Day 84
He wakes up, walks down the corridor, lets himself into her quarters. He squats down at the side of her bed, lays a hand on her back until she stirs.
Day 86
He wakes up, walks down the corridor, lets himself into her quarters. Lately she has been asking for water when she wakes, so he replicates a glass before moving into her bedroom. He does not call for lights. He squats down at the side of her bed, lays a hand on her back until she stirs. Eases her into a sitting position so that she can drink, her eyes shut tight against the headache she can't shake off anymore.
Day 89
He wakes up, walks down the corridor, lets himself into her quarters. He squats down at the side of her bed, lays a hand on her back until she stirs. She does not sit up. She does not accept the glass of water. Without opening her eyes, she shifts into the middle of the bed, pulls back the covers.
He slides in, arranging their bodies so that his wraps around her slight frame, his hand coming to rest on her hip. Her breathing is tightly controlled, fighting against the agony in her head.
There's an ancient song Tom knows from a novelty jukebox in a dive bar called The Phoenix, an old Academy haunt. He hasn't thought of it in years but it comes to him now unbidden, a dark echo of another life, another universe.
Time, time, time is on my side.
The irony is irresistible.
Day 82
Seven Days Earlier
In the artificial half-light of early morning, Tom trudges out of his bedroom and into the living room, a standard-issue Starfleet living room bathed in orange, and his heart stops, because Kathryn is on the couch.
And because Kathryn is on the couch, a book propped up against her knees and a soft smile on her lips, he finds himself believing, for one breathtaking moment, that he has not awoken in his own quarters.
But when she notices his stunned expression, her smile vanishes.
"Oh, Tom... No," she says, half-rising. "Oh, god, I'm..."
"I need a minute." He backs up and presses himself against the wall of his bedroom, willing the vice grip around his heart to ease.
He cannot believe his stupidity. Like it's a fairy tale, like he captures the heart of the princess and all is well, the curse is lifted? He has so far managed to eschew the folly of hope, focusing instead on the details as they have worked their way through an unwritten list of likely and, increasingly, unlikely escape plans. If he has at all allowed himself to imagine what their success might look like, he has kept his musings entirely theoretical: Maybe this thing will work. Probably, it will not.
Because nothing eviscerates a person like unrealized hope.
When he feels capable of speech, less like he's seeing double, he finds her standing at the window, her hands wrapped tightly around a coffee mug. She looks desperately guilty.
"I've been falling asleep on your couch," he says, by way of explanation, though he expects she understood immediately.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"Don't be." He drops an apologetic kiss on the top of her head. "I'm an idiot. Next time I won't be surprised. Sorry about sleeping on your couch," he adds, now that the jig is up.
"Don't be ridiculous," she smiles weakly.
All his short-lived adrenaline gone, he collapses into the spot on his couch that she'd vacated. Beside him, upside-down, is the book she'd been curled up with. He sees now that it isn't her book, but his: War of the Worlds again. A dead giveaway, if he'd been able to see the cover.
"I never got to find out how it ends," she says, following his line of sight. She shrugs off-handedly, which does not fool him for a second.
But because neither of them needs a reminder of the time they'd tried to listen to the radio broadcast, he says, "Something tells me you're not here just to steal my books."
"Exogenetics," she confirms, moving to sit across from him.
He stares at her blankly, and she laughs. "You really weren't paying attention before, were you?"
"I was a man on a mission," he agrees.
"Well, having prevailed over the one, you now have a new mission. Those strange readings? Harry picked up a nucleotide resonance frequency. That kind of signal could easily be utilized to activate DNA."
She look at him expectantly, so this is apparently supposed to mean something to him. He badly wishes he had replicated his own cup of coffee before sitting down. "Okay, wait," he says, closing his eyes. He thinks back on the events of the last loop. He'd barreled into Engineering…
"Wait, someone lives here? You let me go on like that when you'd just found out someone lives here?"
She doesn't even try to conceal her grin at his expense. "You were a man on a mission."
Yes, well. "So someone lives here," he starts again. "And they're putting out a signal that taps into DNA… Oh."
Of course. The Doctor had said that Chakotay was hallucinating because a gene had been triggered. But that means…
"Chakotay isn't hallucinating."
"Looks like it," she confirms, leaning forward eagerly. "I think someone out there is trying to talk to him. Trying, and failing."
