Caretaker (9 page)

“Lock down the magnetic constrictors.”

“Captain …” He followed her deeper into the engine room, waving silent commands to the two engineers with him as he went.

“If we lock them down, at these pressure levels, we might not be able to reinitialize the dilithium reaction.”

“… Warning. Warp core microfracture …”

“We haven’t got a choice,” Janeway told him. About being here, about surviving this, about any of it. “We’ve got to get the reaction rate down before we try to seal it.”

Otherwise the rest of it wouldn’t matter. And, for Janeway, that just wasn’t an option.

Damn her. Damn her, anyway! She’d looked him straight in the eye, acknowledged his presence next to Stadi’s lifeless form, and then excluded him as though he were the enemy on her bridge.

What did she think he would do? How badly did she think he could screw up, compared to all the damage already done?

Is that how you have to measure yourself now, Paris? In relation to how much worse you can make a situation?

And what proof did he really have that Janeway wasn’t right?

“I’m reading fires inside.” Kim’s voice interrupted his brooding, jerking Paris back to the dark, cluttered corridor just outside the sickbay doors and the sickly stench of burning meat from somewhere within. He’d followed Kim out of the bridge for lack of anything more useful to do. At least putting things together down here would amount to something, would help other members of the crew even if Janeway didn’t think Paris had what it took. “We’ll have to be careful when we open the doors,” Kim said.

Assuming they could get them open. Leaving the ensign to stare at his tricorder, Paris banged on the emergency panel to the left of the entrance until it popped open, dropping half its contents with a startling clatter. Kim jumped around with a gasp, and Paris waved him over as he pulled the fire extinguisher loose from its mount. “Take this,” he said, trading the extinguisher for Kim’s tricorder with a smile he didn’t entirely feel. “I’ll go in first—I’m expendable.”

Kim gave him a startled look, but only nodded mutely and brandished the extinguisher like a phaser as Paris moved up to the door.

Smoke belched over them in a rotten-smelling wave the instant Paris keyed the doors aside. Coughing into his arm, Paris stumbled into the darkness with the tricorder pushed out in front of him in search of life. Bright, fat sparks dripped like molten gold from a panel in the sickbay’s far wall, and Kim darted across to smother the fire in chemicals while Paris made his way toward the two bodies tangled around each other at the base of the console. He knew Fitzgerald and the nurse were dead even before the tricorder confirmed his fears.

“They must have been right next to the console when it exploded.”

He closed the tricorder to silence it.

Overhead fans roared into life, the overhead lights brightening as power rallied from somewhere and began to sluggishly waken damaged consoles. Pulling a sheet from one of the examining tables, Paris draped it hastily across the two bodies. Already the echo of approaching voices sounded in the corridor outside—wounded arriving, no doubt, and many more to come.

Paris could imagine few things less heartening than stumbling through the sickbay doors only to find your doctor lying dead.

“Computer!” Kim ran to meet the first arrivals, a burned, battered group in engineering gold. “Initiate emergency medical holographic program!”

A sparkle of what Paris took at first to be a transporter tingled through the damaged room. Then, waiting impassively by one of the examining tables, a nondescript man in Starfleet blue suddenly appeared at Kim’s elbow as the ensign struggled to lift an unconscious engineer onto the bed. Paris shook off his startlement and hurried over to help.

“Please state the nature of the medical emergency.” The new arrival peered keenly at the growing flood of patients from the corridor outside.

“Multiple percussive injuries,” Kim told him, and the hologram flashed into action as though activated by a switch. In less time than it took Paris to scrub the sting of sweat from his eyes, the pseudo-doctor was on the other side of the sickbay, bent over a leg wound to peel back the burned cloth.

Something like the registering of information flickered through the hologram’s eyes, but no expression reached his face. “Status of your doctor?” he asked as his hands moved up the patient.

Paris only shrugged when Kim glanced up at him. How did you explain to a computer program that the entire ship’s butt was in a very flimsy sling?

“He’s dead,” Kim answered at last, and the hologram in turn responded promptly, “Point four cc’s of trianoline.”

Kim moved a few uncertain steps forward. “Trianoline?”

