Ishtar Rising Book 1 - Michael A. Martin [8]
“Aye, sir,” came the conn officer’s response.
“There’s been a small change in plans. Best speed back to the Sol System.” The da Vinci had only just departed Earth a few weeks earlier. “And tell everyone to bring their suntan lotion. We’re in for some warm weather.”
“Sir?”
“We’re off to Venus. Gold out.”
* * *
“Dropping into a standard equatorial orbit,” said Lieutenant Songmin Wong, still working the conn station.
“Very good, Wong,” said Gold, sitting in the command chair at the center of the U.S.S. da Vinci’s busy bridge. He stroked his chin with his biosynthetic left hand as he stared contemplatively at the amber, cloud-shrouded world that already half-filled the main viewer.
He couldn’t help but recall that it had been in a similarly hellish planetary atmosphere that he had lost his hand not very long ago. But Galvan VI had cost him a good deal more than that—half his crew had died there, and the da Vinci herself had very nearly been pulled down to a fiery demise in the superdense core of that gas-giant world.
So many good people lost, he thought, his mind conjuring faces out of the broad swirls of the cloudtops. He would never forget McAllan, the tactical officer who had always insisted on such spit-and-polish formality on the bridge—and who had died while pushing Gold away from several collapsing bridge ceiling support beams. Or Barnak, who had been immolated along with most of his engine-room crew while saving the ship from an imminent warp-core breach.
And Duffy, whose sacrifice had saved not only the da Vinci but Galvan VI’s resident global civilization as well, a race of energy beings who called themselves the Ovanim.
If any force in the universe could have restored those lives in exchange for his own, he’d have struck the bargain in a heartbeat.
The turbolift doors hissed open directly behind the captain, interrupting his grim meditation. He turned and watched his first officer, Commander Sonya Gomez, enter the bridge. Trailing behind her was Lieutenant Commander Domenica Corsi, chief of security, and Lieutenant Commander Tev, the ship’s new second officer.
Gold glanced over his shoulder and observed Gomez and Corsi watching the screen, apparently enthralled by the spectacular image displayed there. Tev merely glared down over his flat Tellarite nose at the viewer, his blunt, hirsute face a study in disdain.
If the tableau on the viewer provoked any Galvan VI-related unease in Gomez or Corsi, neither officer revealed it. Instead, both women seemed momentarily awestruck, like children seeing the Grand Canyon or the Valles Marineris for the first time.
“Venus,” Gomez said. “I’ve never taken the time to come here before.”
Gold smiled, thinking of all the denizens of New York City who had never managed to fit a visit to the Statue of Liberty into their hectic schedules. His New York–bred wife, Rabbi Rachel Gilman, had yet to make the brief trip downtown to the reconstructed monument.
“I haven’t been here since I took dense-atmosphere flight training back at the Academy,” Corsi said, her gaze captivated by the lethal, deceptively placid-looking cloudtops. “It’s funny how little the planet has changed since then. Considering how long terraforming efforts have been going on here, I mean.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Gomez said. “To help the Ishtar team fix whatever seems to be holding the project back.”
“How long has the project been under way?” Corsi said.
“It’s been six years and change since Pascal Saadya took the reins,” Gold said. “And Starfleet had been studying the whole Venus-terraforming concept for a couple of decades before that.”
Gomez whistled, evidently surprised. “Six years. That seems like sort of a long time for one of Dr. Saadya’s terraforming jobs.”
Gold nodded. “Dr. Saadya told me that preparing and testing mathematical climate models has taken up the lion’s share of his time up until now. But he claims that the numbers phase of the work is finally coming to an end. So the time has come, at long last, to apply a bit of elbow