Star Trek: Pantheon (21 page)

Cadwallader frowned. “Bugger Dr. Selar,” she told him. “I’m in much better shape than she thinks. Stay as long as you like.”

His eyes narrowed in mock-reproach. “I think Dr. Selar deserves a little more respect.”

Cadwallader grunted. “Dr. Selar deserves a good pinch.” She considered him. “And for that matter, so do you.”

He gave her his best apologetic look. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“That was a lousy thing you did, Will Riker.”

He nodded. “Just try to see it from my point of view. At the time, you were a murder suspect.”

She looked at him questioningly. “You didn’t really think that, did you?”

Riker shook his head. “No. But I couldn’t take the chance that I was wrong. And even if you weren’t the murderer, I couldn’t just come out and tell you about the investigation. You might’ve given it away without realizing it—a nervous look at the wrong time, a slip of the tongue…” He let his voice trail off. He shrugged.

Suddenly, Cadwallader grinned. “You look pretty foolish when you’re trying to apologize—you know that?”

He feigned injury. “Thanks a lot.”

“Especially,” she added, “when there’s no need. I’ve had a little time here to think, you know. And it didn’t take me long to understand why you did what you did.” She put out her hand; he took it. “So don’t get all maudlin on me. You’re forgiven, as far as that goes.”

Riker squeezed her hand. “I’m grateful.”

“Besides,” she said, “you’ll have plenty of opportunity to make it up to me. That is, after we catch the murderer and give this subspace phenomenon the slip. And dodge whatever other perils pop up in the meantime.”

He chuckled. “You sound pretty confident.”

“I am,” Cadwallader replied. “But then, I’ve looked death in the eye and lived to tell of it.”

Riker rolled his eyes. She laughed softly—just as he intended.

“You know,” he told her, “you’re pretty remarkable, Tricia Cadwallader.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

Someone cleared her throat behind him. Even before the first officer turned around, he knew it was Selar standing there. She looked at him, one eyebrow arched meaningfully, not needing to say a word to make her message clear.

He turned back to Cadwallader. “Time to go. I’ll see you soon,” he said.

She nodded. “Soon,” she echoed—showing just the least bit of doubt, and thereby giving the lie to all her brave talk.

It was with that unsettling impression lingering in his mind that he headed for the exit.

Beverly Crusher flopped down on her bed, bone tired. Not so much from tending to Cadwallader, though seeing to the woman’s care had kept her in sickbay for quite a long time. After all, that was her job; she was prepared for it.

What had
really
worn her out was the
wondering.
The suspicion. And the knowledge that no place on the ship was really safe.

If the assassin could make the holodeck a deathtrap, why not sickbay? Or engineering? Or the bridge?

The killer had known the blackout was coming. Had been able to find Morgen at just the right time, under just the right circumstances. The attempt’s failure might have come down to the only unlooked-for element—the doctor’s presence. By being there, Crusher had given the murderer three targets instead of two. And that might have meant the difference between a timely rescue and a bloodbath.

If she hadn’t thought to go looking for the Daa’Vit, or if she hadn’t arrived before the blackout…the assassin might have succeeded. And Daa’V might have found itself without a monarch.

She couldn’t avoid the thought:
it still might.
They had no more idea who the murderer was now than they’d had after the first incident.

He could even get me
here,
she mused.
Even here in my own quarters.
At any moment she might turn around and see those phaser beams stabbing at her again. Or maybe something else—something equally deadly.

No. The murderer is after Morgen, she assured herself. That’s what all the evidence suggests. Alone, you’re safe.

Before she knew it, she’d taken out the box of tapes. And a moment later she was rummaging through Jack’s recorded messages again. Seeking security in the sound of his voice? Maybe. And why not? She had never felt so safe with anyone as she had with her husband.

She selected a tape at random—just as she had before. And as before, as she read the stardate, she recalled her circumstances at the time.

It was the hardest part of her stay in San Francisco. Still plugging through med school. Still pre-Wes, though many of her friends at the time were either pregnant or raising young children. And still waiting for that first shore leave, missing Jack terribly.

