Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [4]
Gardenhire was grimacing as he watched Gorvoy spread the salve. Tarasco put his hand on the ops officer’s shoulder.
“Go on,” he told Gardenhire. “Get back to the bridge. See if Sommers needs any help.”
The redhead nodded. “Aye, sir,” he said. With a last, sympathetic look at Hollandsworth, he left sickbay.
But Gardenhire wasn’t gone long before Tarasco heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming from the corridor. Suddenly, another medical team burst into the room, carrying a young woman between them.
It was Zosky, the stellar physicist who had signed onto the mission at the last minute. She was a dead weight in the medics’ arms as they followed Gorvoy’s gesture and laid her on another bed.
My God, the captain thought…how many more? And what could have killed them, while so many others had been spared?
He watched as they laid Zosky down, as Gorvoy took a moment to examine her with his bioscanner…and as they pulled the blanket over her face. Not the console, part of him insisted.
The doctor eyed Tarasco. “Maybe you ought to get back to the bridge, too,” he suggested.
The captain nodded. “Maybe.”
He had started to leave sickbay when Coquillette and Rudolph came huffing in from the corridor. They were carrying yet another victim—a baby-faced engineer named Davidoff.
“McMillan said there were two of them,” Gorvoy told them. “Where’s the other one?”
As if in answer to his question, Chief Engineer McMillan came shuffling in with one of his men leaning on him for support. Tarasco recognized the injured man as Agnarsson, McMillan’s first assistant.
Agnarsson was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong jaw and a fierce blond mustache. But at the moment, he was weak as a kitten, fighting hard just to stay conscious. The captain helped McMillan get him to a bed and hoist him onto it.
“What’s the matter with him?” Tarasco asked.
The chief engineer cursed beneath his breath. “He started to glow—he and Davidoff both. It was the damnedest thing.”
The captain looked at him, his pulse starting to pound in his temples. “He was glowing? And he’s still alive?”
“I’m fine,” Agnarsson muttered, hanging his head and rubbing the back of his neck. “Just a little light-headed is all.”
Then the big man picked up his head…and Tarasco’s jaw fell. Agnarsson’s eyes, normally a very ordinary shade of blue, were glowing with a luxuriant silver light.
Two
Captain’s log, December 30th, 2069. Tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve. We should be preparing our usual celebration, festooning the lounge and watching Sommers mix her killer punch. Unfortunately, with six of our comrades dead, no one feels much like celebrating. So instead of toasting 2070, we’re delving under control consoles and wriggling through access tubes, trying to expedite the process of bringing basic systems back on-line. The problem is every time we think we’ve fixed something, a new trouble spot rears its ugly head. And even if we can solve all the little snags, we’ll still be left with a great big one—the warp drive. Chief McMillan says it may be beyond repair this time. And if we’re restricted to impulse power, none of us will live long enough to see Earth again.
Tarasco paused in his log entry, put down his microphone and looked around at his quarters. They were small, cramped—and yet palatial in comparison to those of the average crewman.
They hadn’t seemed so bad when the captain first saw them. But back then, he was contemplating spending six or seven years in the place, at most. Now he was looking at living out his life there.
He recalled the story of Moses, the biblical patriarch who led his people through a wilderness for forty years and brought up a new generation in the process. But in the end, Moses was prohibited from entering the Promised Land with his charges.
Is that how it’s going to be with me? Tarasco asked himself. After all we’ve been through, am I going to be Moses? Have I already seen Earth for the last time?
It was a depressing thought, to say the least. Putting it aside, the captain saved his entry, got up