Star Trek®: A Choice of Catastrophes

by Michael Schuster

  “Four.” A woman’s voice, the one with the broken legs.

  There was a long pause.

  “Five.” Another woman.

  No more? Hell. “Anyone else?” called McCoy.

  Someone moaned, but no one answered. The deck chose that moment to rumble once more under McCoy’s feet, but nowhere near enough to do any harm, merely a gentle reminder of the straits the ship was in.

  “How close are you to the intercom?” asked Two.

  McCoy turned around. His eyes had adjusted enough that he could probably make it safely. There was one next to the food slots, and he’d almost made it there before the distortion had hit. But the intercom wasn’t as important as what was next to it: the emergency kit. All large public areas on the ship had a cubbyhole in the bulkhead that contained medical supplies and other emergency paraphernalia.

  Stepping cautiously to avoid fallen hazards on the floor, McCoy worked his way to the speaker grille of the intercom. He hit the activation switch. “McCoy to sickbay.”

  There was no response.

  “McCoy to bridge.”

  It wasn’t even hissing with static or interference, it was just dead.

  “Intraship’s out,” he called to Two. “You don’t happen to have a communicator on you, do you?”

  “Not today,” Two replied. Not good, because neither did McCoy.

  McCoy felt to the left of the intercom, locating the release for the emergency pack. He gave it a hard push, and a panel sprang open, revealing an inset in the bulkhead, faintly illuminated by an emergency glowstrip. He grabbed the medical kit and slung it over his shoulder.

  Next to it was a flashlight, which McCoy grabbed and flicked on immediately—promptly sending blinding light right into his face. Blinking, he turned it around and cast it over upturned tables and toppled chairs, until he saw someone. A lone man sitting at a table by himself, the same one that McCoy had seen eating mashed potatoes just before this whole mess had happened.

  “Hey, Doctor,” the man said. McCoy recognized him as the voice of Two. “Watch where you point that.”

  “Sorry.” McCoy dipped the light to illuminate the man’s body, not his face. “Who is that?”

  “Lieutenant Leslie, sir.”

  That’s who he was! Ryan Leslie had done a rotation in sickbay as an emergency med tech, though McCoy had repeatedly mixed him up with a navigator named Connors. Judging by his red shirt, he was now in security, or maybe engineering.

  “Okay, Leslie, I hope you remember your medical training, because we’ve got a lot of work to do here.”

  Leslie swallowed visibly, but gave a confident nod. “I think so, sir.”

  “Doctor!” called out another voice, a woman’s. Four, McCoy thought. “Over here.” McCoy swung his light across the room to find a woman with her legs stuck beneath a collapsed table. “I think my legs are broken.”

  “Don’t move and stay quiet. You’ll be fine soon enough.” McCoy turned around and found another flashlight in the emergency compartment.

  Leslie held tight until McCoy made it to him and handed him the second flashlight. “How are you doing, son?” He kept his voice quiet, so that no one else could hear him.

  “I’m fine,” said Leslie, but he still seemed nervous.

  McCoy narrowed his eyes. “You don’t sound it. Really, how are you?”

  “I hit something when I fell. Hurt my arm.”

  “Show me,” McCoy said.

  Leslie held up his left arm, which even in the unsatisfying light was visibly bloodied. The sleeve’s fabric had torn above the elbow, and the skin showed a gash halfway down the forearm. It looked bad, but that was due to the amount of blood. All McCoy needed was an autosuture, and thankfully there was one in the medical kit. Working quickly, he rolled up the torn sleeve to be able to use the device. As he moved its beam slowly over the wound, the affected tissue was stimulated into healing quickly. Within a couple of minutes, there was no trace of any damage except for the drying blood.

  “Now you’re fine,” McCoy said. “Right now I need your help, son. There were about a dozen of us in here. We need to find the seven who didn’t count off before we do anything else. We can’t afford the chance that one of them is bleeding to death while we help someone else. Got it?”

  Pale and visibly shaken, Leslie said nothing; he merely nodded.

  “Then let’s get to it.”

