Ishtar Rising Book 1 - Michael A. Martin [9]
Corsi made a face. “I wonder how he was able to sit on his hands for such a long time and do nothing but…calculate.”
Gold shook his head and allowed an impish grin to spread across his face. “Maybe six years sounds like a long stretch to you and me, but Saadya can be a patient cuss when he needs to be.”
But it’s never taken him more than four years, tops, to renovate an entire planet from soup to nuts, Gold thought. Strange.
“I’ve read some of Dr. Saadya’s papers,” Gomez said, sounding impressed. “He’s already terraformed a couple dozen pretty inhospitable planets. He’ll probably go down in history right alongside some of planetology’s real legends, like Gideon Seyetik and Carl Sagan.”
Gold maintained his grin. “That’s what Pas always believed. I can already tell that the two of you are going to get along great.”
Gomez’s jaw dropped. “You know him personally?”
“Before he went full-time into the business of recreating the heavens and the Earth, he was a junior science officer aboard the Gettysburg. We struck up a friendship there and we’ve tried to keep up with each other’s careers ever since. But before yesterday I hadn’t heard from him in years.”
He only seems to get in touch when he needs a favor from Starfleet. Or has an extremely farshtinkener tsoreh of a problem that he needs somebody else to fix in a hurry.
“Saadya’s project is obviously suffering from some fundamental efficiency problems,” said Tev, shaking his head dismissively at the image displayed on the screen. The da Vinci was quickly approaching the planet’s night side.
“I’m no planetologist,” Corsi said, apparently in reluctant agreement, “but maybe Dr. Saadya has bitten off more than he can chew with this project.”
Gold shrugged. “We’ll find out soon enough.” He couldn’t help but wonder whether Corsi was right. Had his old friend finally taken on a world that even his great talents couldn’t tame? Pas certainly hasn’t lost any of his chutzpah. Nobody can take that away from him.
“Faugh,” said Tev. “Some truly egregious errors have been committed here, despite Saadya’s alleged ‘patience.’ Otherwise the terraformers wouldn’t have destroyed one of their own key ground stations.”
Turning to face the Tellarite, Gold said, “I’m sure Dr. Saadya will be delighted to accept your keen engineering insights, Tev. And that Project Ishtar’s problems, whatever they may be, will soon be in the most capable of hands.”
Tev nodded to Gold, clearly accepting the compliment with what passed for good grace among Tellarites. Though Gold knew his praise sounded superficially sarcastic, his words were, in fact, utterly sincere. Despite Tev’s lengthy inventory of personality deficits—vanity, arrogance, and overweening conceit predominating among them—none of Tev’s crewmates could dispute his technical brilliance.
“Ishtar,” Gomez repeated, still staring at the hot-house planet. The da Vinci continued moving languidly toward the terminator that demarcated one end of the long Venusian night. “I know that name’s from some old myth or other.”
“Mesopotamian,” Corsi said. “Assyrian and Babylonian, mostly. She was a fertility goddess. They used to call this planet Ishtar all over the ancient Middle East.”
Gold’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Have you started working Abramowitz’s side of the street, Corsi?”
The security chief shrugged. “I guess I got interested in ancient cultures back at the Academy around the same time I was memorizing Sun-Tzu’s Art of War.” Gold wondered briefly if, in turn, Abramowitz, the ship’s cultural specialist, had secretly cultivated some unarmed combat expertise that she was keeping to herself. Go figure, he thought.
“This is simply an N-class world with a toxic, reducing atmosphere,” Tev said. “Perhaps this so-called Project Ishtar is less than efficient because the humans running it have chosen to waste so much of their time and energy on romantic superstitions and unproductive tale-telling.”
Gomez scowled. “Romantic or not, most of us humans find ‘tale-telling’ a rewarding pastime. And a lot of