READ TO ME
by ardavenport
*-*-* *-*-* Part 1
Thump!
Picard started awake. The bedroom lights were up. He saw blue to his right, and up. Beverly Crusher stood at his shoulder, holding his book up above him.
"Why do you do this?" she demanded. "If you're tired, why don't you just go to sleep?"
"What?" He stared up at her, surprised.
"Why do you have to fall asleep with a book in your hands? Just put it down and turn the light off."
Annoyed by this sudden imposition, he propped himself up on his elbows. "I didn't know it bothered you so much."
She waved the book, her arms falling to her sides. "It doesn't bother me," she denied. "It's just so...pointless that you do it all the time."
He squinted up at her and wondered why she seemed so upset about something so trivial and that perhaps there was more at the heart of her mood than just his sleeping habits.
"How's Doctor Selar?"
Crusher's shoulder's slumped, her defiant stance diminishing. She sat down on the bed next to him, the book sliding between her knees. "Still in a healing trance. And so are all the others."
"Hmm." Picard pulled himself back, sitting against the pillows. "I would have hoped for some kind of change by now."
Crusher sighed. "There were some physiological responses in all of them when you were all affected on the bridge. Increased heart rate, body temperature. But there hasn't been any kind of change since then." Picard nodded. She'd reported those when they'd happened, so he already knew about them, but he was disappointed that there was nothing new.
She sat with her head bowed, her red hair tinted a brighter shade of crimson from the glow through the view port from the world the Enterprise orbited. Picard laid his hand on her thigh, caressing it.
"Long night?" he asked. He didn't know the time, but it had been late when he'd last spoken to Commander Data about their latest unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the beings on Plasset IV below them. And then he'd returned to his quarters to find the doctor not there, so he'd settled in, reading in bed, to wait for her. They'd been sharing quarters for a couple of months and he'd gotten used to seeing her there when he went to bed.
"Yes," she replied with a tired edge to her voice. "Aside from having nine comatose Vulcans in Sickbay, we've been up to our eyeballs in petty emergencies all night."
"Oh?"
"Yes. The first thing that happened was a couple who burned themselves in the shower. I don't know what they were doing, they won't say a word about it, but they both had second degree burns on the lower parts of their bodies. Then security brought in three people from down in Engineering. I think that new replicator specialist brought aboard a new recipe for Romulan ale and they'd been trying it out."
"What?" the captain demanded. "Which replicator specialist?"
"Uuuuh, Dorias, I think, the one with the blue hair." Picard barely remembered her. She was a civilian and had only come aboard at their last stop on Caius VI. She couldn't leave any earlier than their stop at Starbase 219, unless other transport could be arranged sooner. Picard had complete authority about who stayed on the Enterprise, and he was not going put up with this kind of thing on his ship, especially when they were in the middle of a mission. Crusher noted the severe look on his face.
"Oh don't look so offended. Every replicator specialist and transporter chief I've ever known has had an illegal pattern for Romulan ale."
"Not aboard my ship." Crusher let it go. She knew perfectly well that Picard, in his much younger years, had indulged in similarly forbidden fruits and she thought that his present righteousness was a bit overplayed. But after having to deal with three drunken, vomiting technicians earlier that evening, she was just as happy to hand them over to the captain's displeasure.
"Well, after that," she continued, "Kragaz came in with his pet cat." Picard remembered the small, Juran astro-biologist. He'd spoken with the scientist a couple of times about their current situation. Kragaz had come aboard at the same time as the blue-haired Dorias. "It was in heat. And Kragaz had never had an Earth cat before and he had no idea what was wrong with it."
"What? It's fertility should have been regulated before he brought it aboard the ship. Why wasn't it checked?"
"He was supposed to have brought it in with him when he came in for his physical, but he forgot. I've been reminding him for the past two weeks about it. He didn't get around to it until something went wrong tonight."
"You let it go for two weeks?" the captain demanded.
"Yes," Crusher answered crossly. "All Kragaz's records said that his animal had been checked out and that he'd read all the requisite material about it's care. And I didn't think it was important enough to send Worf down to have it confiscated." Her words sounded overly angry even to Crusher. She suddenly wondered if she would have been so quick to snap back at him if she weren't sitting on his bed, looking at him in his pajamas, a nesting of plants behind his pillow and the light from that hellish-colored planet glowing through the view ports behind him. Her reply to him now seemed too close to bickering. His hand still rested on her leg.
"Anyway," she went on, "that cat got away from us, and that thing was yowling and shedding and shitting all over my Sickbay for twenty minutes before we got it into a cage. We all got phaser stuns on our shins trying to catch it." She brought up one of her long legs and rubbed an ankle for emphasis. Picard's expression lightened as he pictured what must have gone on down in Sickbay and as he watched her massage a shapely leg, just above her boot.
