Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [140]
“Have a seat, Mr. Joseph.”
“Yes, sir,” said the younger man. He sat down, but he didn’t look any more comfortable than before.
Ben Zoma leaned forward. “As you may have guessed, I called you here to talk about what happened last night.”
Joseph looked contrite. “Yes, sir.”
“You know,” said the security chief, “it’s good to be alert, especially when we’re dealing with something as tricky as the inlet manifold. But sometimes, it’s possible to be a little too alert.”
“Sir,” Joseph replied, “I thought there was a real danger—”
Ben Zoma held his hand up, silencing the man. “I know exactly what you thought, Lieutenant. And I must say, I admire the quickness with which you responded. But for heaven’s sake, you’ve got to be a little more certain before you sound a shipwide alarm.”
“But, sir,” Joseph argued respectfully, “if there had been a problem with the inlet manifold—”
“Then it would have been picked up by our engineers,” the security chief assured him. He reached for his computer monitor and swiveled it around so the other man could see its screen. “Just as they would have picked up that field coil overload you were certain you saw a couple of days ago…and that apparent injector malfunction over which you shut down the warp drive.”
The other man sighed and slumped back into his chair.
“Then,” Ben Zoma went on as gently as he could, “there was the time you called an intruder alert without verifying your sensor data. And the time before that, when you thought an unidentified ship was approaching and it turned out to be a neutrino shadow.”
Joseph hung his head.
The security chief was sympathetic. Not too many years earlier, he himself had been a fresh-faced, junior-grade officer.
“I don’t bring up these incidents to make you feel bad,” Ben Zoma explained. “I just want you to see that you’re overreacting a bit. Granted, a threat to life and limb occasionally rears its head on a starship…but it can’t be lurking everywhere.”
Joseph nodded. “I see what you mean, sir.”
“Good,” said the security chief. “Then we’ve accomplished something.”
The younger man looked up, his eyes hard and determined. “I’ll do better,” he vowed. “I promise you that.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Ben Zoma.
But in reality, he wasn’t sure at all.
Chief Medical Officer Carter Greyhorse hadn’t intended to walk into the ship’s gym. Distracted as he was, he had believed he was entering the neighboring biology lab, where he meant to review the work of a Betazoid biochemist who claimed to have synthesized the neurotransmitter psilosynine.
The doctor had expected to be greeted by the sleek, dark forms of a computer workstation, an industrial replicator and an electromagnetic containment field generator, all of them packed into a small, gray-walled enclosure. Instead, he found himself gazing at a tall, blond woman in a formfitting black garment pursuing some exotic and rigorous form of exercise.
The woman’s cheeks, he couldn’t help noticing, were flushed a striking shade of red. Her full lips had pulled back from her teeth, endowing her with a strangely wolflike appearance, and her ice-blue eyes burned with an almost feral intensity.
And the way she moved…it took Greyhorse’s breath away. She punched and kicked and spun her way through one complex maneuver after another, her skin glistening with perspiration, her long, lean muscles rippling in savage harmony.
Harsh, guttural sounds escaped her throat, occasionally devolving into a simple gasp or grunt. But they didn’t signal any pause in her routine. Despite whatever fatigue she might have felt, she went on.
In the presence of such passion, such vigor, Greyhorse felt oddly like an intruder. He experienced an impulse to go back the way he had come, to retreat to his safe and familiar world of scientific certainties.
But he didn’t go. He couldn’t.
He was mesmerized.
The woman, on the other hand, didn’t even seem aware of the physician’s presence in the room. Or if she was aware of it, it didn’t appear to faze her. She pursued her regimen with uninhibited energy and determination,