The Sky's The Limit Part 30

This tale unfolds in the weeks leading up to the feature film Star Trek Nemesis.

BOB INGERSOLL & THOMAS F. ZAHLER.

Bob Ingersoll is a practicing attorney with the Cuyahoga County Public Defender Office in Cleveland, Ohio, who hopes to get it right one of these days so he can finally stop practicing. For over twenty years he used his legal background to write the regular column "The Law Is a a.s.s" for Comics Buyer's Guide, a weekly trade newspaper for the comic-book industry.

He has written scripts for numerous comic-books, including Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lost in s.p.a.ce, Quantum Leap, and Hero Alliance. He was the co-author of the novels Captain America: Liberty's Torch and Star Trek: The Case of the Colonist's Corpse.

He has no idea what he wants to be when he grows up.

When Thomas F. Zahler's father introduced him to Star Trek and comic books, he probably had no idea what an impression they would make on the boy. Thom became obsessed with both, but decided it would be easier to become a cartoonist than join Starfleet.

After graduating the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, where he learned to draw funny pictures and tell stories, he began a successful career as an artist, working for clients across the country. His work has been seen everywhere from advertising campaigns to magazines and throughout the world of comics. He wrote and drew the action-adventure-spy series Raider, and is currently writing and drawing the critically acclaimed superhero sitcom comic book Love and Capes.

Zahler lives in northeast Ohio. He has not yet completely given up on a career in Starfleet. He can be found on the web at www.thomz.com.

WILL RIKER AWOKE WITH A RATTLING GURGLE IN HIS THROAT.

His lungs burned as if they couldn't fill with air fast enough. He felt colder than he thought it was possible to feel. And his chest hurt like h.e.l.l.

He looked around, desperately trying to regain his sense of place, but nothing looked familiar. He was on a warm floor. A muggy, musty smell filled the air. Beverly Crusher was kneeling in front of him, unmoving. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. Her mouth agape.

As if...

As if she had seen a ghost...

With that, memories spun about him. Tellarite...swamp...Deanna...the shuttlecraft...Deanna...some kind of outpost...Beverly...Deanna...

Desperate to ground himself, Will tried to lock eyes with Beverly, but he couldn't catch her gaze. She was looking at him, but not at his face. She was looking at his chest. Riker moved his head downward, following her line of sight.

That's when he saw a large hole in his chest, a hole that a surprisingly detached part of his mind told him was too large to be anything but fatal. Protruding from that hole, sitting right in the center of a gaping chest wound, was a small, triangular piece of highly polished metal.

And Riker screamed.

"...although these polar shifts are a natural occurrence, we are still at something of a loss to explain their cause."

Riker tried to focus on Data's droning recitation of the mission briefing but was failing miserably. Having an emotion chip may have changed the android's personality, but, unfortunately, it had no effect on his speaking style. Try as he might, Riker couldn't concentrate on this briefing. All he could think about were the two major changes that were about to take place in his life. His upcoming captaincy of the starship t.i.tan and, even more important, the fact that, finally, he was getting married to ship's counselor Deanna Troi.

Deanna was more than just his friend and fiancee. She was his imzadi. It was a word from Deanna's homeworld, Betazed, that translated loosely meant "beloved." But like so many words transposed from one language to another, the fullest meaning would not translate well. Imzadi meant beloved, but it also meant so much more. Betazed was a planet of telepaths, a world of beings who knew what bonding between two people on every level truly was. A world that gave such true bonding a name all its own.

Riker fumed silently, upset that he couldn't let his full frustration show. He was supposed to be with Deanna right now on Holodeck 2 in a recreation of L'Astrance, a Parisian restaurant overlooking the Eiffel Tower that was Deanna's favorite place to eat on Earth. They had reserved the holodeck time weeks ago as a getaway, promising themselves there would be no wedding plans. No discussions about the delicate seating arrangements required when the bride was a Daughter of the Fifth House or finding a menu that would satisfy a guest list that included vegetarians and devotees of live gagh worms. Just him and Deanna together for one night in the City of Lights. Rich food and richer company.

It was where Riker was supposed to be. Where he wanted to be. There. With Deanna. In Paris. Not in some boring briefing of the Enterprise's department heads called just because one of the ship's d.a.m.ned probes came back with a "startling revelation."

Riker pictured Deanna in his mind, eating a Souffle au Bleu d'Auvergne and talking about something amusing she had heard during lunch in Ten-Forward. He was trying to remember the exact taste of L'Astrance's exquisite creme brulee, when Geordi La Forge put his coffee cup down on the briefing room table, just loud enough to snap Riker out of the daydream.

