Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [9]
“I appreciate your eagerness,” McAteer told them. “I understand how important it is to you to bring the White Wolf to justice. But I think we need a new approach to the problem.”
A new approach? Picard repeated inwardly. He wondered what the admiral had in mind.
He was still wondering when McAteer turned to him and smiled like a fox noticing an unguarded henhouse. “Captain Picard,” he said, “I’m giving you this job.”
Picard turned red in the face. Me? he thought.
Apparently, he wasn’t the only one inclined to question McAteer’s choice, if the stares and the muttered comments that followed were any indication. Obviously, his fellow captains were wondering why McAteer might tap a man who had been a mere second officer a month earlier over a wide assortment of seasoned veterans.
The White Wolf had beaten the best the fleet had to offer. How was a green apple going to do what those other captains couldn’t?
Picard would have liked to hear what the admiral had to say in that regard. But McAteer wasn’t offering any explanations at the moment. He was just standing there, staring at his youngest captain as if awaiting the man’s response.
Picard gave the only one he could. “I hope to prove myself worthy of your confidence.”
The admiral nodded. “I’ve no doubt of it.”
Then he went on to dole out the other assignments. In each case, he discussed the difficulties of the mission and what Starfleet stood to gain by it. But Picard barely heard him. He was still trying to figure out what he had done to deserve the White Wolf.
Mollie Katz had served as a Starfleet transporter operator for more than thirty years, first on a series of space-spanning starships named Phoenix and Exeter and Yorktown, and now here at Starbase 32. In the course of her long career, she had met with more than her share of unusual transports.
But never anything like this.
The customized gray-and-white containment suit and matching helmet had been Katz’s first clue. The second had been the ghostly visage visible through the helmet’s transparent faceplate.
But even as the figure stepped up onto the transporter platform, Katz hadn’t imagined the challenges with which she would be presented—challenges she was even now trying to meet as she made careful adjustments to her control settings.
Three humans stood to one side of the transporter operator, all of them Starfleet personnel, alternately watching Katz work at her console and gazing at the figure on the platform. They seemed curious, no more than that.
But it had to be a lonely thing for the being inside the containment suit. It had to be hard to endure the scrutiny of others when you were so different from them, so different from anyone within a radius of several light-years.
At last Katz felt certain that her settings were what they should be. Programming in the requisite destination coordinates, she obtained a lock on the place. Then she activated the targeting scanners and verified range and relative motion, which, fortunately for her subject, were both minimal.
Checking the diagnostics monitor in the upper left quadrant of her panel, she saw that the system was functioning well within acceptable parameters. So far so good, the operator told herself.
Normally this would have been the point at which the transporter’s molecular imaging scanners came on-line. However, Katz had already been using the scanners for the last several minutes to get an idea of what she was dealing with.
She directed the primary energizing coils to generate an annular confinement beam, which would be used in a little while. Then, with painstaking care, she encouraged the phase transition coils to convert the subject into a subatomically debonded matter stream.
This was the tricky part, the part she would at other times have left to the computer but felt compelled in this instance to carry out on her own. It wasn’t that she thought she could be more exact than an electronic device. It was that if