One of the background sounds on a starship that a crew rapidly becomes familiar with, and soon does not even give a second notice to, was the sound of the public address system, which could broadcast information to the crew at any time. Somehow, a person on board could pick out information directed at them, either by name or simply because it was something that they had to know. They could do this without being seemingly burdened by all the information that did not matter. Chan had the helm during her duty shift, and kept her attention on the sensors and the various readouts as the Alexandria itself adjusted its course slightly to avoid objects that were too large or too dangerous for the deflectors to handle themselves. Otherwise, the starship had its course set and an entire shift could go by without any adjustments made to the course or any input from the person at the helm. The ship was staying on its plotted course very carefully, and Chan found herself having to do very little by way of adjustments. In addition, neither Parouge nor Allende were on the bridge, since they were not needed for such routine shifts and were just a quick call away if it suddenly became non-routine. The other officers on the bridge did engage in routine banter, discussing previous missions, the movie last night and some pointless gossip on who was associating with who and what they were doing-but they never talked about the people in whose presence they were. None of it interested Chan very much, although she did contribute when she could.
Then the announcement came over that ever-present public address system. "Lieutenant Sakapsatimolos, please report to the bridge and take over the helm. Lieutenant Commander Chan, please report to sickbay."
"What?" Chan asked the navigator, sitting to her right.
"Tash just lost her day off," he answered.
"And I've got to go to sickbay. I wonder what for. I just had my medical check."
"Maybe they found something and are only telling you about it now. Go ahead and go. I can handle this until Tash gets here."
"Okay."
Chan left the bridge and headed for the port turbolift. She grabbed the control handle and called out, "Sickbay." The turbolift car started up, but the sensation of movement was almost totally dampened out. The only real sign of the movement was the moving dot along the diagrams of the ship mounted on the back wall. The diagrams told her where she was and where she was going. During the short trip, Chan kept trying to figure out why she was being called to sickbay. As far as she knew, she was in perfect health. She could not recall a time when she got sick or ill, as Odonan medical science was sufficiently advanced to quickly handle such problems. She had spent a lot of time on alien planets, and of course, those alien germs and diseases had no effect on her. Chan had experienced sickbay before, but mostly to have injuries treated. Some of those alien worlds had managed to give her a lot of injuries that required treatment. But right now, she was not injured.
The turbolift came to a stop, and the doors snapped open. By now, Chan thought, she knew her way around the ship for the most part, but she felt a bit of uncertainty as she walked along the corridors. She found it almost embarrassing to have to look at the signs on all the doors until she found the one marked "sickbay."
After doubling back to virtually the turbolift station that she exited from, Chan finally found sickbay. It was only natural, she thought afterwards, that sickbay be close to the turbolift exit. Once she found the entrance, she walked smartly through it and into sickbay as if she had come directly from the turbolift and knew precisely where she was going. As soon as she entered, she stopped, and looked in the direction of the recuperation ward, where three men were lying down. Clemsen, the farthest away from her, was instantly recognized, but the other two were not forgotten either. Chan clearly remembered the landing party that accompanied her down to Transcestus IV.
"What's going on?" the Odonan woman asked, as Solok approached.
The doctor quickly summarized what they had discovered so far about Clemsen and what had struck the landing party. Nkomo and O'Grotty also had plant growths inside their lungs and digestive tracts, and in both cases, the genetic pattern in the plant parasites was practically that of the host. However, in the other two, the growths had hardly progressed beyond the microscopic. They had been destroyed or removed, with the largest less than a millimetre long. None of the growths had affected the two in any way.
"Are they going to be alright?" Chan asked, again showing her concern. She was the one in command of that landing party, and as such, felt responsible for them.
"Yes," Solok replied, his voice without emotion or even varying pitch. "We are just keeping them here for observation. I have recalibrated the medical scanning bed for Odonans, so I need to check you now."
"Okay," Chan replied. "I doubt that those spores could survive in my body, with the immune system and all."
