Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [94]
“A little food, too, sir,” Troi suggested.
Picard nodded. “As soon as we finish here, Counselor. Otherwise, I know you’ll turn Beverly loose on me and none of us wants that. The doctor has more than enough to do.”
“Casualties were high, Captain?” Geordi asked. He had been too busy working on repairs to hear Crusher’s report.
Picard squared his shoulders and turned away from the window. They were back to talking about the crew now, not himself. “High enough, but it could have been worse.” He nodded at Troi, smiling. “Thanks to some impressive battle maneuvers.”
“Taught her everything she knows,” Riker said.
Picard rubbed his forehead, trying to mask a grin, and asked, “What have you been able to discover about Vaslovik?” he asked.
Riker arched an eyebrow and activated the room’s main viewscreen. “After you told us what Sam said about him, the computer was able to track down these images in the Starfleet archives. Computer, display file Vaslovik-one.” The computer complied and brought up a holo of Vaslovik. “This was taken several years ago at a scientific symposium on Vulcan,” he explained. “He wasn’t even the true subject of the image. The Andorian to his left …” Riker shifted the focus of the image. “… was the main speaker. As far as we can determine, this is the only recorded image of Vaslovik in the Starfleet archive until he joined Maddox’s project. Apparently, he’s always been a little shy about being recorded.”
Picard grunted acknowledgment, thinking about the number of times any of the three of them had been recorded in either log files, security dossiers or news items. True, they were Starfleet officers, but even the most mundane citizen of the Federation could expect to have his likeness cataloged at least once every day or so.
“And here,” Riker continued, bringing up a second visual, “is another image we found in an unrelated section of the Starfleet archives. It was part of a tricorder scan taken by Dr. Leonard McCoy of the Constitution-class Enterprise on Stardate 5843.” The image was what Picard would expect of a tricorder recording from the era: two-dimensional and overlaid with technical data. Despite that, seeing the two images side by side on the viewscreen, there was no denying the truth: some relatively minor cosmetic differences notwithstanding, these were two different portraits of the same man. Vaslovik and Flint.
“Amazing,” Picard breathed. “He hasn’t aged a bit.”
“Apparently not,” Troi explained. “Though, according to the computer, there are no fewer than seven points of difference in the morphology. Flint’s ears, for example, are slightly larger and the earlobes are attached, while Vaslovik’s are detached. Flint’s nose is straight while Vaslovik’s looks like it must have been broken once and healed poorly. It’s hard to be certain, but we think Flint’s eyes were closer together—”
“But why not completely alter his appearance, or just grow a beard?” Picard asked.
Troi shrugged, flicking her eyes at Riker. “That’s hard to say, sir, but from what we know, I’d say the answer is probably, at least a little, vanity. He likes the way he looks.”
“What do we know about the encounter with Flint?”
“That’s the odd thing, sir. Very little,” Riker said. “The story of the old Enterprise’s encounter with a six-thousand-year-old immortal human named Flint is fairly common, now, and a subject of some considerable controversy among Terran historians. But the logs of the three Enterprise officers who met him—Captain Kirk, Commander Spock, and Lieutenant Commander McCoy—talk about Flint mostly in the abstract, as a human anomaly. They describe his home, his abilities, his financial and technological resources—”
“Such as?” Picard prompted.
“He’d purchased the planet he was living on. He manufactured guardian robots to tend his estate, and he conducted experiments in more advanced forms of artificial intelligence to create self-aware androids. And, according to the logs of all three members of the landing party, with the press of a button he was