Intellivore - Diane Duane [32]
People.
Crusher hurried over to the nearest one. It was a child, dressed in some kind of plain coverall, slumped on the ground with one small hand tucked, as if by accident, beneath a plump, pale cheek. The position was almost sleeplike, but the eyes were open.
Riker felt his stomach clench, as it always did when confronted with death. He knelt beside Crusher and watched, briefly useless, as she passed her medscanner over the body.
Except that it wasn’t a body. The breath went in and out, its rhythm steady; the half-closed eyes gazed without flickering at something invisible off in the distance. But other than the respiration, there was no movement. There was no sign that the child had noticed them or registered their presence at all. Riker looked at Crusher.
She shook her head. “Autonomic brain activity,” she said. “Nothing more. Nothing cortical.” She looked up at the security people. “Fan out. See how many more are like this.”
The team moved away, and Riker touched his communicator. “Enterprise?”
“Enterprise here,” said Picard’s voice. “What have you found?”
Riker stood up and looked around. “We’re in your original beam-down point, Captain. There are a lot of people around who—if they’re like the ones we’re looking at right now—are deeply unconscious. Alive, but …” He glanced down at the little boy by his feet. “But not responsive.”
“Enterprise away team,” said Ileen Maisel’s voice, “we’ve got a lot of unconscious people over here. We’re working toward the command and control center, and it all looks very …” There was a silence, the unsound of someone hunting for words adequate to the situation. “Did I say spooky? I didn’t say the half of it.”
Dr. Crusher sat back on her heels, looking at the little boy, then tapped her own communicator. “Crusher to every away team,” she said. “Medical personnel?”
“Jim Spencer over here, Beverly,” said Marignano’s chief surgeon. “I’ve only had the chance to examine a few cases so far. I’m seeing profound unconsciousness and no reflex response.”
“Babinski?” said Crusher.
There was a brief silence, then, “Negative Babinski,” said Spencer. He sounded confused.
“God, that’s strange,” Crusher muttered.
The Enterprise away team made their way through the ship. Nearly everywhere they went, the story was the same. Twisted forms lay on the ground or slumped against the shells of buildings and temporary structures. Sometimes they were still half sitting, in positions that suggested they had been about to get up. But they could not do so now.
Riker watched Crusher go from colonist to colonist, each time standing up with that same concerned, perturbed look. The away teams from Oraidhe and Marignano kept searching, too, checking in with Riker and the Enterprise team every ten minutes or so.
Boreal was large, but not so large that the search took very long. Finally, Riker touched his communicator one last time and said, “Enterprise?”
“Go ahead, Number One.”
“All four hundred twenty-eight colonists have been located and accounted for. They’re all the same way: alive but unresponsive, uninjured except for some cases of minor trauma. We don’t know how. No reaction to stimuli, otherwise in good health. But …”
“Dr. Crusher?” said Picard. “What’s your analysis?”
She stood in one of the broad hallways that led out of the central core parkland area toward the ship’s C&C. “Captain, if it’s etiology you’re looking for, I have none to offer. This I can say: except for differences in physiology, all the symptoms are very similar to those of the Alpheccan we picked up from the crippled pirate vessel. We’ll need to do a more complete diagnostic on them, of course; but there’s another problem. All these people are going to require total medical and nursing care. None of them can move. They don’t even blink their eyes. Everything is going to have to be done for them. It’s