No, I can’t order you to forgive anyone, Nog. Onlyyou can do that.
The twelve aliens Commander Vaughn had beamed to the medical bay had suffered injuries ranging from third-degree burns to fractures to blunt-force trauma to punctures. The two who were conscious spoke a few words that the universal translator evidently found as unintelligible as Bashir did. Their long, willowy forms, awkwardly arranged on the too-short biobeds, were equally alien, their black, chitinous exoskeletons reminding him of a cross between hardwood saplings and giant versions of the crustaceans his father sometimes caught on Invernia II. Their almost perfectly round heads bore black-whiskered faces that were oddly evocative of both praying mantises and sea lions.
And there was something very familiar—weirdly comforting, in fact—about their deep, dark eyes.
As Bashir, Ensign Krissten Richter, and a pair of corpsmen tended to the messy details of improvisational trauma surgery, all of them elbow-deep in alien gore, Bashir quietly entered the mental room in which he stored his childhood memories and took his first patient down from a high shelf at the back of a little-visited closet. The first surgical procedure he had ever performed had been sewing up the torn leg of Kukalaka, his favorite plush bear, at the age of five.
Seeing the eyes of his childhood companion writ large on these alien faces tempted him to dub his patients “Kukalakans.”
Nurse Juarez’s temporary absence had never been felt more accutely. But Edgardo was still on bed rest in his quarters, waiting for his leg to finish healing after an EVA mishap two days ago.
Three of the aliens had expired during the time it took the Saganto return, and it had since taken nearly thirty minutes of extremely messy surgery before Bashir felt confident that no more of them were in imminent danger. Eight of the aliens were now curled up on biobeds or on the floor. Although they were all unconscious and weak, they appeared stable for the moment, and comfortable enough in the Defiant’s class-M atmospheric mix.
Bashir wiped his gloved hands across the front of his amber- and umber-splattered surgical smock. Just as he was about to order Ensign Richter to transport the healthiest five of the lot back to the alien ship, the vital signs of the ninth creature took an abrupt turn for the worse.
The being lying on the biobed before Bashir would have stood nearly two and a half meters in height—were it capable of standing. Below its elongated, bulbous head were two upper limbs; farther down jutted three equally long lower extremities—none of which seemed sturdy enough to bear the being’s weight. But at the moment Bashir was far more concerned with the thick yellow ichor that had once again begun bubbling up through the brutal diagonal tear in the creature’s blue-black abdomen. The first round of protoplaser suturing on the wound had evidently not held.
Bashir placed the dermal regenerator on a higher setting and quickly stanched the worst of the bleeding. Satisfied that his makeshift suturing job would remain in place this time, Bashir slowly moved his tricorder across the creature’s belly to scan for evidence of internal bleeding. But it was damned difficult to interpret tricorder readings on creatures one had never before encountered, or even read about.
Bashir glanced up at Richter, who looked on with concern etched into her sharp features. One of the corpsmen, the youthful-looking Lieutenant John Candlewood, watched impassively for a moment before moving on to check the vital signs of some of the other unconscious aliens.
Krissten appeared to need a little encouragement. “You and the corpsmen did some fine work here, Krissten,” Bashir said.
Tears welled up in the young med-tech’s large, blue-green eyes. “Not fine enough for three of them.”
Bashir spoke in a tone he usually reserved for his most grievously ill patients. “Some patients are beyond saving, Krissten. Even the ones we know how to treat.”
Closing her eyes, she nodded slowly. No one ever gets used to death,he thought. And nobody ever should.
Bashir glanced down at the tricorder display. One of the creature’s large thoracic vascular channels was leaking fluid into its body cavity. A humanoid with an internal injury like that would probably have bled to death within a minute or two.
“I’m going to have to go in there again and patch up that blood vessel,” Bashir said. Assuming that itis a blood vessel,he thought as he picked up a laser exoscalpel from the instrument tray beside the biobed.
“Initiating sterile field,” Krissten said, her training evidently overcoming her emotional distress.
Bashir’s brow furrowed as the field’s faint blue glow arced across the alien’s wounded thorax. Four minutes later, Bashir had neatly cauterized the ruptured vessel without disturbing any of the surrounding—and still mysterious—organs and tissues. It appeared he had succeeded in stopping the creature’s internal bleeding.
So why was the alien’s breathing suddenly becoming so labored?
Krissten was clearly troubled by the same thing. “I don’t understand why he’s starting to have respiratory trouble now,” she said with a shake of her head. “If our atmosphere were poisonous to them, we would have known about it the moment they came aboard.”
The creature opened its eyes, gasped, and released a string of guttural sounds that could have been coughing or an attempt at speech. The only thing Bashir knew for certain was that the medical bay’s universal translator hadn’t placed them in the latter category.
The alien fixed both of its glistening, plum-sized black eyes on Bashir and reached weakly in his direction with one spindly arm. The creature’s three opposing digits trembled as they clenched and unclenched. Krissten took a cautious step backward. But Bashir saw no threat in the alien’s gesture; he took it instead as a plea for help. The creature’s quivering, willowy limb brought to mind the time he had spent with Ensign Melora Pazlar, whose thin Elaysian bones were probably just as frail because of her homeworld’s low gravity.
Of course. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?
The weak alien lowered its trembling arm and let out a painful-sounding wheeze. Bashir tapped his combadge. “Bashir to Nog.”
“Nog here, Doctor. What can I do for you?”
“Can you get me a reading on the artificial gravity levels aboard the alien ship?” Bashir smiled at the perplexed look on Krissten’s face.
Nog’s voice was infused with the enthusiasm of a busy engineer hard at work at his craft. “I can do better than that, Doctor. Shar and I are already aboard helping them pick up the pieces of their engine room. And the gravity here is one of the biggest nuisances we have to deal with.”
“How so?”
“Well, if you try to walk too fast, you end up falling on your butt in slow motion. I’d say the local gravity is set at about point-one-five of standard.”
Bashir recalled having seen the ancient 2-D images of Apollo astronauts “bunnyhopping” across the lunar surface in their bulky environmental suits, and sometimes toppling over, tortoise-like, after having taken a bad step. And there were the Russian cosmonauts who’d had to be carried from their capsules on stretchers after returning to Earth from months-long zero-gee orbital missions.
“Thank you, Nog. Bashir out.” He nodded to Candlewood, who had been following the exchange intently and immediately took the hint.
“Adjusting the local artificial-gravity environment to Earth-Lunar standard, sir,” Candlewood said as his fingers moved briskly over a wall console.
Bashir felt immediately lighter, and the wheezing alien at once began breathing more easily and deeply. The unconscious patients also seemed to have been invigorated by the change, as their respiratory muscles suddenly found themselves with considerably less work to do. Bashir imagined he saw a look of gratitude in the unfathomable oil-drop eyes of the creature who lay before him. He offered it a reassuring smile, though he was well aware that his countenance was probably as inscrutable to the alien as the alien’s was to him.