Tucking his mask under his sword arm, Picard managed a smile. “I’ll try to keep that in mind, sir.”
He would, too. After all, Ruhalter was more than his captain. He was also the twenty-eight-year-old Picard’s mentor—a man the second officer greatly admired, despite the differences in their personalities.
“Perhaps you would care for a rematch,” Picard suggested.
Before the captain could answer, a voice echoed throughout the gym: “Leach to Captain Ruhalter.”
The captain looked up at the ceiling, as if he could see the intercom grid inside it. “Yes, Mr. Leach?”
Stephen Leach was Ruhalter’s first officer. He had been left in charge of the ship’s bridge while the captain and his second officer took their exercise in the gymnasium.
“You have an eyes only message from Admiral Mehdi at Starfleet Command, sir,” Leach reported. As usual, he projected an air of cool efficiency.
Ruhalter looked at Picard. “Eyes only, eh? I guess I’ll have to ask for a rain check on that rematch.”
Picard nodded. “I understand, sir.”
The captain glanced at the ceiling again. “I’ll take it in my quarters, Mr. Leach. Ruhalter out.” Replacing his mask and sword on a wall rack, he nodded in Picard’s direction and left the gym.
As the younger man watched his captain depart, he wondered what the message from Starfleet Command might be about. After all, it was rare for headquarters to send an eyes only missive to any vessel, much less a deep-space exploration ship like the Stargazer.
The second officer ran his fingers through his sweat-soaked, auburn hair. Few eyes only messages remained that way for long, he mused. He hoped this one wouldn’t be an exception.
* * *
Idun Asmund was running a diagnostic routine at her helm console when the turbolift doors opened and her twin came out onto the bridge.
Gerda Asmund was Idun’s mirror image—tall, blond, and eminently well proportioned. Men invariably found the two of them attractive, though the reverse wasn’t true nearly often enough for Idun’s taste.
One of the drawbacks of having been raised among Klingons, she reflected. Unless a man smoldered with a warrior’s passions, she wasn’t likely to give him a second look.
Negotiating a path around the captain’s chair, which was occupied at the moment by the tall, rail-thin Commander Leach, Gerda relieved Lieutenant Kochman at the navigation console. Then, as she sat down and surveyed her control settings, Gerda shot her sister a look.
Idun had no trouble divining the intent behind it. Clearly, Gerda was bored. For that matter, so was Idun.
They had joined the Stargazer’s crew with adventure in mind. After all, the Stargazer was a deep-space exploration vessel, its mandate to push out the boundaries of known space. However, in more than seven months of service, they had seen nothing but routine planetary surveys and the occasional space anomaly—hardly the kind of excitement they had hoped for. Gerda had even broached the subject of transferring to another ship.
Idun was a bit more optimistic than her sister. And less than fifteen minutes ago, she had been given reason to believe her patience might finally be rewarded.
“Commander Leach?” came a voice over the ship’s intercom system. It was the captain, Idun realized.
The first officer looked up, his dark eyes alert in their oversized orbits. “Yes, sir?”
“Set a course for Starbase two-oh-nine,” the captain said. “And don’t spare the horses.”
Idun saw Leach frown. He was a man who liked to deal in hard facts, not colorful colloquialisms.
“Warp eight?” the first officer ventured.
“Warp eight,” the captain confirmed. “Ruhalter out.”
Leach turned to Gerda. “You heard Captain Ruhalter, Lieutenant. That survey of Beta Aurelia will have to wait.”
“Aye, sir,” said Gerda, bringing up the appropriate cartography on her monitor and charting a course. A few moments later, she sent the results to her sister’s console.
A comment went with it: Warp eight. Sounds serious.
Idun sent a return communication: Preceded by an eyes only message not fifteen minutes ago.
Surprised, Gerda looked up from her monitor and glanced at her sister. For the first time in months, a smile spread across her face.
Gilaad Ben Zoma, the Stargazer’s chief of security, heard a beep and looked up. “Come in,” he said.
