FOREIGN FOES

by Dave Galanter

  “How’m I doin’, Doc?” Geordi croaked out softly, droplets of perspiration streaking down his skin.

  “You’re going to be fine,” she told him.

  It was a lie. She didn’t know that. She wasn’t sure of anything right now. It was just what doctors told patients when they were critical . . . what doctors told themselves when those patients were friends.

  Beverly glanced at her hand-scanner for the third time in as many moments, then gazed at Geordi again.

  Not a brain hemorrhage. Not an aneurysm. Not something simple. Nothing she could just give him a pill for and make go away. And no magic technological wand to wave. This was the kiss-and-jab of being a doctor to her closest friends: she could cure them when she knew the answer, but had to watch them suffer when she didn’t.

  Setting the scanner down, she slipped her hand into Geordi’s and held it tightly.

  Suddenly he convulsed, every muscle pinched and shaking. He writhed forward, plunging off Beverly’s lap and onto the transporter dais.

  She dived for him, scooping up his head, keeping it from cracking against the hard deck.

  Pain seized his body—a hot poker of agony that jerked his muscles one way, then the other. She reached around and hugged him—half motherly instinct, half medical training—keeping him from hurting himself.

  The readout on her tricorder told her nothing she couldn’t see for herself: Heartbeat—rapid. Breathing—shallow. Perspiration—by the bucket. The pain indicator on the graph might be malfunctioning, but not as badly as Geordi was.

  Did she dare give him a pain depressant without knowing the cause?

  His neck was a knot in her hand as he pitched back and forth. He cried out, and his hands flailed back up to his temples, fingers scratching at the glowing implants.

  She yanked her head up to the nurse and pointed at the medkit. “Four CCs zenapantocene!”

  Geordi’s trembling body went slack as the hypo hissed into him.

  She pulled his limp body back onto her lap and slipped her hand back between his slack fingers and squeezed.

  “Come on, come on! Where’s that damn stretcher?”

  * * *

  The turbolift droned upward. Rushing was always too slow when life was at stake.

  Beverly Crusher bounced on the balls of her feet, as if to lighten the drag on the lift or get her closer to the deck . . . something.

  She hung tightly on to Geordi’s hand, her thumb lightly brushing back and forth against his clammy skin. Too clammy.

  The lift released them, but the door to sickbay was still an endless corridor away. They hurried, Beverly’s long red hair an annoyance in her eyes as they ran.

  People . . . walking . . . in the way . . . “Move it!” Doctor’s orders.

  They exploded into sickbay, Doctor Crusher barking commands. The room became a beehive, with Geordi its center and goal.

  “Lifesign indicators at minimum, Doctor.”

  “Get him into the bio-bed—activate a sterile field.”

  “I want that cart over here. And move MacCaffy out of the way!”

  “Where?”

  “Post-op.”

  “Set up cranial scan!”

  Beverly ushered the medical team over to the diagnostic bed in the middle of the room. She had to pull her hand free of Geordi’s—not from any grasp of his weak fingers, but from her own.

  “Set up the O.R.,” she ordered the young medic who’d closed Geordi into the diagnostic table. “I want a complete neurosurgical team standing by. Dr. Peiss to assist.”

  “Raenna is already on her way.”

  “Good.”

  Beverly paused a moment, looked down at the stretcher that held only Geordi’s VISOR now. The eyes without their master. Or was the VISOR the master here? Was it the reason he was now in sickbay?

  She turned away from it, looked back to Geordi, and frowned at the sight of his unconscious body. So lifeless . . . with that bright, humming diagnostic equipment enveloping him. It flashed, pulsed, clicked . . . as if it were alive for him.

  Fumbling with the bio-bed control pad, Beverly cursed her fingers for not working right, not knowing the places on the console that would be second nature if . . .

  She ordered another doctor over, and pushed herself toward the wall comm. “Sickbay to Bridge.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Data replied after a moment.

