Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [9]
“You could try being a little less stiff,” LaForge suggested. “Learn some slang or something.”
Data’s lips flattened. “Slang. Colloquial jargon, nonstandard idioms, street talk … it’s often inaccurate. I have tried to incorporate that speech into my language use, but it does not seem to flow.”
“That’s because you use it as though it still has quotation marks around it. You use individual words instead of the whole meaning of the phrase. You’ve got to try to use slang more casually.”
“What purpose does it actually serve?”
LaForge leaned toward him and delicately said, “It makes you approachable. Give it a swing.”
As his lips silently traced that last word, a perplexed expression overtook Data’s features. Unlike the times when he worked too hard at his expressions and ended up looking like a vaudeville clown, these moments made him look much more human than any he could force, these moments when unexpected emotion simply popped up on his face. “Swing … a child’s toy, a sweeping maneuver-oh! An effort. A try. Yes, swing. I’ll swing. Computer, show me all available dictionary and dialect banks on Earth slang, rapid feed.”
The computer came to life on the panel before him and its soft feminine voice, in a delivery much more at ease than Data’s own, asked, “What era’s slang would you like, and what language?”
Geordi LaForge settled back into his lounge and mumbled, “I always thought you needed a hobby.”
Abruptly there was a sound on the quarterdeck, something akin to a growl, but as quickly it was gone and replaced by the resonant bass of Lieutenant Worf as he stared at his monitor.
“Not possible!”
Captain Picard drew his attention away from the blue giant and approached his own command chair, behind which the horseshoe rail arched upward and across the tactical console. Past that, Worf stood with his back to the bridge, staring at his status monitor as though his dissatisfaction could bore right through it. Of course, with a Klingon, that might very well be the case.
Pulling up the automatic extra measure of calmness he found himself using with Worf, Picard urged, “Lieutenant? Something?”
“I’m not sure I saw it,” the Klingon spat.
But Security Chief Tasha Yar twisted her toned body without taking her hands off her tactical console and told him, “I saw it too.”
“Saw what?” Picard demanded.
“An energy pulse, Captain.” The girl pushed back a lock of her boy-cropped blond hair. “A huge one. Across the entire solar system.”
Only one step carried Worf all the way forward to Tasha’s side. “Very sharp and powerful, sir, a refractive scan. Like an instant sensor sweep.”
“It was too quick-fire for sensors,” Tasha shot back.
“Then what?” Worf boomed. “There’s no trace of it now.”
Picard used their argument to cloak his movement up the ramp to tactical, where he peered over the controls. There was nothing showing. “Could it have been an aberration? Feedback from our experiments?”
“Sir, it came from outside the solar system,” Tasha said, her throat tightening around her voice as it always did when she let herself get excited.
“Track it.”
“Nothing left to track,” Worf said coarsely.
Picard raised his head. “Don’t use that tone with me, Lieutenant. There is no crisis yet.”
Worf’s big brown face didn’t look in the least apologetic, given a particularly animalistic texture by the riblike cranium of his Klinzhai racial background, the strain which had emerged dominant during the last Klingon purge. He was imposing; in fact, he was downright terrifying, because the other crew members could always see that controlling himself was plain work for him and someday he