A moment later, the doors to his small, economically furnished office slid apart, revealing a compact, baby-faced young man with short, sandy hair in a uniform that seemed a tad too big for him. He looked uncomfortable as he stepped into the room.
But then, Ben Zoma mused, Lieutenant Peter “Pug” Joseph probably had an idea as to why he had been summoned. The security chief smiled to put the man at ease and gestured to a chair on the other side of his desk.
“Have a seat, Mr. Joseph.”
“Yes, sir,” said the younger man. He sat down, but he didn’t look any more comfortable than before.
Ben Zoma leaned forward. “As you may have guessed, I called you here to talk about what happened last night.”
Joseph looked contrite. “Yes, sir.”
“You know,” said the security chief, “it’s good to be alert, especially when we’re dealing with something as tricky as the inlet manifold. But sometimes, it’s possible to be a little too alert.”
“Sir,” Joseph replied, “I thought there was a real danger—”
Ben Zoma held his hand up, silencing the man. “I know exactly what you thought, Lieutenant. And I must say, I admire the quickness with which you responded. But for heaven’s sake, you’ve got to be a little more certain before you sound a shipwide alarm.”
“But, sir,” Joseph argued respectfully, “if there had been a problem with the inlet manifold—”
“Then it would have been picked up by our engineers,” the security chief assured him. He reached for his computer monitor and swiveled it around so the other man could see its screen. “Just as they would have picked up that field coil overload you were certain you saw a couple of days ago . . . and that apparent injector malfunction over which you shut down the warp drive.”
The other man sighed and slumped back into his chair.
“Then,” Ben Zoma went on as gently as he could, “there was the time you called an intruder alert without verifying your sensor data. And the time before that, when you thought an unidentified ship was approaching and it turned out to be a neutrino shadow.”
Joseph hung his head.
The security chief was sympathetic. Not too many years earlier, he himself had been a fresh-faced, junior-grade officer.
“I don’t bring up these incidents to make you feel bad,” Ben Zoma explained. “I just want you to see that you’re overreacting a bit. Granted, a threat to life and limb occasionally rears its head on a starship . . . but it can’t be lurking everywhere.”
Joseph nodded. “I see what you mean, sir.”
“Good,” said the security chief. “Then we’ve accomplished something.”
The younger man looked up, his eyes hard and determined. “I’ll do better,” he vowed. “I promise you that.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Ben Zoma.
But in reality, he wasn’t sure at all.
* * *
Chief Medical Officer Carter Greyhorse hadn’t intended to walk into the ship’s gym. Distracted as he was, he had believed he was entering the neighboring biology lab, where he meant to review the work of a Betazoid biochemist who claimed to have synthesized the neurotransmitter psilosynine.
The doctor had expected to be greeted by the sleek, dark forms of a computer workstation, an industrial replicator and an electromagnetic containment field generator, all of them packed into a small, gray-walled enclosure. Instead, he found himself gazing at a tall, blond woman in a formfitting black garment pursuing some exotic and rigorous form of exercise.
The woman’s cheeks, he couldn’t hel
p noticing, were flushed a striking shade of red. Her full lips had pulled back from her teeth, endowing her with a strangely wolflike appearance, and her ice-blue eyes burned with an almost feral intensity.
And the way she moved . . . it took Greyhorse’s breath away. She punched and kicked and spun her way through one complex maneuver after another, her skin glistening with perspiration, her long, lean muscles rippling in savage harmony.
Harsh, guttural sounds escaped her throat, occasionally devolving into a simple gasp or grunt. But they didn’t signal any pause in her routine. Despite whatever fatigue she might have felt, she went on.
In the presence of such passion, such vigor, Greyhorse felt oddly like an intruder. He experienced an impulse to go back the way he had come, to retreat to his safe and familiar world of scientific certainties.
But he didn’t go. He couldn’t.
He was mesmerized.
The woman, on the other hand, didn’t even seem aware of the physician’s presence in the room. Or if she was aware of it, it didn’t appear to faze her. She pursued her regimen with uninhibited energy and determination, pushing her finely tuned body to levels of speed and precision that few other humans could even contemplate.