Riker half turned his head and looked at La Forge with mild annoyance. Then he caught a hint of smile on the chief engineer's lips that seemed to say, "Hey, if I have to suffer, we all have to suffer."

Riker glanced out of the corner of his eye over at Jean-Luc Picard to see whether the Enterprise's captain had noticed his earlier lapse in concentration. But Picard was looking squarely at Data in rapt attention and, in contrast to Riker's own lack of focus, having no problems maintaining his interest.

"What would this have meant to the inhabitants?" Picard asked. "Losing their homeworld for a second time..." Picard let the sentence trail off.

Of course he's interested, Riker thought. It's archaeology.

Then Riker noticed that Picard's expression wasn't so much one of interest as one of shared sorrow. Like those Riker had seen at his mother's funeral on the faces of the people who experienced a loss of their own. Riker realized it wasn't just Picard's interest in archaeology. In a sense, for the captain it was personal, as he knew what it was like to lose a world, just as the Fabrini had.

The Fabrini were an ancient and advanced race that colonized other worlds some ten thousand years ago, after its home star went nova. Traces of the Fabrini had been found scattered around the galaxy, but only traces, until the discovery of an entire Fabrini colony on Yonada, a multigeneration s.p.a.ceship constructed inside of a hollowed-out asteroid.

Now Enterprise had chanced on another Fabrini colony. This one was found when the ship had sent a probe to a small, former Cla.s.s-M planet in an unexplored solar system. On the planet, the probe discovered the remains of a Fabrini colony established almost seven thousand years ago that had thrived for close to five hundred years before rapid polar shifts rendered the planet uninhabitable and the Fabrini were, again, forced to flee their home.

Beverly Crusher, chief medical officer, broke the somewhat awkward silence. "As near as we can tell from the probe, the shift rendered the planet inhospitable to life. And fairly quickly. The Fabrini colony that lived there would have had to leave in a hurry. If they were able to leave at all."

"So it seems the Fabrini," Riker started, trying to get his mind back in the game, "were smart to establish multiple colonies rather than place all their eggs in one basket again."

"How much damage would have been done to the structures after the polar shift?" Picard asked. "The Fabrini were extremely advanced in the medical sciences. Any intact relics would be a remarkable find."

"The structures themselves are mostly undamaged, sir," said Data. "As to how much of their culture survived over several thousand years of exposure to..."

"We'll need an expedition to find out," Beverly finished. She was clearly excited by the thought of the Fabrini's legendary medical knowledge. Moreover, Riker could tell she wanted to experience the colony and that knowledge firsthand, not talk about it in the abstract.

"Agreed," said Picard, and Riker could see that his captain's face mirrored the enthusiasm found on the doctor's face.

Riker glanced down at his padd and accessed Data's prepared presentation. He flipped ahead in Data's outline to see where all this was leading. The now-abandoned colony was on a planet that could no longer sustain humanoid life for an extended period. The polar shift had played havoc with the planet's atmosphere and continued to do so. Magnetic fields were constantly in flux. Without proper shielding, no human life could survive for more than a few days.

"We won't be able to beam down?" Riker asked, cutting off Data's lengthy description of the decay rates of Fabrini construction techniques.

"No, Commander," Data answered. "The planet is bathed in heavy magnetic interference that is thick as pea soup." Riker found himself smiling at the description, remembering a time when Data would have been incapable of using a phrase like that properly, or so easily. Riker realized at that moment how much he was going to miss serving with his friend.

Geordi leaned forward. "Because of the interference, transporters and communications will be severely limited. A thousand meters at best for the transporters, maybe a little more for the communicators."

Riker glanced down, consulting the scans of the planet's magnetic field. "Looks as though the ride through the upper atmosphere is going to be choppy as h.e.l.l." Riker grinned. "You're going to need a d.a.m.n good pilot."

"Are you volunteering, Number One?" Picard asked. Riker could tell that Picard was more than a little disappointed; the captain had hoped to lead the mission himself.

Riker grinned. "Captain, in less than a month, I'm going to be sitting where you are, with some full-of-himself first officer telling me that I can't leave my ship. I'd better get in on all the away missions while I can, sir."

Picard responded with a smile of his own. "I think you're just trying to avoid working on your wedding plans, Number One."

Riker's scream faded away. Beverly's own shock was gone, too, replaced with a clinical distance as her medical training took over her reactions. "What do you remember, Will?" she asked.

