Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [67]
And then the captain was there standing next to her, laying his hand on her shoulder and Troi felt some of the crushing weight lift from her. “Commander,” he said softly. “Deanna, I need you now. I need you to help hold the crew together. If he’s truly gone, more than ever, I need you. They need you. Can you do this?”
Slowly, she lifted her head and looked into her captain’s eyes, read the concern there, and nodded, her jaw set.
Picard nodded back and started to turn when Troi received a hail from the planet and put it on the main viewscreen.
It was Dr. Crusher. She was standing in the DIT’s infirmary next to a pair of beds. On one of them sat Commander Bruce Maddox, looking slightly confused and a little wan, but otherwise awake and aware.
On the other Reg Barclay and Will Riker sat, both drinking out of steaming mugs. A medic was dressing a nasty-looking cut on Barclay’s forehead and Riker had a swelling abrasion under his eye, but, overall, they appeared to be in passably good health, especially considering that they should both be dead.
Beverly was looking out for us, Troi realized. She must have found a way to use the infirmary’s emergency transporters to lock onto Will and Reg, and beamed them off the pod before it was destroyed.
The captain had apparently drawn the same conclusion. “I see you’ve been busy. Well done, Doctor.”
Crusher looked exhausted, but no less pleased. “And I understand you’ve been keeping my medical staff busy. I’ll be beaming up in a moment, but as for these three …” She nodded her head toward the patients behind her. “I’m afraid I can’t take all the credit.”
“No?” Picard asked.
“No,” Crusher replied. “I had help.” Crusher turned to the man who was treating Reg’s head and said, “Could you come over here, please?”
The med-tech turned and smiled into the pickup, then waved at the bridge crew. Troi repressed the absurd desire to wave back, noticing that a section of skin at the man’s temple had been removed, exposing an android’s skull. “Hello, Captain, Counselor. I guess it would be an understatement to say we have a few things to talk about.”
It was Sam.
Chapter Seventeen
RHEA MCADAMS CAREFULLY TORE Data’s uniform shirt away from the wound in his left shoulder. Opening a panel in the bulkhead, she pulled out a small tool kit and set it down on the floor beside her leg. Data watched all of these simple movements and wondered why it seemed to take an eternity for her to complete each one.
He could not move his head, could barely move his eyes, so Data did not see any of the contents of the kit until she picked up a small probe and inserted it into the wound in his shoulder. There was no pain of course, though it did produce a strange invasive sensation and he would have shuddered if he could. The cataloging of this perception, too, seemed to require an inordinate amount of time.
Rhea left the probe in the wound, then flipped open a tricorder unlike any Data had ever seen. He tried to itemize the differences between the device and Starfleet’s standard tricorder, but despite the fact that he had been staring at it for more than four seconds, he could not effectively focus his thoughts.
“You’re hemorrhaging internally,” Rhea said calmly, “but I can’t find where.” Or rather, this is what Data guessed Rhea said. He heard it as, “You’re hemorrhag___int____ly, but I can’t____where.” His language processing center labored for several seconds to try to fill in the blanks until he came up with the most likely interpretation, by which time Rhea had already said at least one more sentence, perhaps two. Data sensed dimly that he should be frightened, but felt only a slight annoyance; it was very inconsiderate of the universe—a universe he had always cataloged with precise, careful observations—to begin sputtering.
Rhea twisted the probe deeper into the wound and a thin stream of circulatory fluid sprayed out and hit her on the cheek. “Found it!” she cried, and Data felt very pleased for her. He must have grayed out then for several seconds because when consciousness