Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [83]
Some of the bluster had worn off by the time he’d been routed through a maze of security checks and retina scans and spoken to half a dozen Rigelian authorities, each more officious than the one before, and he had no doubt that if he wasn’t who he was he’d have been ignored entirely. But even Papaver Thamnos knew better than to let Leonard McCoy talk to his automated comm system.
By the time the lanky, liver-spotted old pirate, who was not much younger than McCoy himself, appeared onscreen, McCoy was ready for his afternoon nap. Still, they managed to exchange pleasantries and talk about the weather and what to do about arthritic knees, and McCoy was about to do his diplomatic best to lay out his case for needing to know the whereabouts of Thamnos the Younger without telling the old man why when, as if on cue, a pack of multicolored five-toed Rigelian emilli hounds came bounding into the room where Thamnos the Elder was, setting up a fearful baying racket.
The old pirate feigned surprise, but didn’t order the dogs away. Instead he began laughing and playing with them, encouraging them, in a scrabble of toenails and a kind of breathless yapping, to race around the room in a kind of bizarre choreography as he sat back and watched McCoy’s reaction. His face-an older, cannier version of his son’s-was a grinning mask.
McCoy, to his credit, didn’t rattle. He’d figured the dogs had been introduced in an attempt to distract him, and he was not about to be distracted. He also knew the yapping would make it difficult for the voice-print analyzers to do their job. He waited calmly until most of the hounds tired and flopped panting on the floor before he asked Thamnos where he might find his son.
“No idea,” Thamnos said. “Wouldn’t tell you if I did know. Wouldn’t be prudent. None of your business, anyway. Can’t help you. Don’t know why I should. Only professional courtesy, one physician to another, letting you get this far. Goodbye.”
And that was that. The two men sat glaring at each other for a few moments while the senior Thamnos sat stroking of one of the dogs, stonewalling him. Then McCoy tried again.
“There’s a disease akin to the Fever,” he began. “Some of the first victims were on your own world-“
But Thamnos merely held up one liver-spotted hand to silence him.
“Not interested. Someone else’s problem. Isn’t it?” he asked the dog, fondling its ears and checking them for ticks.
How long they sat there at an impasse, McCoy couldn’t tell. He cleared his throat and tried one last time.
“Dr. Thamnos-“
“Can’t hear you.”
Now it was a question of who would terminate the transmission first. Much as it irked him to do so, McCoy shut it down from his end without saying goodbye. He hoped Papaver would eventually divert his attention away from the dogs and wonder how long he’d been performing to an empty room, but he doubted it.
“Tuvok? What is a ‘red herring’?”
Tuvok was scanning transmissions from the worlds they passed on the way to Quirinus, searching for any report or rumor, official or otherwise, of unexplained fatal illnesses. Had they the time and the guarantee of safety, they might have come closer and scanned the worlds themselves. But Uhura sent them daily updates on the spread of the disease; it bloomed from world to world on the starcharts like the blight of fungus on an endangered tree. There was no time to refine the search process. Perhaps if there were Listeners in the vicinity, they could go to ground and search out data on the worlds they passed, but Albatross had to hurry.
Thus Tuvok scanned, encoding his findings and sending them back to Earth for Dr. Crusher’s team to analyze.
And now this question, the sort of question one of his children might have asked when they were far younger than she, Tuvok mused. But if Zetha was what she claimed to be, her education has been incomplete at best, and such questions could logically be expected.
She was tending