"Sounds like quite a night." Crusher nodded back to him, feeling tired. Then she told him about the boy who'd stuck a pin in his little sister, the plant physiologist with the rash, and that Troi, Bosh and Herman, the three strongest telepaths/empaths on the ship (aside from the unconscious Vulcans), had come in with new headaches.
"I don't know, Jean-Luc, if I didn't know any better, I'd swear the full moon was out." She looked back at him, and then out at the red light from Plasset IV in the view port. "Jean-Luc, how long are we going to stay here?"
Picard sighed. "I suppose until we're able to communicate with what's down there." Crusher hung her head, knowing that would be his answer and wondering why she'd bothered to ask.
"Jean-Luc, Selar and the others can't stay in a healing trance forever."
"Is their condition deteriorating?"
"No, but it's starting to get to Troi, and any other telepath or empath on the ship. We've been here for days, we're still not any closer to talking to whatever that is out there, and I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it."
"Selar and the others seemed to think it was."
"That there are Vulcans down there? There's nothing down there but hydrogen and trace organic compounds." She gestured toward the planet.
"Not Vulcans, their katra." He used the Vulcan term for what Beverly Crusher had been told corresponded to souls...or ghosts. He extended his hand to her and she took it, his large fingers gently enfolding hers. "We're sure that a ship went down on Plasset. We're not sure which one; one of the science academy ships, or the starship. But from what Selar, T'Sen and Seib told us, and from what we've been seeing from the planet, and from Troi, and from your our analyses, Doctor, we know that there's something alive and intelligent down there that knows what happened and it's been trying to communicate with us almost since the moment we arrived. Now we have an obligation to try to answer."
"I'm beginning to wonder how much this thing could affect the other people on this ship." His other hand closed over hers.
"Have you seen any evidence of that?" Picard reminded her of the Enterprise's previous encounters with shipwide telepathic mis-communication.
"No," Crusher admitted. "But...I just have this feeling, especially today, that whatever's down there might be getting impatient and is going to try things that aren't as benign as painting pictures in clouds." The expression on Picard's face was not sympathetic toward her inarticulate misgivings. "They certainly got through on the bridge today."
"That was only an illusion," Picard reassured her. "Commander Data was completely unaffected. Nothing showed up on the sensors, and it wasn't even a complete illusion. It was more like a memory." He paused, momentarily trying recapture it. "I can't even remember what it looked like, not even the shapes. But it was the bridge of another ship; I'm sure of that."
"In red mist," she added, inclining her head toward the view port. His eyes flicked in that direction. She freed her hand from his and laid it on his leg. "Whatever killed that other ship, what's to keep it from reaching up and pulling us down as well? You know how overwhelming illusions can be, how easy it can be to manipulate reality. You don't need any kind of weapon when you can do that."
"If they wanted to do that, they would have done it days ago."
"Maybe they just haven't gotten around to it."
"Beverly, I don't understand how you can calmly suggest that we simply leave, when we clearly have a duty to not only investigate what happened, but to communicate with a new life form. That is the very essence of the mission of this ship." Crusher looked away, knowing that she'd lost the discussion even before she'd spoken. If they couldn't investigate this mystery, then what was the point of having a starship at all? She thought about her own trepidations that seemed to have been building up all evening. She remembered Selar and the other Vulcans, three of them children, almost simultaneously having nervous breakdowns when the attempts to communicate had started up from Plasset IV. The only thread of sanity that they'd been able to hang onto was the knowledge that the horror, the dread that they all felt came from the planet below and not from some sudden lack of inner control...and that the source was somehow Vulcan, from some past tragedy that had now resurrected itself to reach out to them. Crusher remembered Selar and T'Sen, hunched over and clutching their bodies as if they were naked, as they told her, Troi and Picard what they felt. Red mist; they all said they saw everything through red mist and that they felt it creeping into their bodies though no medical scan revealed anything more serious than severe stress. After a day of this even Selar's constitution couldn't take the constant turmoil, the desperate need to find its source, and they had all retreated to within themselves. If they could not regain their logic and emotional control while the Enterprise crew searched for the source of their distress, they would endure the storm in oblivion.
Crusher sighed. Picard was still looking at her, waiting for an answer. "I'm sorry, I know we have to try to find out what happened. It's just...how much suffering do we need to go through for it?" Even distraught, Selar and the others had been adamant that the Enterprise find out what had happened and what was on the planet. And if they just left, Vulcan would petition Starfleet to send another ship, or even send their own ships, if it came to that. "I don't know, maybe I'm just tired."
"Hmm, well perhaps you should take a break. Read a book," Picard suggested, happy to move on from such a pointless discussion.