  They fanned out, taking opposite sides of the room. McCoy’s search was aided by his tricorder, which led him to a man slumped underneath a table. He recognized him as Ensign Rix, from the communications center. A quick inspection, coupled with tricorder readings, showed that he had a concussion, but there would be no lasting damage.

  Leslie called him over to look at a noncom who’d been flung into a bulkhead with extreme force. Externally, she looked fine, but McCoy’s tricorder showed massive internal bleeding. He injected her with a drug to slow it, but she needed to be taken to sickbay, and soon.

  In a back corner, they found the patient McCoy had been dreading. A tall Saurian with numerous injuries. He didn’t say anything, even when the flashlight’s beam hit his face, but he wasn’t unconscious. A large shard of something had gotten lodged in his gigantic left eye. It was probably taking all the fellow’s willpower to keep from blinking.

  McCoy handed Leslie his flashlight while he went to work on dealing with the eye. He might not be able to save it, but if he waited until they got to sickbay, it was a loss for sure.

  The odd thing was, despite everything, McCoy felt better than he had all day. Oh, he was sore and hungry and rapidly getting tired, but he was doing something. He was solving problems.

  “Hey!” came the voice of Four once more. “What about me?”

  “Are your injuries life-threatening?” McCoy shouted.

  There was no answer.

  “Then let us do our job. I promise we’ll get to you as soon as we can.”

  Leslie looked up from his work. “Shouldn’t we see if she needs help?” he asked.

  “We’ll get to her, don’t you worry,” replied McCoy. “There’s only the two of us. We can’t heal everybody at once.”

  “Yes, but…” Leslie let the sentence trail off.

  “But what?” McCoy asked. “The best we can do is treat one patient at a time.” And maybe not even that. He just barely kept himself from swearing: the shard had penetrated too far into the Saurian’s reptilian eye. “I’m not going to be able to get this out without taking this man to sickbay.”

  He finally made his way over to Four. Though she was indeed trapped underneath a table, her legs weren’t fractured. No ruptured arteries, either. McCoy knew she was in considerable pain. Wasting no time, he motioned Leslie over, and together they lifted the table off her. A damned heavy bit of furniture that could have done much more damage—Four didn’t know how lucky she was. “There you go,” he said as he gave her a dose of painkillers, “you’ll be fine. We’ll send somebody to get you to sickbay.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she said in a small voice.

  He’d helped another person—but what worried him now was Three. They hadn’t heard from him since McCoy had had everyone count off. A check of his tricorder revealed another life sign, very faint, in a corner of the room. When he moved his light there, a hard-to-define shape turned into the body of someone slumped on the floor. McCoy hurried over.

  It turned out to be a man, unconscious. No, not unconscious—comatose.

  The man’s foot had been injured in the distortion, but there was no brain damage that McCoy could detect.

  And just like that, McCoy felt himself deflate. What was wrong with the man? He’d obviously been fine enough to talk in the immediate aftermath of the distortion. Like Bouchard’s, this man’s readings were getting weaker by the moment. McCoy checked the emergency medical kit, but there was no dalaphaline in it.

  “Lieutenant!” he called, shining his light across the room. Leslie looked up from where he was working on the Saur
ian. “We need to get this man to sickbay right away. Help me open the doors.”

  It likely won’t matter, even if you hurry. This man is dying before your eyes. And you have no idea why.

  Scotty eyed the sky warily. The clouds were thick and dark now, but the shields were keeping the Hofstadter safe as it moved closer to the energy reading. A light rain was starting to pelt the shields, but thanks to the thick, insulated hull, it was almost silent.

  But Scotty couldn’t shake the feeling they were moving in the wrong direction. “Mister Spock, that poor lad could be out there in this blasted weather.”

  Spock’s steady hands held the shuttle as level as possible, given the forces that were hitting it, and he did not look away from his console as he answered. “Negative, Mister Scott. The cap—”

  A loud clang of thunder reverberated through the ship’s hull. Scotty noticed that the view outside the shuttle was completely obscured. The rain had picked up immensely, and all he could see was pouring water. The shuttle rocked back and forth as the winds redoubled, but the commander did not flinch.

