Miracle Workers (SCE Books 5-8) - Keith R. A. DeCandido_. [et al.] [9]
“How is she?” Gomez asked as she helped lower the Nasat to the deck. She held Pattie’s still form down as Lense reached for her tricorder, but to Gomez’s surprise, she was the first object of the doctor’s scrutiny rather than Pattie.
“Just as I suspected,” Lense said as she snapped the tricorder closed and reached for the medical kit on her belt. “The theragen I gave you has begun to wear off. You’ve started to feel the effects of interspace.”
Gomez’s sigh was a mixture of relief and apprehension as she allowed herself to relax somewhat and sag against the nearby bulkhead. At least now she knew that the feelings of panic and uncertainty she’d been experiencing had an external cause, and weren’t due to her own failings. On the other hand, she hadn’t expected the inoculations Lense had given them all to lose their effectiveness so quickly.
As if anticipating Gomez’s question, Lense said, “Being in the rift might be having a more intense effect on us than merely being in proximity to it. I should give the entire away team another dose as soon as possible.”
With hypospray in hand, the doctor reached for Gomez’s right shoulder and placed the injector into the pressurized receptacle located there. The connection was designed expressly for the purpose of allowing injections into a suit’s occupant when circumstances didn’t allow for the removal of the helmet, making it easy to provide medical treatment in almost any environment. Once she had administered the theragen to Gomez, she repeated the process on herself.
“I didn’t expect to have to give booster shots so soon, if at all,” Lense said. “If we can’t get out of the rift before my supply of theragen is exhausted, we could be in serious trouble.”
Gomez thought about the near hysteria she had endured in the Jefferies tube. Knowing that those feelings were nothing compared to what she might experience should the away team be exposed to the full effects of the rift now filled her with a pronounced sense of dread.
CHAPTER
4
His thoughts concentrated somewhere beyond the image displayed on the da Vinci’s main viewer, Duffy sat in the captain’s chair, staring into the reaches of starry space. His eyes followed a glowing ribbon of energy projecting from the starship’s deflector dish as it lanced outward, then narrowed to a point near the center of the viewscreen. Somewhere out there, he hoped, the beam would find a crack or seam, anything that could be seized upon and forced open and give the da Vinci access to the interdimensional rift that had reclaimed the Defiant, along with their own away team.
As a young boy on Earth, Duffy had sometimes entertained himself with thoughts of contacting a passing ship of alien spacefarers. Armed with the biggest portable beacon his father owned, he would slip from his home in the dark of night and settle himself on a grassy rise in the backyard. There he would activate the beacon and point it into the night sky. Sometimes his fingers fiddled with the beacon’s switch, making the beam of light pulse at random. Other times he would allow it to burn steadily for what seemed to him like hours. He would sprawl in the grass, paying little mind to the closely shorn blades prickling the back of his neck as he looked skyward and hoped that maybe this would be the night that the captain of a Vulcan science ship or a curious Pygorian trader would stop by for a visit.
Duffy’s posture slumped a bit in the center seat as he recalled the night he had told his father that he wouldn’t need the beacon anymore. His father had patted him on the shoulder and encouraged him to keep it at his bedside, should he ever change his mind. The response of his young voice rang in Duffy’s memory.
That’s okay, Dad. You can keep it. I’m tired of just watching the light. No one ever comes.
He tried to fend off the ironic ring of his memories as the deflector beam pierced the blackness. He continued to watch it for a few seconds