Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [196]
“I mean it,” Santana added. “I’ve already told Commander Picard, but I want to tell you as well.”
Still, he remained silent.
“You’ve got to want to say something to me,” the woman told him.
He did. But he didn’t say it.
Santana looked at him a moment longer, her dark eyes full of what appeared to be pain. Then she returned to her work.
Joseph didn’t like the idea of hurting her. However, as he had said to himself often enough, he was determined not to give the colonist an opportunity to fool him again.
Carter Greyhorse had been busy over the last few days, to say the least—busy with Santana and Leach and the less severely injured survivors of their encounter with the Nuyyad.
And with the exception of a few helpless moments, he hadn’t spent any of that time thinking about Gerda Asmund.
But when the medical officer returned from Magnia, he hadn’t had the option of burying himself in patient care any longer—and his preoccupation with the navigator had threatened to paralyze him in a duranium straitjacket of despair.
Despair, because he had no chance with her. He had come to accept that, at least on an intellectual level. They were too different. She was vibrant, vigorous, full of life. And he was…not.
So, in the absence of an urgent need for his medical skills, Greyhorse had come up with another project in which to immerse himself—a project he had begun even before he saw Gerda in the gym. He had renewed his interest in the creation of synthetic psilosynine.
The doctor had even gone so far as to replicate a batch of the neurotransmitter himself, following the guidelines of the Betazoid scientist who had pioneered the process. And now, having brought the stuff back to sickbay, he was testing its integrity at his office computer.
It was turning out to be a success, too. Not just the psilosynine itself, but its ability to take his mind off Gerda.
Just as Greyhorse acknowledged that, he caught a glimpse of someone walking into sickbay.
Turning away from his screen, he saw that it was Joseph from security. Under normal circumstances, the doctor would have completed his tests, then gone to see what Joseph wanted from him. However, their circumstances were anything but normal these days.
Getting up from his computer terminal, Greyhorse exited his office and emerged into the central triage area. “Something I can do for you?” he asked the security officer.
“I hope so,” said Joseph. He looked around. “And I hope you’ll keep this conversation confidential—as a matter of ship’s security.”
Ship’s security? “All right,” Greyhorse responded, wondering what the problem might be.
“You treated Serenity Santana while she was comatose?”
“I did,” Greyhorse confirmed.
“And you told Commander Picard that you saw her brain waves spike when we were approaching her world?”
“That’s correct,” said the medical officer. Suddenly, it occurred to him where Joseph might be going with this. “Santana’s all right, isn’t she?”
The other man looked up at him, jolted from his line of questioning. “She’s fine, as far as I can tell.”
“Then this isn’t about her health?” asked Greyhorse.
“No,” Joseph assured him. “It’s about an act of sabotage.” And he went on to describe the way one of their command junctions had been tampered with.
“But what does this have to do with Ms. Santana?” asked the doctor.
“Obviously, she couldn’t have sabotaged the shuttle herself. But Commander Picard and Lieutenant Ben Zoma think she might have manipulated someone else into doing it.”
“Someone else?” Greyhorse echoed, considering the possibility for the first time. “You mean…”
“You,” said Joseph. He looked disturbed by what he was saying. “Or me. Or anyone on the ship.”
The doctor sat down on the edge of a biobed and thought about it. It was an eerie proposition at best. Unfortunately, he didn’t know enough about Santana’s abilities to confirm the theory or deny it.
“It’s possible,” he said at last. “But I can’t say for certain.”
The security officer looked disappointed. “Commander Picard thought you might say that.”
Greyhorse