Chapter Three
The specter opened
his mouth, as if to say something, but the only sound that came out was a few
more crackling noises. Stevenson had backed up against the opposite wall of the
office, his gaze locked with the gaze of the blue ghost of the Captain.
Stevenson suddenly
asked: "Captain?"
The specter answered
with a few more static-like noises.
"Is that
you?"
More
crackling...
Then, the specter
disappeared...
Stevenson stared
with wide eyes at the space where the specter of the captain had been standing
a few seconds before... This whole story was getting crazier by the minute; a
ghost of the captain? Or was it really the captain?
"Computer, how
many people are on board this ship?" He asked.
"Fifty-two,"
It answered.
"What?"
He jumped. "How is that poss..."
"Correction,"
The computer interrupted. "There is one person present aboard this
ship: Lieutenant John Stevenson."
He felt dizzy...
Something was very
wrong, but was it with him? Was it with the ship? He didn't know anymore. Maybe
this was all a bad dream, and if he closed his eyes and opened them again, he
would find out he was actually lying in his bed.
No...This was
real...
And he had to find
out what had gone wrong with his reality...
* * *
The next logical
step was sickbay. If he had indeed not been well the day before well sickbay
was where he had gone, without doubt.
He had always found
the sickbay of the Valiant very strange. He knew it was for a good
reason but it was still strange to him. Sickbay was divided into two section,
one section was a normal sickbay, with bio-beds, scanners and the doctor's
office; the other half was a totally white, sterile environment that smelled of
disinfectant right into the corridor outside the room. The white area of
sickbay was supposed to be used for the manipulation of products with a
"biohazard" label and also for various kinds of plastic surgery.
He walked to the
doctor's office and let himself drop into the comfortable seat that doctor
Tarses usually occupied. The laptop on the doctor's desk, strangely, was still
activated, it was displaying some information about plants, or
something...Stevenson wasn't a biologist.
He aborted the plant
program and attempted to access the doctor's logs. He easily accessed the
medical logs for the day before and scanned through them.
"There you
are." He accessed a log entry named: 'Stevenson'.