The Rings of Tautee (15 page)

He thought he would never feel terror again after that day the seventh planet exploded, hurling the space station out of its orbit and into deep space. He had managed to keep busy through much of it[*thorn)'s many injuries to attend to, so much sudden nausea[*thorngg't he wasn't able to watch the spin, and he was glad of that.

By the time it ended, and he realized that he had lived, he had thought the terror would fade.

But it didn't. It existed beneath his placid surface like a tumor, growing and feeding on his system. The station's one hundred and fifty crew members 162 Ti1Every RINGS OF TAUTEE were alone in space. No one would rescue them. No one could.

Isi, their botanist, believed that she would be able to grow enough food for them, using recycled wastes. Their food supplies were vast. They had just begun their mission on the station when the destruction happened.

Tijer worried about the waves. They seemed to be growing stronger, and Buk, the engineer, had mentioned that if a wave caught them wrong it would torque the entire station, shattering it in a single blow.

Instant death.

Tijer squinted at the darkness. The sun's light seemed dimmer, but something was reflecting. A new rock, hurtling toward them. Another threat. Larger rocks could shatter the protective shield.

Then he frowned. That wasn't a rock.

A rock never had such a straight trajectory.

He was watching a ship.

He pressed his face against the cool triple pane. He didn't remember any ship design like that. Tauteean ships were oblong, not round. And they certainly didn't have odd tail sections.

He backed away and shook his head. He was hallucinating.

The terror had gotten too much for him.

He hurried down the corridor and reached the medical unit in time to see all his patients turn into multicolored light. He blinked, trying to clear his eyes, but his patients were fading.

He held up an arm. It wasn't solid anymore. 163 Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch He was fading too.

A ship? he wondered as his body evaporated.

Someone else's ship? Could the stories he'd read as a boy have been right?

Could some one else have been out there after all?

The bubble seal was cracked. Brug stood below it, wearing an oxygen mask. His companion, Docr, was putting a sealant on the bubble, but that was only temporary.

A few more of those waves, and the bubble colony would collapse the way the moon had days before.

Two hundred people would die. Finally. They would die as everyone else had.

They had thought they had been lucky. They had thought that, since the moon split up and their bubble colony had survived on a tiny chunk of asteroid, their trials were over. But the trials were only beginning.

Brug hadn't counted on the waves continuing.

And getting worse.

This section of the colony was sealed off, protected since the bubble overhead was cracked. The crack would spread along the dome until it reached the inhabited areas. Then there would be nothing to hold in the atmosphere. Their oxygen helmets would only last a day or two.

"What's that?" Docr said, her voice sounding tinny in the helmet's microphone. She was pointing a gloved hand at a grey speck.

"Dirt?" Brug asked. He wasn't sure if going through all this work was worth it. Especially since they were going to die shortly anyway.

164 THE RINGS OF TAUTEE "No," she said. "It's growing."

He glanced again. He could have sworn, a moment ago, that the grey thing had been the size of a speck.

Now it was the size of Docr's finger.

"I don't know," he said, suddenly interested.

"Brug," another voice said through his intercom. "You're not going to believe this."

"Try me," Brug said, squinting through the crack at the growing grey creature.

"I think a ship is heading toward this asteroid."

"I think you're wrong," Brug said. "We don't have grey ships."

"I know."

Docr looked at him. He glanced at her.

Her eyes were wide. "That's impossible."

He nodded. "Mass hallucination. It was only a matter of time."

"True enough," she said, "but none of us have gone crazy yet. Control," she said to Operations, "do you have stats on that thing?"

"It's big," Control said. Brug couldn't identify the voice. "And it seems to be moving at an impossible speed. I think that[*thorn]" Control's voice stopped. It didn't get cut off, it didn't fade. It just stopped.

"Control?" Docr said. "Control? Someone?

Pick up?"

There was no static on the line. The line was still open. Brug turned his dial, tried to bring in Mess, then Living. Nothing. Open lines but no voices.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"I don't know," Docr said. Then she looked up. The grey creature was over their dome, larger than 165 Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch the asteroid, longer than anything Brug had ever seen before.

