Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [56]
Noting that McCammon had visibly reddened at that remark, Chang turned his gaze back upon Mayweather. “Well, now you know better, Ensign,” he said tartly.
He pointed at the front windows, toward the growing but still dim and distant pinpoint of light that the sensors had marked as the probable site of a Xindi fuel-gathering facility: their target. “Ensign, I want you to take us to a position just inside a half-klick’s distance from the Xindi structure. Then we can launch our tether lines and ride them all the way down to the thing’s exterior.”
“That might be a little tougher than you’re making it sound,” Mayweather said, still looking annoyingly skeptical. “For starters, how’s your team rated for environmental suit operations?”
“We’ll worry about handling our suits,” Chang said, weary of Mayweather’s second-guessing. “You keep your eyes on the rudder.”
“What do we do if the Xindi decide to shoot us down, thinking we’re just some dumb chunk of rock about to crash into their platform?” asked Guitierrez, who was still seated in the copilot’s chair. Chang was glad to note that she seemed much steadier—and looked significantly less green—than she had only a little while earlier.
“From what I can see, they haven’t been going out of their way to attack any of the other big hunks of debris,” McCammon said from just aft of the cockpit. “And some of those look like they’ve drifted closer than half a klick to the facility.”
“There still could be some sort of shield around the thing,” Mayweather said, looking away from the computer controls to set his gaze squarely upon Chang. “Or maybe none of the other large pieces of debris we’ve seen so far have approached whatever distance threshold might alert the Xindi crew, or trigger whatever security countermeasures they have waiting for us. We really have no idea what tricks they might have up their sleeves, you know.”
Chang didn’t much care for Mayweather’s tone. Had the same words been delivered in the same manner by a friend or a MACO colleague, he might have taken them as good-natured, and perhaps even constructive. But he and the ensign had maintained a barely civil state of mutual coexistence for the past several weeks, and the ice had as yet shown little tendency to thaw. There was still no one specific thing about the pilot that Chang could identify as the flash point for his annoyance, other than his slovenly housekeeping, which didn’t make life any easier; it was more an all-around irritation at being forced to share space with someone whose fundamental way of looking at the world was exasperatingly different from his own. Truthfully, he felt the same way toward many Enterprise crew members.
But he didn’t have to bunk in the same room as any of those others. And none of the other Starfleeters were as proficient as Mayweather—who seemed unable to resist the impulse to brag that he was born and raised in microgravity—at reminding Chang of his own shortcomings as a spacefarer. Mayweather’s presence in his life was therefore beyond annoying. After all, it constantly rubbed his nose—not to mention his inner ear and his gastrointestinal system—in an unpleasant yet inescapable truth: I’m a space marine who isn’t quite up to traveling through space. If it weren’t for the space-sickness meds Doctor Phlox had prescribed him—“prosthetic space legs,” as Corporal McKenzie liked to call them—Chang had no doubt that somebody else would now be in charge of the MACO side of this mission.
Rather than responding to Mayweather’s continued criticisms, Chang instead pointed at some of the monitors that displayed the results of the ongoing passive scans of the dust cloud through which the shuttlepod was moving. “Switch this one over to a three-dimensional view,” he said.
As a scowling Mayweather tapped a series of commands into the console before him, the monitor that Chang had indicated displayed an unusual sight, magnifying the swath of space along their heading and rendering