Riker could tell she was thinking three steps ahead of where he was, so he decided to trust her clarity and follow her lead. "You and I took a shuttle down to this planet. We started looking around, and you identified this building as a medical center. We came in and split up. You managed to turn on the lights, and then I saw..." Riker's voice trailed off.

Beverly put a hand on his shoulder. "Go on, Will."

"...I saw a Tellarite. A scavenger. He looked like he had some sort of weapon, so I drew my phaser. He didn't see me at first. He...he couldn't have gotten a shot off before I did. My phaser must have malfunctioned. And that...that's the last thing I remember. What happened after that?"

"You died."

"I what?" Riker sat forward, some of his earlier panic returning. A sharp pain in his chest made him regret sitting up so quickly.

Beverly looked him straight in the eyes. "Will, you've got a hole the size of my fist in your chest where your heart used to be. You don't survive that."

Riker looked down at his wound again. His blood-drenched uniform had a circular hole in it, one that exactly matched the hole in his chest. The image beyond that was surreal. There was an open, perfectly smooth crater in his chest. Through the shadows, he could make out some of his organs-his spine, his lungs. He moved slightly to try to allow more light to pierce the shadows, and after illuminating more of his internal organs, decided against it.

Reflexively, he brought his hand up to probe the wound but was rebuffed by a force field. It didn't provide a warning shock, like the ones in the Enterprise's brig, just enough of a repulsion to keep him from pressing further.

And in the center of everything, hovering in the void of his chest, was the triangular spike that he guessed was keeping him alive.

"I heard you cry out," Beverly said, intentionally distracting him from his self-examination, "and came here just in time to see the Tellarite run out as those doors over there"-Beverly nodded toward the two large doors that were the medical center's main entrance-"were closing."

"For a six-thousand-year-old facility, this place seems to work remarkably well."

"And you're lucky it does. When I got here, this room was already powering up. I think it's an emergency room of some sort. There were self-actuating probes coming out of the ceiling, examining you. And they attached that device to you," she said, indicating the sliver of metal Riker had noticed before.

"As near as I can tell," Beverly continued, "it's the only thing keeping you...well, as alive as you are."

Will started to say something but stopped, realizing she wasn't done. "Will, whatever that thing is, it's not so much keeping you alive as animating you. I scanned you, and your heart is completely gone. You're not pumping blood, you're not even breathing.

"The device is generating...something to replace your damaged or missing organs. It's stanched the bleeding. It's keeping your tissue from necrotizing. It's even providing some sort of energy to keep your brain functioning. I just don't know how."

"So what you're saying is I'm dead, but I'm not getting any deader."

Beverly smiled. "That's pretty much it." She got up off the floor and started to circle the room, pointing out displays or consoles. "Admiral McCoy wrote quite a few papers about the Fabrini. Their medical knowledge saved his life once. Over coffee at Starfleet Medical once, he hinted that he had been quite...friendly...with one of their descendants."

"Sounds like my kind of guy."

"He wrote that the Fabrini had a very clear protocol for medical emergencies: first a.s.sure that the patient doesn't get any worse, then try to make the patient better. Between that and their artificial intelligence capabilities, this emergency room must have been set up to implement the first part of that protocol."

Riker noticed for the first time his phaser on the floor near him. He picked it up and checked it. "My phaser's dead." Riker smiled. "Deader than me, at least. What happened to it?"

Beverly checked her own phaser for the first time and found that it, too, was not working. "I think that's my fault. When we first arrived and managed to turn on the lights, I think I activated the entire medical facility. Along with standard sterile fields, it must have some sort of weapons deactivation field."

"But the Tellarite shot me."

Beverly looked puzzled, then almost annoyed, as if she didn't like her theories being proved wrong. She knelt next to Riker and flipped open her medical tricorder. When she finished scanning him, she showed him the display. "I don't know what he used on you. There's a residual energy around the area of your wound that doesn't resemble any known weapon signature. It looks more like the aftereffects of a transporter."

"It wasn't a weapon," Riker said. He stroked his beard and remembered something Captain Picard had told him once. For the first time in a while, Riker actually felt glad for paying attention to one of Captain Picard's archaeology talks.

"It was a catalog gu...No, a cargo gun."

"A what?"

"A cargo gun. It's a kind of a short-range, portable transporter focused through a gun barrel. I've heard about them, but I've never seen one before...well, before now, I guess. They're used by scavengers and some less-reputable archaeologists. Say you're out picking through some ruins alone. You can't carry a heavy statue by yourself, but you can beam it into a buffer carried in a backpack and keep it there until you can rematerialize it somewhere else."