"No kidding." Tom quickly runs through the options in his head. They already know they can't launch a probe, or a buoy. They've never gotten a response to their distress signal. They could try working with Tuvok, but if it were as simple as telepathy the residents of Chaotic space wouldn't need the nucleotide frequency. Where does that leave them?
"I think we have to speak with Chakotay," Kathryn admits, anticipating his question.
"That's not gonna go well," Tom says.
"No. We'll need an ironclad cover story to avoid telling him about the temporal disruption."
"Then I suggest we invent one before we make the attempt. Over breakfast?"
"Works for me. Mind if I…" she trails off, waving in the direction of his bathroom.
He doesn't, of course. He makes use of the time by replicating an assortment of her favorite things—the coffee, croissants, cut strawberries—and a few new things to try, to add to his growing mental catalog of Things Kathryn Likes (Or Not). She doesn't eat much but she'll try a little of all of it, and whether it's to make Tom happy or on account of a deeply buried, poorly-honed sense of self-preservation, he doesn't much care.
But before he can finish laying out the spread she comes charging out of his bathroom, grabbing him by the hand and pulling him inside.
"What—"
"Listen," she says shortly, holding herself stock still. Tom holds his breath. "Do you hear that?"
And now that she mentions it, he does, but he can't imagine how she did. It's a crackling sound, electric almost, incredibly faint but for the good acoustics of his spartan bathroom. He presses his ear to the wall and follows the noise down, crouching low, tracking the source to a panel by the door. "Scoot," he tells her, and she takes a few steps back so he can pull the panel off.
He registers her sharp intake of breath before he makes sense of what he's seeing.
Gel packs. Tom doesn't pay a ton of attention to this sort of thing but he knows they snake all throughout the ship, a vast system that runs everything from life support to his sonic shower. And heknows, too, that they don't normally look like this, the blue fluid tinged worryingly with green and churning wildly, silvery swirls seeming to take on a life of their own. The crackling is stronger now and as he leans in he realizes that it's coming from the silver, spindly threads of it so thin he almost missed the fact that they're jumpingfrom pack to pack, somehow.
"It's like the Aurora Borealis," Janeway breathes.
"No," Tom says uneasily, "it's like Chaotic space."
"Tricorder?"
"Desk."
She retrieves the device and hands it to him, watching over his shoulder. She doesn't need to tell him what to look for. He modulates the tricorder to scan for temporal variants, passing it methodically over each gel pack in turn.
It lights up like a beacon.
On instinct, Tom strides over to a panel under his window and pries it open. These gel packs look the same but here the silver strands are thicker, turbulent, forking through the exposed circuitry. He's careful not to get too close to these while he scans, snapping the tricorder shut when he finds what he's searching for. He looks up, meeting Janeway's intent gaze.
"I think we've found our boundary," he says.
They'd scanned the hull, of course. Thoroughly, repeatedly. No external signs of temporal disruption, no anomalies other than Chaotic space itself. But Janeway had been certain, always, that the border was close.
And it's been inside the ship all along, running through the interior perimeter where they simply never would have looked for such a thing.
"Which explains why we couldn't get that probe out," Tom says. "Must be hard work, being right all the time," he teases.
But Janeway doesn't smile. She has taken over the scanning, pulling half of his wall apart in the process. "This is bad. We can't destroy the gel packs, Tom. We don't have enough replacements."
"One thing at a time," Tom says. "Let's just—"
"Wait," she cuts in. "Impossible… Come look at this." She hands him the tricorder, digging her thumb and forefinger into the ridge of her brow. "Tell me I'm not seeing things."
"What am I looking for, here?"
She points, squeezes her eyes shut. "Computer, dim the lights," Tom calls, then looks at the reading she'd indicated.
She's not imagining it. Like her, he almost doesn't believe it. "They're emitting a neurogenic field?"
"Bio-neural," she reminds him, panting a little. "It's like someone's hacked into them, used them to amplify that field. Must be why it's not just the exterior walls."
"The memory loss," Tom realizes. "But why not us? If it's in the ship, why are we aware of everything?"
"A better question might be why at all, but—" she sucks in a breath through her teeth and doubles over.
"This is just a headache?" Tom demands. They have hours to go yet; she shouldn't be in this much pain. "They've been worse than you told me, haven't they?"
"Mornings," she forces out. "Couldn't afford to get… distracted…"
"Seriously?" Tom would be furious right now if he weren't so afraid. "We need to get you to Sickbay."
"No point," she insists. "It'll pass. Just… give me a minute."
