Star Trek_ A Choice of Catastrophes - Michael Schuster [13]
Giotto regularly walked the path of danger; it was difficult to complain about getting shot at when you put on the red shirt. It went with the territory.
TWO
Stardate 4757.4 (0924 hours)
In sickbay, well over a dozen people had come in for various injuries from the repeated jostling the Enterprise had taken. Chapel had called in Nurse Thomas, along with med techs Brent and Abrams. Additional help was required while the other duty nurse, Zainab Odhiambo, worked on burns. McCoy’s patient was an engineer who’d suffered multiple fractures of his arm when he’d unexpectedly been knocked off a catwalk. Simple enough to treat with a bone knitter, but time-consuming.
McCoy had been worried that the aftereffects of the distortion would continue, but it seemed as though they’d gotten the ship under control, letting the doctor work without interruption.
He was about halfway through the bone repair when Brent and Abrams came up to him, startling him. He was about to grumble at them, but their somber expressions stopped him. Something bad must’ve happened. McCoy switched off the regenerator. “What is it?”
“Coma,” replied Abrams, his trademark scowl deeper than normal. Brent nodded wanly. They worked together frequently, but McCoy had always thought them an odd pairing. Clifford Brent was a skinny, black-haired man who more often than not looked worried, whereas Robert Abrams was a stouter man, with thin, brown hair, whose face seemed molded by perpetual displeasure. Whether Brent was worried because Abrams was unhappy, or Abrams was unhappy because Brent was worried, McCoy had never been able to discover.
“How… never mind. Nurse!” McCoy shouted across the room. Both Chapel and Odhiambo turned toward him, looking expectant. “Zainab, please finish up here.” He turned to the injured engineer, who looked understandably dejected. “You’ll be in good hands.”
That done, he joined Brent and Abrams at the end of the ward, where a tall, thin man in a gold command uniform lay on a biobed. The face looked familiar—McCoy had passed the man in the corridors…. Bouchard. Wasn’t he from Neu-Stuttgart?
A glance at the life-sign monitor above the bed told McCoy all he needed to know: each indicator was depressingly low. The periodic bleeps that indicated respiratory and cardiovascular function were too widely spaced. “What happened to him?”
“We don’t know, to be honest,” Abrams said. “Apparently he just fell over.”
McCoy glared at him, but it was Brent who explained. “We really don’t know, Doctor. He works in phaser control, and his fellow officers brought him in just now. They said he collapsed in the middle of the room.”
“When we hit the distortion?” It wouldn’t exactly be difficult to do that, as McCoy well knew.
“Seems likely,” said Brent.
His colleague shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. They acted surprised; it couldn’t have been that.”
From the corner of his eye, McCoy spotted someone in blue approaching him—Chapel. McCoy was glad to have Christine and her insights at his side. He touched a control on the side of the monitor to skip to more specific readouts of the man’s brain. “Well, he’s definitely in a coma. Readings don’t point to any physical trauma.” He switched back to the summary display, about to give an order for a more detailed analysis when he noticed something wrong. “Neuron activity is dropping. He’s dying.” But not if he could do something about it. “I need a hypo of dalaphaline and a neural stimulator.”
The med techs ran off without more questions, and he inspected the monitor again. Without knowing what was actually wrong, he couldn’t bring the man out of the coma. All he could do was slow down Bouchard’s decline. If he was lucky.
What he needed right now was information—as much as he could get. He asked Chapel for the man’s medical records.
“Olivier Bouchard,” she said, reading off a data slate, “assigned to phaser control since transferring here. He’s been in sickbay twice before. Routine physicals. Nothing out of the ordinary. He’s never even been in a landing party. No previous brain injuries.