Brug heard a faint buzzing. He turned to see Docr fade into bits of light. He faded as well, only to reappear in a room filled with tall monsters.

"I can't believe things could get worse," he said to himself, and fainted.

Chapter Twenty-three THIS TIME, the noise was deafening. Voices talking, crying, and laughing. Some yelling in recognition. McCoy fought the urge to put his hands over his ears as he moved through the corridors.

Or over his nose. The smell was overwhelming. Nearly a thousand refugees, most of whom had not bathed since the disaster began, were shoved like cattle into the hallways, dining areas, and cargo bays of the Enterprise.

All the living quarters were filled, all the lounge areas, and all the maintenance closets.

McCoy got the sense of hundreds of frail filthy people with little more strength than it took to moan at him each time he touched one of them.

They were all bruised, all exhausted, and all terrified. A few seemed to think they had died and

Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch gone to the Tautee version of hell. McCoy couldn't say as he blamed them. He was beginning to wonder the same thing himself.

He had started out in sickbay, but emergency after emergency brought him deeper into the ship. He was lucky he'd been trained in field medicine or he would have been as overwhelmed as his nose and ears.

First rule of field medicine Treat the most seriously injured.

Second rule Don't attempt miracles.

Third rule Attempt miracles.

And so on.

Mostly he had been working with crushed bones and collapsed lungs. These Tauteeans were so fragile, and so many of them had survived on very little oxygen. If he had had an entire field team, he would have been able to keep all the survivors alive. Now he would be lucky if he only lost a few.

McCoy found himself in the shuttle bay. The trip there had been a succession of pink and bluish blood, broken femurs and tibias, and shattered ball-and-socket joints. He only knew he was in the shuttle bay because of the shuttles parked on their spots, doors open to reveal even more Tauteeans inside.

The Tauteean he was working on was Iying on one of Scotty's cabinets. It had once been spotless. Now it was covered with dirt and smudges from a hundred filthy fingers.

The Tauteean was male, young as Tauteeans went, and in a lot of pain. A gash ran across his forehead, just over his eyebrows, and when McCoy 168 THE RINGS OF TAUTEE first bent over him, he had seen a bit of greyish brain matter.

A quick medical scan showed the gash to be superficial and the brain uninjured, and the man's vital signs were strong.

Rule Four Save the minor wounds for later.

"He'll live," McCoy said to the Tauteean assistant named Nutri whom he had drafted to assist him. Nutri seemed to have some medical knowledge and had dug right in and helped. Nurse Chapel had also taken an assistant and was also checking patients.

Anyone on the Enterprise with even a slight bit of medical knowledge had been drafted to do the same.

At least two Tauteean doctors were among the survivors. McCoy had given them a minute lesson on how to read a medical tricorder, how to close a skin wound, and how to mend a broken bone. Then he sent them deep into the bowels of the ship. He expected they'd make a number of mistakes, but it was better than nothing for most of these people.

McCoy stepped over a Tauteean with a black-and-blue eye who claimed nothing else was wrong, and bent over the next patient. This one was a young girl, who was half the size of Prescott. A child then. She was unconscious. McCoy scanned her and found that one leg had been crushed. Finesse surgery, which he just didn't have time for at the moment.

He could do the major repairs now and save the minor ones for later. If he had had more time, he would have done it all at once. Instead he would have to go back in, cause her extra pain, in order to save her leg and her life.

Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch He would be working on these people until he died.

Eighty years from now.

To make matters worse, the ship shook every five minutes. He kept losing track of the time, and so it seemed that each time he was about to do something delicate, the ship hit one of those waves.

For a while survivors poured in. As he mended that bone, and inflated this lung, he heard stories that made him marvel at the ingenuity of the Tautee people.

And made his hair curl.

He had survived some terrifying things in his day, but nothing like what these people had gone through.