"You cannot be assured of that," the doctor cautioned, "since the parasite mimics the genetic structure of the host, and this might be sufficient to counteract the artificially-enhanced immune system."
"If you say."
The Odonan woman followed the doctor into the examination room, and towards the full-body diagnostic bed. From the side, it did not look like much, just a large, gray base with a bed mounted on rails. Above the base was another large, gray housing, and underneath that, an array of sensors that could measure, scan and display any part of the body in any way. Microtransporters were built into the device to remove growths and tissue samples or anything else, as necessary, and they could also insert objects into the body. Behind the glass partition on the other side were the controls, display screens and the sample retriever from the microtransporter. Chan saw al-Calihad standing there.
"You will have to lie on the bed in a supine position, and the forcefield belt must be turned completely off, and preferably removed. It can be turned off?"
"Yes," Chan said. She was already thinking just that, and the nervous system carried those impulses into the bioelectronic controlling chip on the belt. All power and function in the unit ceases, giving Chan full exposure to the unusually warm temperature in sickbay. She laid down on the bed, and let Solok push a button that caused the bed to slide underneath the upper part of the machine.
Solok went to the control room, and tapped some instructions into the main panel. Above him, mounted on the upper housing, was a large display screen that would diagram Chan's body in various colours. The computer doing the work had already been programmed to scan for the characteristic signs of the growths.
Al-Calihad switched on the monitor function. At one end of the large screen, the vital signs appeared. On the left were Chan's values, and on the right, the normal Odonan values for comparison. The woman's body temperature was twenty-nine degrees, quite normal, and the blood pressure averaged to seventy-four kilopascals at the peak of the pulse cycle, also quite normal. The pulse was a little rapid at fifty-eight, but Solok thought that was just due to the nervousness and uncertainly that Chan likely felt right now. On the list was an entry that al-Calihad had never seen before, "internal electrical activity." Chan had a current of five hundred and twenty-six milliamperes going through her secondary nervous system. The value rose as al-Calihad watched.
"Solok," she started, "this machine won't work efficiently while Chan is electrically active."
"Yes, I see," he replied in a flat, monotone voice, while looking at the readings. "Unfortunately, the lieutenant commander is feeling tense, and that increases the electrical production."
Al-Calihad touched a button that opened up a communications unit located near the patient as she was in the machine. "Chan," the woman said, "you're producing too much electricity. Can you calm this down?"
"I feel alright," the Odonan replied.
"Try anyway. There's nothing to fear here. This is quite safe, and the growths, if caught small enough, appear to be harmless."
"I'm not nervous," Chan said, wondering what the fuss was all about. Then she realized that while she was alright, Clemsen was not. The presence of airborne spores for those triffid plants implied in her mind that she might have made a command error in bringing back the escape pod, which would have been full of spore-filled air. That had already mixed with some of the air from the Alexandria. She just never anticipated the spores, as she reacted on the image of plants attacking. That lapse concerned her.
"Damn," al-Calihad muttered. "One point seven amperes now, and rising. If we turn the scanner on, we'll blow all the electronics in it."
Solok looked over at the woman quizzically, thinking that somehow the electronics could not "blow" as vividly as al-Calihad's tone of voice suggested that they could. He never understood the human need to use clever phrases when a straightforward statement would do. He moved over to the intercom and tapped in a code. "Nurse Yamanoto," he started, "bring to the examination room the device that I ordered constructed for Lieutenant Commander Chan."
"Right away, doctor," came the reply.
"What device?" asked the science officer.
"It's a modification of a device found in Odonan sickbays that allows the current in the body to discharge harmlessly."
Yamanoto, a smallish woman of Japanese descent with a rather yellowish skin and slit-like eyes, wheeled in the small device. It was basically a copper pipe with rubber insulators, and an electrical sink mounted on the base. By gripping the bare metal of the pipe and by adjusting the settings in the resistors and capacitors in the sink, current could be drawn out of Chan's body and dissipated as heat. The device was standard on Odonan starships. Even though Odonan equipment was designed to be immune to the effects of the bioelectrical discharges, in some situations, it was desirable to draw off the current.