"Nope," Tom says, hoisting her up. "We're going."
"We can't tell him—"
"I'm not going to." On its face the situation does not merit an emergency medical transport, and it would be hard to explain what would look like a huge overreaction on his part without disclosing Kathryn's looming aneurysm. They'd given up trying to treat her headaches but Tom can't just sit here and do nothing, and so he ducks down and drapes her arm across his shoulders, walking them awkwardly into the corridor.
He regrets this choice enormously when they run headlong into Chakotay as he's exiting the turbolift.
"What's wrong with her?" he asks sharply, immediately on high alert.
"Just a headache," Tom says, half-dragging Kathryn into the lift.
Chakotay raises his eyebrows skeptically, and wherever he'd been headed, now he changes tack and follows them to Sickbay. He does not help Tom support her. He seems, somehow, less worried than he does suspicious.
The Doctor looks up in surprise when they enter, rising quickly from his desk. "What's her status?"
"I'm fine," Janeway groans.
"We need your top-shelf painkiller, Doc," Tom says. "The normal stuff's not gonna cut it."
The problem, Tom recognizes belatedly, is that Kathryn Janeway is renowned both for her headaches and that she only very rarely seeks treatment for them. Both Chakotay and the Doctor react to this request with utter disbelief, but the Doctor loads a hypospray and dutifully injects her, monitoring her body's response closely.
"Are you feeling its effects?" the Doctor asks, frowning at his tricorder.
Kathryn seems to be weighing the value of lying, but decides against it. "The pain is passing," she says. "As I told you it would," she adds, scowling at Tom. Which is not, of course, a commentary on the treatment itself. The Doctor notices this and starts to speak, but Chakotay beats him to it.
"You knew an analgesic wouldn't work," he says to Tom.
Silently, Tom curses. "It was a pretty bad headache," he shrugs.
"Uh huh. Funny thing about that. I came in earlier and the Doctor's treatment didn't help me, either."
This is plainly news to the Doctor, who looks affronted.
"Feeling under the weather, Commander?" Janeway prods, a little recklessly.
"You don't seem surprised by that."
Tom and Janeway share a look.
"Captain to the Bridge," Baxter intones over the comm.
Janeway taps her combadge impatiently. "Call Lieutenant Tuvok, Mr. Baxter," she says, and cuts the line.
"Will someone please explain what is going on?" the Doctor snaps.
"This is a bad idea," Tom murmurs.
"In for a penny," she says, sliding off the biobed decisively. "Gentlemen, we are about to enter a region of subspace inhabited by aliens who are trying to communicate using a nucleotide resonance frequency. And we have reason to believe that you, Commander, are the recipient of that would-be message."
You could hear a pin drop in the silence that follows this extraordinary pronouncement, Tom thinks. But not for long.
"We're where?" Chakotay demands.
"The hallucinations," the Doctor muses at the same time. "But how did you know?"
"That's an excellent question," Chakotay pivots, rather more aggressively than Tom would prefer.
"We didn't," Janeway hedges. "Call it a hunch."
"With all due respect, Captain," Chakotay says through gritted teeth, "You're gonna have to do a hell of a lot better than that."
Janeway takes a deep breath. She places her hands on her hips. Tom braces himself.
"All right then, here's the situation: for several weeks now we've been experiencing what one might call a time loop. Only Mr. Paris and I retain our memories at the end of each day, and we have tried to inform both of you of this fact on several occasions." She pauses to look at each of them in turn, fixing them with the sort of glare that does not invite the voicing of their doubts. "And we know about your hallucinations, Commander… because they've been getting worse."
The Doctor is speechless.
Chakotay is not.
"You want to know what I think is going on here?" He takes a step forward and is way too close to Janeway for Tom's comfort. "I don't think you are the real Captain Janeway. I think you know about my hallucinations because you're the one causing them. You think I don't remember but I see you in my visions. You steal the faces of the people I care about! Tell me the truth!"
"Chakotay, calm down. We just want to help you," Tom tries, edging carefully toward the Doctor's office.
"Paris, I don't know what your involvement is in all this, but Kathryn Janeway wouldn't waltz in here with a headache and start babbling about time loops. That… imposter has taken you for a fool," Chakotay snaps. "Doctor, you have the authority to relieve her of command and you need to do it, now."
"That's enough, Chakotay," Janeway interrupts.
