Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [214]
Ben Zoma shrugged. “I’ve been better. Fortunately, my body doesn’t know that right now. How about you?”
“I’ll live,” the second officer told him. He glanced at Jomar. “If only long enough to find out our guest’s motivation for sabotage.”
“I’d be interested in that story myself,” said Ben Zoma. “And now that we’re not headed for the depot any longer, we’ll have plenty of time to hear him tell it.”
Picard looked at him questioningly. “Not headed for the depot…?”
“Our secret weapon is kaput, remember? Without the Magnians manning our tractor beam, we don’t stand a chance. And with our saboteur out in the open, there’s no reason to even pretend we’re going.”
His friend frowned. “Perhaps you’re r—”
“Commander Picard?” came a voice over the intercom, interrupting the second officer’s remark.
Ben Zoma recognized the voice as Gerda Asmund’s.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” Picard responded.
“Sir,” said the navigator, “two of the Nuyyad ships have left the depot and are coming after us.”
In the wake of the announcement, the security officers exchanged glances. Greyhorse looked disturbed as well.
The muscles rippled in the second officer’s jaw. “Then again,” he said, “perhaps we’ll be having that battle after all.”
Ben Zoma acknowledged the grim truth of Picard’s statement. The depot was significantly closer to the galactic barrier than the Stargazer was. If they wanted to return to warn the Federation about the Nuyyad, they would at some point have to engage the enemy.
“We can’t resort to the Magnians,” Ben Zoma sighed. “But without them, we’ll be outgunned.”
His friend shook his head. “Two against one, Gilaad. It doesn’t sound very promising, does it?”
“We can still beat them,” someone said.
Tracing the comment to its source, Ben Zoma saw Jomar looking at them from his heavily guarded biobed. The Kelvan’s pale-blue eyes glistened in the light from the overheads.
“I beg your pardon?” Picard replied.
“I said we can beat them,” Jomar repeated without inflection. “That is, if you allow me to complete my work.”
“And what work is that?” asked Ben Zoma.
The Kelvan continued to stare at them. “The work I did in an attempt to minimize the effects of your plasma flow regulator and distribution manifold on your phaser system.”
Ang looked at him. “What…?”
But Ben Zoma understood. “I get it now. That secondary command line you were laying in…you were trying to streamline our plasma delivery system and beef up phaser power.”
“That is correct,” Jomar confirmed. “The incidents you no doubt attributed to sabotage were inadvertent and…unfortunate.”
Picard regarded the Kelvan with narrowed eyes. “You were expressly forbidden to tamper with the phaser system.”
Jomar looked unimpressed. “The Nuyyad must be stopped, Commander. And I had every confidence that the Stargazer’s plasma conduits could tolerate the modifications.”
The second officer turned ruddy with anger. “It wasn’t your choice to make, Jomar. It was Captain Ruhalter’s—and now it’s mine. But at no time was it ever yours.”
“I stand corrected,” Jomar replied evenly, though it was clear he didn’t mean it in the least. “However, you now have an option that you would not have had otherwise.”
He was right, of course, Ben Zoma reflected. And with a couple of Nuyyad warships on a collision course with the Stargazer, they needed all the options they could get.
Picard must have been thinking the same thing. No doubt, he was leery about working alongside someone who had been trying to choke him a short while earlier—and the Kelvan’s scheme was still a dangerous one.
But the alternative was to take a chance on making Gary Mitchell–style monsters out of Santana’s contingent. And that, in the long run, might be infinitely more dangerous.
The second officer looked at Ben Zoma. What do you think? Picard seemed to be asking.
“Let’s do it,” his friend said.
The commander thought about it a moment longer. Then he turned to Jomar again. “Very well. How much time do you need?”
“Not much,” the Kelvan told him. “Twenty minutes, perhaps.”
Picard nodded. “You’ve got it.”
Once again,