  “We’re running tests on Geordi,” she said quickly, turning to the screen next to her, taking in the initial data from the more comprehensive scans of Sickbay’s sensor bio-bed.

  “How is he?” Data asked.

  Beverly shook her head. “Not well.” She poked something into a control panel on the wall, shook her head, cleared the screen, and tapped it in again. “He’s sedated, but still in a great deal of pain.”

  “Cause?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said, and cursed the fact. “I can’t seem to relieve the pain. Maybe a viral infection.” She pressed her lips together and frowned, dissatisfied with her own non-answers. “I don’t know,” she repeated quietly. “The area around his neural implants is inflamed.”

  “Diagnostics are running on the transporter systems to discover sabotage, if any. Have you found such evidence?”

  Beverly’s brows wrinkled in confusion. “Sabotage? No.” She shrugged, wondering who would do such a thing—and why. “I’m going to have Bioengineering look at the VISOR, though.”

  “Understood, Doctor,” Data said. “Contact me when you know more.”

  The channel beeped closed and she pulled in a breath, her brow wrinkling. “Your concern is underwhelming,” she muttered, and looked back to Geordi. For godssake, Data, what could possibly be more important than your best friend?

  “Computer.”

  “Ready.”

  “Request access to primary and secondary communication frequency controls.”

  “Access denied. Command security code required.”

  “Override command security code, personal authority.”

  “Confirm authority.”

  “Lieutenant Commander Data, currently in acting command of U.S.S. Enterprise. Reference ship’s log stardate 47511.3”

  “Pro tem command only. Access denied.”

  He tapped quickly into the control panel.

  “Access denied.”

  He paused a moment, thought, then typed again, longer this time.

  “Restriction released.”

  “Re-restrict primary controls, my personal code.”

  “Complete.”

  “Encode all secondary frequencies with encryption procedure in file ‘Commander Data two-zero-three point five-nine-three.’”

  “Encryption complete.”

  “Computer, link all frequencies through my console.”

  “Complete.”

  “Function switch, main database.”

  “Database ready.”

  “Search all sub-bases, Klingon military tactics. Topic: covert operations. Subtopic: espionage. Cross-reference: Hidran-Klingon conflict of twenty-two ninety-two.”

  “Searching . . . Complete. Four hundred thirty-six files found.”

  “List topics.”

  Data glanced over them rapidly, then pecked a few orders into the console.

  “New cross-reference: current Klingon tactics based on military reports.”

  “Complete. Seventy-seven entries found under Tactical subtopic, one-hundred fifty-one entries found under Federation/Klingon Liaison sub-topic.”

  “List entries, maximum speed.”

  “Stop squirming!” Deanna snapped.

  Riker pulled away, more from her tone than from the pain in his leg.

  She pulled the bandage back around his calf and twisted. His hand lurched off the control panel and the small shuttle rocked. Deanna found herself jammed between Riker’s leg and the small alcove under the console.

  Flying manually by choice was exhilarating for Riker—having to do it was just nerve-stretching, and his injur
ed leg wasn’t helping.

  She pulled herself back up, grabbing the ends of the makeshift bandage again.

  “Watch it!” He reached down, flexing his toes and feeling the caked blood that had stuck his uniform to his calf. He wanted to rub at the wound but couldn’t bring himself to reach any farther than his knee.

  Deanna slapped his hand away and the flitter shook again.

  “Just let me do this, and you fly the ship,” she said. “Why not try to get the autopilot working?”

  “Can’t be fixed for the same reason we can’t reach the captain. Enterprise’s white-noise blanket must be having some effect on it.” He stabbed at the autopilot control, then felt the ship shudder and lose altitude. He quickly turned it off. “We’ll just have to continue manually.”

  She twisted at his bandage again and he grimaced. “That’s a little too tight, Deanna,” he said, squinting at the console in pain.

  His only answer was a bandage that pinched even closer around his leg.

  “You’re cutting off my circulation!”

