Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [3]
Picard spent a few minutes cleaning his brushes and getting the pigment off himself—he had never been able to break himself of the habit of smudging the canvas with his thumb when he wanted the shading exactly right. He was in the middle of pulling out a uniform tunic when the communicator chirped: “Captain?”
It was Data again. “Yes?”
“Mr. La Forge has completed his work on the mission specialist’s quarters, and the commander will be beaming over shortly.”
“Excellent. I’ll go down and greet him. Picard out.”
He found Chief O’Brien working thoughtfully over the transporter panel when he got down to transporter room six. “A problem?” Picard said.
O’Brien shook his head. “Just some fine-tuning. The commander wears a field generator for protection in our environment. While the transporter’s field analysis routines are pretty thorough, I don’t want to take the chance of disrupting his suit.”
Picard put his eyebrows up and waited. After a few more moments, O’Brien was satisfied. “Transporting now,” he said, and touched the controls.
Out of the glitter and the whine of the transporter effect formed a shape hovering about four feet above the floor, horizontal. The shimmer faded away. Resting on a flexible levitation platform was what looked like a dolphin in an inch-thick coating of glass. At least, it looked that way until the dolphin swung his tail in greeting, and the “glass” moved and rippled slightly, revealing itself as a skin of water being held in place around the dolphin’s body by a small envirofield generator strapped around that tail. The dolphin whistled, and his universal translator output said, “Bonjour, More’sieur Capitaine; permettez bord?”
Picard smiled. “Oui, et bienvenue, More’sieur Commandant! Did you have any luggage?”
“It went to cargo transporter five,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’ll go to the commander’s quarters from there.”
“Very well. Commander, would you like a look at them?”
“Very much, thank you.” The dolphin downstroked with his tail, arching his back a bit, and the negative-feedback mechanisms in the levitator pads matched the gesture, flexing the pad so that the dolphin seemed to swim through the air down off the transporter platform and toward the doors. “Before you ask, Captain,” the commander said, “it’s “Wheee,” or at least that’s close enough. The rest is just a family nickname —part of the official name, but not particularly necessary.”
“Thank you,” Picard said, slightly relieved: the issue of how to pronounce the commander’s names had been causing him concern since he first looked at his Starfleet record. Hwiii ih’iie-uUlak@ffha’ was one of the cetacean members of the Starfleet navigations research team, a delphine native of Omicron Five’s oceanic satellite, nicknamed Triton Two by an early Starfleet researcher who, after a prestigious university career at Harvard and the Sorbonne, had signed on with Starfleet to continue “clean-hyperstring” studies in deep space— preferably as deep as possible. After several years spent posted to starbases on the fringes of Federation space, Hwiii had requested a sabbatical to get even farther out and, on its granting, had arranged to hitch a ride with a passing Lalairu vessel on its way to the empty space above the Great Rift. Such a spot was perfect for his chosen work, investigation into the nature of subspace hyperstring structure: space uncontaminated by stars, planets, even dark matter—all of which could render equivocal readings that, for greatest usefulness, needed to be absolutely certain.
So much Picard knew about the officer from his records, but he had had enough experience