Spirit Walk_ Enemy of My Enemy (Book 2) - Christie Golden [42]
Kaz stared at the body, disbelieving. He shook his head. Ellis had died only yesterday. The computer had to be in error. It happened, from time to time, and Voyager was fresh out of space dock after having been gutted to within an inch of her mechanical life. Hadn’t Campbell recently said something about “ghosts” in her system? Kaz was supposed to talk with Vorik in the morning anyway. He’d mention the computer and have the chief engineer run a thorough diagnostic.
Six years in stasis, indeed.
And yet…
Ellis did look younger to him. Kaz could have sworn he remembered seeing some wrinkles around the first officer’s eyes and mouth that had seemingly vanished. Perhaps those were just a by-product of the way Ellis held his expressions. But the hair seemed a little thicker, didn’t it, and wasn’t there less gray in the pale gold strands…?
The computer had to be wrong. He’d seen Ellis just yesterday. And yet…
Things aren’t what they seem.
His mouth suddenly went dry. He grabbed a medical tricorder and ordered the computer to drop the stasis field. He scanned Ellis’s body, and his heart sped up at what he discovered.
Everything on the tricorder pointed to indications of long-term stasis. Certainly longer term than a few hours. Slight tissue dehydration, lack of cellular reproduction—
“The computer was right,” he whispered aloud, and he started to tremble at the implications.
There were a variety of hypotheses, of course. One was that they had somehow passed unknowingly through a space-time continuum, and that Ellis’s body, in stasis, was the only thing that revealed the passing of time. Another was that somehow both the tricorder and the computer were malfunctioning…in the exact same way….
He wasn’t what he seemed, either.
Could the being before him somehow be an impersonation? A clone?
“I need all the facts,” he said, realizing that he was talking to himself but not caring right now. He needed to complete the autopsy. Perhaps it would reveal something that solved this bizarre puzzle.
Kaz would start with the clothing, which had carefully been removed from the body earlier and was in a separate compartment. It was blood-soaked and torn from the attack that had claimed Ellis’s life. With more focus than he thought he’d ever brought to bear in his life, Kaz removed the clothing, spread it on the sanitized surface, and ran the medical tricorder over it.
Chakotay had said he watched, helpless to interfere in time, as Ellis was attacked and mauled to death by the creatures whom they now knew to be the colonists. Logic dictated that the clothing and the injuries would be teeming with DNA from the attack.
Kaz found nothing.
He looked closer, using his eyes and gentle fingers instead of tools. The cuts in the clothing were startlingly clean and uniform, looking little like what a rent from an animal’s claw would produce. If he didn’t know better, he’d say these cuts came from a precise instrument, such as a knife or a scalpel.
Kaz replaced the clothing in the sealed container and placed it in the cadaver drawer. Now he bent over the unclothed body, examining the actual wounds themselves. Again, there was no hint of DNA-rich dirt from under a supposedly unsanitary claw, no scattering of animal hair that could point toward Ellis’s attacker. It was, in fact, unnaturally clean, as if Ellis had been killed with a sanitized weapon by an assailant who had no DNA of his own to deposit.
Kaz stood back, wishing with all his might that he could somehow contact Ellis and ask him just what the hell had happened. He knew that on Earth, several centuries ago, it was widely believed even by medical professionals that the eyes of the slain retained the image of their attacker. Would that it were so simple.
“Autopsy addendum,” he said, “0342. Initial visual, tactile, and tricorder examinations reveal no indication of DNA from alleged attacker.” He cringed as he said “alleged,” but it was the truth. Even if it meant, in a very real way, that he was calling Chakotay a liar.
A thought came to him. Holograms had