Intellivore - Diane Duane [26]
“Are these anomalies serious enough to be a cause for concern?” said Picard.
“From the present data, I would think not.”
“I commend your thoroughness, Mr. Data. Meanwhile, unless the other captains have some other business that needs attending to, we should now set our course to follow the remaining pirate vessel.”
“That course is laid in and awaits your order, Captain. As regards other business, Captain Clif advised us a short time ago that he would be beaming over to see you within the hour.”
“Yes,” Picard said. “Engage, then; and when the captain comes aboard, ask him to meet me in Holodeck Twelve.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Dr. Crusher looked at Picard with a slight smile as he stood up from the desk. “Business?” she said. “A strategy meeting?”
“Hardly.” Picard gave her a wry look. “You’re the one who’s always telling me that I need more recreational time. Well, haven’t I been seeing to that lately?”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “You’ve been making more of an effort, I admit,” she said. “I’ll let you know when I think it’s reached therapeutic levels, Jean-Luc, but so far I haven’t seen any indication that you’re overdoing it.”
“I’ll expect you to let me know if I do. Meanwhile, though—as I was saying, we don’t often get much chance to socialize with other ships’ crews. Clif’s an interesting person—”
“Or persons.”
“Yes,” Picard said. “I suppose you could put it that way.” He didn’t speak the rest of his thought—that there hadn’t been much chance for him, at least, ever to get to know a Trill well. Beverly had done so, and Picard wasn’t sure that he cared, right this minute, to investigate how she felt these days about that old encounter.
Beverly, though, just smiled slightly and said, “Go on, Jean-Luc, and confer and otherwise confabulate with your fellow captain. If I come across anything here that you need to know about in a hurry, I’ll let you know.”
Picard nodded and went out.
It was coming on toward sunset; the water had gone three-colored, the waves golden on their swell side and red-golden on their lees, and in the restless space between waves a cerulean blue mirrored the highest sky, untouched by the sunset.
Picard and Clif walked along the deck of the frigate, Clif a little more slowly than Picard as he got used to the slight roll of the ship. The oncoming evening was quiet; the occasional seabird’s cry was distant, drifting from the direction of the low, humpbacked island that hunched against the eastern horizon. Around them, ropes creaked and canvas flapped slack in the warm wind as sail was taken off. Various crewmen in the shipboard wear of nineteenth-century Earth touched their caps to the two captains as they went up and down the deck about their business. Up near the bow, several crewmen were down on their knees, enthusiastically holystoning the deck; amidships, a group of ten or so were going through gun drill.
Picard and Clif paused to watch them, leaning on the rail that looked toward the sunset-gilded island, a kilometer or two away.
“Thirty-pounders,” Picard said. “Not the heaviest that a ship like this might carry, but adequate for the work: and you don’t want to handicap your vessel’s nimbleness in a fight by overgunning yourself.”
The crew carefully adjusted the guns so that they were parallel to the ship’s deck, and held them there, an interesting business while the ship rolled. “Take out your tompions—”
“I think I prefer the way we do it now,” Clif said with a smile, as the gun crew pulled stoppers out