Surak's Soul - J.M. Dillard [55]
At last the turbolift stopped, and the doors opened onto D-deck, to Archer’s relief; he had half expected Wanderer to recover and stall their journey before they reached the main engineering level. But now the engine room was only a corridor’s stroll away. Archer moved swiftly out of the lift, clutching his affected arm to his side, gritting his teeth against the pain; T’Pol matched him stride for stride.
Yet before they made it even a third of the way to their destination, Archer stopped in his tracks at an unexpected sight—one that at first his concussion-fogged brain could not make sense of.
Lieutenant Meir, her blond hair in unkempt curls upon her shoulders, uniform disheveled, had just stepped into their path from an intersecting corridor; at the sight of them, she turned and faced them.
Archer was speechless. At first, he felt overwhelmed with joy: he had been wrong, Meir had been alive all along, simply unconscious, and had recovered….
And then a darker realization overtook the joy. There was something deeply unnatural about the human woman’s movements, something marionettelike.
Like any good sub-commander, T’Pol stepped into the breach at the captain’s silence. “Lieutenant,” she ordered. “Report at once to engineering.”
Meir’s eyes were open but sightless, directed at the other two officers, but unfocused. Her hand moved to her utility belt, and the phase pistol strapped there.
With his good hand, Archer seized T’Pol’s shoulder and pushed her and her burden down just before Meir fired. At the same time, he dropped to the deck; the rush of adrenaline managed to make his shoulder’s intolerable pain bearable.
“Meir’s dead,” he breathed to the downed Vulcan beside him. “Hoshi was right—she wasn’t hallucinating. Wanderer has somehow reanimated the lieutenant.”
The bright blast overhead streaked past them and seared open the bulkhead with the pervasive smell of scorched metal.
“The attack is not logical.” T’Pol lay on her stomach, palms pressed to the deck beneath her collarbone; her normally perfect fringe of bangs was parted, and a stray brown wisp of hair stuck out above the rest. She turned her face toward the captain. “Her weapon is set to kill.”
In the instant before Meir took inhumanly clumsy aim again, Archer saw that the Vulcan was right. It made no sense: if Wanderer wanted to keep Archer and the unconscious ensign from engineering so that it could feed off them, why not simply stun them?
Meir fired, jerkily, again, and Archer rolled. In the periphery of his vision, bedazzled by the phase-pistol blast, he saw T’Pol rise, leaving the ensign lying on the deck. The Vulcan charged the human woman, striking her at waist level and knocking her off her feet, onto her back. Her hand struck the metal deck with audible force; the phase pistol went skittering across the corridor.
T’Pol scrambled in the direction of the weapon. But Meir did not stay down long. Her body jerked to its feet as though yanked by an invisible wire attached to her sternum; she headed straight for the Vulcan.
At the same time, Archer struggled to his feet, clasping the injured arm against his side. He, too, made a dash for the weapon.
T’Pol reached it first. She seized the phase pistol and turned—at the same time, smoothly switching the setting from kill to stun.
“It doesn’t matter!” Archer shouted. “She’s already dead!”
But his words came too late. In the heartbeat it took T’Pol to turn and switch the weapon’s setting, Meir charged.
T’Pol fired, the blast knocking the human’s body backward.
How do you knock a corpse unconscious? Archer wondered. How do you kill it?
His question was answered immediately as Meir rose again, puppetlike, and headed once more for T’Pol. By this time, Archer was upon them both. With his good arm, he swung with all his strength at Meir, hoping at