As for his true sensory organs, the ones he used to see and hear and so on . . . where they were located was anybody’s guess.
“However,” Jomar went on in his monotone, “it will not be enough to merely defend ourselves. If we are to hold our own against the Nuyyad, we must increase the power of our own weapons.”
“Increase it how?” asked Werber.
The Kelvan shrugged. “By routing your warp chamber’s plasma flow to your emitter crystals in a more pure and unadulterated form.”
The weapons chief’s eyes narrowed warily. “Go on.”
“As the system is currently configured,” said Jomar, “electro-plasma must pass through a flow regulator, a distribution manifold, and a prefire chamber before it reaches the crystal. I propose that we delete the flow regulator and distribution manifold in favor of a single device, which would do the work of both of them—and at the same time, facilitate a higher subatomic energy level at the end of the process.”
For a moment, every technician in the room was silent. Picard could see them pondering the Kelvan’s idea, turning it over in their minds. Then Simenon broke the silence.
“Where did you come up with this?” he asked.
“Actually,” Jomar told him, “it is the approach we have taken in Kelvan vessels for the last seventy years.”
Vigo, a Pandrilite officer in the weapons section, leaned forward in his chair. “I don’t understand,” he confessed. “How can you achieve higher energy levels in the crystals without—”
Werber cut Vigo off with a preemptive wave of his hand. “Without compromising the integrity of the conduit network?” he asked, finishing the Pandrilite’s question himself.
As Picard watched, Vigo slumped back in his chair again and fell silent. However, he didn’t look at all happy about it.
Meanwhile, the Kelvan answered Werber’s question. “Starfleet Command has made available to me considerable data concerning the conduit network and its rated tolerances. As far as I can tell, it is somewhat less durable than the energy channels in my people’s ships—but nonetheless strong enough to withstand even a substantial increase in subatomic activity.”
Simenon shook his lizardlike head from side to side. “Not from where I stand, it’s not.”
“No question about it,” Werber added. “That plasma will never reach the prefire chamber. It’ll blow up in the conduits first.”
“And send us all to kingdom come,” Leach agreed.
For once, Picard found himself on the first officer’s side. He turned to Ruhalter. “It would be imprudent to make the kind of changes that are being discussed without considerable study. I advise against it.”
“As do I,” Leach chimed in, obviously reluctant to let Picard receive the credit for anything.
Ruhalter addressed the Kelvan. “To be honest, Jomar, I’m not thrilled with the idea either. It seems too damned dangerous. But your strategy for beefing up the shields . . . that I like.” He glanced at Simenon, then Werber. “I want you to get started on that as soon as possible.”
“Aye, sir,” said the weapons chief.
“As you wish,” the engineer added.
If the Kelvan resented the rejection of his phaser idea, he didn’t show it. His expression was as neutral as ever.
“What else?” asked the captain.
“Nothing else,” Jomar told him. “I have discussed all the possibilities I meant to discusss.”
Ruhalter nodded. “All right, then. Thank you all for attending. Now let’s get to work.”
And with that, the meeting ended.
As Pug Joseph approached the Stargazer’s brig, he was forced to admit something to himself.
He had guarded his share of prisoners in the course of his brief career. Every security officer had. But he had never actually looked forward to guarding one until now.
Garner, the officer on duty in the brig, acknowledged Joseph with a businesslike nod. “All quiet,” she reported.
“Good,” he replied.
Not that he had expected Garner to say anything else. After all, it wasn’t exactly a Nausicaan slave-runner they were holding. It was just a woman, and a very cooperative woman at that.
He looked past the brig’s translucent, yellow barrier and saw Santana sitting upright on the edge of her sleeping pallet, her eyes closed, her hands held out in front of her as if in supplication. She had told Joseph about the technique during his last shift—a form of meditation, it was used widely in her colony as a way of achieving calm . . .
And perspective. She certainly needed that right now.
“Go ahead,” he told Garner. “I can take it from here.”
His colleague smiled as she passed him on her way out. “I’ll see you later,” she said.
“Later,” he echoed.
But his mind was already focused on Santana, who hadn’t fluttered an eyelash since he arrived. He considered saying something to let her know he was there, but he didn’t want to disturb her.
“Mr. Joseph,” she said abruptly. “Nice of you to drop by.”
The security officer chuckled. “As if I had a choice.”
Santana opened her eyes, disappointment etched in her face. “You mean you only come to see me because you have to?”
For a moment, he felt the need to apologize. Then he realized that she was just joking with him . . . again.
“Funny,” he said.
“I’m glad you think so,” Santana replied. “After all, you are my only audience.”
“You didn’t get along so well with Garner?”
She rolled her eyes. “She’s not the friendliest person around. So, tell me . . . have you met the Kelvan yet?”
Joseph shook his head. “I haven’t even caught a glimpse of him.”
The woman’s expression turned sour. “Figures. He’s the one you really ought to be watching.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
Santana looked as if she were about to say something critical—then stopped herself. “Never mind. I don’t want to start any controversies. This mission is too important to all of us.”