  A chirping alarm drew Scotty’s eyes to the displays in front of him. “Shield status is impaired,” he said. “The weather is hitting us harder than it should.”

  “Is the weather the cause of the impairment?” asked Spock.

  Scotty began checking the circuits, but he already knew the answer. “No, sir. It’s something else.”

  “Mechanical fault?”

  Scotty knew that Spock was simply being thorough, but he couldn’t restrain himself. “These shuttles can take whatever you throw at them, Mister Spock! I’ve been over every circuit my own self. It’s some kind of interference.” His eyes narrowed as he traced the interference’s progression through the circuits. “The pattern is the same as what’s affecting our sensors.”

  Spock nodded. “Weather report, Mister Jaeger.”

  Scotty swiveled his chair around to see that the geo-physicist was peering into his tricorder. “I still don’t know what’s causing this,” Jaeger said. “It has the marks of a hurricane, yet it’s forming over the land, not the water. There’s no warm front that I can see. But all signs indicate that the farther we head south, the worse it gets.”

  “Thankfully, we are almost at the source of the energy reading. We will land the Hofstadter in a sheltered area and proceed to its source on foot.”

  “On foot?” Scotty repeated, incredulous. “It’s worse than a gowk’s storm out there!”

  “That is why we are equipped with ponchos, Mister Scott.” Lightning flashed through the shuttle’s viewports, momentarily casting the Vulcan’s severe features in a fierce, bright light. “Please locate an area of shelter near the signal. I wish to land immediately.”

  Scotty looked down at the scans of the surface. The problem with the first officer wasn’t his unflappable logic, it was that his unflappable logic was always right.

  McCoy and Leslie improvised a stretcher out of a table and lifted the comatose man—a transporter operator named Gaetano Petriello—onto it as quickly and carefully as they could. Soon they were waddling down the dark hallway, Leslie walking backward and taking the front, McCoy at back and directing. Progress was painfully slow when they needed speed. It didn’t help that McCoy had to use his teeth to hold the flashlight because he needed his hands to grip the table. The beam wavered wildly, giving them only a rough idea of what lay strewn about.

  Once they got a few dozen meters down the corridor and turned the bend, they got to an area where emergency power was on. The dim, red lighting helped McCoy see, but at the same time worsened his mood. Seeing Petriello bathed in red from head to toe only seemed an omen of what was to come.

  Thankfully, the rec room #3 was on the same deck as sickbay, and they soon made it. The doors slid open to reveal a madhouse. As they carried Petriello inside, McCoy had a hard time processing just how full sickbay had become. All the biobeds were occupied, even those generally reserved for routine physicals. In fact, there were more beds here than usual; McCoy was pleased to see his staff had reacted quickly and put up additional beds in between the others. And yet, despite all that, people sat on chairs or leaned against walls, waiting to be treated.

  Working unaffected in the middle of all was Nurse Chapel. She was standing next to a female patient, sealing up a gaping wound in the woman’s stomach. McCoy spotted a number of other medical staff buzzing around from patient to patient. Chapel didn’t even look up, just kept on running the device over the patient to help stem the bleeding and bridge the gap. Her arms were covered in blood, and her hair had fallen into disarray.

  They stood on the threshold for only a moment before McCoy gave the table a shove, sending Leslie toward the center of the room. If these distortions went on for much longer, they’d quickly run out of space if they were unable to discharge any patients—but then McCoy spotted Nurse Odhiambo helping a man off bed 5, and he ordered Leslie to move Petriello over to it. “One more heave, son, then we’re done.” Together, they lifted Petriello off the table onto the bed.

  The monitors flicked on immediately, showing what McCoy had feared—the man was going the way of Bouchard, all his vital signs slowly sinking. McCoy quickly went to the supply cabinet and loaded a hypospray with dalaphaline. He turned to Leslie. “If you still remember your turn in sickbay, get me a neural stimulator. Or ask somebody to give it to you.” As Leslie went to get one, McCoy injected the drug straight into Petriello’s skull. After a few moments, the crewman’s vitals weren’t falling quite as fast, but they were still sinking.

