Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [48]
“Maybe we’ll be the first,” his first officer told him.
“Maybe,” Picard conceded.
But after half an hour, Idun still hadn’t had any luck.
If the captain had wished, his helm officer would have pressed on until she dropped from exhaustion. She had been trained by her adopted family never to admit defeat.
But Picard had been brought up by members of a more practical species, and he didn’t see any point in placing Idun under such stress. Besides, it wasn’t as if they couldn’t get through the debris field without a path of less resistance.
They could do what the White Wolf’s other pursuers had done—reshape their shields to minimize the friction and plunge through the region as best they could. But the Stargazer would pay a price for that approach, just as all the other ships had paid a price. And in the end, it would keep them from completing their mission here.
Clearly, they needed a different strategy—one that would get them through the debris field in better shape than their predecessors. Until they had that strategy in hand, they would have to hover here on the fringes of the Beta Barritus system.
And the White Wolf would remain free.
Frowning, the captain turned to Ben Zoma and said, “Convene the senior staff, Gilaad. We’ve got work to do.”
Admiral McAteer gazed at the mantel clock sitting on his desk, the syncopated movement of its polished brass workings visible through its thin glass walls.
McAteer loved the clock, a gift from his grandmother on the occasion of her passing. Well, not exactly a gift, he reflected. More of an inheritance, really. But he thought of it as a gift.
Truth to tell, he hadn’t liked his grandmother very much, nor had she liked him. But that didn’t keep him from loving the clock. It was a symbol to him of precision, of efficiency—the kind that he would instill in Starfleet little by little, until it was the Starfleet he had always had in mind.
The admiral smiled as he watched the brass gears turn in perfect coordination. Timing was everything, wasn’t it?
Take his plan for Picard and the Stargazer, and by extension for Admiral Mehdi as well. Its success depended on everything happening just when it should.
First, he had given Picard his assignment in front of every other captain in the sector. Next, he had foisted those seven new crewmen on him, to distract him and increase the level of difficulty. Finally, with all eyes on Picard, McAteer would pull the rug out from under him.
Not that he had any choice, really. Starfleet really did have to get that cargo back. And even if Picard had a lifetime to recover it, he would never be equal to the task.
Contrary to what Mehdi seemed to believe, the man just wasn’t captain material.
And when that became as painfully obvious to everyone else as it was to McAteer, Mehdi would be exposed as well. He would finally be seen for what he was—a man who had been in power much too long and had begun to make choices to the detriment of Starfleet.
As McAteer looked on appreciatively, the brass insides of his clock spun and whirled, oblivious to everything but the march of time. Leaning back in his overstuffed chair, the admiral tapped his combadge with a forefinger and said, “Mr. Merriweather?”
“Sir?” came the response from his assistant, whose office was in the alcove beyond.
“Send a message for me,” McAteer told him. “Subspace frequency.”
“To whom, sir?”
The admiral smiled again. “To Captain Jean-Luc Picard . . . on the Stargazer.”
Captain Picard scanned the faces of the six officers who had followed him into the Stargazer’s briefing room. Ben Zoma, Wu, Simenon, Valderrama, Idun Asmund, and her sister Gerda barely fit around the room’s black oblong table.
The captain indicated the hologram of Beta Barritus that floated above a projector built into the center of the table. The star looked like a drop of molten fire, the vast system surrounding it a shimmering blanket of fog.
“As you’re aware from your study of this system,” Picard began, “the other starships that have tried to deal with the problem of the debris