The giant's chest heaved with each breath, a rumbling groan that felt like it shook the room. He didn't fit in the standard beds for patients, meaning that engineering had been forced to replicate an entirely new set up to ensure that the giant remained appropriately sedate and restrained. At Worf's insistence they'd added three redundant systems to the brig's shielding to restrain the occupant. Geordie had even tied it into the ship's main power rather than an internal system – the Giant wasn't going anywhere.
He almost looked peaceful.
"I do not like this." Spoke the taciturn Klingon. He was not in the room. They'd cleared the brig of all non-human security and limited themselves to only a minimal presence of medical crew presence, but Worf insisted upon being present via a surrogate hologram projector. An ethereal human shape spoke with the man's voice, keenly observing the proceedings from where he stood on the holodeck six floors down. There was more worry in his voice than Beverly suspected he would have liked, an anger tinged with an edge of fear to it. "It would be better to neutralize this threat before he has the opportunity to do greater harm to this ship."
"Worf, we can't kill everything we meet just because it's dangerous." Beverly replied, though she found a part of herself agreeing with the Klingon she was embarrassed to admit wasn't exactly small. "When he killed those people he wasn't in his right mind. We made this man a killer."
"He is a warrior." Worf replied, his avatar's expression doing a poor imitation of the Klingon's scowling frustration. "It was doubtlessly not the first time he killed."
"Killed perhaps, in war – but some of the people he hurt were civilians. And we rendered him unable to make another choice." The doctor shuddered, examining her patient through the shimmering energy of the force-field. "Can you even imagine how terrible that would be? To wake up and discover that you murdered innocents? We're going to have to tell that man that his body wasn't his own, that his thoughts were beyond him."
Worf paused, mulling over the idea. "To be robbed of your honor would be a most grievous insult in Klingon culture. I would be – angry – to say the least, were it to be inflicted upon me." His avatar shook its head. "But that changes nothing, to rob a man of his honor is to give him cause to seek your death. It does not matter if we face a warriors righteous vengeance or a murderer's callout rage, this will end in blood."
"Your opinion is noted Worf." Beverly replied curtly, reaching over to the man's holo-projector. "But I need to focus on the needs of my patient at the moment."
"You wish for me to leave?" Worf's irritation was visceral.
"You're welcome to keep watching but I need to have the space to think, yes." Beverly replied, depressing the button on its side – allowing Worf to watch but dismissing his avatar. She turned from the evaporating hologram and faced the giant yet again.
Nobody would call him handsome, rugged certainly, but not handsome. His face and body were badly scarred. There was barely a scrap of skin that wasn't marked with some sort of scar or blemish earned through some type of pain. Beverly couldn't be sure how old the man was, not entirely, he'd had so much modification done to his body that she wasn't certain how much of his genetic structure even began to resemble what his species had originally been.
The Federation ban on genetic research following WWIII and the genetically modified men and women of Sung's brood had all but killed the field of human genetic alteration. There were pockets of society which delved into such things, fringe societies operating outside the jurisdiction of the Federation, but the Federation itself limited research into the creation of "better" humans to the purely theoretical. Khan's later re-emergence to harry the celebrated Captain Kirk had done little to improve Federation opinions on the subject of human genetic modification.
Clearly the society who'd produced the giant shared no similar stigma upon the modification of their basic genetic code. She'd identified no fewer than ten organs that seemed to have been grown externally to the man's body and later implanted into their host. A redundant heart, a lung to filter harmful toxins, and various other redundancies effectively made the man impossible to kill short of decapitation or total disintegration. He was a marvel of medical science – a Frankenstein's monster from the far distant past, complete with metal protrusions jutting out from either side of his neck where the helmet had apparently interfaced with the man's spine.
Under other circumstances Beverly might have been excited to study the man, but she found herself unwilling to take joy in the scans of the man's body. She had too many coroners' reports going across her desk. Whatever else this man might have been, he was a murderer. He was a murderer whose crimes were due to a mental deficiency beyond his control, but that made his victims no less dead.
If Beverly was being honest, a small part of her wasn't sure if she even wanted to heal the Giant. Perhaps it would be better to just let the creature stay in his slumber forever. But as a healer, it was her sacred duty to tend to the sick and do no harm. He was in her care and she would make him well if it was within her power to do so. Life was life – there was always value in protecting it, even if the ones she saved couldn't see it. The Giant wouldn't be the first enemy soldier she'd treated.
