Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [64]
The lie was so total and transparent that Picard couldn’t hold his face still, much less keep the look of incredulousness off it. Then again, neither could anyone else on the bridge. He glanced swiftly around at their actions. O’Brien was in the seat that was usually Data’s: Picard found himself wondering who was transporter chief here, whether there even was such a function. He rather thought that someone from security probably managed the transporter. Beside him sat Ensign Crusher—an Ensign Crusher. For a moment he fought the urge to lean forward and get a look at that young face, to see what changes were in it here. But Wesley looked fixedly ahead, giving all his attention to the screen.
Behind Picard, Worf stood, without his Klingon sash of rank, as he had appeared in the recording earlier. It would have been unwise to spare him more than a glance, but somehow Picard got the odd feeling that this Worf might be more like the one he was familiar with than the rest of these people. His face seemed little changed. It’s not necessarily an indication, Picard reminded himself. Judging alien expression, even in a species as humanoid as the Klingons, could be a business full of pitfalls.
He leaned back in his seat again. “Of course you do, Number One,” Picard said as smoothly as he could. “And I trust you implicitly.” The two or three meters I can throw you!
“So there’s our ration of humor for today,” Picard said mildly. He got up as casually as he could and began to stroll around the bridge, doing his best to master his responses once again. It was a sobering walk, and one that filled him with distress. The ship’s bridge was at best a parody of his own. He walked quietly past the bank after bank of weaponry control and status readouts. The controls for photon torpedoes, and the master status boards for the phaser banks, he understood. There were other panels new to him, giving status in numbers of “disassociation packages,” “sterilizers,” “nova devices.” The first he guessed was the derivative from the old Romulan weapon. He shuddered again at the thought of the dust of a dead world traveling companionably in the orbit of another, so that falling stars would seem to rain down constantly through a sky toward which no eye turned anymore in the evening. … But these other weapons —he would have to do some quiet research work, and as quickly as he could.
He passed behind Worf, watching the Klingon’s eyes shift to follow him. Not a nervous look, but speculative. Casually Picard leaned up against a bulkhead and studied a ship’s schematic, trying to look preoccupied. What on earth, he thought, are those great empty bays down in engineering? And what’s happened to all the personnel quarters in the primary hull? There were large spaces showing down there, areas that were formerly subdivided into family quarters, entertainment areas, gyms, libraries: even the arboretum was gone. He leaned in closely enough to pretend to be wiping at a smudge on one of the viewing panels and saw several of those large areas labeled Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Disassociator Storage; Mass Weapons Transporter One, Two; Razor Field Generation; Terraforming Equipment: Atomics. Atomics in several different flavors.
D@egueulasse, he thought, thoroughly disgusted. He moved casually away and stopped by the engineering panel, gazed at it, still trying to look lost in thought. His revulsion at the weapons load the ship was carrying was briefly replaced by astonishment at the power readings he saw— especially the graph for available power from the warp engines. He made a mental note not to bother trying to outrun this craft, if it came to that. This one could hold high warp speeds, to judge by the engine ratings here, for three or four times as long as his own Enterprise. It could also feed much larger reserves of power to the phasers and the photon torpedoes than his own could. He had already been upset by the photon torpedo complement, six times what his own ship had