Star Trek Corps of Engineers: Ghost

by Ilsa J. Bick

  There was more bone at Jennifer’s wrists and fingers, her ankles. The tips of her toes were rotted, gangrenous; the white bone standing up like wicks from black candles.

  Jennifer Almieri looked as if she were melting.

  “Doctor?” Stern’s voice cut knifelike through the sudden roar in Lense’s ears. Then, when she didn’t answer: “Elizabeth, I think you need to leave.”

  “No,” Lense said hoarsely. In retrospect, she wouldn’t be able to remember whether she’d said that in denial of the visual evidence, or in response. “Why…why was she left so long? How could someone not know…”

  “Your mother was due today for an early morning lecture at the Academy,” Stern said, softly. “The last person to speak with her was the professor who’d arranged for the lecture and she called him eleven days ago, a day after she arrived planetside. When she didn’t show, he called, then finally convinced a building super to bypass her privacy shield and get into her apartment. That was at one o’clock this afternoon, and the body’s been in a stasis field since the D.C. medical examiner’s office responded.”

  “But she looks as if she’s been dead for weeks. Not ten days, or even twelve.”

  “I know, Elizabeth,” Stern said, not unkindly. “And that’s the problem.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The steam from his shower had dissipated and the air was getting chill. Naked, Faulwell shivered, his skin prickling with gooseflesh. Still, he made no move to wrap a towel around his body or duck into the silent room he’d taken at the Academy’s VOQ. It occurred to him that he ought to have been thrilled to have a room all to himself; snagging a vacancy at the Visiting Officers Quarters was a coup. But he wasn’t. The room was meant for two.

  Except Anthony Mark hadn’t shown.

  Faulwell scrubbed condensation away from a three-quarters length mirror above the vanity. His face appeared out of the mist, like something from a dream.

  A month after Stratos, and he was still thin. His ribs showed. He’d never been a muscular man; people thought him bookish and quaint, a little bit of a dreamer. Even a romantic. They were probably right. How many men wrote letters by hand—with fine paper and good ink, an antique pen—and how many of those wrote to a lover they hadn’t seen in, what, almost a year?

  So who were you writing for, huh? For yourself? Because that’s what it’s been, you know: a one-sided conversation that you’ve been carrying on with a man you barely know.

  And yet he’d brought the damn box. Squared it on Anthony’s side of the bed where it remained, unopened, like an accusation.

  Faulwell’s eyes slowly roved over the hollows and angles of his body’s terrain, lingering over a scimitar slash of scar tissue a little left of his navel. He traced its curve, the reflection of an apostrophe, with the ink-stained index finger of his right hand.

  And Sarjenka had wondered why he kept the scar. Looking back on it now, that was the one moment in the entire time of his relationship with Lense—if you could call an acquaintance any kind of relationship at all—that Faulwell knew that she understood exactly why. She hadn’t said much of anything about her time marooned on that planet in another universe. But Lense understood. Sarjenka had fretted, but he and Lense had locked gazes, and then Lense had given a small nod, a slight smile.

  Not every scar was visible. Memories cut as deeply as any knife.

  He let loose a long sigh. Jolen…all right, there was attraction there, yes. No doubt about it. But nothing serious.

  His mind drifted to Lense. So self-sufficient, self-contained, force-field-at-max, although he couldn’t rid the image of her face when that doctor—Plath?—dropped that little bombshell about Jennifer. She’d looked stunned, almost lost. Even now, he had half a mind to throw on some clothes and track her down.

  Still naked, he padded out to the bedroom. He dropped to the bed—what would’ve been Anthony’s side—and ran his hand over the box of letters he’d so carefully arranged there. The box was made of very expensive, darkly scarlet bloodwood. When his fingers flicked open the bronze clasp and then lifted the lid, he caught a faintly spicy aroma—a little bit of cinnamon, a little nutmeg. Beautiful stationery.

  But the letter he teased out wasn’t written on the same stationery; the paper was embossed with a Starfleet logo, for heaven’s sake; and the penmanship wasn’t florid, and the ink wasn’t dear either.