"Lieutenant Commander Chan," Solok said in his polite, formal voice, "Nurse Yamanoto has brought in the discharger. Can you use it?"
"Yeah, sure," she replied, although she did not feel like electricity was moving through her body. Usually she was aware when current was building up, and this was not one of those times. On the other hand, she was so used to several hundred milliamperes running through the secondary nervous system to power the forcefield belt that she was not really aware of it anymore. Looking at the nurse, who was still holding the device as if she needed to hold it in position, Chan said, "You shouldn't be touching it when I am."
Yamanoto yanked her hand away and backed off. Chan gripped the copper bar in an awkward way so that the orsotic tip in the palm would come in contact with the metal, just as Chan concentrated on it. Once the tip touched, a sharp spark and a loud retort spat out of the electrical sink component. Yamanoto shrieked, and jumped backwards, while Chan just laughed.
Concerned, al-Calihad yelled over the intercom, "Chan! Are you alright?"
"Yeah, sure," she answered, suppressing a light laugh. "However, whoever built this thing did not do such a good job of it, or else it was poorly adjusted."
In the examination room, Solok asked, "What's her electrical reading now?"
"Too low to register," al-Calihad answered.
Solok hit one of the test buttons, to make sure that whatever electricity was still in Chan's body would not interfere with the systems. Seeing green status lights come on, the Vulcan doctor touched two more switches, starting the scanning process. Both he and al-Calihad stood back, and watched the schematic generated by the computer appear on the big viewscreen. They saw the pink marking the basic body outline, as viewed from the top. The skeleton appeared in white, the nervous system in yellow, the circulatory system in red, the respiratory system in orange, the urinary system, complete with four kidneys, in green, the reproductive system in blue, and then some strange, gray markings appeared. That colour was reserved for body systems not normally found in humans and which could not be readily correlated. In the case of Odonans, the gray outlined the starabus, the secondary nervous system and the arrangement of orsotic tips. Chan had a hundred and sixteen of them scattered over her body.
"All's clear," al-Calihad reported.
Solok outlined the chest area with the magnification frame, and then expanded that small area to fill the screen. The sensor systems conducted another pass over the targeted region, adding to and clarifying the detail. "Nothing," the doctor said, as he studied the images and the various readout screens. He was able to rotate the displays in three dimensions to get a complete view.
"What's the tolerance?" asked the science officer.
"Micrometre level."
"What's the cell size of the plant?"
"About the same."
"Spore size?"
"Tenth of a micrometre on average."
"Perhaps we should expand to that resolution."
After Solok made the adjustments, the sensors passed over the desired region once more. The first pass, scanning the entire body, had taken just a second, and was scanning for possible growths from sizes of a tenth of a millimetre and up. The second pass, over a smaller region of the body, took point eight seconds and was looking for anything a micrometre or more in size. The third pass took three seconds, and was mapping out the chest region of Chan's body to the level of her chromosomes. The rotating image on the main display screen looked like a mass of intertwined colours, a surrealistic image of what a sliced-open body would actually look like. The third pass mapped everything from a tenth of a micrometre and up.
"Nothing," Solok said. "She must be clear of the spores and the plants. It was probably the forcefield belt that she had on that protected her."
Al-Calihad noticed the rise in Chan's electrical readings again, and was about to point that out to the doctor when a buzzer sounded, indicating that the sensitive electronics were being interfered with by an outside source of energy. "What the-" she mumbled, momentarily unsure of what was happening or what to do. Solok's only reaction was to hit one switch that shut off the device and secured the sensitive components, and then he hit a second switch that caused the bed to roll out from under the machine.
Walking around to face the woman as she sat up on the bed, Solok remarked, 'There is no sign in your body of the spores or the growths that result from them. This was more than likely a consequence of wearing the forcefield belt. Is it programmed to stop such things?"
"It's actually programmed for what it lets in. Everything else is stopped." When Solok did not react in any way, with motions or with words, Chan added, "Is that all?"
