The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [52]
Trip fought down incipient claustrophobia by closing his eyes and by trying to regulate his breathing. Beyond the chamber’s confines, he could hear muffled voices, though he couldn’t quite make out the words.
A com speaker near his head- which allowed sickbay personnel to communicate with patients inside the otherwise sound-opaque hyperbaric chamber- suddenly came to life. Now he could hear what was going on beyond the confines of the hyperbaric chamber, in sickbay, where Phlox and his medical technicians were frantically continuing to respond to a preprogrammed sequence of ever-declining vital signs.
My vital signs, Trip thought, swallowing hard. He opened his eyes again, though he studiously tried to avoid staring at his own ghastly reflection.
Of all the personnel now present in sickbay, only Phlox’s assistants would not have known that those life readings were utterly counterfeit, mere electronic simulations designed to allow Charles Tucker to die, officially and on the record.
“What’s happening in there, Phlox?” the captain said through the chamber’s speaker, still playing his part to the hilt.
“He may have inhaled too much of the plasma during the explosion,” came the Denobulan’s precise, professional response, his voice laced with concern and a convincing tinge of fear. “His lungs are failing.”
“Vital signs crashing, Doctor,” said Crewman Stepanczyk, one of the medical technicians.
Archer: “Do something!”
“I’m afraid, Captain, that there is very little that we can do,” Phlox said. “We’re losing him.”
Trip listened quietly to the sounds of his own death. A chill slowly navigated the length of his spine, reminding him of how his mother described that very sensation: “Somebody just walked across your grave.”
And now here he was, entombed in a space not much larger than a casket. For better or worse, a chain of events had led him ineluctably into this tiny tube, pretending to be dead, while three of his friends lied to all his other friends and family for him. He thought of how T’Pol would react, especially after the loss of their daughter and their emotionally wrenching journey to Vulcan. And his family, barely over their grieving after the loss of his sister Lizzie, now forced to mourn another death. He hoped that Albert, the final “living” Tucker sibling, would take care of their parents better than he, Trip, had after Lizzie had been killed by the Xindi.
He closed his eyes again, and in the resulting darkness he saw a slow parade of faces.
His mother, Elaine. His father, Charles. His brother, Albert.
T’Pol.
The pain came then, like a barbed lance piercing his heart.
How can I do this to them? The regret was almost overwhelming, nearly swallowing him from the inside.
A part of him wanted to kick his feet out at the chamber door, yelling to them that it was all a mistake, that he wasn’t dead, that the whole thing had been a setup. He considered for a moment what the ramifications might be, both for himself and for his coconspirators. I guess it depends on whether the news got off the ship or not, he thought. If everybody who’s in the loop agreed to keep quiet, the logs could be fixed or “lost,” and we could write our own version of history.
But there in the back of his mind, brooding and snarling like the monster that lived in his childhood closet, was the fear of what would happen if he didn’t go through with this covert mission. In his mind’s eyes, his loved ones’ faces were replaced by fleets of Aenar-piloted remote-control drone warships. Each vessel was painted garishly to resemble a hungry, carnivorous bird with talons