Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [157]
For a moment, he felt the need to apologize. Then he realized that she was just joking with him…again.
“Funny,” he said.
“I’m glad you think so,” Santana replied. “After all, you are my only audience.”
“You didn’t get along so well with Garner?”
She rolled her eyes. “She’s not the friendliest person around. So, tell me…have you met the Kelvan yet?”
Joseph shook his head. “I haven’t even caught a glimpse of him.”
The woman’s expression turned sour. “Figures. He’s the one you really ought to be watching.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
Santana looked as if she were about to say something critical—then stopped herself. “Never mind. I don’t want to start any controversies. This mission is too important to all of us.”
But it was too late. She had roused the old Pug Joseph—the one who couldn’t help seeing danger at every turn.
“Are you saying he poses some kind of threat?” Joseph asked.
“Not necessarily,” Santana said. “My people have had some unpleasant experiences with Kelvans, that’s all. It doesn’t mean this particular one is going to be a problem.”
He searched her eyes. “Do you really believe that?”
She smiled disarmingly. “Why would I lie?”
Why indeed? Joseph asked himself. He couldn’t come up with a good answer. When Santana first came aboard, he had been as suspicious of her as anyone else. Now he knew better.
“So,” he said, switching tacks, “where were we?”
She knew exactly what he meant. “Let’s see…you were telling me about the place where you were raised. Boston, wasn’t it? And there’s a river there where your parents took you for picnics…”
Joseph was pleased that she remembered. “The Charles.”
“Yes,” she said, closing her eyes so she could pick the image from his brain. “The Charles.” Her brow creased with concentration. “And you had a little brother named Matthew, who lost his sneaker somehow and put his foot in the potato salad…”
Suddenly, Santana began to laugh, and before he knew it he was laughing with her, both of them caught up helplessly in the memory of little Matt stepping where he shouldn’t have. The brig rang with their hilarity.
Pug Joseph found that he liked Santana very much, no matter what Commander Leach or anyone else said about her. In fact, he wished he could have felt this way about everyone he guarded.
Vigo wasn’t particularly enamored of Jefferies tubes. His Pandrilite musculature made crawling through the cylindrical, circuit-laden passageways a cramped and uncomfortable proposition at best.
Fortunately for him, Starfleet weapons officers seldom had to negotiate the tubes the way engineers did. Their maintenance and repair activities were typically restricted to one of the ship’s weapons rooms, or on a rare occasion, the bridge.
But there were exceptions to every rule. And at the moment, Vigo was caught up in one.
For some political reason that escaped the Pandrilite, Lieutenant Werber wanted his section to be well represented in the effort to implement the Kelvan’s shield strategy. As a result, Vigo and several of his fellow weapons officers had been asked to assist their counterparts from engineering in retrofitting field generators and distortion amplifiers from one end of the ship to the other.
And that meant crawling through one Jefferies tube after another, enduring muscle cramps and skin abrasions in the process.
“Pass the spanner,” said Engineer First Class Pernell, a spare, fair-haired man lying just ahead of the Pandrilite in the passageway.
Vigo found the requisite tool and removed it from his equipment bag. “Here it is,” he said, and handed it to Pernell.
They were busy installing new graviton relays in one of the Stargazer’s field generators. The relays, which had been fabricated only an hour earlier, were designed to expedite the passage of vidrion particles through the deflector system.
The Pandrilite wiped perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. It was hot in the tube too, so hot that he had begun to wonder if something had gone wrong with the ventilation system.