Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [42]
“And the saucer section?”
“No warp drive. No photon torpedoes. But just about everything else.” Picard sighed. “I wonder what Vigo would have said about all this.”
Asmund looked back over her shoulder. “He would have wondered why you needed a primary hull in the first place.”
The captain nodded. “Or, for that matter, living quarters.” He smiled at his own joke.
Idun stared back at him, stony-faced as ever.
Picard looked at her. “Idun,” he said. “I don’t like to see you acting this way.”
“Which way is that?” she asked softly, turning back to the console.
“Like an outsider,” he said. “Apart from everyone else.”
She sighed. “Captain…I am apart from everyone else.”
He looked at her. “Why do you say that?”
Asmund stood up straight, returned his gaze. “You know why.”
He smiled gently. “Idun, that was twenty years ago. No one holds that against you.”
“That’s what Captain Mansfield told me when I received Morgen’s invitation. But he—you—you’re wrong. Both of you.”
“Morgen invited you to be part of his honor guard. Would he have done that if he intended to shun you?”
“Captain Mansfield said that too. But it’s not just Morgen. Back at the starbase, Greyhorse was…I don’t know. Different. Not the way he used to be. Even Simenon was…distant. Aloof.”
“Has it occurred to you that you haven’t seen them in almost a dozen years? That they may have changed? That you may have changed?”
Asmund frowned. “It…occurred to me, yes.”
“Nor are Simenon and Greyhorse our two most congenial former comrades. I would not use them as a barometer of how the rest of us feel about you.”
She nodded. “Perhaps not.” A pause. “With all due respect, Captain, I’d like to talk about something else.”
Picard regarded her. He knew that Asmund, like Worf, could not be pushed. She would obey an order, if it came to that. She would go through the motions—but inside she would resist that much harder.
“As you wish,” he said finally.
Just then the turbolift doors opened. Turning at the same time, they saw Joseph emerge from the lift.
He grinned sheepishly. “Hi. Sorry I’m late.” He looked from one of them to the other. “I didn’t miss anything, did I?”
The guided tour completed, Dr. Crusher sat down at her desk. She indicated the three cabins that comprised the ship’s medical facilities.
“Well,” she said, “that’s what the well-dressed sickbay is wearing these days. What do you think?”
Greyhorse nodded. He seated himself across from her. “Very impressive, Beverly. Not as impressive as your holodecks, but impressive nonetheless.” Picking up a tricorder lying on Crusher’s desk, he put it through its paces. “A far cry from what we had to put up with on the Stargazer. We were lucky if both biobeds were functional at the same time.”
She regarded him. “Tempted?”
He looked up from the tricorder. “I beg your pardon?”
“You know,” she said. “To ship out again?”
Greyhorse chuckled dryly. “Beverly, there is no sickbay in existence that could tempt me to do that. Don’t be deceived by the fact that I signed on with a deep-space exploration ship, where patient care was my first priority. I have always preferred things to people—which is why Starfleet Medical suits me so well. I would rather peer over my morning coffee at a computer monitor than have to deal with something that can talk back.”
Crusher looked at him askance. “You mean you don’t get even a little twinge now and then? A desire to push out the frontiers?”
“I am pushing out the frontiers. I would think you’d know that, considering you pushed them out with me for a year or so.” He shook his head. “Truth be told, I should have been an engineer—like my father and brothers.”
Now that she thought about it, Crusher remembered Greyhorse’s saying something about a course in engineering at the Academy—just before he switched over to the medical curriculum, to avoid becoming “just another Greyhorse family robot.”
“I don’t know what kind of engineer you’d have made,” she said. “But you’re a damned fine doctor.”
He put the tricorder down and met her gaze. “It is very