“Envoy Sellassars and Captain Jean-Luc Picard dined in Ten-Forward at 1800. The captain escorted Envoy Sellassars to engineering, where he was given a tour by Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge at 2000 hours. From that point, Envoy Sellassars returned to his quarters, where he remains.”
“Okay, he’s been in contact with everyone here,” Beverly said. “Everyone except Will. Alyssa, check Deanna’s readings, see how they measure up to last night. Then check the others. I have a feeling about something.”
Before she could take another step, the sickbay doors parted and Lieutenant Raisa Danilova stumbled into sickbay. “Doc,” she said, “having trouble—” Before she could finish, she collapsed into unconsciousness. A quick scan revealed the same comatose condition.
“Take her over there and keep an eye on her,” Beverly said, pointing the EMH toward a small chair in the corner. She was running out of beds, and fast. “Damn it,” Beverly said, “this is spreading like a cold.” Walking into her office, she said, “Crusher to bridge.”
“Bridge here, Doctor.” It was almost comforting to hear Lieutenant Commander Evan’s voice. At least there was still a sense of normalcy around the ship.
“Commander,” she began, “I know this is a bizarre question, but I need to ask. Has anyone on beta shift had trouble sleeping?”
There was a pause, and just as it slipped past the uncomfortable point, Evan’s voice replied, “No, ma’am. Everyone reports perfectly normal sleep, Doctor.”
“Nobody has fallen asleep at their post?”
“Not that I’m—wait a minute. Sanders? Doctor, Lieutenant Sanders is acting groggy, like he’s about to fall asleep.”
If Beverly’s memory served, Sanders was at tactical.
“Sanders is unconscious, ma’am. I’ll have him brought to sickbay immediately.”
Beverly looked around. “While you’re at it, could you send down a few more beds? We’re a little full here.” That cinched it. She’d bet money that their sleep patterns matched Sellassars’s. “Thank you, Commander. Sickbay out.”
Okay, now how do I do this without creating an intergalactic incident? If he thinks we don’t trust him, how do we get him to trust us with information that might save the quadrant?
It was Alyssa’s yell that brought her back to reality.
“What’s wrong?” Beverly asked.
Ogawa pointed at Amarie—their four-handed bartender—and her lower right arm, which was giving a slight twitch about every thirty seconds.
“Okay, that’s new. How much do we know about her race?”
“Not much,” the nurse replied. “Commander Riker said she was the first of her kind he’d ever encountered. We’ve got all of the medical scans on her when she came on board, but really, that’s it.”
Beverly took samples of Deanna’s, Will’s, Jean-Luc’s, Geordi’s, Raisa’s, and Amarie’s blood, then retrieved the second vial of the envoy’s blood from the cabinet. From there, she headed into the lab. Instead of trusting the computer to compare the lot, she used the one thing she knew she could trust, her eyes. Slipping a microscopic slide of each blood sample under the scope, she compared it to the base—Sellassars’s blood. She went over them three times, every sample, comparing it to the envoy’s as closely as her eyes would allow. “There’s no connection. Nothing. Sellassars isn’t carrying anything that—”
“Doctor, I have brought the envoy as you requested,” Data’s voice said from the main sickbay.
“What am I doing here?” Sellassars’s jingling voice said. “I was sleeping peacefully when this gentleman said you needed me urgently, Doctor.”
When Beverly walked back into the sickbay, she was surprised to discover that every single one of her patients was awake. Groggy as anyone whose sleep had been interrupted, but they were awake. And Data stood amid them all, Sellassars’s hand in his.
“Envoy Sellassars,” Beverly said, making sure every bit of due deference she could manage was there. “I believe there may be an answer to the problems that are plaguing my crewmates. May I please take a sample of the Barth on your skin for examination?”
The Kendarayan’s coal-black eyes widened. “No, you may not. They are my protection. Take even one of them, and you damage me. I will not allow it.”
Beverly took a deep breath. You can do this. Just think like Jean-Luc. What would he do? “Then can you explain why people on this ship have been having sleep disturbances ever since you came on board? I have a half-dozen people here who’ve slipped into comas instead of just falling asleep. They wake up the next morning as though nothing happened. I can’t find anything medically wrong with them. The only common denominator here is that they’ve all somehow been in contact with you.”
Sellassars’s dark eyes looked directly into hers. “So have you. Have you been having the same sleep problems?”
Beverly was ready for that one. “No,” she calmly said. “But I also haven’t been in direct contact with your skin.”
“How do you know they have?”
He had a point. Beverly couldn’t ignore that fact. That’s when an image flashed in her mind, the image of Sellassars brushing his hand against Deanna’s cheek shortly after he’d come on board. “I know you touched Counselor Troi. And she was the first known victim of these sleep disturbances. Could she have passed something on without knowing it?”
Sellassars laughed, and it was like the tinkle of bells. “Anything is possible, child.”
Beverly’s jaw tightened as she caught Jean-Luc’s exhausted but present gaze. After taking a deep breath, her voice was hard as duranium when she asked, “What are the Barth, Envoy? What have you brought onto my ship?”
“They are harmless to you, Doctor, I assure you of that. Their sole purpose in life is to protect Kendarayans from any biological threat.”
She spared a glance toward Alyssa. “How often do they reproduce, these Barth?” Beverly asked.
“Often enough to continue protecting me on my journey through life. The Barth belong to the Dream Riders, Doctor. You would never comprehend.”
