Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [19]
The turbolift doors brushed open. A preoccupied ship’s counselor stepped in.
“Bird? Bun? Babe? Skirt? Fox?”
“Data!” chorused Picard, Riker, and Yar, just as the lift doors closed.
The android flinched, and closed his mouth in an almost pouting manner. His gold-leaf face took on a sudden innocence; he looked vulnerable. Under their scolding eyes, he retreated once again to his memory search through the starship’s deep mainframe, and Picard noticed a definite shift of Data’s shoulders when attention fell away from him.
“Stations, everyone,” Picard said casually, setting the mood for the bridge to relax until there was a reason not to. The tension didn’t entirely dissolve, but each officer made a laudable effort not to contribute to its increase.
From one side Picard accepted a graceful nod from his ship’s chief surgeon. He recognized the decidedly medical gesture-Crusher wasn’t going to offer an opinion-not yet. Not until all the cards were on the table. Not about Troi’s agitated condition, not about these unclinical occurrences, not about anything.
“I’ll be in sickbay, Captain,” she said roundly, “whenever you need me.”
Picard nodded an acknowledgment, warmed beyond logic by her words, and the past once again moved between them, the mutuality of sadness and vision that had made them acquaintances long ago yet had also stood in the way of their ever becoming close. He watched with a twinge of regret as Crusher pivoted and left the bridge.
Burying his feelings, Picard approached Riker from so practiced an angle that Riker didn’t notice him until he spoke. “Mr. Riker.”
“Oh-Captain … aye, sir? What can I do for you?”
“Better ask what you can do for yourself. Tell me again what you saw in the corridor.”
Riker shifted uneasily, unhappy with the idea that he’d been “seeing things.” He still held a heavy rock in his stomach, his brows still tightened over his eyes no matter how he tried to relax his face. “I wish I knew. It looked as solid to me as you do now-he did, rather. When it faded, I assumed it was overbleed from Troi’s holographs. But it wasn’t. And I wasn’t imagining it.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“Because it didn’t do what I would’ve expected it to do. I think my imagination would make something act as I might expect it to, but this … man … reached out to me with the strangest expression. It’s difficult, sir. I’d like to be more concrete-“
“Captain,” Data abruptly called from above, whirling in his chair. “I have it, sir.”
“Hi, Mom.”
Wesley Crusher raised his head as his mother strode into their quarters off the main sickbay. His face had the typical porcelain smoothness of sixteen-year-old skin, his hair combed a little too neatly, his clothing pin-straight on his skinny frame. He’d taken to looking more like that since the captain made him acting ensign. It seemed to Beverly Crusher that Wesley was keeping himself perfectly groomed just so he wouldn’t look out of place among the uniformed personnel on the bridge, and like any sixteen-year-old he carried it to extremes.
“Wes,” she began, not in greeting. “I need you to do something for me.”
He gladly turned away from his study tapes. “Sure, Mom. What?”
“Are you scheduled to go onto the bridge today?”
“Me? Well, not exactly. Mr. Data asked me to help him catalog some physics theories sometime this week, and I was going to use that as an excuse to go up there later-“
“Can you do that now?”
Wesley got to his feet, which made him suddenly as tall as his tall mother. “Really? I mean, how come?”
“Baby-sit the bridge for me.”
Wesley’s smooth face fractured. “Huh?”
“I want you to keep an eye on things for me. There’s something going on, and nobody’s sure what. It’s affecting Deanna Troi, and if I can’t have her expertise to call upon, then I want to at least keep a jump on conditions.”
Wesley grimaced. “Mom,” he began, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
Dr. Crusher grinned sadly at him. “Call it medical intuition. Call it anything you want, but just be my spy on the bridge. I can’t go up there myself because