"Yes."
"What about the others?"
"They are resting."
"Can I see Terry, ah, Lieutenant Clemsen?"
"Yes, you may."
Chan walked back into the main ward, where the other members of her ill-fated landing party were resting in the well-scattered beds that lined one wall in the gently-curving room. Her friend was at the far end, so she went over there.
Clemsen saw her approach, and smiled just a bit, enough for her to notice but not for the others to be too aware that she was doing anything more than a commanding officer comforting those under her command on a mission. "How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Okay," the man said, sounding normal and alert. "I don't know why Solok's keeping me here."
"I guess he wants to make sure no more spores take root."
Clemsen looked at Chan, into eyes that were so brown that they were almost black. In the relatively bright light of the ward, Clemsen could see that the Odonan's pupils were slightly slit-like. It was only noticeable on close examination. "About you, let me guess. They found nothing in you."
"Yeah," Chan admitted.
Clemsen could tell that something was wrong by the way that the woman was talking and reacting. When a human found out that he did not have some serious affliction that had struck others in close association, that person would normally be ecstatic and happy. Clemsen found it hard to believe Odonans would be significantly different. "What's bothering you?" he finally asked.
"It's my fault."
"What? That we had these growths? We picked them up while on the surface of the planet."
"They're airborne spores," Chan replied. "That escape pod was filled with them, and once we brought that vessel back up to the hanger deck, we spread them to the rest of the ship. I know that the circulation systems are isolated, but even so, some air still filters through. What about those people who normally work in that part of the ship?"
"Relax," the young man replied, lowering his voice now that Chan was crouching down so that she was closer to him. He liked how close she had her face to his. "Solok will find them and put them all into that thing in the other room for a couple of seconds and find 'em and zap 'em. I had the worst one, and even that took days to grow and I was actually attacked by one of those plant things. There's no danger."
"But still, it was a command blunder. What if those spores landed somewhere else, and started to grow without us knowing it?"
"It needs organic matter to grow."
"There's organic matter on the cargo decks, for replenishing the replicator system and other systems as needed," Chan pointed out. Oddly, this thought had not occurred to her before, and now she was feeling kind of urgent over it.
"Yes, but it's under stasis and in sealed environmental chambers with its own life support systems. Some of the bulk containers are even on an unpressurized deck."
"But still, there was no need to lift off in the escape pod. Once inside, we were secure enough for the thirty seconds or so it supposedly took to get someone to man a transporter station."
"Chi," Clemsen said, sounding a bit more forceful, although the volume of his voice remained low. "Nobody can anticipate the results of a command decision. You did not know what had happened on the escape pod or its inhabitants, and you had no idea what those plants were capable of. They might have gotten into the escape pod too."
"Impossible," Chan retorted. "I acted the way I did because I was angry at what I thought was a bad move on the part of the Alexandria. It's almost the attitude that if I can't use the transporter when I need it, then I won't use it at all."
"Still," the man continued. The woman's hand was on the edge of the bed, and as Clemsen rotated slightly to more easily face her, he found one of his hands lay on hers. He again touched her bare skin, without any forcefield intrusions. "I've been lying here in this bed for hours now, so I've had time to think about it. We never did learn who was on that escape pod, but surely after the first people got attacked by those plants, the others would have stayed on it. Also, I keep replaying one scene in my mind, the one when the vine tried to get onto the vessel. It was not heading for any of us, but for the door controls."
"I don't remember that," Chan replied emphatically, knowing what Clemsen was implying.
"I do, quite clearly."
"Are you implying that those plants might be in any way sentient?"
"It's not impossible. We saw signs in how they were, ah, sharing Calij. They could have found the outside controls of the escape pods. They're very simple, you know."
"There's only one thing wrong with your theory," the Odonan woman replied. "The life support system on that vessel supposedly failed, or else the occupants believed that it did. If they closed the door to the craft, there would be no way to recycle the air. Those things are naturally airtight, and since they were designed to be used and operated by civilians with no previous ability with space vessels, there are no external vents or whatever. They had to go outside, or risk asphyxiation."
