Surak's Soul - J.M. Dillard [13]
Archer had invited Trip to make the situation more comfortable, so it wouldn’t seem like he, the captain, was worried about Hoshi and Malcolm, but simply interested in discussing the situation. Trip knew nothing about what the landing party had seen on the planet’s surface; his presence would allow Hoshi and Malcolm to voice what they’d witnessed, and Archer knew well what a sympathetic listener Trip could be.
“It was pretty hard to take,” Archer was telling Trip, who was leaning forward over a scraped-empty bowl of what had been chili with raw chopped onions, to which Trip had enthusiastically applied the greater part of a bottle of hot pepper sauce. With a combined sense of horror and sympathy indigestion, Archer had watched him consume it swiftly, without pause or watery eyes; in fact, Trip hadn’t even touched his iced tea until after he’d eaten the entire bowl. Now he sipped it leisurely as he listened intently to his commanding officer’s words.
Archer continued, sawing at a piece of uninspiring, synthesized chicken. “Each time T’Pol detected a life sign, by the time we got there, it was too late….” He stopped sawing and sighed, glancing surreptitiously over at Hoshi, hoping she would take the opportunity to open up about how she felt. When she didn’t speak, he kept on. “We…we made it into a medical facility, where all these people were just sitting together, crowded into a waiting room like cattle. They died like that, just sitting, all of them with calm expressions on their faces, as if they’d just fallen asleep.”
“Horrific,” Reed sighed, carefully balancing a meatball atop the perfect spaghetti mound he had created. “Like something out of a horror story. Whatever happened to them must have happened too fast for them to fight it. Like an invisible tidal wave, or one of the twenty-first-century designer plagues—so fast, they were alive when they inhaled, and dead by the time they let go the same breath.” He paused to poke the meatball with his fork. “Makes you wonder about life. To think we could all be wiped out, our entire civilization, by something so small even our best microscanners can’t detect it…. The universe is a damnably harsh place.”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Hoshi interrupted at last—her first words during the dinner—and pushed the plate from her. “I just don’t feel like eating.” Archer sensed she was about to stand up and excuse herself, but Trip spoke before she could.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I don’t think I could if I’d witnessed the sort of tragedy you just have. It was an awful lot to take in…the loss of so many people at once.” He shot Reed a warning glance. “Don’t listen to the lieutenant here. Things like this don’t happen every day.”
“An entire world,” Archer added softly. He put down his knife.
“I have a theory,” Trip said. “The Vulcans are right in one way—”
Archer ogled him owlishly and said, in an attempt at humor, “Call sickbay. The commander’s feverish.”
Trip tsked at him, then continued. “No, I’m serious. They’re right in the fact that technology overtook us humans awfully quickly. We went from small villages where everybody knew each other to megacities in a matter of a few centuries—before we had the ability to evolve emotionally tougher hides. Think about it: We’re emotionally designed to live in small groups, where major tragedies are really uncommon. The death of one person—we’re designed to handle that if we’re allowed to properly grieve, and have the support of our community. But all of a sudden, our communications advance to where we not only know what’s going on in our village, we know what’s going on all over the planet—and then the next planet, and the next…We’re not designed to tolerate all the bad news.”
“It makes sense.” Archer nodded, hoping to encourage an exchange.
Hoshi frowned down at her glass of water and ping ed it by flicking her forefinger off her thumb. “It does. But what happened still happened. Everyone died, and it’s just that…we were useless down there.” She looked up at the men and said, almost argumentatively, “I don’t know