What's Past_ Many Splendors (Book 6) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [26]
Temple walked off. Sonya looked around, saw Cliff and Gar, as well as Dershowitz from security on three other biobeds, and Koji sitting in the central biobed, holding his right arm gingerly while Dr. Crusher applied a bone-knitter to it.
What happened to Kieran?
Sonya realized that that was the foremost thing on her mind. The last thing she saw before being rendered insensate was Kieran falling to the floor. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and the fact that he might be dead scared her, even more than the notion that Geordi or anyone else might be.
She figured that everything was fine—that Worf caught Danar or, at the very least, that Danar was no longer a threat, since everyone in sickbay seemed fairly calm.
But that left her with her own thoughts, which were primarily of Kieran. I’ve been an idiot, she realized. Not that this was a huge revelation—she’d been an idiot in some manner or other for most of the last year—but that didn’t make it any less so. She’d been making excuses for not pursuing a relationship with Kieran, all of which sounded very reasonable when she’d spelled them out at the corner office, and which sounded completely ridiculous in light of what just happened. What if the Borg come to the Alpha Quadrant? What if the next time we’re in the Romulan Neutral Zone, the captain doesn’t have two Klingon ships up his sleeve? What if one of those weird anomalies we come across blows us to bits? What if the next computer virus sends us the way of the Yamato?
Dr. Crusher finished with Koji and walked over to check on Sonya. A smile on her pretty pale face, she went over Sonya with her scanner. “You’re looking more awake, Ensign. How do you feel?”
“Nauseous, and my head hurts.”
“Perfectly normal.” She pulled a hypo out of her blue lab coat pocket and applied it to Sonya’s neck. Almost immediately, her head cleared and her stomach felt like a stomach again instead of a whirligig. “That’ll mask the symptoms until the concussion subsides. I wouldn’t recommend returning to duty until your next shift starts—which, according to the duty roster, isn’t for another twenty hours.”
Sonya blinked in surprise. It had only been four hours since she’d gone on duty and GQ was sounded. “Thank you, Doctor. Uh, Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“What happened?”
Crusher chuckled. “Sorry, I guess you couldn’t have known. Danar managed to escape. Nobody was killed, thankfully. Worf got a few bruises, Lieutenants Meyers and Costa also got concussions, Ensign Oliver broke his arm, and Lieutenant Duffy cracked a rib. Everyone else was just stunned a bit.”
Sonya felt a profound sense of relief at the fact that Kieran was okay.
“Now get some rest—doctor’s orders.”
Smiling, Sonya lazily raised her right arm in salute. “Yes, sir.”
She let herself drift off to sleep thinking that she needed to talk to Keiko Ishikawa.
The pleasant scent of wild roses from Earth, toyar from Betazed, and fire flowers from Berengaria wafted in the carefully circulated air of the Enterprise’s arboretum on deck seventeen. Sonya stood in the middle of the tree nursery—the flowers in question were in the main part of the arboretum—knowing that what she was doing was crazy.
She had talked with Keiko, who had assured her that she would keep the tree nursery clear from 1900 onward. Keiko had a twinkle in her eye, adding, “It’s about time you two got your act together.” But then, Keiko had recently started seeing Chief O’Brien, so she had such things on her mind anyhow. In fact, Keiko’s recent romantic bent had been one of the deciding factors in her choosing the arboretum as the site for her and Kieran’s rendezvous.
“Rendezvous,” listen to me. Bad enough I lied to Kieran to get him here, telling him there was a symposium. I guess I just wanted to hedge in case he said no, or wasn’t interested. Sonya hadn’t been on a date since she was a young teenager; she’d been too busy pushing herself to the next level, whether it was school, the Academy, or the Enterprise. By deceiving Kieran, it gave him an easy out, in case she’d totally made a targ’s ear out