Hard Crash - Christie Golden [5]
For in the center of the room, its decaying limbs splayed at an odd angle, a corpse was strapped into a chair.
"So it did have a crew," said La Forge softly, sadly.
"Or at least a pilot," said Gomez. Duffy admired the calmness of her voice. Sometimes it was hard to believe this was the same big-eyed girl who'd spilled hot chocolate all over Captain Picard just a few short years ago. But of course, she wasn't really the same. She had changed, just as he had, in the intervening decade or so. Gomez stepped forward and shone her wristlight over the humanoid body.
La Forge and Duffy and stepped beside her. Duffy began to take tricorder readings.
"As Lieutenant La Forge reported earlier, the atmosphere in here is perfectly breathable," he said to whoever was listening. "It never shut down after the pilot's death. That's why the body's rotting."
"Let's not take our suits off just yet, shall we?" said La Forge. Faulwell and 110, less interested in the dead body than in the computer that might be coaxed to yield information, stepped over to the consoles and began to analyze them. They spoke together in low voices, Faulwell occasionally bending over to hear 110 better. They seemed to be having a hard time figuring out where to begin. For the first time in a while, Duffy heard the oddly musical sound of the Bynar language as 110 adjusted the blinking buffer he always kept at his side. Duffy wondered why 110 was talking in his native tongue. Could he simply have forgotten there was no one here who could understand him?
La Forge tapped his comm badge. "La Forge to da Vinci."
"Go ahead, La Forge," came Gold's voice.
"It appears there was a crew on this vessel, Captain," La Forge continued. Duffy examined his tricorder as he spoke. Out of the corner of his eye, Duffy saw something on the floor and directed his tricorder at it.
"A single pilot," said La Forge. "Humanoid. It appears to be female."
"Injured in the crash?"
"Negative. It looks as though she was strapped into the seat. Hard to say how long she's been dead. Long enough for decay to set in." La Forge stepped closer to the corpse, his face almost touching that of the dead pilot. "No obvious trauma."
Duffy knelt and regarded the piece of equipment on the floor. According to his readings, it was the alien equivalent of a tricorder. Gingerly, he reached to pick it up. It was about the size of an old-style tricorder and weighed about as much. They could take this back to the ship and analyze it while Faulwell and 110 continued to work on the computer here.
He glanced over at the linguist and the Bynar, and frowned to himself. 110 seemed to be having a hard time cracking the ship's computer, and Faulwell was looking a tad impatient. I'm sure it would be much faster if 111 was still with us, Duffy thought. Although even a single Bynar is usually several times faster than any human in accessing a computer.
"No, wait," said Gomez. She was squatting on the other side of the humanoid in the chair, examining the fastenings. "Look at this, Commander."
Both Duffy and La Forge moved to shine their wristlights where Gomez had indicated. La Forge inhaled swiftly, but otherwise gave no indication of how startled he must be. Duffy gaped, seasoned Starfleet officer though he was.
"Correction, Captain Gold," Geordi said. "The pilot appears to be impaled upon the chair."
That got Bart's attention. His head whipped around and he gazed, frowning, at the corpse in the chair. Leaving the Bynar alone for the moment with the conundrum of the computer that would not yield its information, he strode quickly over to the rest of the team.
"Geez, will you look at that. You're right," he said, distaste in his voice. As rigor mortis had set in, the arms had pulled back from the metal of the chair. Three spikes