"Oh, I don't think so," he says dangerously, taking one more step forward and gripping Janeway's biceps. He shakes her once, twice. "I don't think I've gone nearly far enough to protect this crew. You're too strange for us! Too alien! Get them out!"
"Doctor, sedate him!" Janeway gasps. The Doctor hesitates, but Tom is halfway to the instrument tray even as she gives the order.
To his credit, Chakotay puts up a hell of a fight. Tom approaches from behind to draw his attention away from Janeway, and Chakotay swings wide, tries to knock the hypospray out of Tom's hand and then throws a wild left hook at the side of his head. Tom dodges and ducks around the other man, pressing the sedative into his neck in one quick motion. He and the Doctor catch Chakotay before he can hit the ground, and together they drag him to a biobed.
"Captain, this is completely unacceptable," the Doctor cries. "I demand to know what—"
"Computer, deactivate the EMH," Tom orders.
And then, for all intents, they are alone in Sickbay. Janeway releases a heavy sigh into the sudden silence.
"Well, that took an unexpected turn," she says.
"Why are people always trying to punch me today?" Tom quips.
"Don't be dramatic. How many todays has it been since you even went to breakfast?"
Tom gives her a lopsided grin, but it fades as she gingerly presses her fingers into her upper arm. "I can't believe he put his hands on you. Are you okay?"
"It's not him, Tom," she replies, shaking her head slowly. "The neurogenic field. It's almost as though it's a protective measure. Like it's… shielding them from knowing about the loops. Except that because of his gene, Chakotay's subconscious is in overdrive."
"But why? You're the one who has a brain aneurysm every afternoon. You're talking about it like it's traumatic for him."
"Isn't it?" she asks seriously. "To be sealed in amber, but conscious of time passing? In this place, of all places? You can't even look out the window anymore."
That stops him in his tracks.
"It's not the same," he says. "I have to watch you die."
"And the long run?"
The long run. He almost laughs. Hope, he thinks, for the second time today. Hope, when they can't even attempt to treat a headachewithout it becoming a major incident. When, yes, he can no longer tolerate the sight of space writhing and twisting and pressing, hateful, grotesque, and now it seems to be coiling through the ship itself like some kind of contagion, the notion of their escaping more preposterous than ever.
And Tom knows, he knows that Chakotay is not at fault here, no more than Harry is, or B'Elanna. But he is sick of coddling every useless person on this ship, sick of the two of them alone working to save this crew, to save her, when by all rights they should have the entirety of the ship's resources at their disposal, if everyone would just wake up and listen to them instead of going about their days like mindless goddamn automatons.
"I try not to think about it," he says, not meeting her eyes.
She smiles grimly. "Which is my point exactly."
And yes, maybe it would be better not to know. But never at the expense of her dying alone, again and again, forever or until the ship itself comes apart in just exactly the same way that things are building up and breaking down inside her head.
"Okay," he says, suddenly drained. "You're right."
She comes to him then, touching his arm lightly as she looks up into his face with real concern, her eyes flitting across his features. But he does not want her to worry about him on top of every other godforsaken thing, so he wraps his arms around her and rests his head on hers, and when he feels her relax against his chest he allows his eyes to close, just for a moment.
They sway a little, and the ship hums. And time, such as it is, ticks on, unrelenting.
"All right?" she asks softly. He nods, and releases her, a little unwillingly.
"I don't want to have to go through this again," she says, looking pensively at Chakotay's still form. "Grab a tricorder and scan him while I pull up his medical records."
He does as he's told. "You know I have no idea what I'm looking for here, right? Field medic."
"We don't need to," she assures him. "We just have to compare the new scans to his baseline records. The computer will do the work."
And indeed, it hardly takes any time at all. Tom is thorough, passing the tricorder over every centimeter of Chakotay's skull. After a few minutes the computer chirps its completion of the scan overlays and Tom sets the device aside, coming around to join Janeway behind the console.
"There," she says after a moment, pointing. "That's the gene. The alien signal realigned his molecular bonds."
"So why can't he understand them?"
"I have to believe that any beings that could survive in Chaotic space would exist on a perceptual wavelength way outside what our senses can detect. It's possible we're just too… too different…" she trails off. An unfocused look comes over her and she puts a hand on the crown of her head, smooths her hair back. "Chaos," she whispers.
"Kathryn?" Tom asks, worried.
"Maybe it was random chance. Tom," she says urgently, eyes wide, "maybe they didn't even know about Chakotay's 'crazy gene'. Maybe it was random chance. 'Too strange,' he said. You told me he's been coming to Sickbay since the beginning."
