Surak's Soul - J.M. Dillard [34]
Once in his quarters, Reed lay down with a sudden delicious sense of exhaustion, as if he wanted to sleep forever and never waken. He fell onto his bunk, all sense of embarrassment at having fainted in sickbay forgotten. He usually wasn’t all that squeamish about things medical, and the fact that he’d passed out alarmed him somewhat…but at the moment, he no longer cared. He only craved rest.
And at the instant he lay down, he fell into a strange waking dream. The oceans of Oan, turquoise and beautiful, rolled over him, sweeping him away on their currents, and he opened his lungs to them and breathed in the cool, sunlit water…
And realized he was drowning. Bone-deep weakness came over him, saturated him, and he struggled against it, mentally clawing like a drowning man fights the water. He opened his eyes, and with his last fragment of strength, painfully dragged himself from his bed, and pressed his body to the bulkhead. His finger trembled as it pressed the companel control.
“Sickbay. Cutler here.”
“Help me,” Reed whispered, then slid down the length of the wall to the deck, and oblivion.
Six
IN THE LAB just outside sickbay, surrounded by decontaminated data retrieved from the Oani planet’s surface, Archer stood beside Hoshi and let her explain to T’Pol—accompanied, as always, by the nebulous Wanderer—what she had learned from the medical logs of one of the perished doctors.
Archer was angry—angry at the situation, angry at T’Pol for taking the alien on an extended tour of the vessel even though he had given permission for her to do so, angry with a vengeance at Wanderer. He remained unconvinced that his anger was entirely rational—at least some of it had to do with the fact that Phlox was stricken and apparently dying (he hadn’t yet checked in with Cutler on the doctor’s current status), and with the specter of the entire Enterprise crew following suit. It has nothing to do with the fact that I haven’t gotten any sleep….
But for a very rational reason, he was downright furious that Wanderer hadn’t mentioned anyone from the planet Shikeda.
T’Pol listened impassively to Hoshi’s tale, glanced briefly at the shimmering creature beside her, then said, “It’s true that Wanderer passed by the planet Oan. But Wanderer says that this other traveler was quite mistaken in terms of what destroyed the Oanis. Wanderer says that it was radiation.”
“What if it’s wrong?” Hoshi countered hotly, a split second before Archer could demand the very same thing.
At least I’m not the only one who’s mad. “Exactly.” Archer crossed his arms over his chest and stared expectantly at the energy column, as if waiting for it to address him directly. “How can Wanderer be so certain?”
T’Pol’s eyes widened ever so slightly; her lips parted an instant before she finally said, in a tone that struck Archer as being cooler than usual, “Captain. Wanderer is an extremely intelligent, very highly evolved being. I doubt it is mistaken.”
“As opposed to a puny humanoid with a body?” Archer said, allowing some of the anger through in his tone. “Wanderer may be evolved, and more intelligent than we are, but that doesn’t make it entirely incapable of mistakes. Of course, I’ll apologize at once if Wanderer can show us how it knows there is no microbe involved.”
T’Pol glanced at the creature beside her; after a space of silence, she spoke again. “The problem here is the same as with the radiation. Our detection devices are very primitive. Wanderer could show us the radiation if only we were more advanced….”
Archer turned on her with vehemence. “You know, you’d think you wanted to do something other than come up with explanations as to why we all have to die. Don’t you want to live, Sub-Commander?”
“Of course,” T’Pol said, so unruffled and composed in the face of Archer’s frustration that he became even more irritated. “Like most humanoids, I possess an inborn survival instinct.” She paused. “But I have been trained not to let emotion prevent me from accepting