The Long Night by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

long, long time ago.
    "Is it empty?" Bashir asked.
    "If it were empty, do you think the commander would have sent for you?"
    "Well, he should know that the odds of reviving an eight-hundred-year-old cold sleeper are about as good as you winning two dart games in a row." Bashir mounted the platform.
    "I won twice this afternoon," O'Brien said.
    "Thanks to a riot and a few other distractions." He set his equipment down on the opposite side of the coldsleep chamber and then pulled out his tricorder. His hands were freezing. He pulled gloves out of his pocket, gripped them with his teeth, and tugged them on finger by finger.
    Dax had turned her tricorder toward him. "Forgive me, Julian," she said, "but the commander insisted that we record all our efforts here."
    "Including my first statement, I suppose," Bashir said, feeling a flush creep into his cheeks.
    Dax smiled. That soft smile always made her a vision of loveliness. "I'm afraid so."
    He shook his head slightly, then glanced at the opaque lid of the coldsleep chamber. The man inside belonged to a race Julian had never seen before. On the trip, he had brushed up on Jibetian physiology, but his material was on current Jibetian anatomy, not anatomy from eight hundred years before. He didn't remember much about the shallow-ridged cheekbones, although he did remember reading about the redundant internal organs that had been common among the royal family. Some scholars claimed those organs were responsible for the family's longevity.
    "Dr. Bashir," Dax said, "You'll have to explain each procedure. This tricorder isn't set up for in-depth recording."
    "I'm not going to talk my way through each stage," Bashir said. "It would take too much time."
    "But you'll at least have to give us an overview."
    He glanced at her, biting back his annoyed comment for the sake of posterity. She was positioned well behind the tricorder, and so when she shrugged, she added a bit of mischeviousness to her movements.
    She was amazingly joyful for a woman trapped on a crashed space ship, eight hundred years old.
    Bashir didn't want to think about that. If he were Dax, he would be exploring the ship. She didn't know the great luck she had, being able to see all these new places. He beamed down for crisis after crisis, rarely got a chance to explore his surroundings, and usually had to concentrate on some new type of medical emergency.
    Like this one.
    Something bothered him about this coldsleep chamber. But the technology was just unfamiliar enough to his Federation-trained eyes that he couldn't quite pinpoint the problem right away.
    He flicked on his medical tricorder, then nodded toward Dax. "I am going to do a basic medical scan of the man inside this chamber. I need to make an overall assessment of his condition."
    O'Brien had almost disappeared on the side of the chamber. He seemed to be working on something as well, probably examining the technology to see why it was still working. Bashir couldn't concentrate on that, nor could he think about the reasons behind Dax's intensity or the commander's unusual order to record their proceedings.
    Instead, he focused on the readings from his medical tricorder. He hit a button that would record the readings for later use. If the commander could be that cautious, so could Bashir. The findings were just as he suspected, but for the sake of the unseen people who would review this case, he reached into his bag and pulled out a different tricorder, running the scan all over again.
    Then he shook his head. "This man has massive cell damage from eight hundred years of cold sleep. I doubt anyone will ever be able to revive him."
    Dax's expression changed from mischievous to one of pure horror. O'Brien popped his head up from the side of the chamber. "You can't make that kind of diagnosis from two tricorder scans, Julian," Dax said.
    "I'm afraid I can, Lieutenant," he said, keeping everything formal. "Cells are cells, whether they belong to Jibetians or Trills.