Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [46]
Had Maury returned from the canteen and passed by the nurse’s station without Crusher noticing? But, no, that didn’t feel right. She wasn’t that tired. Crusher started toward Maddox’s room, but stopped when someone close behind her said, “Doctor Crusher?”
Startled, she spun around and felt her hand come into contact with a cup of hot coffee. Crusher’s senses, already jump-started by the shadowy form in Maddox’s room, went into overdrive. Time slowed down. The mug and the steaming liquid made a very pretty parabola. The ruckus brought Data running and Maury, who had never before seen a gold-skinned, yellow-eyed android, yelped and jumped out of the way. Data lost his footing in the puddle of coffee and only kept himself from flopping over backward onto the floor by grabbing Crusher’s outstretched hand.
“I’m sorry!” Crusher said—much too loudly—while simultaneously trying to look back over her shoulder toward Maddox’s room. All she succeeded in doing, however, was badly twisting her left ankle. “Dammit!” she shouted, trying to keep Data on his feet while at the same time trying not to put any weight on her injured ankle.
“What is it?” Maury shouted. “What’s going on?”
“Maddox,” she tried to say, pointing toward the room, hopping on one foot. Maury didn’t wait for another word, but took off for the room, Data at her heels. She was the last to reach the room and leaned heavily on the doorframe, favoring her ankle. Maury was checking all the monitors and looking puzzled.
“What was it?” she asked, confusion in her voice. “I don’t see anything.”
And neither did Crusher. Everything looked perfectly normal. The biobed blinked contentedly. Maddox’s heart beat steadily. He breathed in and out and dreamed who knew what dreams?
“I … I don’t know,” Crusher said. “I was sure I saw someone … Data, give me a hand back down the hall.” Data grabbed her arm and half-guided, half-carried her back to the nurse’s station.
Maury was standing on the other side of the station looking down at the two of them. “Would someone please tell me what just happened?” she asked, her voice cracking a little.
Crusher looked up at the nurse and smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know. But I think I might need some sleep.”
“Good,” Maury replied, accepting the apology, “because I don’t think any more coffee is a good idea.”
Maury went to get the muscle regenerator, leaving Crusher standing on one foot. She scanned the hall, willing something to be out of place. But nothing was, which only made her that much more angry.
Chapter Thirteen
RHEA MCADAMS SNORED.
Loudly.
Data found this entrancing.
Upon returning to his lab, he found McAdams leaning on a console, her head cushioned on her forearms, with a tiny bead of saliva suspended from the corner of her mouth. At first, he didn’t know what to do, having very little experience with sleeping people. Though he could “sleep,” that is, shut down his system to a degree and enter a state resembling human unconsciousness, it was not something that he had to do. Rather, it was something he did because he found it interesting and even, occasionally, revealing. He could also dream—the part of sleeping he found most intriguing—and enjoyed replaying and analyzing the random images his subsystems generated.
But he had very little experience with the social customs involving human sleep. Should he leave? Somehow announce his presence? Move as quietly as possible?
Rhea solved the problem for him by waking on her own, stirred by the sound of the doors as he entered. She lifted her head and Data noticed that the side of her face was mottled with red stripes because the sleeve she had rested her head against was wrinkled. A lock of hair stuck out at an odd angle. He was captivated by these things, too. Rhea yawned. “What time is it?”
“It is seventeen hundred hours, forty-five minutes,” Data replied. He almost added, “And