Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [73]
“Maybe that’s the way a captain always feels,” Ben Zoma suggested. “No matter how long he’s been in command.”
Judging by the expression on Picard’s face, that possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “Perhaps,” he allowed.
The two of them sat in unhurried silence. Finally, it was the captain who spoke up.
“I should take another look at what we know of the White Wolf. I may find something I have overlooked.”
Ben Zoma shook his head. “You’ve gone over those logs for days on end. It’s enough. You may be the man in charge here, but there’s nothing more you can do.”
“There must be something I can—”
“Go to bed,” Ben Zoma advised him. “That’s what Captain Ruhalter would’ve done.”
The captain mulled it over, then rejected the notion. “Perhaps not just yet, Gilaad.”
Ben Zoma’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You just can’t stay away from those logs, can you? You’re going to stay up into the wee hours trying to find something you missed.”
“Not into the wee hours, I assure you.”
“You’ll turn in shortly, then?”
“Absolutely. In just a few minutes.”
“Scout’s honor?”
“Without question.”
Ben Zoma leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Good. I’ll wait.”
Picard began to protest. “There’s no need to—”
His friend stopped him with a raised hand. “Honestly, what kind of first officer would I be if I didn’t look after my captain’s health and well-being?”
Picard shook his head. “Gilaad, I—”
“And what kind of friend would I be if I let you sit here all by yourself, trying to find a needle’s worth of something useful in a haystack of command logs?”
The captain sighed. “Believe me, I’m not looking forward to it. I would go to bed if I could.”
“I’m sure you would,” Ben Zoma replied evenly. But he didn’t move out of his chair.
Picard was reminded again of why he held his first officer in such high regard. “Can I at least offer you something to drink?” He indicated the half-empty cup on his desk. “Tea, perhaps?”
Ben Zoma shook his head. “No, thanks. Puts me to sleep. How about a cup of black coffee?”
The captain rose from his chair to fill his friend’s request. “Coming right up.”
Gerda Asmund watched the seething red expanse of Beta Barritus slide off the edge of the viewscreen. She didn’t think she would miss it, either—not after staring at its steadily swelling girth for the last three hours.
The star’s lurid light was replaced by cottony clusters of soft rose and lavender, too dense for Gerda to see through. Fortunately, she didn’t have to see anything. Valderrama’s radar was working like a carefully honed bat’leth, slicing through anything and everything in its way.
Soon, the navigator thought, they would find the White Wolf. She could feel it in the marrow of her bones. They would find him and put an end to the myth of his invincibility, adding to the glory already associated with the name Stargazer.
And glory was what made the difference between bloodwine and water, between life and mere existence. Any Klingon knew that.
Gerda was in the process of refining the course she had laid out for her sister when she noticed something on her radar monitor, something represented by a green blip on the otherwise black field.
There weren’t any planets or moons in this solar system. There weren’t even any asteroids. They had all been reduced to ions when their original star went nova.
And it couldn’t be their radar-assist companion probe because that was elsewhere. So if there was an object out there, it was neither one they had brought with them nor a naturally occurring body.
Which left Gerda with just one inescapable conclusion.
She turned to her sister and saw that Idun had noticed the green blip as well. Her eyes, which were locked intently on her monitors, were alight with a warrior’s anticipation.
The navigator looked to the intercom grid. “Captain Picard, this is Lieutenant Asmund.”
“Picard here,” the captain said a moment later.
He sounded tired to Gerda. But then, none of them was getting much sleep these days.
“There’s something on radar,” she