Crusher looked down at the book she'd taken from him when she'd come in and found him sleeping with it lying on his chest. Her finger still held the place where it had been open. She read the title. "Flowers of Despair, by Elis Jan." She'd seen him reading it the past week. It was the biography of a Bajoran who had died during the Cardassian occupation of her planet. "Oh, yes, this will take my mind off my worries. Cheer me right up."
"It's not as grim as you might think. And it helps me a great deal to take a break from whatever problem I might be working on with something completely different. It gives me a fresher perspective when I come back to it."
She smiled. "I can't read this. It'll only put you to sleep anyway."
He scowled at her. "It will not."
"Jean-Luc, you always fall asleep whenever I read to you."
"Oh, really?" He crossed his arms over his chest.
Crusher raised her eyebrows at him. "All right." She brought her other leg up and sat cross-legged on the bed next to him, her behind resting against his leg. She opened the book.
I had come a long way to the Lorha Valley. The sun had grown cold, the sky gray as the skins of the invaders. The plants withered, sickened from their poisons. The pagh of the whole world had paled and run colorless, leeched out by the takers in this place. I had come very near to the places of the first invasion, where they had landed their first predator's claw on our world.
Real uplifting stuff, Jean-Luc, Crusher thought to herself.
I stayed with cousins of my step-daughter. They did not know me; I did not know them, but the whole world seemed full of strangers, so what did it matter? In the night, we lit fires and huddled about them for warmth. Our cities, our powers of light and dark had already become mere legend to our younger children, mysteries that were controlled by the gray outsiders, not their parents.
But for all the outward signs of poverty, this camp was better than others I saw, the clothes of the people less shabby, their tools seemed cleaner and better kept. It was many days before I found the reason, by accident, for they would not have willingly revealed their secret...
Picard listened. Crusher had started in at the top of a page he'd already read. Perhaps, he thought, the book was a bit grim after all. He had to admit that he had fallen asleep at a point in Elis Jan's wanderings when he seemed to be getting near to finding what had happened to his mother and her followers. In spite of the advice that he'd just given to Beverly Crusher, he found it hard to concentrate on a historical mystery when the Enterprise was probing into a real and present one.
Which ship was it? The Z'Kaz, the X'mon? Or was it the starship, Excalibur? The first two had been explorers from the Vulcan Science Academy, each with a crew of around sixty, and both missing for over fifty years; the Excalibur had been gone for nearly a hundred. Half the Excalibur's crew had been Vulcan, half Human, with over 400 people in all. There were hundreds, thousands of reasons why a ship could disappear. Hundreds, thousands of ships had gone missing over time, strayed beyond the well known spaceways within the Federation. There had never been any way of keeping them in, the Federation had never even tried.. Explorers, settlers, fortune-hunters; Starfleet provided some semblance of order (for the few who wanted it) and organized exploration. But plenty of Starfleet vessels disappeared as well.
Now something on Plasset IV was calling out to them with the answer to one of these mysteries. They just had to translate what was being said, by empathy, by illusion, by shapes in the clouds of the red gas giant planet. Their simple planet survey had turned into a quest as soon as the Vulcans on the Enterprise had fallen from the formless, disembodied cry that was trapped on Plasset. Soon after that the tainted hydrogen clouds had taken on rough shapes, strange twisting things that rose high above the atmosphere, but they never came within a hundred kilometers of the starship watching them. The science departments had spent days trying to interpret it and presumably the beings on Plasset were doing the same for the replies that were sent back. The illusions on the bridge had been the first real breakthrough they'd had.
Red shapes, like the ones in the atmosphere had appeared on the bridge. Eyes closed, Picard recalled them clearly. He'd been struggling all afternoon to remember them, fighting with the wispy tendrils of the recollection of illusion. Now it flowed to him as he lay in his bed, the single-hued redness taking shape, acquiring form and shadows.
A voice. A woman's voice...Beverly Crusher's. She was reading something, wasn't she? What was it? Picard listened to the sound of it...
"Captain's log: stardate 3417.2.: We have been orbiting Plasset IV for three days now and we are now positive that there is intelligent life here. Science officer T'Kar and Mr. Saren have catalogued thousands of shapes and patterns, but we have been unable to decipher them. The probes we sent into the atmosphere have all ceased functioning now. T'Kar believes that the beings on Plasset have taken them. The signals we received for the last ones were very strange. The first ones just disappeared. But on these last probes, vital systems shut down first, failures that should have either completely disabled or destroyed them. The data we received from them was corrupted with other signals, not just static. We haven't been able to decipher these patterns any better than the others, but..."
/Red alert./
*-*-* *-*-* End Part 1