The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [156]
“Are you volunteering, Number One?” Picard asked. Riker could tell that Picard was more than a little disappointed; the captain had hoped to lead the mission himself.
Riker grinned. “Captain, in less than a month, I’m going to be sitting where you are, with some full-of-himself first officer telling me that I can’t leave my ship. I’d better get in on all the away missions while I can, sir.”
Picard responded with a smile of his own. “I think you’re just trying to avoid working on your wedding plans, Number One.”
Riker’s scream faded away. Beverly’s own shock was gone, too, replaced with a clinical distance as her medical training took over her reactions. “What do you remember, Will?” she asked.
Riker could tell she was thinking three steps ahead of where he was, so he decided to trust her clarity and follow her lead. “You and I took a shuttle down to this planet. We started looking around, and you identified this building as a medical center. We came in and split up. You managed to turn on the lights, and then I saw…” Riker’s voice trailed off.
Beverly put a hand on his shoulder. “Go on, Will.”
“…I saw a Tellarite. A scavenger. He looked like he had some sort of weapon, so I drew my phaser. He didn’t see me at first. He…he couldn’t have gotten a shot off before I did. My phaser must have malfunctioned. And that…that’s the last thing I remember. What happened after that?”
“You died.”
“I what?” Riker sat forward, some of his earlier panic returning. A sharp pain in his chest made him regret sitting up so quickly.
Beverly looked him straight in the eyes. “Will, you’ve got a hole the size of my fist in your chest where your heart used to be. You don’t survive that.”
Riker looked down at his wound again. His blood-drenched uniform had a circular hole in it, one that exactly matched the hole in his chest. The image beyond that was surreal. There was an open, perfectly smooth crater in his chest. Through the shadows, he could make out some of his organs—his spine, his lungs. He moved slightly to try to allow more light to pierce the shadows, and after illuminating more of his internal organs, decided against it.
Reflexively, he brought his hand up to probe the wound but was rebuffed by a force field. It didn’t provide a warning shock, like the ones in the Enterprise’s brig, just enough of a repulsion to keep him from pressing further.
And in the center of everything, hovering in the void of his chest, was the triangular spike that he guessed was keeping him alive.
“I heard you cry out,” Beverly said, intentionally distracting him from his self-examination, “and came here just in time to see the Tellarite run out as those doors over there”—Beverly nodded toward the two large doors that were the medical center’s main entrance—”were closing.”
“For a six-thousand-year-old facility, this place seems to work remarkably well.”
“And you’re lucky it does. When I got here, this room was already powering up. I think it’s an emergency room of some sort. There were self-actuating probes coming out of the ceiling, examining you. And they attached that device to you,” she said, indicating the sliver of metal Riker had noticed before.
“As near as I can tell,” Beverly continued, “it’s the only thing keeping you…well, as alive as you are.”
Will started to say something but stopped, realizing she wasn’t done. “Will, whatever that thing is, it’s not so much keeping you alive as animating you. I scanned you, and your heart is completely gone. You’re not pumping blood, you’re not even breathing.
“The device is generating…something to replace your damaged or missing organs. It’s stanched the bleeding. It’s keeping your tissue from necrotizing. It’s even providing some sort of energy to keep your brain functioning. I just don’t know how.”
“So what you’re saying is I’m dead, but I’m not getting any deader.”
Beverly smiled. “That’s pretty much it.” She got up off the floor and started to circle the room, pointing out displays or consoles. “Admiral McCoy wrote quite a few papers