Shakedown #92"
By: Favor, Medic / Morale Officer, [PST]
Giuseppe Silvio, Chief Engineer, [RNPC]
Stardate: 58202.28 1800
Sick Bay
Ensign Favor hurried through the Sick Bay hatch. "Computer: Seal the doors," she ordered, and leaned against the wall, catching her breath in hitching sobs. That had been close. A little too close. She had felt the Counselor's thoughts like fingers, lifting mental stones, peering at ugliness. "Damn," she whispered.
Favor looked around the surgery, at the supplies neatly stacked, the instruments of her trade dark and empty, waiting for a sick or damaged person to come along so she could heal them. "They can make technological devices to fix any physical thing wrong with me, but they can't make a cloaking device that'll keep a Betazoid from doing the five-finger fandango through my head," she said aloud.
She rinsed her face and hands, and blew her nose, and turned towards the man asleep beneath the Kriko-shield. When they first hustled Silvio into her surgery, he had reminded her of a broken bird. A little broken bird that flew into the ship on wings of steel, and landed in Sick Bay.
She hadn't actually spoken with Silvio herself. Some crewman who'd been there at the pod's landing had administered emergency pain meds. Silvio had been worked over, and his head was crumpled, his bones snapped. Catastrophic injuries. Favor ticked them off like she was counting spare change--the bleeding in the cranium, the ruptured eardrums, the scalded flesh.
And--oh yes--the missing fingernails.
By the time they hustled him into her surgery, the meds were taking effect. He had looked at her and made a few mewling noises in the back of his damaged throat, and then the Chem-coma carried him away. She'd brought him out of it only once, so the captain could de-brief him.
She examined the clear panel on the side of the Kriko-shield. "Your wing is healing, Bird," she said. If she stared through the panel long enough, she could actually see the re-calcification of his bone as it knit itself back together. "It's healing quite nicely."
There was no reply from Silvio, only the wooshing sound of the respirator, and the quiet hum of the pseudo-feeder/catheter. Good, Favor thought. Let the man rest. The Chem-coma was doing its job.
In spite of all the advances in medical science, the best remedy for healing was the oldest---simple sleep. Give it enough rest, let the machines do the work that the injured body can't do for itself, and the body will mend.
"The dead do not inhabit their graves, Silvio. Do you know this?"
She imagined that he did. She imagined that the carnage he'd witnessed, the smells of burning flesh, the things he'd seen in the past weeks, would stay with him for a lifetime, and she thought of the Counselor's perfume. "It was familiar," she said to Silvio. "It reminded me of someone I used to know."
The dead do not inhabit their graves. No indeed, Favor thought. The dead do not inhabit their graves at all. They come back when you least expect it, at the most inconvenient of times, in ways that you cannot possibly imagine, to remind you of what you've lost.
Even when you think you've stored them safely away in the past, they'll come back to remind you. And remind you. And remind you. And remind you.
"And believe me, Silvio, they'll find you. Even if you're a million light years away from them, in places and planets where they never were. They'll find you."
Maybe her dead mother could entertain Silvio's dead shipmates from the Kittyhawk, Favor thought wildly. Maybe all those dead people could get together here aboard the Zion and have one big party, like the ones she remembered from her childhood, her mother and her mother's friends and all those dashing Star Fleet officers. "At least they'll leave the two of us alone," she said, and laughed bitterly.
She studied the sleeping man. He looked like every human tourist she'd ever seen, on holiday in Ming, white from their months in deep space. They'd stumble out of the Transport Center, lugging their bags, their ridiculous skin as pale as the moon. They'd wade out into the Sea of Tieran, bobbing in the green surf, and then drag themselves up onto the sand and lay about like gufa seals, turning pink in the tropical sun.
Tourists, Favor thought. Stupid tourists! They flicked on their white smiles, hitting on the local women, flashing huge expense accounts around, and dazzling simple people like Favor's own mother, who never had more than two fengo in her monetary account at any given time.
Oh, yes, those tourists, having a ball on vacation, and then leaving as seamlessly as they had arrived, one melting into the other, they all looked alike anyway, and never giving a thought in the world to what they left behind in their rooms back on Raisa.
Never giving a thought that they might have left behind something a little more important than a lost bathing suit.
Where did they think the Lesser Tribe came from, anyway?
She looked at Silvio again. He really was quite pale, wasn't he?
"Yes, as pale and empty as a human's promises," she said bitterly. With her endo-scanner, she pressed deeply into his arm, checking his platelets. In his sleep, Silvio moaned, and Favor softened. She chided herself for her unprofessionalism. She couldn't blame an innocent man for what a guilty man had done.
His platelet count scanned low; he'd lost a lot of blood, and now it was seeping. "Not good, Bird," Favor said. "Not good at all. Computer: Two units human O Positive."
The machines hummed, and she watched as Silvio's veins plumped with fresh plasma, and his skin glowed pink. He shifted again, and Favor quickly adjusted the Chem-coma levels, increasing the meds, until he was still, his breathing deep and even.
Where did people go when Chem-comas carried them aloft? Favor had heard different stories from other doctors and medics, and even patients themselves. Sometimes they went backwards to the past, becoming children again. Sometimes they went to planets that didn't exist, and saw fantastic beasts conjured from their sleeping imaginations.
When she'd interned, Favor saw a patient arrive out from a Chem-coma in tears. "She was there," he'd pleaded, clutching Favor's arm. "Send me back. Oh, please, send me back to her!"
It had been his dead wife, Favor read on his medical chart, and they'd had to ship him to readjustment therapy. In the week that he'd been gone, drifting in his Chem-coma, he'd spent a lifetime with his long-dead wife, raising children, turning old and gray, and then he'd been yanked into reality and had to learn to live without her all over again.
Medicine could be cruel at times.
She rinsed her face and hands once more, and set the alarm on the Kriko-shield. She'd catch a cat nap; if anything went wrong with Silvio, the alarm would page her from her quarters.
"I'm leaving now, Bird," she said. "I need to think up some something for my next MWR memo to the crew. Got any ideas?"
Silvio didn't answer.
Favor hadn't really expected one, anyway.