But it was too late. She had roused the old Pug Joseph—the one who couldn’t help seeing danger at every turn.
“Are you saying he poses some kind of threat?” Joseph asked.
“Not necessarily,” Santana said. “My people have had some unpleasant experiences with Kelvans, that’s all. It doesn’t mean this particular one is going to be a problem.”
He searched her eyes. “Do you really believe that?”
She smiled disarmingly. “Why would I lie?”
Why indeed? Joseph asked himself. He couldn’t come up with a good answer. When Santana first came aboard, he had been as suspicious of her as anyone else. Now he knew better.
“So,” he said, switching tacks, “where were we?”
She knew exactly what he meant. “Let’s see . . . you were telling me about the place where you were raised. Boston, wasn’t it? And there’s a river there where your parents took you for picnics . . .”
Joseph was pleased that she remembered. “The Charles.”
“Yes,” she said, closing her eyes so she could pick the image from his brain. “The Charles.” Her brow creased with concentra tion. “And you had a little brother named Matthew, who lost his sneaker somehow and put his foot in the potato salad . . .”
Suddenly, Santana began to laugh, and before he knew it he was laughing with her, both of them caught up helplessly in the memory of little Matt stepping where he shouldn’t have. The brig rang with their hilarity.
Pug Joseph found that he liked Santana very much, no matter what Commander Leach or anyone else said about her. In fact, he wished he could have felt this way about everyone he guarded.
Vigo wasn’t particularly enamored of Jefferies tubes. His Pandrilite musculature made crawling through the cylindrical, circuit-laden passageways a cramped and uncomfortable proposition at best.
Fortunately for him, Starfleet wea
pons officers seldom had to negotiate the tubes the way engineers did. Their maintenance and repair activities were typically restricted to one of the ship’s weapons rooms, or on a rare occasion, the bridge.
But there were exceptions to every rule. And at the moment, Vigo was caught up in one.
For some political reason that escaped the Pandrilite, Lieutenant Werber wanted his section to be well represented in the effort to implement the Kelvan’s shield strategy. As a result, Vigo and several of his fellow weapons officers had been asked to assist their counterparts from engineering in retrofitting field generators and distortion amplifiers from one end of the ship to the other.
And that meant crawling through one Jefferies tube after another, enduring muscle cramps and skin abrasions in the process.
“Pass the spanner,” said Engineer First Class Pernell, a spare, fair-haired man lying just ahead of the Pandrilite in the passageway.
Vigo found the requisite tool and removed it from his equipment bag. “Here it is,” he said, and handed it to Pernell.
They were busy installing new graviton relays in one of the Stargazer’s field generators. The relays, which had been fabri cated only an hour earlier, were designed to expedite the passage of vidrion particles through the deflector system.
The Pandrilite wiped perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. It was hot in the tube too, so hot that he had begun to wonder if something had gone wrong with the ventilation system.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. His shoulders stung where he had rubbed them raw against the walls of the passage, his hip hurt where he was forced to press it against a circuit bundle, and his legs were so contorted he could barely feel his feet.
But Vigo wasn’t going to complain. He was a Pandrilite. He had been given an assignment and he would carry it out.
Suddenly, the weapons officer saw something move into the tube from a perpendicular passageway far down the line. At first, he thought it was one of his fellow crewmen, on his way to an assignment much like his own.
Then he realized that it wasn’t a crewman. It wasn’t even humanoid. It was the kind of life-form one might have seen at the bottom of an alien ocean, slithering out from under a rock to snatch unsuspecting sea creatures with its long, dark tentacles.
As Vigo watched, anxious and fascinated at the same time, the thing pulled itself along the tube with chilling efficiency. His hand darted to his hip instinctively, but he wasn’t wearing a phaser.
“What is that?” Pernell asked, his voice thick with consternation.
The Pandrilite shook his head, his eyes glued to the tentacled monstrosity. “I don’t know. I—”
Before he could finish his sentence, before he could even think about getting out of the Jefferies tube and calling for security, the thing began to change. Right before his eyes, its tentacles grew shorter and the mass at its core lengthened, until it wasn’t nearly as horrific.
In a matter of seconds, it became the kind of figure Vigo had expected all along: a black set of work togs accommodating two arms and two legs and—in this case—a head full of fiery red hair.
“Bloody hell,” Pernell whispered, his skin pale and slick with perspiration. “It’s the Kelvan.”
The Pandrilite nodded. It was the Kelvan. And now that he thought about it, he had been warned that Jomar might return to his original shape on occasion. He just hadn’t been prepared for what that shape might be.
The Kelvan continued to make his way toward Vigo and Pernell, though he seemed somewhat less adept at maneuvering a human body through the tube. Finally, he got close enough to speak with them.
“Any problems?” Jomar asked.
“None so far,” the weapons officer managed.
“Good,” said the Kelvan.
Apparently, he was just checking up on them. No doubt, he meant to do that with the other retrofit teams as well.
“Do not let me keep you,” Jomar added.
Then he made his way back down the tube. Eventually, he came to another perpendicular passageway and vanished into it. Vigo was glad the Kelvan had opted to retain his human form until he was out of sight.
