Hard Crash - Christie Golden [9]
Gomez stepped closer, looking down at the Bynar with her arms folded tightly across her chest. "No one's really sure," she said. "He was attempting to interface with the computer aboard the alien ship when it appeared to send a massive shock throughout his system. He was caught in it for a few seconds, and then it shot him across the room. We had him beamed up the instant he was released."
Lense extended a hand for Gomez's tricorder, which had captured the whole event. She reviewed it in silence, Em peering over her shoulder.
"Who was working with him, or was he by himself?" asked Lense, handing the tricorder back to Gomez.
"Bart was with him at first, but he came over to look at the pilot's remains after we noticed the--the holes."
Lense glanced up sharply at the hesitation in the other woman's voice. As a previous victim of burnout herself, she was always keenly alert to the manifestation of the symptoms in others. But Gomez appeared to be all right.
"Holes?" Lense demanded.
"Of course. You were so busy keeping 110 stable you haven't had a chance to look at the body," said Gomez. "There were holes in each of the arms. It was impaled on the chair."
Lense glanced quickly over at the pilot's body. Sure enough, there were three holes in the lower arms. Gomez was clearly a little rattled, and who wouldn't be, upon discovering a body that had seemingly been impaled on sharp spikes in the command center of an alien vessel which had just gone on a city-wide rampage? Gomez wouldn't be human if that hadn't unnerved her, at least a little.
"The pilot's not going anywhere," she said with a touch of black humor. "Right now I'm more interested in 110. Did he do anything, touch any specific button? He had to have triggered something, or else the computer would have exploded the minute he tried to interface with it."
"You'd think so," said Gomez, moving hesitantly to stand beside the Bynar. "And he probably did, but no one was watching."
"What about his own tricorder?"
"He hadn't activated it. He never does." She looked miserable. "Captain Gold's reprimanded him about it before. It's just not in the Bynar nature. Between their evolved brains and the buffer they carry with them at all times, they seem to have everything they need."
"Perhaps when they're on Bynar, but not when they're all the way out here," snapped Elizabeth. It was too bad that they couldn't translate the information stored on 110's omnipresent buffer. But only the Bynars could figure out that gibberish. "If he'd recorded what happened in a way we could understand, we'd be a lot closer to knowing how to help him."
"The pilot," said Em slowly.
Lense and Gomez turned as one to regard him. "What about the pilot?" demanded Gomez.
E m seemed a little uncomfortable at suddenly being the center of attention. "Well," he began, "according to your tricorder, Commander, the incident occurred as the pilot's body was being transported out. We've seen that it was attached in some fashion--you used the word 'impaled'--directly to the ship. Perhaps there were sensors that were triggered when the body was removed from the chair. The ship has to be operating on automatic commands. Maybe the removal of the pilot activated it."
"Very good, Emmett!" said Elizabeth. She was proud of the EMH's deductive reasoning, but a little embarrassed that she hadn't had figured it out herself. A quick glance at Gomez confirmed that the other woman shared her discomfiture.
Lense turned back to the supine figure of the Bynar. "There are first degree burns on his hands and face," she said. Whatever had happened to him had been bad enough to burn right through his protective gear. "Em, can you take care of those for me, please?"
"Certainly, Doctor," Em replied, and began to run the dermal regenerator over the injured flesh while Lense continued.
"There appears to be no permanent damage to the brain. If he'd been human, there might have been, but Bynar brains are set up to be able to handle bursts of computer-generated