Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [191]
But Brentano and the Kelvan didn’t seem to hear them—or if they did, they weren’t inclined to take the advice to heart. The colonist planted a finger in Jomar’s chest.
“You think you know everything,” he shouted, “don’t you? You slimy, tentacled son of a—”
Brentano never completed his invective.
One moment, he was standing nose-to-nose with the Kelvan, poking his forefinger into Jomar’s sternum. The next, the colonist seemed to disappear, completely and utterly.
Picard couldn’t believe his eyes—and he wasn’t the only one shocked by what he had seen.
“What did you do to him?” demanded Santana.
The Kelvan turned to her with his customary lack of passion. “I did this,” he replied calmly. And he pointed to a small, coarse-looking object sitting on the ground.
Picard took a closer look at the thing. It had four triangular faces, making it a perfect tetrahedron.
“What the blazes are you talking about?” snapped another of the Magnians. “Where’s Brentano?”
“He is here,” Jomar told her, unperturbed by the woman’s display of emotion. “However, he has assumed a less disagreeable form.”
The colonist still didn’t understand. But Picard, to his horror, was beginning to. Kneeling, he picked up the tetrahedron and turned it over carefully in his hands.
“What he means,” the commander said, “is that this is Brentano.” He looked up at the Kelvan. “At least, it was.”
The colonist screwed up her features in disbelief. “What are you talking about?” she asked Picard.
He didn’t blame her for reacting that way. A hundred years earlier, Captain Kirk had to have doubted his own sanity when he discovered that his ship had been littered with tetrahedron-shaped blocks…and was told that they were distillations of his crew.
Just as the block in his hands, Picard surmised, was a distillation of Armor Brentano.
He put the tetrahedron back on the ground, then looked up at Jomar. “Change him back,” he said.
The Kelvan’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t answer.
“Change him back.”
“He was insolent,” Jomar remarked.
“Nonetheless,” Picard insisted, his tone unrelenting.
The Kelvan reached for one of the studs on his belt. A moment later, as if by magic, Brentano was standing in front of them again, looking a trifle dazed but otherwise unharmed.
“What happened…?” he asked.
“That’s what I would like to know,” said Santana. She glared at Jomar with unconcealed animosity.
“A misunderstanding,” Picard assured her. “Nothing more. Nor is it likely to happen again.” He glanced at Jomar. “Isn’t that right?”
The Kelvan shrugged. “It will not happen again,” he agreed.
“It would be best,” the second officer advised, “if we forgot about this and resumed our work.”
Taking her cue from him, Santana managed to submerge her anger. “Commander Picard is right,” she told the other Magnians. “Let’s just get back to what we were doing.”
Having done her part to smooth things over, she helped Brentano back to his seat. A moment later, Jomar and the other colonists returned to their workstations as well.
Nonetheless, the damage had been done. The second officer could see that with crystal clarity. None of the colonists would be comfortable working with Jomar after what they had just seen.
Nor could Picard blame them.
Unfortunately, the Kelvan was still the foremost authority on vidrion generation. Despite everything, he would have to remain in the control chamber for the foreseeable future.
But he wouldn’t remain the Stargazer’s only representative there. The second officer resolved to dispatch one of his other engineers as well—perhaps Simenon himself, since he and the Kelvan seemed to have a good rapport.
As for Santana…she seemed inclined to remain alongside Brentano for the moment, helping him see what it was about his work that had produced the Kelvan’s objection. A good idea, Picard reflected.
He had barely completed the thought when Santana glanced at him. I’m glad you think so, she replied.
The second officer acknowledged her remark