The Expanse - J.M. Dillard [44]
Trip shook his head. That had occurred to him as well; he’d pulled the records, but common sense had already dictated his answer, which he gave the Captain now. “We would’ve known by now.”
Archer stared at the containers, firmly held in place on the left bulkhead by some cock-eyed rendition of gravity, and considered them a moment. At last, he made a sweeping gesture at the bay with his chin. “Seal it off.” He turned to go, then paused. “Let’s hope this little ‘anomaly’ doesn’t last any longer than the others did.”
He strode off, leaving Trip to ponder the event. Tucker lingered until the deck began to rumble again, and watched with an engineer’s delight as the cargo containers went flying from the left bulkhead to the right, then snapping into place, held fast by an invisible force.
It was a miracle McFarlane hadn’t been killed.
Trip knew that the Captain was trying to follow a lead—a rumor, really—to a mining colony where there might be a Xindi. He hadn’t permitted himself to think much about it, at least not while he was on duty; but for the first time, he considered how Archer must be feeling about the situation. If Trip had been so horrified at the thought of losing McFarlane, how must the Captain react to the notion of bringing his people closer to unknown danger?
Perhaps, Trip decided, he was being selfish, grieving so for Lizzie, when there were so many other people who had suffered, were suffering, as a result of the attack on Earth.
He drew in a deep breath and tried to break free from the numbness, the thickly veiled pain, and failed.
T’Pol entered sickbay to find Phlox staring at a monitor connected to his neutron microscope; beside him on the counter sat several Petri dishes filled with active cultures.
Whatever the Doctor was looking at, it pleased him immensely, for he was indulging in one of his intense Denobulan grins.
When T’Pol stepped up beside him, Phlox’s smile widened impossibly; he turned to her and gestured with enthusiasm at the display on the screen.
“Come, look at this! The pigmentation is far more colorful than I would’ve suspected.”
While T’Pol did not share the doctor’s emotionality, she could appreciate his unalloyed enjoyment of science. She gazed at the monitor. Clearly, these were some sort of living dermal cells—hard and glistening, like the skin of Terran snakes, and aesthetically quite pleasing. Each shimmered with translucent, warm jewel-tone colors, from topaz to crimson, with hints of citrine.
“What are we looking at?” she asked. With Phlox, always researching and testing new medical alternatives, it was impossible to deduce.
“Xindi epithelial cells,” Phlox replied with satisfaction. “I’ve been transnucleating the tissue samples harvested from the corpse they found inside the crashed probe.”
“It looks more like scales,” T’Pol remarked.
“Precisely,” Phlox agreed, nodding in his perpetually cheerful manner. “When I’m finished constructing my physiometric profile, I wouldn’t be surprised if he turns out to have reptilian characteristics.”
She had thought Phlox had called her to sickbay in order to consult her about what he had just shown her; it was clear now that he was indulging in one of his more roundabout behaviors. He had engaged her in conversation about something else in order to broach a more difficult subject. While the tactic was no doubt useful for putting humans at ease, T’Pol preferred to get directly to the point.
“You wanted to see me?” she asked.
Phlox picked up the next Petri dish from the counter and began to prepare it for the microscope. His smile vanished; his manner grew uncharacteristically serious. “Do you have any siblings?”
A Vulcan would consider this a personal question, but T’Pol answered it directly, even though she did not see what possible need the doctor would have for such information. “No.”
“Commander Tucker had one sister,” Phlox said softly. “She was killed in the attack.”
T’Pol remembered the expression on the Commander’s face shortly after the event, when she had encountered him in Captain Archer’s ready