It was perhaps the oddest medical examination Picard had ever seen.
The couch was empty: the medical readouts all remained resolutely at zero, blipping up occasionally as a stray skin cell or minute organism floated across the sensors. Three medical staff, amongst them Beverley Crusher, hovering around the empty bed with additional tricorder, drawing a blank. Crusher even placed her hands onto the couch, feeling across the surface with bare hands and evidently finding nothing.
And in the background, Lieutenant Commander Data, his golden eyes flicking between the empty bed and the stern face of his commanding officer. Geordi had just finished running another scan of his friend. "He seems fine, Captain. The issue with his power circulation is still there, but the self-correcting mechanisms are getting better at handling it. His positronic net checks out. I can't find anything wrong with him that would suggest he was seeing things."
Picard regarded Data seriously, then, with a sad quirk of his lips, he said: "I suppose it would be callous to say I almost wish there was something amiss with your perceptions, Mr Data."
Data gave this a moment's thought, classified it as a rhetorical question, and did not answer. Picard continued. "Because the other alternative we are left with is scarcely appealing - that we've brought one of these creatures on board with us unawares and that it has been killing members of my crew."
"My hypothesis is that the creature was beamed up along with the first away team. At that point we were not aware of either their existence or the extent of their abilities. The creature would have escaped notice while I was unconscious and has remained undetectable since then." Data looked over once more at Dr Crusher. Her hands were red and the cuffs of her uniform tunic were dappled with blood. He raised his voice, very slightly. "Doctor. If I may suggest that you wash your hands before handling any sterile equipment?" Beverley gave him a startled look and headed straight for the sonic cleanser.
"Data, I want you to personally carry out a full scan of the ship. Every area, every sweep we can run, I want you to do it. And quickly." Picard found his eyes being drawn again to that empty couch. It was starting to make him feel very uneasy. "First of all we're looking for that creature, wherever it is. But secondly…"
He sensed rather than saw Dr Crusher scrubbing more briskly than was necessary at her apparently pristine hands. "Secondly," he said, quietly, "we're looking for more bodies."
"General quarters. All off-duty personnel, general quarters. Red alert."
The Enterprise was going into shutdown. She was a large ship, and as Picard had often felt to his cost, she was full of civilians as well as crew. And what was worse, Picard thought as he headed back to the bridge with the automated beat to quarters ringing out all around him, was that he couldn't even be sure that sending people away to lock themselves in their rooms was the best thing to do.
That creature could be anywhere. Invisible. Undetectable. The best chance we have is that Data can track it down before it kills anyone else.
And just how many bodies were lying out in the corridors, or sprawled like broken dolls across the floors of turbo lifts? Was it possible that they wouldn't have noticed a few people out of hundreds going missing over the space of mere hours? Picard entered the lift and tried to dismiss the possibility that he was standing in a corpse all unawares. He wondered, briefly, if it was worth asking Data to check every crew member for bloodstains on their trouser cuffs or hands.
But that would perhaps waste time. Down in engineering, Data would be practically plugging himself into the ship's internal sensor system right now, using those machine perceptions that could not be fooled as easily as organic brains to see things that were really there.
Six impossible things before breakfast…
Will Riker's earlier words came back to him, and he smiled humourlessly. This situation was getting more and more like a grotesque fairy tale by the minute.
That same Will Riker was currently on the bridge, in the command chair. He had been there to hear Geordi's call in, at which point Picard had shot out of his chair like a cork from a bottle and fairly snapped at Riker to take over the bridge.
Captain, you'd better get down here. I'm with Data. He says he's found a dead body.
Which opened up a whole can of worms, of course. I'm with Data, but only he says he's found a dead body. Not, we've found a dead body. No name. No details of how the death occurred.
Somehow, it was the lack of a name that bothered Riker most.
Always the same, has been with humans for centuries. If you overhear that someone's died, you always have to know who it is, just in case they were a friend or worse, family. This is why obituary columns were always so popular. Morbid fascination.
"We're a grim species, sometimes," he observed aloud, drawing a frown from Worf at the security station above the horseshoe rail. The turbo lift admitted a severe-looking Picard, and Riker responded instantly to the clipped "In my ready room," command that was swiftly issued.
"I did exactly the same thing," said Picard, collecting his tea from the replicator. Riker frowned, confused.
"Did what, sir?"
"As soon as it properly started to sink in what kind of situation we were in, I started imagining invisible corpses piled high around me." The captain regained his chair and cradled his tea with one hand. "It's instinctive, Will. You immediately looked around the room, checked the floor, even scuffed up the carpet. Just in case there was a body there, even though if there was neither of us would be able to see it."
Riker considered. He had done all of those things, if he thought about it. But Picard was right. It had been an instinctive reaction, not something deliberate. Just as a predator instinctively kills. We can't control our instincts, and neither can they. Shut up, Will. Stick to the task at hand.
"I suppose this changes those options we were talking about earlier more than a little," he said, leaning forward. "It's not an isolated planet we're talking about, it's more like an infection. Any visiting ship could take one of these things away with it and not know about it until everyone on board was dead."
Picard nodded. "Naturally I sent Starfleet Command full details of our situation and of your options immediately after you presented them to me." He stared into his cup as if seeking further clarification there. "However, I do feel that this new development may complicate the issue."
Riker ran a finger over the edge of Picard's desk. "Data think the sweep of the ship'll take him long?"
"Less than an hour. He's interfacing directly with the raw data, if you'll pardon the expression."