He'd done bad things. Terrible things, but she was his Doctor. Until that stopped there wasn't anything that would stop her from doing her duty, even if she found it hard not to hate him. The tricorder in her hand felt unusually heavy as she monitored the man's vital signs.
It had been difficult to configure treatment to repair the damages done to the man's cybernetic interfaces. Even with a supply of the necessary rare elements, one needed to insert the correct portions of the precise element in the exact locations within the complex interlacing of cybernetics to ensure that no greater harm was done to the Giant than had already been inflicted upon him. Fortunately for the Giant, Data was an expert on the subject. Though she knew that the Android had no true emotions, there was an unmistakable sense of longing in how the Lieutenant Commander had fretted over making sure that he was able to ensure proper functionality of the man's hardware without preventing his higher brain functions and emotional centers from operating at optimal efficiency.
It had been a slow process by design, fearing that they might trigger some sort of failsafe or involuntary response from the patient. She'd spent the time going over the man's medical scans in depth, analyzing and re-analyzing the man's vials to understand him better. The Giant was old. Not just in the sense of his timeless incarceration within the stasis chamber of the pillar, he'd already been an old man before entering the pillar. He looked no older than forty, perhaps fifty considering his salt and pepper hair, but her guess was that eighty or ninety was closer to the mark. Hopefully she looked half that good at his age.
She'd happily do without the scars though. The Giant had not lived a happy life. There were so many scars and burns across the man's flesh that she was hard pressed to even parse out which scars corresponded to which injury. He'd suffered several recent fractures unrelated to his time on their ship, cracking though not breaking the thick, interlocking bone-like ceramic plates protecting his organs. The man bore tattoos across his chest and parts of his back, curious angular script written in verse beneath the images of a black fist and a two headed bird. Beverly paused, something about the script seeming oddly familiar to her.
Beverly tapped the insignia on her chest twice, "Computer, run a translation program on the man's tattoos. Search early Earth languages, German."
The computer's droning female retort chimed in reply. "Partial translation of symbols managed. Similarity to known Earth linguistic patterns 20%."
"Try adding Latin, French, English, Spanish." Beverly noted, the jagged script seeming increasingly familiar to her the more she squinted her eyes.
"Similarity 45%." The computer replied.
"Computer run it through all known languages." Beverly replied.
"75% similarity to symbols and grammar present in known languages of existing sentient species." The computer replied.
"How many are human?" The doctor asked, feeling a jolt of electricity up her spine as a wild thought hit her.
"60% similarity to earth based linguistics." Replied the computer.
"Is it sufficient to approximate what it means?" Beverly asked.
"Negative." Replied the ship's computer. "Crucial elements of grammar and syntax do not correspond to known linguistic patterns. Further information is required."
That was unusual to say the least. Alien languages tended to be, for lack of a better word, alien. For the giant to have even partial linguistic similarly indicated linguistic cross pollination. Which was impossible. Or at least which ought to have been impossible… yet there it was.
Yet another mystery from the pillar.
"You're an odd one." Beverly pushed back a lock of crimson hair from her face as she adjusted her equipment, fretting over the readouts. The element appeared to have been properly re-integrated into the man's neural network. Appeared being the key word. There would really be no way to know until Deanna had her crack at him.
Beverly tapped her comm badge, "Beverly to Deanna."
"Yes Doctor?" Replied the ship's counselor.
"I'm ready when you are." Replied Beverly.
"I don't know if I'll ever be ready." Replied the counselor's voice as the doors to the brig opened, allowing her to pass the cadre of phaser rifle armed security personnel.
"Deanna, have you just been waiting outside the brig all day?" Beverly's face scrunched up in worry.
"Yes," The half-betazoid replied. "I don't think that I was going to be of much use for anything else today. I'd be too distracted to be of much use for any of my other patients."
"Other patients?" Beverly smiled. "Putting the cart before the horse aren't we?"
"Possibly." Deanna replied. "But I find that it's best to think of a damaged mind as a mind in need. Even a mind that wishes me ill. It makes it easier to help that person find their calm."
"So what do we do?" Beverly asked.
"I stand here and reach out to his mind, and if it works he wakes up." Deanna replied, the worry in her voice leaking through.
"What can I do to help Deanna?" Beverly asked.
"You could stay and hold my hand." Deanna replied.
"Will that improve the psychic connection?"
"No, but it will help me be less scared."