Maybe not the most riotous time in the life of Beverly Crusher. But that didn’t mean Jack’s tape would be gloomy as well. It always seemed his most upbeat messages came when she needed them the most—as if he’d had a sixth sense about her that transcended the thousands of light-years separating them.

What the hell. Without giving it another thought, she popped the tape into the player.

“Hi, Bev. I hope things are as exciting for you as they are for me.”

Crusher closed her eyes and smiled.
Just what the doctor ordered.

“We’ve just gotten back from Coryb, the fourth planet in the Gamma Shaltair system, where we were surveying the Coryb’thu civilization as a precursor to formal first contact. Up until now, the only surveys I’d been on were the flora-and-fauna kind—never anything that involved a living, breathing civilization. You can’t imagine what it was like walking through their cities, brushing against them, exchanging smiles with them—and none of them ever suspecting that you weren’t one of them. Kind of eerie and exhilarating at the same time. And whenever it got more eerie than exhilarating, there was Ben Zoma or Pug or Idun nearby to haul me back to reality.

“The funniest part was having to wear these prosthetics that Greyhorse designed for us. The Coryb’thu are basically humanoid, but the middle part of their faces extend forward into kind of a snout. The prosthetics created the same effect. And they weren’t even all that uncomfortable. The only problem is they take a while to remove, which is why I’m still wearing mine as I speak. We cut a deck of cards to determine the order in which we’d have our faces restored to us—and I picked the two of diamonds. Oh, well. You know what they say—lucky in love, unlucky in prosthesis removal. And speaking of love—either that relationship of Greyhorse’s ended as soon as it began, or I really
was
seeing things. I’ll keep you posted on that.”

Greyhorse’s relationship? Beverly shook her head. There could hardly have been two subjects farther apart in her mind than romance and the former medical officer of the
Stargazer.
She wondered who the lucky girl might have been—assuming, of course, that it hadn’t just been Jack’s imagination getting the best of him. She’d have to ask Carter about it.

“Got to go now. As you know, we get only so much time in these subspace packets. Love you. Miss you like crazy. And study hard, damn it—someday, I want to be able to turn around and see you standing there next to me.”

End of tape. Crusher sighed. Hearing Jack’s voice had had the desired effect. She felt better—much better.

Almost safe, in fact.

*   *   *

“There,” said Simenon. “That’s more like it.”

Wesley frowned, visualizing the flight of his last toss before it sank beneath the surface of the lake. Two hops—not bad, but not great. The Gnalish had gotten as many as four without even trying.

“Don’t stop to think about it,” Simenon advised. “Thinking has nothing to do with it. After all, you’re only throwing rocks—your ancestors did that with brains a good deal less developed than yours.”

The ensign chuckled and picked up another stone. Positioning it the way the Gnalish had taught him—the procedure having become second nature by now—he pulled back and let it fly.

One hop, two.

Three.

And it wasn’t done yet. With one last burst of energy, the stone leapt in a high fluid arc—the rock-skimming equivalent of a grace note.

Four.
The ensign turned to Simenon. “Well?” he asked.

The Gnalish puckered up his face and grunted approvingly. “Much better,” he said, studying Wesley intently. Something changed in his eyes, softened.

Wesley hesitated, then decided to say what was on his mind. It didn’t look like he’d get a better opportunity. “Professor? You said you’d tell me more about my father—about how he died.”

Simenon nodded, cleared his throat. “I did, didn’t I? Very well, then.” The Gnalish switched his scaly, gray tail back and forth over the forest floor, as if gathering himself. Then he began. “You’re familiar, I assume, with the problem we encountered?”

“The Nensi phenomenon,” Wes told him. “A ball of matter and energy thought to have its origin in a special category of supernova. Very rare, but very destructive—and almost impossible to distinguish from a rogue comet except at close range.”