  “You’re ‘circulating’ all over the deck. I’m trying to stop the bleeding.”

  They’d been sniping at each other since takeoff and he was ready to let himself circulate to death if it would quiet her up. She’d wanted to turn back when the ship had lurched and he’d crammed his shin into the jagged edge of the console panel. He had decided they’d go on.

  Riker didn’t believe that their minor disagreement was what edged Deanna’s emotions, though. Maybe she hadn’t released the tension she’d absorbed from the delegation. . . . He didn’t know, and he might have cared more, if she hadn’t been taking her anger out on the gash in his leg.

  What kind of transport doesn’t carry a med-kit? Riker glanced back around the small shuttle the colonists used for short-distance surveys. It was old and small, with barely enough room for the two of them and their tricorder. A thick layer of gray dust covered every surface. Riker had wiped down the controls before powering up, but that had only removed a decade of grime.

  Dust—and the sight of his own blood. Things he usually enjoyed living without.

  He sneezed, and his leg pulsed with pain. The small ship jostled again and be and Deanna grunted as she bumped against his leg.

  The pain and the frustration weighed upon him, with her anxiety a mound on top of his own. He struggled to keep his glare on the small craft’s controls and off her as she worked on cleaning and dressing his mangled shin and calf. Well, maybe not mangled, but it felt that way.

  “We should turn back.” she said.

  “No,” he growled, burying his thoughts in the console, pounding at the controls. Too minor a reason—he wouldn’t turn back just because he was in a little pain.

  He looked down at the strip of uniform that now acted as his bandage. A laser suture on board would have been nice, or even a roll of gauze, but the lack of either wasn’t enough reason to squelch a mission.

  “We have our orders. I’m not going to let this stop us.”

  Orders. He bent his lips into a frown. The captain had asked the impossible—not unusual for Picard—but this time Riker saw no reasonable way. Thousands of square kilometers of land couldn’t be surveyed in a flying dinghy with a souped-up tricorder.

  Deanna gave a final tug at the bandage and pulled herself out of the small crevice she had been folded into. “It’s not a small injury, Will. No one’s been on this planet long. We don’t know what kind of microbes . . .”

  She let her sentence trail off.

  “What kind of microbes what?”

  She settled into the only other chair, the copilot seat, and looked out the starboard window. A real window. With real blue-green sky and endless fields of grain below.

  “Nothing,” she murmured.

  He pursed his lips and silently fumed, unable to stem the burst of emotion he knew would probably catch Deanna’s empathic attention. He could feel her staring—those know-all-tell-nothing eyes of a counselor—and wondered where the intimate eyes of a friend had gone. Or did he even want them?

  And what did Thomas Riker see when he looked into Deanna’s eyes?

  There was a strange and confusing turn of events. Recently Riker decided he led a . . . well, an odd life. What normal person wakes up in the morning to find that a transporter malfunction years ago had created an exact duplicate of himself? It had been strange to look in that mirror . . . to see a man he could have been—would have been—had things not happened at certain turns in his life.

  Thomas Riker, as Will’s duplicate now called himself, had been stranded early in his—their?—career, marooned at an abandoned post. That Lieutenant Riker, as he would remain while Will Riker received two promotions, lived his life not among the stars, but scraping an existence from day to day. Thomas Riker only dreamed of the life that Will Riker was actually living. More than that, Tom Riker was still in love with Deanna Troi.

  Not so surprising, that. So why wasn’t Will Riker? And why did he feel those twinges of jealousy and guilt when Tom and Deanna had began . . . or was it continued? . . . where he and Deanna had left off?

  Maybe he was still in love, in a way. He still enjoyed her company—more than any woman he had ever known, but he wasn’t really interested in rekindling anything at this point, was he? Falling in with Barbara was evidence of that. Then why did he feel those twinges?

  It probably didn’t matter. Deanna wasn’t interested in Will Riker anymore, it appeared. She was interested in Tom Riker. Even if Will did want to rekindle anything . . . well, he didn’t know if that was possible. It all depended on Deanna, and she wasn’t an open book right now.