The doctor lifted his head, fixing Kim with an expression of chill impatience that Paris could only assume had been programmed in—accidentally or otherwise—from whatever real physician had been the template for this AI. The look certainly had the same effect on Paris that smart-assed doctors always did—he felt stupid and more than a little resentful as he volunteered, “We lost our nurse, too.”

That answer was apparently enough, although it didn’t do much to ease the hologram’s peevish expression. In a blink, the doctor was at one of the scattered medical cabinets, selecting a hypo and a canister of spray. “How soon are replacement medical personnel expected?”

“That’s going to be a problem… .” Kim had to turn almost in a complete circle to follow the hologram’s lightning-fast return to the patient’s bedside. “We’re pretty far away from replacements right now.”

The doctor cleaned and sealed the leg wound with a speed and thoroughness Paris suspected as all for the best, as far as recovery was concerned. The pilot couldn’t help thinking it was a good thing the engineer was unconscious, though—it didn’t look like Doc Holodeck’s handling of the leg had taken little things like discomfort or bedside manner into account.

“Tricorder.” He was at another bed instantly, one hand thrust out as he probed the livid bruise on a new patient’s forehead despite the young woman’s hisses of protest.

Not sure what else to do, Paris tossed his tricorder to Kim and let the ensign press the device into the hologram’s grasp. From the way the kid jerked back from the doctor’s touch, Paris guessed that hologram hands didn’t exactly make up for the feel of real human skin pressed against your own. He made a vow to himself never to get hurt on this mission if he could avoid it.

The doctor glanced at the tricorder, then pushed it back at Kim in brusque rejection. “Medical tricorder.”

The ensign nodded, flushing in realization, and darted between a half-dozen other waiting patients to retrieve the right device.

The hologram took it from him this time with no particular sign of thanks.

“A replacement must be requested as soon as possible. I’m programmed only as a short-term emergency supplement to the medical team.”

Paris laughed a little at the thought of how many of them on this ship would have to serve as emergency supplements for each other in the next few days. “Well, we may be stuck with you for a while, Doc.”

The hologram glanced up in what Paris almost mistook for insulted surprise. But that was his own projected feelings of inadequacy from being faced with a nonphysical program that had more responsibility than he did. A classical what-was-the-world-coming-to sort of thing.

The doctor looked away again to finish applying a light analgesic spray to the darkening bruise. “There’s no need for concern,” he remarked to Paris while closing up the tricorder. “I’m capable of treating any injury or disease.” He met the patient’s worried gaze with no warmth or reassurance in his tone. “No concussion. You’ll be fine.” Then, brusquely to Kim, “Clean him up.”

Yeah, Doc, you can treat disease and injury, Paris thought as he watched the doctor-image reappear on the other side of a knot of wounded, snapping off emotionless commands to whatever hapless crewman stood nearby as he set to work. It’s just the treating the patient thing you’ve got to work on now.

Janeway kept judiciously out of the way as Carey and one of his assistants activated the core seal with a great crack of thunderous light. Ozone seemed to blossom like fire in the air throughout the engine room. For one fearful moment, Janeway imagined that the warp-core leak had run wild, swallowing the ship, the crew, every bright hope for all their bright futures, in a single flare of atomic flame. Then the field’s initial discharge settled into a deep, steady glow, and the nitrogen misting from the side of the core pinched off to nothing. She stared at Carey across a sudden weird, thrumming silence.

“Unlock the magnetic constrictors,” she told him quietly.

Carey nodded and reached around his console to punch in the command.

“Constrictors on-line.”

Whatever sense of power coursed through the veins of a living ship swelled into life again. Their lives and deaths, all wrapped up in one matter-antimatter package. Janeway clenched one fist behind her back, a captain’s prayer. “Pressure?”

“Twenty-five hundred kilopascals …” The engineer looked up from his instruments with a smile. “And holding.”

Thank God, thank God! Relief washed over her in an almost fatiguing wave. Janeway flashed Carey a thumbs-up, and reached across to tap her comm badge when it beeped to interrupt them.

