Crossover - Michael Jan Friedman [54]
Goodwin smiled. The Justman was on its way.
But that didn’t mean he was about to relax. Not when the Hawking had that matter-antimatter glitch and the Magellan was plagued with sensor feedback.
One never knew when the captain was going to need another shuttle placed into service. But whenever that was, the lieutenant wanted to be ready.
He was just closing the outer doors when a voice flooded the shuttlebay. “Commander Riker? You still there, man?”
Goodwin didn’t recognize the voice. It seemed to crackle with annoyance, as if it couldn’t wait to find fault with something. It was just the sort of tone his old commanding officer used to take.
He shuddered at the thought. There was no way Captain Ben Abdul could’ve come aboard without his knowing about it… was there?
Shaking off his trepidation, he replied, “Commander Riker is gone, sir. He and Commander Data and Commander La Forge have taken off already.” He cleared his throat. “Is there anything I can help you with, sir?”
The intercom system conveyed a sound of disgust. “I guess not, Lieutenant. All I wanted to do was let them know what’s happened up here—that Captain Picard’s no longer in charge and such.”
Goodwin felt the information go through him like an electric shock. Captain Picard … no longer in charge?
“But then,” the voice went on, “they’ll find that out soon enough. McCoy out.”
In the empty silence that followed, the lieutenant looked around at his fellow crew members. They seemed just as puzzled as he was.
“McCoy?” he muttered. “Admiral McCoy?”
The bent, frail-looking, white-haired old fellow who’d come aboard en route to the Neutral Zone? That McCoy?
“But what happened to Captain Picard?” asked Ensign Perry, a slim brunette.
Goodwin shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted
But the lieutenant made it his business to find out.
Proconsul Eragian stood with his hands clasped behind his back and surveyed the bridge of the Federation starship. As his aides went over each station with the utmost scrutiny, he shook his head.
“Leave it to Starfleet to cobble together such a confusing amalgamation of equipment,” he mused. “Such an outright mess.”
At his side, Lennex nodded in agreement. But he added no comment of his own.
Typical, thought Eragian. Probably, the Tal Shiar was busy contemplating the implications of the Starfleet captain’s offer. Free the unificationists indeed. Even if it were within his power—which it wasn’t at the moment—the proconsul would hardly entertain such a notion.
Still, a way to capitalize on the human’s arrogance might yet occur to him, Eragian was glad he had left the matter open for further discussion. He might even find a way to use it as leverage against Tharrus.
For now, however, he had other things on his mind. A puzzle, as it were. The puzzle of this ship.
The registry on its hull had suggested this was the Yorktown—a Constitution-class vessel employed more than a century ago, according to the intelligence Lennex had garnered on it.
At the same time, the plaque beside the turbolift, translated for him by his own ship’s computer, indicated that the bridge came from a vessel called Enterprise.
Obviously not the Galaxy-class Enterprise currently in service, but a predecessor—though Romulan records showed that at least two of those predecessors had been destroyed. One of them, apparently, had been a victim of the great military victory at Narendra III, still commemorated as a holiday among his people.
But by far the strangest part of the puzzle was the one that had spawned his interest in the first place—the cloaking device that had been discovered in the engineering section. It was one of the original modules developed on the homeworld, it seemed, long before they perfected cloaking technology.
Of course, it had since been upgraded, and by someone who knew what he was doing. But its rudimentary construction was still eminently recognizable.
How had the Federation gotten its hands on it? None of the records Lennex