Alyssa, however, got the message just fine. She pulled Data aside, and ran a microscopic slide over his palm where it had contacted Sellassars’s flesh.
“Dream Riders?” Jean-Luc asked, pushing himself into a seated position. “We don’t have any information about them in your culture. I would be fascinated to hear more.”
Sellassars smiled, those iridescent blue teeth sharp against his sparkling flesh. “The Dream Riders are quite special among my people, Captain,” he began. “We are people who don’t dream as others dream. Our bodies go through a process by which our metabolism slows, our brain functions ebb, and we float along the ether amid the great unknown. We are sometimes able to cross the barrier between life and death, using our gifts to carry messages to those Kendarayans who have gone before.”
La Forge leaned onto his side. “There have been stories of people who walk with the dead for centuries. You mean, your people can actually do it?”
Sellassars’s eyes turned down as he pulled his hood over his head. “Yes, though we are supposed to remain unknown to the rest of Kendaraya. It is feared that if the Dream Riders’ identities were known, we would be hunted.”
Beverly reached out and touched Sellassars’s shoulder. “But there is something about you that is allowing non-Kendarayans to approach death when they sleep, too. What is it?”
Sellassars shrugged, the gesture nearly lost in the play of light off his robes. “I do not know.”
“I think I might,” she said. Grabbing the slide from Alyssa, she quickly retreated to the lab. Sure enough, when she got a look at the Barth under the microscope, she saw exactly what she expected. “There’s an odd nucleotide in here. One that isn’t normal in the humanoid races of the Federation. I’m going to take a guess that that’s the reason you’re able to be a ‘Dream Rider,’ Sellassars.”
Beverly began pacing the lab, continuing to think aloud. “And like a germ on a child’s
hand, it’s able to spread. If the Barth reproduce as fast as you slough off skin cells, then it wouldn’t take long for this nucleotide to spread.”
“And you wouldn’t even need to be there,” the EMH said.
“No, he wouldn’t,” she replied, backing the harshness in her voice with a glare toward the hologram. “Computer, deactivate Emergency Medical Hologram.”
The EMH was just beginning to protest as he faded from existence.
Beverly sighed with relief. She was beginning to hate that thing. “Computer, please send a quick message to Dr. Louis Zimmerman, Jupiter station. Message reads: Doctor, please re-work the personality matrix on the Mark 1 program before it goes into wider distribution. There are significant flaws with the program’s ego matrix. Message ends.”
Smiling, she turned to the envoy. “Now, all we need to do is figure out if we can deactivate this nucleotide without doing you or the Barth any harm in the process. That is, of course, if you’ll agree to help, Sellassars. This will allow your mission to be far more successful than it would have been.”
Sellassars looked around the sickbay. “I am responsible for all of you being here. And for that, I am truly sorry. Yet your willingness to help someone who has harmed so many here is humbling. Of course. I will render whatever assistance I am capable of rendering, Doctor.”
CHAPTER
8
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Reg Barclay, cutting quite the dramatic Scrooge figure on the holodeck’s stage. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with that you show me!”
The Ghost of Christmas Future, as Beverly had programmed into the holographic emitters, was a truly frightening spectre. Its deep black cloak concealed everything, leaving it to look like the dark ghost that it was. It played its part perfectly, solemnly pointing toward a tombstone while Reg slowly crept toward that same spot. Reg leaned over, reading out the name on the gravestone. “Ebenezer Scrooge!” he cried. His entire body began trembling as he fell to his knees.
Come on, Reg. You can hold this together.
“Am I the man who lay upon the bed?”
The Ghost pointed from the gravestone, to Reg, and then back again.
“No, Spirit! Oh no, no! Spirit! Hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?”
The Ghost’s hand began to tremble, precisely as Beverly had instructed it.
“Good Spirit,” Reg kept on, precisely on his marks, “your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life?”
Beverly allowed her inner director to take a back seat for a moment, watching the assembled crew, as well as Envoy Sellassars.
The smile fell from her face at the sight of the envoy, fully enrobed from head to toe, even—to both of their chagrin—his hands. But days of trial and error could not produce a way to negate the effects of the nucleotide sequence without destroying the protection that the Barth gave the Kendarayans. She managed to repair the damage done to the crew, but she couldn’t help feel sorry for Sellassars. He would be forever trapped by his own flesh. But still, he could sleep the sleep of death, and his dreams would ride that line for as long as he lived.
“He had no further intercourse with Spirits,” Data said from the center front of the stage, “but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TERRI OSBORNE’s previous sojourns in the Star Trek universe include four eBooks—Malefictorum (the landmark fiftieth installment of the S.C.E. series), Progress (which kicked off the six-part What’s Past miniseries), and the two-part Remembrance of Things Past (a Next Generation/Corps of Engineers crossover)—and three short stories—“Three Sides to Every Story” in the Deep Space Nine anthology Prophecy and Change, “‘Q’uandary” in the New Frontier anthology No Limits, and “Eighteen Minutes” in the Voyager anthology Distant Shores. Forthcoming is the story “Good Queen, Bad Queen, I Queen, You Queen” in the Doctor Who: Short Trips anthology The Quality of Leadership, due out in the spring of 2008. Terri is also working on several other projects that will take her to the Ireland of the past, the Mars of the future, and other places both near and far. Find out more at her website at www.terriosborne.com.
Star Trek: The Next Generation™: Slings and Arrows Book 4: That Sleep of Death Page 4
