Free Caretaker by L. A. Graf Page B

the doors were only half open, trying to ignore the sudden clench of her stomach when it occurred to her that the lifts might be dysfunctional and everyone on the bridge relegated to ladders and emergency shafts.
    But the control panel lit up at a slap from her hand, and the internal system chimed a calm affirmative when she commanded it to go. A last quick glance at the bridge through the closing doors shocked her anew with the damage and death, but what shocked her most of all was the look of open disappointment on Paris’s face as he looked back at her, painfully aware that she had abandoned him there, dutiless, when there was so much on board to be done.
    When the ship first trembled as though in response to some great external blow, Dr. Fitzgerald wouldn’t let the nurse, T’Prena, call up to the bridge to find out what was going on. As support staff to the great starship, he didn’t feel it was their place to be either bothering the command crew during times of crisis, or trying to tell the command crew what they should be doing.
    “Captains know what’s best for their ships,” he was fond of saying.
    “We know what’s best for their crew.” And, sometimes, what was best was keeping everyone occupied with their assigned duties when there was nothing more useful they could be doing.
    Now, Fitzgerald rather wished he had some idea what was happening.
    He’d been trying to keep T’Prena busy by using her Vulcan memory instead of a note padd as he ran calibrating samples through the cellular diagnostic sequencer. Distracting a Vulcan, after all, was hardly an easy task—judging whether or not you were successful was a whole other matter entirely. Vulcans didn’t fidget or prattle nervously when they were unhappy; they acted the same as they always did. They denied, even, that they could feel unhappy. But a long residency at the Vulcan Science Academy had taught Fitzgerald a lot more than how to gauge a pon farr hormonal surge. He’d learned, as well, that Vulcans in many ways felt just as much as humans did; they simply chose not to let those emotions rule their actions and lives.
    Even when they engaged in behavior for what might otherwise be considered emotional reasons, they made sure they had a logical rationale for doing so. Whether or not that made them emotionless or simply uptight, Fitzgerald had never been able to decide. All the same, he’d realized that once he learned how to recognize the vanishingly subtle clues to Vulcan feelings, he’d begun to appreciate the advantage this gave him as a doctor—the advantage of knowing, just like with human patients, what a Vulcan needed mentally perhaps even before the Vulcan herself did. He was very proud of this skill. It wasn’t every doctor who could boast that he knew what was best for a Vulcan, and so Fitzgerald made it a point to do so whenever the opportunity presented itself.
    But not in front of the Vulcans, of course.
    I was only trying to do what was best. It was all he ever did.
    He took his duties as protector of the crew’s health and welfare very seriously, and would never have done anything to cause any of them harm. Even Paris, to whom he’d spoken so rudely only yesterday—all Fitzgerald wanted was to protect any of the young men and women on board Voyager from suffering the same fate as those three poor crewmen on Caldik Prime. All it would take was a boy as trusting and impressionable as young Harry Kim believing Paris when the older man said he was responsible enough to take a shuttle, man the weapons, work the engines, and any one of the one hundred fifty innocent lives on this vessel might be forfeit.
    That possibility was far more horrible to Fitzgerald than any ill feelings Paris might hold toward him. The doctor had even tried to explain that to Ensign Kim. “It’s for the best, you know,” he had said quietly over their breakfasts in the mess hall. “Men like that never come to any good.” He’d only been trying to