"But wouldn't keeping anything in a transporter buffer like that risk pattern degradation? The statue might not come out intact."

"Like I said: scavengers and disreputable archaeologists."

Beverly started to say something, then stopped and stared at his wound. There was an expression of concern on her face, but Riker couldn't tell if she was thinking of her patient or her friend. Eventually, she looked up and continued. "So you're saying he beamed out your heart?"

"A cargo gun needs time to scan its target. The Tellarite was surprised. He didn't have time for a full scan, so he just aimed and pulled the trigger." Riker looked at the hole in his chest. "Then ran away with a chunk of me, it seems."

"Why?" Beverly asked, looking at the doors the Tellarite used to exit the facility.

It wasn't difficult for Riker to follow Beverly's chain of thought as she looked at the door that led to the outside; she wasn't asking why did the Tellarite shoot. "He's probably alone. And scared. He just killed a Starfleet officer. He wanted to get out of here before any other Starfleet personnel that might be around found him."

Riker noticed that the pain in his chest had started to subside. He decided to test himself and slowly, unsteadily got to his feet. Beverly leaned in to restrain him, but he waved her off. The fog of shock was giving way to anger now.

Beverly shot to her feet. "Will, stop!" She waved her tricorder over his chest wound.

"What is it, Doctor?"

"There's an indicator light on the device. And it's dimming as you walk. Hold on..." Beverly consulted her tricorder display. "Will, that lifesaving machine has a finite amount of power in it. When you move, you're using it up faster."

"So how much power does it have?" Riker realized what he was asking. "How much time do I have?"

Beverly looked at Riker and tried to muster her most calming look. "I have no idea."

They held each other's gaze for a long moment. Beverly could be coolly calm and a.n.a.lytical. It was a skill Riker envied right now, since he needed to do something, even if he didn't know what.

"We have to get back to the shuttle," Riker suggested.

Beverly shook her head. "My tricorder's been picking up one intermittent life sign outside. That scavenger's still out there, waiting for us. And with a weapon he can use to finish what he started with you."

Riker looked around the room, thinking about their situation and the Tellarite with the cargo gun, all while hoping he didn't task the device's power too much.

"He thinks he's killed one Starfleet officer. He probably wants to make sure there's no one to connect him to the crime." He paused and regarded the walls of the emergency room. "Why hasn't he come back in? He's had time to check things out by now. He must think you're alone, with me out of the way. But why is he still out there instead of coming in to finish the job?"

"Fabrini medical protocols again. When this ER detected the drastic change in your condition, it was programmed to a.s.sume the worst, a contagious biohazard, and the entire facility went into a quarantine lockdown. The whole building is sealed. Blast doors. Metal coverings on the windows. Sterile fields. And a facilitywide shield that keeps everything out. Even transporter beams."

"Can you reopen it?"

"I think so. The system seems designed to open sections of the building after a humanoid operator has declared them safe. But with that Tellarite out there, it's probably better to keep the whole place sealed."

"So we're trapped."

"For now, yes. But Enterprise will find us. You know they will." She stopped short of reminding Riker of all the times the crew of the Enterprise had managed some last-minute rescue. Riker had, after all, engineered enough of them, himself. "In the meantime, I'm going to go through the Fabrini medical records. Most of our knowledge of the Fabrini comes from the book found on Yonada. But the Yonadi had stagnated while this branch of the Fabrini continued to progress for centuries. So I've got some catching up to do."

Will started to say, "What do you hope to find?" when it hit him. Beverly had been talking around the issue, driving the conversation away from the most logical question. "Even if we get back to the Enterprise, you can't fix me, can you?"

Beverly set her jaw. "No, Will, I can't. Your damage is too severe."

"If we find that Tellarite, get the cargo gun..."

She shook her head. "I can't just beam your heart back into your chest. Even a.s.suming no pattern degradation, there's no way to do that kind of precise integration. The shock alone would kill you."

The enormity of his situation crashed down upon him. He managed to conceal most of it from Beverly, but she did notice that his knees weakened, just a little bit. She'd had to give this news to far too many people in her career, and she knew the signs. For just a second, he let the mantle of command drop. The slight swagger and the twinkle in his eye disappeared. It was an unvarnished, honest Riker who asked his friend, "What do I do?"

Beverly picked up Riker's tricorder, which had also slipped from his belt during his attack. "Think about what you want to say," she said and handed Riker the device.