  But the words were.

  I have to talk to you.

  I have to show you everything.

  I have to know if you love him.

  Or me.

  Oh God. A single tear trickled down his left cheek. God, I’ve ruined it; I’ve been so damned stupid.

  He didn’t hear the sigh of the door, didn’t know anyone was there until someone gently called his name: “Bart.”

  Faulwell gasped. His heart lurched in his chest. Then he stood, slowly. He was naked, holding Anthony’s letter, crying—and he didn’t care.

  Anthony said nothing, but his blue eyes were grave, and the room’s dim light caught the golden shimmer of his hair.

  It was Faulwell who spoke first.

  “You.” His voice was husky with emotion. “I love you.”

  CHAPTER 5

  After the autopsy, in an adjacent clean room, Stern was passing her hands through a sonic decon unit. “So far, the available evidence is that death was secondary to a massive cerebral hemorrhage with subsequent intracerebral bleeding following rupture of a large saccular aneurysm at the cerebellar-pontine angle. Your mother would’ve been rendered unconscious within seconds and dead within minutes.” A pause. “She had a stroke, Dr. Lense, pure and simple.”

  “No, not so pure and not so simple.” Lense was washing her hands for the third time, methodically scrubbing and wringing her hands under water hot enough to steam. Despite the decay, she had immediately recognized Jennifer.

  Still, Stern had gone by the book, taking DNA for identification purposes via snip-chips, single nucleotide polymorphisms; she’d explained to Duren: “You don’t have to sequence the entire genome to match an ID. We just do a standard panel same as all law enforcement, say, a hundred-thousand sites scattered around the genome.”

  Drying her hands, Lense gazed through a square of glass set at eye level in the door. In the autopsy suite, the diener was closing, his movements precise, economical.

  She turned away. “A stroke doesn’t make sense. A saccular aneurysm would’ve been picked up on a routine physical.”

  “Assuming she ever went to the doctor. This is a woman you haven’t seen in years. So how do you know?”

  “There are bound to be records somewhere.”

  “Of course there are, and they’ve been accessed.”

  “And?”

  “And your mother wasn’t overly fond of doctors. She hadn’t seen one for almost fifteen years.”

  Just about the time I went to the Academy for my medical training. The timing was either supremely ironic, or Jennifer consciously avoided physicians after her only daughter went off to become one. Knowing how frosty things were between them, Lense was willing to put her money on the latter.

  Aloud, Lense said, “She might have had a stroke. I can accept that. But a stroke might have been the end result of something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know, but nothing explains that degree of decomposition, not in just ten or eleven days.”

  “How would you explain it?” Duren, the counselor, had said little during the autopsy. Privately, Lense gave him points for not bolting.

  “I don’t. Maybe something infectious, something that accelerated apoptosis…programmed cell death,” she translated in response to Duren’s puzzled expression. “People used to call it cell suicide. A dying cell releases various chemical signals that then transmit the message to self-destruct to other cells in the immediate area. Then, rather than having a lot of dead cell junk floating around the body, specialized cells—phagocytes—engulf the debris. Effectively eat the remains.”


  Duren frowned. “That doesn’t sound very adaptive.”

  She was grateful to stick to something clinical, something she knew a lot about. “Believe me, you need it. If you have unrestrained cell growth, you get cancers. If certain cells don’t die off, then you affect development, like what happens with a fetus.” She saw Duren’s eyes flick to her swollen abdomen and back, and she said, “With my baby, for example—or any fetus—apoptosis is required for, say, fingers or toes to develop. Something has to trigger certain cells to die off, or else the tissues remain fused.”

  “So what you’re saying is that something else might have killed enough cells to accelerate post-mortem decomposition?” Stern thought a moment then shrugged. “Could be. We’ll run the standard battery of tests, look for an infectious agent, but a test is only as good as the measures it’s designed to examine. Unless whatever this is left some kind of footprint…”

  “You should quarantine her ship,” Lense interrupted. “And someone needs to examine Strong and Darly, maybe even quarantine them.”