Then she did what Carter Greyhorse would have thought impossible. She turned it up a notch.
As the doctor watched, spellbound, the woman attacked the air around her as if it were rife with invisible enemies. She whirled, struck, gyrated, and struck again, faster and faster, until it seemed her heart would have to burst under the burden.
Then, suddenly, she stopped . . . and in a spasm of triumph and ecstasy, tossed her head back and howled at the top of her lungs. The sound she made was more animal than human, Greyhorse thought, more the product of the woman’s blood than her brain.
Finally, her chest still heaving, sweat streaming down both sides of her face, she fell silent. Only then did she turn and take notice of the doctor standing by the door. Their eyes met and he could see the raw emotion still roiling inside them.
He felt he should say something, but speech escaped him. All he could do was stare back at her like an idiot.
The woman drew a long, ragged breath. Then she went to the wall, pulled a towel off the rack there, and stalked past him. A moment later, Greyhorse heard the hiss of the sliding doors as they opened for her. Another hiss told him they had closed again.
Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that the woman was gone. A wave of disappointment and relief swept over him.
The doctor was new on the ship, so he didn’t know many people outside of Ruhalter and his command staff. Certainly, he didn’t know the woman he had just seen . . . not even her name.
But he would make it his business to find out.
Lieutenant Vigo was sitting in the Stargazer’s mess hall, staring at his plate of sturrd, when his friend Charlie Kochman sat down next to him and lowered a tray of food onto the table.
“Now that,” said Kochman, who was the ship’s secondary navigator, “is what I call a replicator program.”
Vigo glanced at Kochman’s tray, which featured a large wooden bowl full of hard, gray mollusk shells with dark, rubbery tails emerging from them. “Steamers?” he asked.
“Steamers,” his colleague confirmed with a grin. “It took a while, but the replicator finally got them right.” He glanced at Vigo’s plate. “You’ve got some more of that Pandrilite stuff, I see.”
“Sturrd. It is the signature dish of my homeworld,” Vigo noted.
Kochman held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, buddy . . . the last thing I want to do is keep a big blue guy like you from eating what he really likes. I just figured you might want to try something else sometime.”
Vigo glanced at his friend’s mollusks, which he didn’t find the least bit tempting. “Sometime,” he echoed.
Kochman chuckled. “To each his own, I guess.” And with unconcealed gusto, he used his fork to crack open one of the clams.
Vigo considered his own food again. One of the other humans on the ship had described sturrd as a mound of sand and ground glass smothered in maple syrup. But to a Pandrilite, it was as appetizing as any dish in the universe.
Usually, he amended. At the moment, Vigo didn’t have much of an appetite.
Kochman noticed. “What’s wrong?” he asked between mollusks.
Vigo shook his head. “Nothing.”
His friend looked sympathetic. “It’s Werber again, isn’t it?”
Wincing, the Pandrilite looked around the mess hall. Fortunately, Hans Werber was nowhere to be seen. “I told you,” he reminded Kochman. “There’s nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”
“Right,” said his friend. “Just like there was nothing wrong a couple of days ago, and a couple of days before that. Admit it—Werber’s on your back and he won’t get off.”
Vigo didn’t say anything in response. He was a Pandrilite, after all, and Pandrilites were taught from an early age not to complain. They shouldered their burdens without objection or protest.
However, Kochman was right. Lieutenant Werber, the Stargazer’s chief weapons officer and therefore Vigo’s immediate superior, was a supremely difficult man to work for.
He routinely held Vigo and the ship’s other weapons officers to unrealistic standards. And when they didn’t meet those standards, Werber would make them feel unworthy of serving on a starship.
Kochman shook his head sadly. “Somebody’s got to stand up to the guy. Otherwise, he’ll just keep on making people feel like dirt.”
Perhaps my colleague is right, Vigo reflected. Perhaps the only way to improve the situation in the weapons section is for someone to let Werber know how we feel.
