Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [52]
But where are we? he wondered. Where they had hoped to be, or somewhere else?
The viewscreen showed the captain the baleful eye of Beta Barritus, surrounded by a soft, pearlescent glow with bright, sharply defined tendrils of color pinwheeling through it. But it didn’t tell him a thing he wanted to know.
“Report,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, his voice echoing throughout the bridge.
There was a pause that seemed to stretch on forever. Finally, Gerda responded to his exhortation. “We made it, sir. We’re on the other side of the debris field, approximately eleven hundred kilometers closer to Beta Barritus.”
A cheer went up on the bridge among the officers at the aft stations. Picard didn’t take part in it, but by the same token he didn’t feel the least bit inclined to rebuke those who did.
Even Ben Zoma was grinning from ear to ear. Glancing at the captain, he nodded his approval.
Picard nodded back. So far so good, he thought. “Scan for the White Wolf,” he told Gerda.
“Aye, sir.”
They weren’t able to look very far. As they had been warned, the proliferation of gases and ion activity in the system made it impossible for their sensors to operate according to specs. But thanks to Simenon’s enhancements, they were able to search a wider area than the ships that had come before them.
Not that it availed them anything. There was no sign whatsoever of the pirate. Of course, he hadn’t gone unchecked and unfettered for so long by making it easy for his pursuers to find him.
“Chart a course based on his ion trail,” Picard said. “Then we will proceed at one-half impulse.”
“Aye Captain,” Gerda told him, and set to work.
“One-half impulse,” Idun acknowledged.
The captain settled back into his center seat. At last, he thought, the chase is on.
Gerda Asmund frowned as she studied her navigation console. She didn’t like what she saw.
“It’s getting worse,” said her sister Idun, who was sitting next to her at the helm controls.
Gerda nodded. “So it would seem.”
In fact, it had been getting worse for the last half hour, but now it was getting worse more quickly.
Not that it came as a surprise to Gerda. The reports they had read, filed by the captains who had approached Beta Barritus before them, clearly indicated that the sensor situation would deteriorate—that once they got past the debris field, the conditions inside the system would gradually make data gathering more difficult.
Of course, there was no way of knowing how difficult, because none of those captains had penetrated as far into the system as they would have liked.
Gerda had thought of suggesting the use of instrumented probes to expand their sensor horizon, but that would have been a bad idea from a tactical standpoint. Though such probes might help them locate the White Wolf, they might also alert the White Wolf to their presence here.
And they didn’t want the pirate to know they were after him until it was too late.
“What is it?” asked Commander Ben Zoma, who had assumed the center seat in the captain’s absence.
“Sensor range is decreasing,” Idun told him.
The first officer nodded. Then he looked up at the intercom grid in the ceiling. “Ben Zoma to Mr. Simenon . . .”
Ben Zoma listened to the end of his chief engineer’s long and impassioned speech. Then he said, “So what you’re telling me is you can’t do any better.”
“What I’m telling you,” Simenon rejoined impatiently, “is it’s not possible to do any better. Our sensors are better tuned than any sensors in the history of Starfleet. They’re operating at absolute peak efficiency. No—above peak efficiency.”
“I see,” said Ben Zoma.
“There is no way in the universe that I or anyone else could improve on their performance.”
The first officer nodded. “So you’ve indicated.”
Simenon’s eyes narrowed. “Then why,” he asked, “do you have that look on your face?”
“I have a look?” Ben Zoma asked.
“You certainly do. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess you were going