Over five hundred Tauteeans on the fifth planet[*thorngg'the original source of the Tautee people[*thorn] had gone below ground into ancient bunkers built for some war fought and won centuries before. They survived on dried food stored for people long dead, and were attempting to repair the aircirculation systems when the Enterprise found them. A few of those survivors had lost family to botulism and other diseases McCoy had thought completely eradicated.

Fifty Tauteeans on a moon of the ninth planet, near the source of the destruction, saw the readings on their computers, guessed something awful was going to happen, and took a spaceship away from the planet. They accidentally surfed the first wave, and managed to float, helpless, in space until the Enterprise spotted them. Many of the collapsedlung cases came from there. McCoy also suspected 170 THE RINGS OF TAUTEE he had one case of reversible brain damage from that ship.

Another hundred had holed up in a sealed laboratory on the moon of the third planet. They continued with their daily business as if nothing were wrong, and were, in McCoy's opinion, his toughest patients. They didn't want to believe he existed, didn't want his help, and wanted to return to their work. He had never seen so many cases of mass denial in his entire life.

Now the problem was where to put all the people. The cargo bays were full, the shuttle bays, including the shuttles, were jammed.

McCoy had sent the less injured, the ones who didn't need to lie down, out into the corridors to sit along the walls. But even the corridors were filling up.

"Dr. McCoy?" Captain Kirk's voice barely broke through the noise of the crowded shuttle bay.

McCoy glanced at the girl with the crushed leg.

She would have to wait a moment. He moved toward the comm unit on the bulkhead, indicating that his assistant should stay beside the girl.

"Go ahead," McCoy said, tapping the intercom line open.

"Bones," Kirk said. "We are beaming another two hundred aboard."

"Damned if I know where we're going to put them," Bones said. And he didn't. There just didn't seem to be much room left.

"Doesn't matter," Kirk said. "Put them in the crew's quarters. My cabin will hold a dozen or so."

"Your cabin's full."

Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch "It is?" Kirk seemed shocked. "Well, just find room. We're running out of time. Kirk out."

"Find room, find room, as if I'm in charge of housekeeping. What does he think I'm doing down here? Napping?" McCoy gingerly made his way back to the injured girl. His assistant was running a tricorder over her.

"She's oxygen-starved," Nutri said. "I think that's why she's unconscious."

The ship suddenly began to shake and rock, and the moans and panicked voices filling the shuttle bay increased. McCoy leaned against the bulkhead for support, and closed his eyes, not wanting to see more bones get broken, more Tauteeans get injured.

Even after an hour of these shakes, every one scared him. Every time he could imagine the Enterprise being tossed against a huge asteroid.

He had a vivid imagination at times. Too vivid.

When the shaking finally passed, he leaned over the girl. Nutri shook her head. "I don't think she's going to make it," Nutri said.

McCoy did a quick scan. The girl's signs were weak, but she was in no danger. And she had been without oxygen for a while, but not long enough to do any damage. She was unconscious because of the pain. And a good thing too. He wouldn't want to stay awake with that kind of injury.

McCoy made a rough splint to keep the leg straight, made certain it was clean and no bones had pierced the skin. Then he glanced at his assistant.

"Find two people to carry this girl into the cargo bay.

I'll fix her leg there later."

172 THE RINGS OF TAUTEE Nutri nodded and dashed off over the sprawling figures of her injured people.

McCoy watched her go. He didn't know if he'd get to the girl later. He didn't know if there would be a later. For any of them. But he had trusted Jim Kirk before. He had to trust him again.

Then, suddenly, right-brace liSo fears got worse as the lights flickered, dimmed, and then went out.

Chapter Twenty-four AT LEAST the bridge wasn't crowded.

Scatty had asked permission to beam survivors onto the bridge and Kirk had denied him. They needed open spaces here, and the ability to think without explaining each action.

Or who they were.

Or how they came to be here.

Talking to Prescott was enough.

The bridge was a place of action.

It had to remain so.

Besides, Kirk needed the space to pace. He stopped beside the science station. He didn't know how Spock could remain so calm.