Broken Bow - Diane Carey [14]
“They are. But we agreed to a few compromises.”
Hoshi fell silent and listened to the recording gacking and gleching and k’tonking merrily in Archer’s hand. Archer kept his lips clamped on any encouragements. He had to give her something worth being scared for. She didn’t want to teach—she wanted to do. Teachers were always the last to use new information. Hoshi would want to be the first.
Yes, yes?
She was leaning a little closer to his hand. “What do you know about these Klingons?”
“Not much,” he tempted. “An empire of warriors with eighty polyguttural dialects constructed on an adaptive syntax—”
“Turn it up.”
The Klingon voice got louder. What a language. Sounded like this guy was throwing up.
“Think about it. You’d be the first human to talk to these people,” he trolled. He lowered his voice, hunched his shoulders, and leaned toward her. “Do you really want someone else to do it?”
Her eyes flickered like butterflies. She backed off a step, then two, and looked at him without turning again to the speaker in his hand. “Why are you rushing me?” she asked. “What do you really want?”
“I want people around me who I already trust,” he admitted.
“Because? The mission’s so simple ... deliver a sick man home. Why do you need to trust anybody the way you’re saying?”
He shifted on his feet, wobbling into a perfectly formed fern, and decided that if he could force her to be honest, then he should be, too.
“Because something’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s happened yet,” she said. “What could be wrong?”
Archer gazed down at the little device, its alien voice of the unavoidable and complex future.
He clicked it off.
“I don’t know yet.”
CHAPTER 4
“TRIP, doesn’t all this strike you as too many things going wrong?”
Charlie Tucker frowned at Jonathan Archer’s question as the two of them peered out the small ready room’s viewport at this side of Spacedock. “What difference does it make what I think? What do you think?”
“Don’t parry. Just tell me.”
“Well, you rushed us into readiness and we’re still not ready, but that meant cutting a lot of corners ... things are bound to tangle some—”
“This much?” Archer settled on the edge of his desk. “Doesn’t this strike you as excessive? Something going wrong with almost every shipment of ordnance of any kind? Messages garbled, timelines confused, shipments misdirected—maybe I’m just being overly cautious.”
“Paranoid, you mean?”
“I want it to work, Trip.”
Tucker smiled briefly. “Well, I think we all want that, Captain. Although I can’t speak for our science officer.” He paused, weighing his words. “Since when do we have Vulcan science officers?” he said at last. Tucker’s complaint was more of a moan, and there was much more to the statement than he was saying outright. Vulcans who hadn’t earned a place at the top of the team. Rank she hadn’t earned, trust she hadn’t earned, on a ship she’d never touched, dealing with science her people won’t share—a perfect perch from which to keep even more secrets.
So Archer gave him the bald truth by way of an answer. “Since we needed their starcharts to get to Qo’noS.”
Seeming almost in physical pain, Tucker rolled his eyes. “So we get a few maps ... and they get to put a spy on our ship.”
His disdain was justified, to Archer’s mind, which made this all the worse. They were selling rank and influence at a pretty low price, on top of the plain risk of a randomly appointed executive officer. Bad judgment, and he couldn’t pretend it was anything less.
He looked away from Tucker, out at the bright Spacedock, which would no longer protect them after today. He felt cheapened, as if he’d bent too far backward, and the people feeling the ache were his crew.
“Admiral Forrest says we should think of her as more of a ‘chaperone,’ ” he attempted. Pathetic. Fancy words couldn’t massage the gift of authority to someone who didn’t deserve it. If anything happened to him, nobody would be taking orders from a “chaperone.” The figurehead could very quickly go to supreme power and the crew would be obliged to obey. And he had told Hoshi