“Exactly. Of course, back then we had no idea as to its origin—and neither did Nensi—considering it was the first time anyone had ever encountered the bloody thing. In any case, it all but stripped the
Stargazer
of her ability to defend herself. Shields went down. Sensors went down. Weapons went down. And we started to record an overload in the starboard warp field generator. Shutting down the warp drive stabilized the situation, but there was still a lot of energy cycling through the nacelle. We were afraid that the generator would just blow up—and whether it would take the rest of the ship with it was anybody’s guess. Remember, we had no shields with which to protect ourselves.

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t just separate into two parts as the
Enterprise
can. But we had to disassociate ourselves from the starboard nacelle, and as quickly as possible. We batted the problem around until we were ready to chew one another’s heads off. Any moment, we knew, we might be obliterated in midsentence. Finally, your father came up with a solution. Someone had to get outside the ship and sever the nacelle from the rest of the
Stargazer.”

Wesley had gone over this part in his head a thousand times. Going outside, cutting away the nacelle with phaser rifles, had been the only way. The
Stargazer
wasn’t set up to fire on itself, even if ship’s phasers had been working at the time. And to approach the project through the power transfer tunnels was unthinkable—they were too full of energy seepage from the warp field generators.

“Naturally,” Simenon said, “your father volunteered—it was his plan. Others came forward also—Ben Zoma, Morgen, Asmund, Vigo. Even Greyhorse. The captain didn’t like the risk involved. Hated it, to tell the truth. But in the end, he chose a team of two: your father and Pug Joseph. Both of them had had experience in hull repairs. Both of them knew how to negotiate the ship’s skin. And since the transporters had been damaged along with nearly everything else, that was pretty important—to be able to get to the nacelles and back again.

“They set out from the airlock nearest their destination—a tiny one, used only in drydock to check the torpedo-launch mechanism. For us, it served a different purpose. The worst part was our inability to track your father and Pug on our sensors. We could talk to them through their helmet communicators, but that was about it. And once they got going, there wasn’t a great deal of conversation—as little as possible, in fact. Just a remark now and then to let us know everything was all right.”

The Gnalish snorted. “Anyway, they reached the nacelle assembly pretty quickly. But it took forever to cut through it. The
Stargazer’
s transfer tunnels weren’t as wide as what you’ve got here on the
Enterprise—
but they weren’t pipe cleaners either. And as you know, phaser rifles can’t sustain a beam indefinitely. They’ve got to be given time to cool down. So while we waited on the bridge, strung tight as Vulcan harpstrings, your father and Pug hacked away until their limbs were trembling with the strain.

“The tricky part was when they got into the transfer tunnel. With all the energy in there already, the phaser beam could have stirred it up even more—or had no effect at all. Most likely, we knew, it was going to be something in between—which is why Pug and your father had been cautioned to approach that juncture carefully.

“For a long time after they began that stage of the work, we heard nothing from them. The captain was as worried as the rest of us. He was about to call for a progress report, when your father’s voice was heard over the intercom: ‘We’re in,’ he said. ‘And no problems to speak of. Just a lot of fireworks.’ We thought the worst was all behind us.

“A couple of moments later, their communicators went dead. Nothing to worry about, necessarily. In fact, I’d predicted it would happen, what with all that energy running out of the assembly. But it was an ominous thing, that silence. Someone began to pace—I forget who. Ben Zoma, maybe.

“It went on like that for quite a while. The waiting, the pacing. The faces that looked like they’d been stretched too tight. Finally, there was no denying it—they’d been out there too long. Something had happened—something bad. Picard said as much. He said that someone had to go out and bring them back.

“As before, there were volunteers. But the captain wouldn’t listen. He was determined to keep the body count down, he said; he was already thinking in those terms. Ben Zoma argued with him, but to no avail. Pulling on a suit, he went after your father and Pug.

“The explosion came sometime later. I don’t remember exactly when. It felt as if we’d been pummeled by a giant fist. And when it was finished, we all stood there, afraid to move—because moving was a step toward facing the reality of what had happened.

“The worst possible event hadn’t occurred—we hadn’t been destroyed, the ship was still intact. The instruments showed us why. It wasn’t the generator that had blown; it was just a pocket of accumulated energy. And the nacelle was floating free, which was what we’d wanted all along.