  “Already way ahead of you,” Stern said, dryly. “The ship’s in dry dock and we’ve posted a guard. As for Darly and Strong, they’ve already been notified that they have to stay on grounds and need to be periodically examined. I’ll send word to Drura Sextus, see if anyone else on the team’s ill. But Darly and Strong have been on the planet for the same length of time; they traveled in the same ship with your mother and they’re right as rain.”

  “What about Jennifer’s apartment in…in…?” Lense felt a sudden stab of mingled embarrassment and shame when she realized that she didn’t know Jennifer’s address. “Has it been checked out?”

  “Standard sweep.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. No sign of forced entry; nothing out of place; no sign of a struggle; no one in or out via private transport and the apartment’s privacy shield was in place. Nothing.” At Lense’s expression: “Look…sure, there’s a chance something’ll be missed. It’s like any clinical test; you can’t test for what you don’t know about, and you don’t test everything. You don’t do that for a patient, and it’s no different in investigative work. We need something to go on to know where to start looking. There’s nothing.”

  “So there’s nothing to stop me from going.”

  There was a slight hiss and then the diener entered on a soft whisper of boots, said a quiet “Excuse me” to Stern before handing her a padd.

  Lense continued, “Maybe I’ll spot or notice something that was missed. Different pair of eyes.”

  “Well, you’re her daughter,” Stern said, an eye on the padd. She gestured her assent to the diener who nodded to Lense before slipping from the room. “Unless there’s some advanced directive she left about who had access to her things…you’ve every right. But I’m not sure how you’d know if anything’s amiss.”

  Lense heard the unspoken implication: You’re hardly in a position to have known her well. “Can you think of any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “Well, I could point out that you’re pregnant, and if this is some sort of insidious infection…”

  “You wouldn’t have let me into the autopsy if you thought that.”

  “There was a sterile field.”

  “Which you dropped for the autopsy. And you haven’t quarantined Darly and Strong.”

  Stern grunted. “We can play this game of gotcha all day.” A pause, then: “We can only look for what we can think of looking for, Elizabeth. That’s all we can do. We’re only human.”

  For some reason, Lense looked at Duren and thought: Only some of us.

  Later, across the Academy campus, in the Xenoarchaeology and Antiquities Department, Lense confronted Preston Strong.

  “Jennifer’s apartment?” Strong laced his fingers across his flat abdomen—a six-pack under there, Lense imagined; Strong obviously took care of himself. “Of course, I know it but…”

  “But what?” Lense had been on-edge as soon as she’d set foot into the archaeologist’s cramped, tumbledown office. (Jennifer’s was just down the hall. Something else she’d have to go through. But the apartment was what mattered now.) She and Strong sat so close their knees almost touched. Their proximity made her jumpy, something that communicated itself to the kid, who’d evidently mistaken her bladder for a timpani. “Is there a problem?”

  Strong’s eyebrows met in a frown. “No, no. It’s just…well, I expected you’d want to rest a bit before…”

  “I’m fine.” She pulled out a padd and thumbed it to life. “If you’ll just give me the address…” She broke off when his fingers gently slid around her left wrist.

  “You shouldn’t go alone.” His voice was low, confidential. “I’ll go with you. In fact, I insist.”

  “I’m fine.” She gave her wrist a little tug, but he didn’t relinquish his hold and for a minute, she had the wild thought that he wasn’t going to let go at all. With sudden urgency: “I should go.” And then she stood, much too quickly as it turned out because a wave of dizziness grabbed her by the throat, and she staggered, almost falling.

  “Elizabeth?” He took her by the shoulders, drew her close enough that their faces were just centimeters apart. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m…” Lense blinked away stars. “I’m fine. It’s just…I just haven’t eaten anything since…”

  His voice, seductive: “You’ll wear yourself out. You’re just like your mother that way; you’ve got to take better care of yourself. Think of the baby.”

  “No.” She pulled herself straighter. “I’m fine. And you need to back off, Dr. Strong. Right. Now.”

