cue to laugh too.
They came to a place where the corridor crossed another corridor. Paxton turned right. So did Ulelo—at which point he saw the set of double doors at the end of the corridor.
Paxton pointed to them. “Next stop, engineering.”
Ulelo nodded. There would be many things to see in engineering. Many things to learn.
“I can’t wait,” he said.
Carter Greyhorse was sitting at his computer terminal, going over his list of scheduled medical examinations, when his first patient of the day walked in.
She was wearing a complete Starfleet-issue containment suit, domed helmet and all. That alone set her apart from anyone else who had ever visited Greyhorse’s sickbay.
But even stranger-looking was her face—if indeed it could even be called a face. It seemed vague, insubstantial as he viewed it through the helmet’s curved, transparent faceplate, and there was only a suggestion in it of humanoid features.
She looked around for a moment, her movements stiff and awkward in the suit. Finally, she spotted Greyhorse and crossed sickbay to get to him.
As the doctor got up and came out of his office enclosure, he forced himself not to stare. But it was difficult not to. He had been looking forward to this moment from the time the newcomers beamed aboard—one of them with more trouble than the rest.
“You’re Ensign Jiterica, I take it?”
“Yes,” came the reply—not an actual voice but a mechanical simulation, generated by a vocalizer in the containment suit. It sounded flat, tinny, and oddly paced. “I’m here for—”
“Your exam,” he said, “yes. This way, please.”
Greyhorse indicated the nearest biobed, which was just outside his enclosure. He had just recalibrated it the day before.
“Have a seat,” he told Jiterica.
The doctor waited for her to reach the biobed and sit down—a clumsy affair at best, given the bulk of the containment suit. Then he activated the bed’s biofunction monitors, ran a routine diagnostic, and examined the monitors in front of him.
Normally they would have shown Greyhorse the status of his patient’s vital functions, each of them represented by a vertical white bar against a dark blue field. In this case, the bars refused to appear. In their place, a message came up: Reset parameters.
Clearly the bed was baffled—and that wouldn’t change even if the doctor spent his whole day resetting parameters. The device was simply incapable of tracking Jiterica’s life signs.
Nor was Greyhorse surprised.
After all, his patient wasn’t a creature of flesh and blood like everyone else serving on the Stargazer. Jiterica was an anomaly in the annals