“What a nasty thing he is,” Pernell observed.
The weapons officer looked at him. “He’s our ally, remember?”
But deep down inside, Vigo had to admit, where his instincts were stronger than his intellect, he thought of Jomar exactly the same way.
As Stephen Leach negotiated the long, subtle curve of the corridor, casting blue shadows in the light of the overheads, he felt as if he were finally making some progress.
For months, ever since the Stargazer left Earth’s solar system, the first officer had been forced to take a backseat to Commander Picard when it came to the important assignments around the ship—assignments that required knowledge and leadership and experience.
And there was no one but Picard to blame for it. The second officer had a way of ingratiating himself to Captain Ruhalter that Leach couldn’t seem to get the hang of.
Things had been different on the Merced. Leach had been the fair-haired boy there, a second officer who could do no wrong. He had had the kind of relationship with Captain Osborne that sons have with their fathers, and only then if they’re very lucky.
If not for Picard, he might have had the same kind of relationship with Captain Ruhalter. No . . . not might have, Leach assured himself. Would have, without question.
But right from the beginning, Picard had upstaged and undermined and sabotaged the first officer, to the point where Ruhalter didn’t seem to feel he could trust Leach’s instincts—and instincts were more important to the captain than anything else.
It was insulting. It was frustrating. And Leach had decided that he had taken all he was going to take of it. He had promised himself that he was going to confront Ruhalter the next time he gave Picard a job that should have been the exec’s.
Then, as if he had read Leach’s mind, the captain contacted him in his quarters and put him in charge of the Kelvan’s deflector modifications. Finally, Leach had a task he could sink his teeth into—and an opportunity, as well, he was quick to note. If he could see the retrofit schedule completed quickly and efficiently, he would prove to Ruhalter that he was good for something more than meeting visitors at the transporter platform.
Smiling to himself for the first time in a long time, the first officer stopped in front of the lounge doors and tapped the metal padd set into the bulkhead. A moment later, the doors slid aside, revealing the room’s long, oval table.
There were three figures seated around it—Simenon, Werber, and Jomar. The Kelvan sat apart from the two officers, his pale blue eyes glazed over as if he were deep in thought.
But he wasn’t. Leach knew that. It was simply one of the flaws in Jomar’s imitation of a human being.
The first officer pulled out a chair and took his seat. “Thanks for coming,” he told the others. “I’m hoping we can keep this short, so we can attend to our respective duties. All I need is an update on how the deflector modifications are going.”
“They are going well,” the Kelvan answered, before anyone else could be consulted. “We should be done on schedule.”
Werber frowned. “As our colleague says, we’ll be finished on time . . . barring any unforeseen complications, of course.”
“No snags, then?” Leach asked.
“None,” Jomar blurted. “Neither with the field generators nor the distortion amplifiers. Everything is proceeding smoothly.”
Simenon regarded the Kelvan with disdainfully slitted eyes. “So far, so good,” the engineer agreed.
Given the climate of optimism, Leach didn’t think anything else really needed to be said. “All right, then. We’ll reconvene at this time tomorrow. Until then, you’re all—”
“You do not like me,” the Kelvan observed abruptly, cutting off the first officer’s directive.
It took Leach a full second to recover from the remark—perhaps because it had some tru
th to it. “I beg your pardon?” he said.
“You do not like me,” Jomar repeated.
The first officer shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Why would you say something like that?”
The Kelvan shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I am different. I do not emote as you do. I lack social graces. Do not bother to tell me that these facts are irrelevant. I know differently.”
Leach could feel his opportunity to impress the captain slipping away . . . and quickly. Hiding his anxiety behind a smile, he dismissed Jomar’s statement with a wave of his hand.
“Listen,” he said, “we’re Starfleet officers. We’ve each had experience with dozens of sentient life-forms—hundreds, in some cases—and believe me, you’re not as different as you might believe.”
“Nonetheless,” Jomar insisted, “you do not like me. You resent my being here. Perhaps you feel that my contributions are unnecessary.”
The Kelvan leaned forward in his chair. His face was still de void of expression, but his posture suggested a purposefulness Leach hadn’t seen in Jomar to that point.
“It does not matter to me what you think,” the Kelvan told them. “You have not witnessed Nuyyad atrocities. You have not seen my people writhing in agony. You have not seen them die. But I have. That is why I will go to any length to halt the Nuyyad’s advance.”
The first officer didn’t quite know what to say to that. Fortunately, Simenon baled him out.
“We all have the same purpose in mind,” the Gnalish assured Jomar. “Let’s not waste any time arguing over how to pursue it.”
The Kelvan considered Simenon, then nodded. “I will take you at your word.” He turned to Leach. “If you have no further need of me, Commander, I will return to my duties.”
The first officer was only too happy to accommodate Jomar. “You’re dismissed,” he said, completing his earlier thought.
The Kelvan got up stiffly and left the room. As the doors slid closed behind him, Leach felt a wave of relief. Grinning, he glanced at his colleagues. “Now, that was interesting.”
THE VALIANT Page 10