  He blinked. “Of course,” he said, relinquishing his grasp at once and saying nothing as she slid away. He gave a sheepish, lopsided grin. “Sorry. You…you look a lot like…”

  “You don’t have to explain anything,” Lense said quickly. She wondered, a half-second later, if that were true. “If you’ll just give me the address and transporter coordinates.”

  A faint, ironic smile played on Strong’s lips. “I wouldn’t have the coordinates. But I do have the address. Here…” Waving away Lense’s offer of her padd, he pulled out a piece of letterhead stationery and began to scribble. “I never use those. They are so…impersonal.” Folding the paper into neat thirds, he slipped it into an ivory parchment envelope and then sealed it, moistening the glue with his tongue, his eyes on Lense. He proffered the now-sealed envelope between his index and second fingers, like a dealer doling out a card. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah.” Lense held the envelope at its edges. The flap was still moist from Strong’s saliva. “Which way to my mom’s office?”

  A few seconds later, hurrying down the hall, she felt his eyes burning a hole in her back.

  Jennifer’s office was on the ground floor at the end of a long corridor faced with offices on the left and a courtyard, lush with purple climbing bougainvillea, on her right. A bar of buttery light thrown on the wall opposite Jennifer’s office made her slow. Someone in there…She rounded the jamb, and the person seated at the computer glanced up.

  “Lizzie.” Surprise in Livilla Darly’s voice. “What are you doing here?”

  Isn’t that my line? “I stopped by Dr. Strong’s office…to get Jennifer’s address. What are you doing here?” Then, moving quickly now, she came around to stand behind Darly. She frowned at the wintry landscape, chockablock with mountainous ice formations. “That’s Drura Sextus.”

  “Yes, indeed.” Darly sighed. “Someone needs to catalog the artifacts we netted on this latest expedition and organize the logs. Your mother always saw to it first thing. You wouldn’t believe the number of artifacts we…your mother uncovered. Of course, the Klingons would be happy to retake the planet, I’m sure. Thank heavens for treaties.”

  “Really? I’d have thought that dig tapped out long ago. I mean, it’s been how long? Ten years?”

  “Fifteen. The thing about the dig…it’s a little like Rome or Jerusalem, or the Hebitia
n burial tombs on Cardassia. They’re all examples of archaeological palimpsests, ruins on top of ruins on top of even more ancient structures. And just like the Hebitian burial vaults, the structures on Drura Sextus extend for kilometers up, down, all around…We were all due back in about six weeks. I guess it’ll be just Strong and I now.”

  “You don’t sound thrilled about that.”

  “You don’t know much about academe, do you? Professional rivalries run deep. Preston began to believe…well, that your mother would’ve been happy to cut us both out of any further publications.”

  Now that sounded like the Jennifer that Lense remembered: ambitious, a little ruthless. “What about you?”

  Darly shrugged. “We were colleagues.”

  “Meaning you were rivals.”

  “Of course—but in case you have doubts, I wouldn’t kill for recognition.”

  “Are you intimating that Strong would?”

  “Inefficient considering that I’m still here.”

  “But you’re the one going through the files—and isn’t that a little weird? Aren’t those private files?”

  As Lense had been speaking, Darly’s face set and now she said, very quietly, “Lizzie, dear, if you’re going to sling around accusations or play amateur sleuth, do your homework. If you had, you’d understand that all expedition files can be accessed with a common key. Hell, if you want—” Darly scribbled on a piece of paper and pushed it toward Lense. “Here’s the password to access your mother’s files. Mine, too, while you’re at it. Sorry, correspondence is private; not automatically copied or stored in the system but…knock yourself out.”

  “Thanks, I just might. Of course, I won’t be able to tell if you’ve erased anything.”

  Darly gave her a withering look. “Don’t be an ass, Lizzie. I’m no fan of crime holos, but even an arcane archaeologist understands that nothing’s ever really gone from a computer. Give a forensic specialist enough time, and she’ll come up with something.”