Tom thinks he knows where she's going with this. "You both started experiencing the effects at the same time."
"What if they're not trying to talk to him? What if they're trying to talk to me, and because of his gene he's been caught in the crossfire? Maybe they didn't anticipate how the neurogenic field would affect him, because we're too strange, and that's why he can't make sense of it, because they don't know—"
"And it's driving Chakotay insane, and it's killing you. How does this help us?" Tom asks desperately. "We don't know how to talk back. We don't know how to make them stop."
She shakes her head. "I don't know."
"And why not me? Why aren't they talking to me, too?"
"I don't know," she says again. "But it's more than we had before."
How can it be, Tom wonders, that they can have made so many discoveries in such a short period of time, and be no closer to having any actual answers?
Janeway insists that he monitor her through her next aneurysm, scanning for signs of the nucleotide frequency in real time. She wants to be sure, she says, which is all well and good, except that he still can't wipe the memory of the last time they did this from his mind, having to watch with his own eyes as the aneurysm devastated her brain with unholy speed.
But she is not wrong, and so he agrees.
She does not, however, want to spend one more minute in Sickbay. They leave Chakotay sedated, and instruct the computer to reactivate the Doctor after it's all over. It's unclear whether either of them will remember what happened, but if not Tom doesn't doubt they'll try to reconstruct the missing time, once Chakotay is found unconscious and alone.
"They're going to give you a hell of a time," she warns.
"Don't worry about it," he tells her. He'd known as soon as he'd deactivated the Doctor that there would be no explaining their actions today, which will be made all the more suspicious by Janeway's sudden death. The worst thing that will happen, probably, is they'll want to lock him in the brig for the rest of the loop. Still, he'd rather not find out for sure. "I'll just have to lead them on a thorough tour of this fine ship."
She doesn't want to die in her quarters, or his. Her ready room would prove logistically problematic, since Tom will need to make a clean escape, after. Neither one of them wants to so much as step foot on deck eight if they can help it.
"What I want," she says bitterly, "is to get the hell out of here."
Which gives him an idea.
He can tell, when he leads her to the holodeck, that she's expecting Sandrine's. A shadow crosses her face and he guesses that she'd rather not die there, again, either. He thinks she's trying to preserve a handful of locations that will not evoke that particular memory, if they ever get out of here.
But because Tom anticipated this, the doors open instead onto a sloping springtime vista he thinks there's a fifty-fifty chance she'll recognize, but even if she doesn't, it should feel familiar. Comforting, he hopes. Wildflowers dot the grassy expanse and wind whips her hair as she turns on the spot, dumbfounded. From where she stands, she can see the Bay, the Santa Cruz mountains, and the Pacific Ocean.
"Is this place real?" she asks in a hushed tone.
"Borel Hill," he says, smiling. "It's near where I grew up. I wrote this while I was still at the Academy, take it everywhere I go. It's especially good after a long shuttle trip."
He can tell she is wrestling with the implications of this. If she is trying to save her favorite places from her worst memories, she probably has reservations about marring his own.
"What was this place to you?" she asks.
Solitude, is the honest answer. So far removed from the father he could never please, the mother who was too quiet, who'd do anything to avoid a battle. Their indomitable expectations of him his only birthright. But he's afraid that this wouldn't translate well, given the company he now keeps. He doesn't want her to think that bringing her here is any kind of sacrifice. She is, indeed, the first person with whom he has ever wanted to share this place.
"Freedom," he says instead.
But only after he hears himself say it does he appreciate the irony. She hears it, too.
"Freedom," she echoes softly.
They lapse into silence. She faces into the wind and it strikes him anew that she is so beautiful like this, the sun catching the blue of her eyes, the red-gold of her hair, and if he didn't know her so well he'd say she hardly seems to belong on a starship, should spend her days just like this. He wonders, if she spent less time in space, whether the dusting of freckles he recalls from their youth would reappear.
She glances at him over her shoulder, her expression bittersweet, and it must be almost time, now. It's gotten to be that they can both sense its approach, near enough that neither of them bothers to ask for the time, anymore.
"We can come back," Tom says, standing behind her. "Whenever you want."
She leans against him without turning. "Thank you," she answers simply.
