Broken Bow - Diane Carey [12]
“Pardon me,” Reed interrupted, “but if I don’t realign the deflector, the first grain of space dust we come across will blow a hole through this ship the size of your fist.”
Tucker snapped back to business. “Keep your shirt on, Lieutenant. Your equipment will be here in the morning.”
“What’s taking so long?”
“There was some problem at central dispatch with Spacecrate Incorporated’s shipment manifest. The crate with your stuff in it got waylaid in transit, and it’s being rerouted.”
“By whom? Who signed that reroute order?”
“Some guy at the dockmaster’s office.”
“Seems odd ...”
“That’s what we get for trying to hurry things up—they get more late.”
“But the shipment was confirmed for this afternoon,” Reed protested. “I got the bill of lading. How do these things occur? Inefficiency?”
Tucker shrugged. “We’ve had six foul-ups already, and it’s not even breakfast. You’re not the only one.”
“All involving shipments?” Travis Mayweather asked.
“All but two, which were misinstallations of critical parts for the motive power system. I’m having to watch my engineers like a mama lion.”
Reed frowned. “Who made these misinstallations?”
“Don’t know. We’re trying to trace them, but nobody seems to know where the work orders are coming from. Just confusion, is what I think.”
“Well, I don’t care for that at all ... where’s the captain?”
“Oh, him?” Tucker shrugged again. “Where would you be if you had just ordered your ship fitted out with a seventy-two-hour readiness deadline and you didn’t even have a deflector or a command staff? He’s in Brazil. Where else?”
“Ghlungit! tak nekleet.”
“Very good. Again.”
“Ghlungit! tak nekleet.”
Ah, the sound of learning. Jonathan Archer came up on the doorway of his target classroom and noticed that he’d been doing a lot of eavesdropping lately. Gotten a lot of information out of it, too. He paused for a couple of moments and listened, trying to pick out which language the students were repeating to their teacher. The process was heartwarming, but quickly becoming obsolete, as most of the races humanity met as it moved into space had learned English just as quickly. They were probably more accustomed to dealing with foreign languages—but, on the other hand, Earth has more than her share of languages, so humans had been used to this sort of thing, too, for eons. Of all the planets Archer had heard of, both rumors and confirmed, Earth had by far the widest range of cultures, races, dialects, and languages. Though the Vulcans and others liked to pretend otherwise, Earth was the most cosmopolitan and diverse planet in the charted galaxy.
But diversity didn’t suit Archer’s purpose at the moment. He needed one narrow thread of talent. It was in that room.
He heard her voice. A charmingly high—“small”—voice, almost a child’s voice, but strong and confident at leading the mumble of students through tedious repetitions of alien pronunciation.
“Tighten the back of your tongue,” the charming voice suggested.
Then somebody choked.
Oh, it wasn’t a choke. Probably alien poetry. Who knew?
Archer was looking forward to having Hoshi Sato’s spirit and cheer on his bridge. Good thing, because she would be there about half the time, and most command watches, as the ship’s communications officer. The station was a relatively new posting, never before located on the ship’s bridge itself, but this was a correction of a problem. The communications officer had turned out to be far more important to the moment-by-moment workings of a ship in space than anyone had expected, even when nobody was talking to anybody. It would be Hoshi’s responsibility not only to make sure the crew heard every command, but that all the systems in the ship were communicating with each other, from sensors to the red alert klaxons. Hoshi was also in the command line, simply because the com officer always had firsthand knowledge of exactly what was happening.
Then she spotted him lurking in the back of the room. Her youthful face screwed up with