  His brain was giving up. Why? McCoy pulled up Petriello’s medical records, which included this interesting morsel of information:

  ESPER RATING: 085

  APERCEPTION QUOTIENT: 20/97

  DUKE-HEIDELBURG QUOTIENT: 255

  He was not very surprised. Two similar cases of sudden coma had to be linked somehow. Granted, Petriello wasn’t quite as powerful mentally as Bouchard, but he was still an esper. They both had to be suffering from the same kind of cerebral problem.

  And if the two cases were related, that meant more data. Maybe he could get somewhere.

  Grateful that you have an extra patient? Some doctor you are.

  Leslie returned, handing McCoy the stimulator. Quickly, the doctor slipped it under Petriello’s head and adjusted its settings. The effect was far from immediate, and not at all satisfactory: the vitals stopped dropping, but they leveled out dangerously low. He had the unpleasant feeling of merely having staved off the inevitable. It was all he could do for now. Others needed his help.

  Taking a deep breath, McCoy surveyed the room. It wasn’t often that it was so full of people in need. From the look of it, Chapel and Odhiambo had gotten to some of them, but not all. To be fair, the two of them did their best, but even so, they were only human. They needed assistance. Where were the med techs?

  Ah, yes. Messier sped about like the tiny whirlwind she was, taking notes about the patients’ injuries, while Abrams was at the far end of the room, peering intently at the monitor readings of… who? If he wasn’t mistaken, the person lying on the bed looked uncannily like Brent. What had happened here?

  “Doctor?” said Leslie, breaking in on his thoughts. “Do you need any help?”

  McCoy turned around to face the lieutenant. “Do I?” he said. “Lieutenant Leslie, you’re damned right I do. I need somebody out there with the necessary experience. First thing I want you to do is go back to the rec room. Get those casualties—especially the Saurian fellow and the internal bleed—in here immediately. Find someone to help you.”

  Leslie nodded, his face serious. “I’ll get on it right away, sir.” And with that, he was gone.

  McCoy cleared his throat. “Abrams.”

  The med tech looked up to see who had called him. Displeasure was etched into his face deeper than normal. “Sir?”

  “What happened?”

  “Brent was looking after a patient during the last disruption. Lost his b
alance and hit his head on the bed.” Abrams almost sounded angry, but McCoy knew it wasn’t directed at him. “Can you take a look, sir?”

  Moving over, McCoy saw that the man’s vitals were safely in the normal range. Thankfully, this was not another coma case. A simple head wound like this was easy to treat.

  Resolved to get the injured med tech back on his feet, McCoy inspected the wound. It wasn’t severe, and most of the repair work had already been done—probably by Chapel. McCoy would finish it up, and then Brent would have to rest for a few hours. Afterward, however, he’d be perfectly healed, which was a big relief; with M’Benga gone, McCoy needed every pair of hands he could get.

  Directing Abrams to get back to work, McCoy made the rounds to familiarize himself with the injured and start triage. There were people with broken bones, crushed hands, major cuts, head abrasions, burns, and everything else he could think of.

  Life-threatening injuries first. Second, injuries requiring treatment that could be delayed. Third, minor injuries that did not require immediate and extensive care.

  From what he could tell, most of the patients fell into the second category, and he and his staff would tackle them one at a time. Almost all of the rest were in the third category.

  However, there were two patients that needed to be treated instantly. Odhiambo was already working on one, a man with a severe skull fracture, while Chapel was trying to stabilize a woman in obvious pain. Biobed readings told him enough: the woman, Ensign Haines, had three broken ribs and a collapsed lung.

  Chapel was about to deal with the pneumothorax, ready to treat the affected lung to let the trapped air escape. She was doing her best to look confident and unflappable, but to McCoy’s practiced eye she looked dead tired. “Christine,” he said, giving her an encouraging smile. “Let me help you.”

  She returned the smile, but up close, the tiredness was even more evident. “Thank you, Doctor. Are you all right?”

  “Of course. Why—” Oh. He looked down at himself, noticing for the first time since the lights went out in the rec room how bedraggled he looked, covered as he was with blood spatters and a variety of other stains. “Yeah, I’m okay. You?”