But the Pandrilite knew with absolute certainty that that someone wouldn’t be him.
Standing at his captain’s left hand, Picard watched Idun Asmund bring the Stargazer to a gentle stop. Then he eyed the bridge’s main viewscreen and the Federation facility that was pictured there.
Starbase 209 was shaped roughly like an hourglass top, its bulky-looking extremities tapering drastically to a slender mid-section. In that regard, it was no different from a dozen other starbases Picard had visited in the course of his brief career.
What’s more, he had seen plenty of ships docked at those facilities. But none of them even vaguely resembled the dark, flask-shaped vessel hanging in space alongside Starbase 209—a vessel whose puny-looking warp nacelles projected from its flanks as well as its hindquarters.
Ruhalter leaned forward in his center seat. “Interesting design, isn’t it?” he asked, clearly referring to the ship and not the base.
“Interesting, all right,” said Leach, who was standing on the captain’s right. “And if I may hazard a guess, it’s the reason we’re here.”
The captain didn’t respond to the remark. But then, he didn’t seem to know much more than the rest of them.
Suddenly, Picard was struck by a feeling that he had seen the flask-shaped vessel somewhere after all . . . or something very much like it. But if not at a starbase, where would it have been? The second officer wracked his brain but couldn’t come up with an answer.
“Sir,” said Paxton at the communications console, “I have Captain Eliopoulos, the base’s ranking officer.”
Ruhalter sat back. “Put him through, Lieutenant.”
A moment later, the image of a fair-haired man with a dark, neatly trimmed beard appeared on the screen. “Welcome to Starbase two-oh-nine,” he said. “You must be Captain Ruhalter.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Ruhalter. “Your place or mine?”
The casual tone seemed to catch Eliopoulos off guard. It took him a moment to reply, “Yours, I suppose.”
“Done,” said Ruhalter. He turned to Leach. “See to Captain Eliopoulos’s transport, Number One. The command staff and I will be waiting for you in the ship’s lounge.”
The first officer darted a glance at Picard, no doubt wondering why his subordinate couldn’t have taken care of El
iopoulos’s arrival. Then he turned and entered the turbolift.
As the doors slid closed with a whisper, the second officer regarded the viewscreen again. The more he studied the strange vessel, the more familiar it seemed to him. He could barely wait to hear what Captain Eliopoulos had to say about it.
Chapter 2
Picard watched the ship’s new chief medical officer enter the lounge with some difficulty. Carter Greyhorse was so big and broad-shouldered, he could barely fit through the door.
“Good of you to make it, Doctor,” said Ruhalter, from his place at the head of the dark, oval table.
Greyhorse looked at him, then mumbled an apology. Something about some research he was conducting.
“Be thankful I’m inclined to be lenient with ship’s surgeons,” the captain told him. “I never forget they can relieve me of my command.”
The doctor’s brow furrowed beneath his crop of dark hair.
“That was a joke,” Ruhalter informed him.
Greyhorse chuckled to show that he got it, but his response lacked enthusiasm. Clearly, Picard reflected as the doctor took a seat beside him, humor wasn’t Greyhorse’s strong suit.
In addition to Ruhalter and Picard himself, five other section heads had arrived before Greyhorse. They included Weapons Chief Werber, Chief Engineer Phigus Simenon, Communications Chief Martin Paxton, Sciences Chief Angela Cariello and Security Chief Gilaad Ben Zoma.
Simenon was a Gnalish—a compact, lizardlike being with ruby-red eyes and a long tail. Everyone else at the table was human.
The assembled officers sat in silence for more than a minute. Then, just as some of them were beginning to shift in their seats, Leach arrived with Eliopoulos in tow.
“Commander Eliopoulos,” said Ruhalter, “may I present my command staff.” He reeled off their names. “Naturally, they’re all most eager to learn why we’ve made this trip.”
“I’m not surprised,” the bearded man responded.
Leach indicated a chair and Eliopoulos sat down. Then the first officer took a seat next to him and said, “Go ahead, sir.”
THE VALIANT Page 6