  What else was new? For a psychological counselor she was a master at uncovering other people’s feelings while shielding her own. She could sense, feel and report on others, but so often bottled her passions while seeming to be open.

  Right now she didn’t even seem that, and it was beginning to annoy. Since when didn’t she confide in him?

  Since Tom.

  The manual control, the frustration of not even knowing what they were looking for . . . it all had worn on him. Mile after mile of grain and mile after mile of edged talk was not a prescription to stop the throbbing of his leg or to find what on the planet was absorbing Enterprise’s energy.

  All he was sure of so far was that Velex seemed to be a giant power sponge that soaked up the white-noise blanket with fervor.

  Every last bit of the flitter’s reserve power had been diverted to sensors to hack through that blanket. That left manual navigation turbulent, and what energy was left being drained by the planet as well.

  He gritted his teeth and tried to think about his piloting more than anything else. If he was going to be resentful about something he should at least take it off of her. She could be reading him. Another problem with empaths . . . they’d leave their victims wondering what thoughts had been “listened to.”

  Each attempt to block his emotions just frustrated him further. Like trying to blow out a camp fire, he was only fueling what he’d hoped to smother— flagging for perusal those thoughts he wanted hidden. The harder he tried not to be read, the easier he would be to read.

  “Sensor penetration?” he asked, knowing the answer was the same as ten minutes ago.

  She looked from one screen to another. “Twelve kilometer radius and holding.”

  Monotone. Distant.

  Dammit, Deanna!

  He was looking at her, and she snapped her eyes up to his.

  “What?” she asked, perplexed.

  Riker hesitated, then decided to push forward. “What’s with you today?”

  She looked at him for a moment, then looked away, back toward the window. “I’m not sure.”

  Concern thumped around his gut, pulling his jaw tight. His leg throbbed with the pumping of his heart but it seemed the least of his problems.

  He stared at the back of her head, then looked out the starboard window, trying to follow her gaze to whatever it wa
s she saw, or felt.

  He leaned over, nudged her shoulder.

  “Deanna, I didn’t mean to snap,” he offered a bit softer, knowing it should have been a lot softer.

  She shook her head a little, looked up. “You didn’t,” she murmured.

  “You all right?”

  “Fine.”

  But she wasn’t.

  “I know when you’re fine. What’s bothering you?” She turned to him, those mahogany Grecian eyes catching his and pulling him in. There was such confusion pasted on her face . . . pain almost—worse than when she was swept up in a tempest of emotions that were the Hidran and Klingon delegations.

  She stared at him a bit longer, looking the little lost girl. Perhaps trying to put thoughts into words.

  He glanced out the window, made a course adjustment, tried to lose his tension in the churning jasmine fields below. Tried to, but couldn’t and swiveled back to her.

  They rode up and down an air pocket and she said nothing. Riker got the feeling she was trying. Her knuckles were white marbles on her lap and he half twisted out of his seat to face her.

  She inhaled deeply and let it out slowly, folding her hands together thoughtfully on the edge of the console. “I don’t quite know how to put it.”

  Riker tapped the autopilot control, but the white-noise blanket still interfered with compu-nav-sensors and the computer refused his command again. He grumbled something and had to turn back to the console. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

  “This planet . . . there’s something unnerving about it,” she said slowly. “It was barely noticeable before . . . but as we get farther from the colony . . .”

  From the corner of his eye he noticed she was looking out the port again.

  “The planet makes you ‘uncomfortable’? What could do that?”

  Cocking her head to one side, as if listening to something in the distance, she focused her eyes on a remote point and whispered, “Nothing.”

  Riker’s brows knitted. He shifted toward her, forgetting their mission to scan and just allowing the flitter to travel off in a relatively straight line.

  She bit her lower lip softly, then finally spoke. “What do you hear when you go to the beach?”