When the first wave of pain crashes into her, he's ready. He helps her to the ground, noticing as he does so that they have been standing in a patch of poppies. An osprey soars high overhead and on the medical tricorder he stole from Sickbay he isolates the aneurysm, a miniscule shadow, just where he remembers it. He scans for the nucleotide frequency and yes, there it is, as she'd predicted, pinging steadily. And now that he knows what he's looking for it occurs to him that it's as though the aliens are tunnelling into her mind, like they're forming an organic micro-wormhole. But for all their technological ability they must have no idea how the human brain works, because that shadow grows and grows and bursts, and whatever they were trying to say, whatever they are ever trying to say, she can't hear them now.
"Tuvok to Paris."
He leaves the program running. He walks to the turbolift and tosses his combadge inside, sends it down to deck fifteen. Then he turns around and crawls into the closest Jefferies tube, locking the hatch behind him.
Day 90
Eight Days Later
He wakes up, walks down the corridor, lets himself into her quarters. Navigating the dim space with practiced ease, he quietly slips into her bed and she stirs, faintly, shuffles backwards so that their bodies are flush. Her breathing is tightly controlled, fighting against the agony in her head. He brushes a few loose strands of hair off her pale face, tucks them behind her ear, then rests his forehead lightly against the back of her head.
"Lieutenant Paris, report to Sickbay."
They both startle.
"That's not likely to be a positive development," she says, rolling onto her back with a groan, an arm thrown over her face.
"I'll come right back," he says. He kisses the bare skin of her shoulder and pushes himself out of bed, tugging his boots back on with great reluctance.
It's early still. Their quarters are on deck three and Sickbay is on deck five, so it's with no small amount of surprise that he finds Kurt Doyle in the turbolift when he expects him to be one deck up, in the Mess Hall. But it's early still. He must be on his way there now.
Tom is having bad luck with the turbolifts, lately.
"I'm going down," he says at once.
"What a coincidence! So am I," Doyle lies.
There's very little else Tom can do here except to step inside. He calls for deck five and Doyle says nothing, waits for the lift to start moving and then, with a predictability Tom could have bet a month's rations on, orders it to stop.
"You know the difference between me and you?" Doyle asks with feigned nonchalance.
Tom doesn't take the bait. He looks at Doyle impassively, waits for him to make his point.
"The difference between me and you is, I'm loyal. I give a shit. I protect my own. So I see you walking around with those shiny new pips and I've gotta wonder, what's my duty, here? You know what I mean?"
"No," Tom says, though he's got a fair idea.
"I mean, I find myself alone with the guy who betrayed my crew, my cause. No way out for either one of us. Do I just walk away from that opportunity?"
"Deck five," Tom says again.
"Belay that," Doyle growls. "I asked you a question."
But Tom's had just about enough of this. He turns to face Doyle head on, hands balled into fists at his side. "So do it, then," he snaps. "Is that what you want?"
"Oh, you can't begin to imagine what I want," Doyle grins dangerously, and Tom even sees it coming but he's angry, he's exhausted, he does not like leaving Kathryn alone and he is wholly dreading whatever awaits him in Sickbay, and so even with his upper hand Doyle gets the drop on him, shoving him against the wall and then landing a heavy jab just above his right eye. Bright white spots dance in his vision and he is pretty sure he felt something crack, something other than his fucking patience. He punches Doyle in the gut as hard as he can and Doyle crumples, a stupid lump at Tom's feet, so he takes the opportunity to kick him as long as he's there.
"Deck five," he says again, with feeling.
"Where have you been?" the Doctor demands when he finally makes it to Sickbay. "What happened to you?" he adds, seeing Tom's rapidly swelling brow.
"Walked into a door," Tom says.
"The doors open automatically."
"Anyway," Tom says significantly. "What's the emergency?"
The Doctor scrutinizes Tom for another beat, then sighs. "Heat exhaustion, of varying severity. Mr. Vorik and Ms. Torres brought them in; I need your help cooling them down. I don't suppose you can tell me why it would be 27 degrees in Main Engineering?"
Tom scans the room, counting. Four humans and a Bajoran. Kes drapes a wet towel over one of them, lays a gentle hand on the crewman's flushed cheek. How broad is the middle ground, he wonders, between a heat that can cause four humans and a Bajoran to collapse, and a heat that will ignite the warp core, decimate subspace, obliterate them all?
No, Tom thinks again, his face throbbing in time with his thudding heart, fighting a rising panic that is quickly becoming his steadfast companion. Time is definitely not on their side.