“Bridge to Janeway.” Rollins’s voice over the comm sounded brittle and laced with panic. “We’re being scanned by the Array, Captain—it’s penetrated our shields—” Janeway turned her back on the engine room’s bustle, trying to concentrate on the fading signal. “What kind of scan?”

She listened to blank air for nearly ten seconds before realizing it was silence she heard, not a pause.

“Bridge? Janeway to bridge! Respond!”

In the chill quiet that followed, the singing sparkle of a transporter crept up around her like a snake. Janeway whirled, and found Carey’s horrified eyes through the fading silhouette of a young engineer. The boy was frozen in an attitude of dull amazement as his atoms dispersed into nothing.

“Initiate emergency—!”

Without further warning, the alien transporter beam caught her, choked off her breath, spirited away her words. Janeway could only rage in frustrated silence as the engine room around her dimmed, faded, and then was gone.

Sensors indicated contusions, edema, and development of a local subdermal hematoma. Suggested treatment: An analgesic/anti-inflammatory regimen, in conjunction with application of cold packs once the ship returned to noncombatant status.

“You’re not seriously hurt,” the patient was informed as per Decision Track Number 30. “You can return to your station.”

Immediately, the transporter engaged and removed the patient from sickbay.

Upon query, sensors verified that no high-level organic life remained within the sickbay. Decision Track Number 1047 initiated manipulation of the holographic interface to display a translatable facsimile of irritation. A channel to the bridge was opened, and the vocalization subroutine reported, “This is the emergency holographic doctor speaking. I gave no permission for anyone to be transported out of sickbay.” Four hundred thousand nanoseconds elapsed with no discernible activity over the intercom channel. “Hello? Sickbay to bridge.”

Accidental Abandonment Subroutine self-activated one million seven thousand five hundred twenty nanoseconds later.

“I believe someone has failed to terminate my program,” the vocalization subroutine informed the empty starship. “Please respond… .”

Sunlight sparkled off the surface of a small, clear pond, reflecting back through the weeping willows to dance around a summer sky as smooth and blue as a china bowl. On the big, sprawling white house, the shutters and porch rail were painted the same color, once upon a time.

Through the years, though, sun, wind, and rain had finally faded the paint to a shade more like robins’ eggs than sapphires. It was still a pretty effect, Paris decided, even if it had no place here, seventy thousand light-years from the very Terran Midwest it so chillingly resembled.

“Come up here … come on now …”

Paris jerked around, startled by the unfamiliar voice, and nearly ran into Harry Kim as the ensign jumped in equal surprise while trying to carefully extricate himself from a rampant flower bed.

There was crew all around them, Paris realized as he put out a hand to steady Kim. Scattered as far away as the barn and the tree line, some of them, but all apparently unhurt and unrestrained. At the foot of the house’s long, wraparound porch, Janeway and a group of disoriented engineers milled in a small knot while a smiling, gray-haired woman in a flowered housedress and apron waved to them from the top of the stairs.

“I’ve got a pitcher of lemonade and some sugar cookies,” she called cheerfully.

Tapping Kim on the elbow as a signal to follow, Paris jogged forward to join up with Janeway’s small band. “Captain …?” he began, then cut himself off. What are you gonna ask? “Who is this lady?” “What’re we doing here?” She’s the captain, he reminded himself, not omniscient.

Although, sometimes, good captains almost managed to be both.

“Don’t believe your eyes, Mr. Paris.” Her own eyes flicked across the reading on her tricorder as the old woman on the porch waited with smiling patience. “We’ve only been transported a hundred kilometers—” Janeway looked at the old woman, then cocked her head upward with a thoughtful frown. “We’re inside the Array.”

Beside her, Kim passed his own tricorder over the porch stairs, the neatly trimmed grass. “There’s no indication of stable matter. All this must be some kind of holographic projection.”

Janeway nodded and slipped her tricorder back onto her belt.

Above them, the hollow clink-clunk of ice dropping into tall glasses caught Paris’s attention. The old woman clucked her tongue at him as she poured sun-colored liquid from a pitcher that hadn’t been in her hands a moment before. “You poor things!

You must be worn out. Sit down and rest awhile … have a cold drink …” She held out one of the tall, frosty glasses to no one in particular, tucking a wedge of yellow fruit onto the rim.