Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [12]
“How slowly?” Reed wanted to know.
“It may be a matter of days, but they should all pull through this ordeal with minimal wear and tear.” Phlox hoped he sounded confident enough; he couldn’t be absolutely certain that his patients would suffer no permanent ill effects, though the scant data he had gathered thus far was consistent with a hopeful diagnosis.
Unless we hit some other new Delphic Expanse anomaly in the meantime, he thought.
Phlox did his best to banish those dark thoughts. In his time among humans, he had learned that they fundamentally needed to hear good news, even if it meant clinging irrationally to even the most slender shreds of hope. While this was certainly not one of those situations—at least not yet—he still felt it was better not to classify the fate of Tucker and the rest as an imponderable.
Archer sighed heavily and put his fingers to the bridge of his nose, looking as if the weight of the world was pressing down on him—which, Phlox knew, was fundamentally the case; Archer clearly felt personally responsible for ending the mortal threat that the Xindi posed to the entire population of the planet Earth.
“Malcolm, do you have all the information that Trip was going to present at the briefing?” the captain finally asked.
“Yes, sir,” Reed said, his body subtly shifting to a more formal stance.
“Then let’s go meet with Major Hayes,” Archer said.
As the command trio exited sickbay, Phlox heard a subtle clacking sound. Grabbing a rubberized grip, he quickly went over to Ensign Sato’s side. Gingerly, he pulled her clacking teeth apart and inserted the grip between them.
“Can’t have our communications officer unable to speak because she’s chipped her teeth, now, can we?” he said to Sato. He smoothed a lock of black, perspiration-slicked hair away from her forehead.
Enterprise had been searching the Delphic Expanse for the Xindi for just over twelve weeks, and this new seizure-inducing phenomenon was the seventeenth anomaly that had affected the ship in some manner. It was the first, however, that had affected the crew directly. Given the horror stories that had circulated for months aboard ship about the Expanse, Phlox sincerely hoped that the captain could find a way to protect Enterprise from these anomalies, and soon. If not, he feared that Enterprise and everyone aboard her might become yet another one of those horror stories.
Assuming, of course, that anyone aboard remained alive to tell the tale.
Corporal Selma Guitierrez wasn’t exactly glad that Sato was absent from their shared quarters right now, especially given what she knew about Sato’s sudden and mysterious medical condition. But as she stared at the scanner’s small readout screen, she was certainly more than content to be alone now.
The test had come up positive. Again.
Seven weeks.
She was pregnant.
With a growl of inchoate anger, Guitierrez threw the scanner at the room’s single narrow bed, ignoring it as it bounced off, struck the nearby bulkhead, and landed in a heap beside the two others. She paced for perhaps a minute in the cluttered, darkened living quarters, then lashed out and hit the wall with her fist. Pain flared brightly in her knuckles and up her forearm, but her ingrained MACO discipline overrode most of it, even as it failed to govern the roiling emotions that had goaded her into lashing out in the first place.
How?
Her mind raced to answer the question. She had engaged in a brief affair with Sergeant Nelson Kemper a week into the mission into the Expanse. They were both originally from Minnesota, so they had some things in common to discuss during their mutual down hours, and she had always been a sucker for guys with chiseled, cleft chins.
She had been bold enough to make the first move, as she usually did, since most men seemed to find her intimidating; during a training drill, she had gotten a bit friendly while following him up into one of the artificial gravity