"What a choice," Clemsen remarked.
"Anyway, it was still an incorrect move to have taken off in the escape pod. We should have waited for the transporter. I find it hard to believe that those plants could have physically cracked or opened the doors..."
"Etcheberry to the bridge," came the words over the intercom.
Captain Parouge touched the receive button on the arm of his command chair, and said, "Bridge, Captain Parouge here."
"Sir, we've completed our search and tests of the filters in the air exchange system in the rear section of the ship. We found the triffid spores there, but only a small number of them, about two per cubic centimetre of extracted material. We disposed of them by deconstructing their molecular structures in the replicator system. That of course would effectively destroy them."
"Of course," the captain replied. "Solok suggested nothing less."
The chief engineer continued, "We also checked out the life support system in the escape pod. As Lieutenant Commander Chan reported, it was in perfect working order. We have no idea what those on the escape pod were thinking. We also checked the filters on its air exchangers, and found that the spores are much more numerous on those. However, the air inside the escape pod, which had been trapped on board since the pod landed in our shuttlebay, is clear. The environmental systems on the pod, which we had let run on its own for this reason, appears to have done the job in clearing the spores from the air."
"Very well," Parouge replied. "Nevertheless, as a precaution, you and all the others who were involved in this are to report to sickbay for a scan, just to make sure that you picked up no spores, despite all the precautions."
"Understood, captain. We best make sure that nothing is wrong. Engineering out." Hearing Etcheberry immediately agree to the order to go to sickbay for a scan was surprising to Parouge, since normally the engineers did not want to think there was any risk in doing what they considered to be "routine" tasks, and that they had better things to do than waste time in sickbay.
Navigator Brian Leung had been waiting for Parouge to finish talking with the engineer. Once he had, Leung spoke up, "The two ships we've been escorting have arrived at their destination, and are entering the planetary system Omerra Alpha."
"Very well," Parouge remarked. He had reviewed their next assignment and destination, and so announced, "Set course for Deneriva II."
"Aye, sir," Leung remarked. He touched a couple of buttons on the panel, displaying the desired destination and having the computer automatically select desirable courses. He scanned along the courses, checking for possible obstacles or dangers, while considering what speeds might be possible. Using that information, and taking just seconds to digest it, Leung started eliminating courses until he had the most desirable route. He downloaded the course details into the navigational control computer. "Course laid in, captain," the young lieutenant finally said. "Arrival time at warp six is two point six four days."
"Helm, engage course," Parouge ordered. He watched as Sakapsatimolos took the information that Leung had provided and brought the ship around on the new heading. As the stars spun in response of the sharp turn from the Alexandria, two things crossed the mind of the captain. One was of their destination, Deneriva II. Archaeologists there were examining a site of "unbelievable antiquity, more than two million years old," according to the chief archaeologist on board, who was very eager to see Deneriva II up close. A number of artifacts had been transported from the planet and studied elsewhere, but incredible relics and structures had been found, including one that suggested that the ancient inhabitants had access to galaxy-wide modes of travel, which nobody had been able to figure out yet. Those thoughts did not occupy the mind of the captain for too long, however, as Transcestus IV and the events there continued come back to occupy his central thoughts. He had thought that those triffids and how they had killed a member of his crew and an unspecified number of survivors from the liner Colonial Explorer were behind him, but then this incident had come up with Clemsen and the other two having come down with the spore-inspired growths. The botany labs had suddenly become very interested in those parasitic and carnivorous plants. In addition, Parouge had to concern himself with the matter of Lieutenant Commander Chan, who was acting a bit irrationally while blaming herself for bringing the spores to the ship and spreading them. Her actions concerned him, since the woman who would potentially be the new security chief once Tashur's transfer went through might always second-guess command decisions. Parouge had the feeling that he had not heard the last of the plants from Transcestus IV.
(End of Part 8)
