The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [176]
Geordi slapped his combadge. “Medical emergency in engineering!” He tapped it again. “Engineering to Worf.”
“Worf here.”
“We need you down here on Deck Sixteen. There’s been a death.”
“On my way.”
Worf walked into engineering a bare fifteen seconds later, next to Doctor Tropp. “Where is the body?”
“This way,” Geordi said, leading them toward the Jefferies tube.
Any death aboard ship had to be handled in a certain way, regardless of whether it was due to accident, enemy action, crime, or natural causes. Security and the ship’s executive officer both had to be notified. With Worf temporarily acting in both capacities, it fell to him alone to make sure that all the proper reports were filed and the captain kept up to date with what had happened.
Worf was used to seeing death, and it didn’t trouble him the way it troubled his human crewmates. He felt a slight regret on the technician’s behalf that he hadn’t fallen in battle against a worthy opponent, but he reflected that the man had at least died doing his duty.
“Plasma burns,” the Denobulan said immediately, before he even activated a scanner. “Quite distinctive, I’m sorry to say.”
Geordi nodded and peered into the Jefferies tube. A blackened and shattered EPS junction unit reeked of burned plastic. “And there’s the source of the plasma. Looks like it blew when Davis was working on it, and the discharge killed him.”
Tropp nodded, but Worf preferred to be thorough. “There will have to be an autopsy to be sure.”
“I’ll get on it right away,” Tropp confirmed.
Picard settled into his chair and watched Luna grow visibly larger on the main viewer.
The Enterprise was following the same course that the very first manned interplanetary missions had taken. Back then it took three days to go from Earth to the moon, but the Enterprise, even under maneuvering thrusters, would be there in thirty minutes. Most people, Picard knew, were so used to modern forms of transport that they would never think about how astonishing that difference was.
“We’re approaching the Lagrange 1 point,” the conn officer noted.
“Launch target drones,” Picard ordered. The lieutenant at ops did so, and Picard glanced at the current tactical officer. “Select targets and fire at will.”
The officer nodded and started blowing away target drones with the ship’s phasers. “All weapons systems fully functional. Targeting fully functional.”
“Very well. Helm, give me a slingshot around the moon and bring us back into Earth orbit at half impulse.”
“Aye, sir.”
Worf returned to his quarters two hours later than he had expected. As the doors slid open, he instinctively looked around for anything unusual. Everything was as it should be, so he switched his attention to Spot. The creature was not in the same place that he had last seen her. As if the day hadn’t been embarrassing enough already, Worf called out, “Computer, where is the feline creature called Spot?”
The reply took a couple of seconds, as if the computer was taken by surprise and had to adjust. “Feline one-four, Spot, is in Commander Data’s quarters.”
“Did the door open for the cat?”
“Negative.”
“Then how did it get out of these quarters?”
“Unknown.”
Worf suppressed a snarl as he stalked down the corridor to Data’s old quarters. The cat was indeed there, in the middle of the lightless room’s floor. She was making a strange and, Worf thought, extremely irritating wailing sound. For a moment, he wondered if the animal was dying and almost called the computer to ask if the ship’s veterinarian had reported for duty yet. The cat stopped making the noise and looked intently at Worf. Then it wailed some more.
The cat bounded ahead of him and stood over something that most definitely did not belong in Data’s quarters.
It was a leathery organic creature of some kind, a little bigger than Spot herself. It was mostly covered in stiff, wiry hair. Stubby digits—they were too stubby to be called limbs—were half curled and lifeless. Sticky brown fluid had dried around