Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [203]
As the doctor pushed his chair back and got up, he couldn’t help wishing that the second officer had some secret weapon he hadn’t informed them of. He was still wishing that as he left the room and returned to sickbay.
As the doors to his quarters whispered closed behind him, Picard made his way to his workstation, sat down and established contact with a terminal elsewhere on the ship.
A moment later, Ben Zoma’s face appeared on the screen. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he quipped.
“Well?” asked Picard, ignoring his friend’s remark. “What did you think of my performance?”
Ben Zoma shrugged. “I thought they bought it.”
“You don’t think any of them were suspicious?”
“Not at all. I think they believe that you’re determined to attack the supply depot.” Ben Zoma smiled. “For a moment, even I believed it, and I was in on the game from the start.”
The second officer nodded. “So far, so good. Now let’s hope the saboteur takes the bait.”
In truth, he had no intention of attacking the supply depot. The only reason he had announced his desire to do so was to encourage the saboteur to rig another command junction.
That was what he or she had done the last two times a confrontation with the Nuyyad was imminent. With luck, the saboteur would be moved to give a repeat performance.
Except this time, Picard would have Vigo monitoring every command junction in the ship, looking for anyone who might want to crawl into a Jefferies tube when no one was looking. And when they found that person, they would have their saboteur.
Or so the theory went.
“The question,” said Ben Zoma, “is how far are we willing to go with this charade? Halfway to the depot? Three quarters of the way?”
The second officer posed a question of his own. “And what will we do if no one has been tripped up by then?”
“You’re the acting captain,” his friend reminded him.
“So I am,” Picard acknowledged, his demeanor as grave as the situation demanded. “And as the acting captain, I think I’ll worry about it when the time comes.”
Greyhorse sat at his desk and tried to focus on the results of his psilosynine research. But try as he might, he couldn’t keep his mind on them. He was thinking about Gerda Asmund again.
The doctor wondered what she thought about the idea of their going into battle. Was the Klingon in her looking forward to the challenge? Or was she as concerned about the prospect of facing all those ships as Greyhorse himself was?
He wished he could come up with something to make it a more even battle—and not just for the positive effect it might have on the outcome of their mission. A contribution like that would make Gerda notice him. It might even earn him her respect.
The medical officer dismissed the notion with a deep-throated sound of disgust. Who am I kidding? he asked himself. He wasn’t an engineer, as so many others had been in his family. He didn’t have the expertise to add anything to the Stargazer’s arsenal.
He was just a doctor. He could treat the wounded as they were brought into sickbay, but he couldn’t do anything about the odds of their getting hurt in the first place.
The only battle he had ever won was on a chessboard, back in medical school. His first-year roommate, a gregarious and energetic man named Slattery, had taught him how to play the game—not the modern three-dimensional version, but the original.
At first, Slattery had beaten him every time. Then, little by little, Greyhorse had given him more of a run for his money. Finally, just before spring break, he managed to checkmate Slattery’s king.
He remembered the man’s reaction with crystal clarity. “Damn,” Slattery had said with undisguised wonder and admiration, “when did you turn into a mindreader?”
The doctor’s eyes were drawn to the series of chemical reactions represented on his computer screen, each of which played a part in the creation of psilosynine. If he had been born with such a neurotransmitter in his brain, he might have been a real mindreader.