Star Trek: The Original Series - Bantam Novels - 006 - The New Voyages 2 by Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath

Author:Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath [Marshak, Sondra & Culbreath, Myrna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Science Fiction; American
ISBN: 9780553279337
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 1989-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

MARGINAL EXISTENCE by Connie Facldis

A happily engrossed Doctor McCoy was up to his elbows in dusty antique medical equipment when his communicator bleeped impertinently. Grumbling, he gently set down the interesting instrument he’d been examining, and hauled out his squawk box.

McCoy here, he answered in a long-suffering voice.

Doctor, we found one! A live one! the radio crackled.

Found one what? Gorshim, is that you?

Yes, sir, it’s me, Gorshim. We found a live being in one of the sleeper-units. It really is alive. Elva’s in there with it now. It looks almost exactly like a…

A muffled shriek erupted through the communicator. Elva! Gorshim’s voice shouted.

Gorshim, what was that? Horst?

There was a clatter over the radio, then only static, but the channel was open.

Now what the devil? McCoy yelled. Lieutenant, what’s going on there!

He shouted worriedly into the little box for several minutes, then gave up and grabbed his tricorder. Determining the coordinates of the voiceless transmission, he hurried out of the empty building and into the vine-and brush-overgrown city streets. He couldn’t begin to imagine what possible trouble there could be. This city had been deserted for at least six hundred years, standard. He knew each towering building or domed dwelling he passed contained only the dead, the crumbling bones in the rusting sleeper units, hung with clogged plastic intravenous tubes and impregnated with traces of unknown drugs.

But a live being? It was incredible. Even if the units had actually been designed for hibernation, a six-hundred-year survivor was an astonishing discovery.

McCoy crossed bootprints in the undisturbed dust of the windless streets. Centuries of dust. Dust thou art … If Gorshim wasn’t hallucinating, McCoy reflected, then the little exploration - survey team could well have uncovered more than a rich archeological find, but perhaps a greater medical find. Six hundred years!

The bootprints crisscrossed each other in scuffled profusion in front of one particularly well-kept building. McCoy glanced around, noticing that all the buildings in the neighborhood looked better-kept than where he had been. Then he spotted Gorshim’s communicator, lying open in a doorway as though it had been dropped, not placed there deliberately.

McCoy didn’t move. Nervously, he surveyed the silent street. Silence, silence, not even the sigh of a breeze at his ears. He checked the chronometer on the tricorder: Only two hours until all of them had to be aboard the shuttlecraft to leave; only four hours more until rendezvous with the Enterprise. Damn. Not enough time to extract a tooth properly, let alone make a half-decent survey of all the findings. And where in the hell had the others gone off to?

Gorshim! he called. Vigeland?

His voice bounced back hollowly from the canyons of glass and steel.

Horst, are you here? he tried again.

Only the echoes answered.

He hesitated before entering the building; anyone who made surveys of unknown places learned to hate entering enclosures. He picked up Gorshim’s communicator and tucked it onto his belt. Then, drawing his phaser, he set it for heavy stun and slipped into the hallway, treading softly so as to make no sound.

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