Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [7]
“That’s pretty amazing,” the captain observed.
The engineer shrugged again. “I suppose you could say that. But do you know what’s really amazing?”
Tarasco shook his head. “What?”
Agnarsson pointed past him. “That.”
The captain felt a whisper of air on the back of his neck. Whirling in response, he saw something silvery sweeping toward him and put his arms up to protect himself from it.
Too late, he realized what it was—a metallic blanket from one of the other beds. As it sank to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut, the engineer laughed.
Tarasco turned to him, uncertain that he could wrap his mind around what Agnarsson had done—and even less certain of how the man had done it. “That wasn’t funny,” he said, not knowing what else to say.
The engineer bit his lip to keep from laughing some more. “Sorry, sir. I just thought…I don’t know.”
“That it might be interesting to float a blanket over and surprise me with it?” The captain couldn’t believe he had said that.
Agnarsson met his scrutiny with his eerie, silver stare. “As I said before,” he replied, “it seemed to make sense at the time.”
“I see,” said Tarasco, not seeing at all.
He was trying to effect a facade of confidence and calm, but he didn’t feel those qualities on the inside. He had been prepared to find a lot of things in the vastness of space…people as strange as the dispassionate, pointed-eared Vulcans and even stranger.
But this…this was the stuff of fantasy.
“I’m not sure you do see,” said Agnarsson. He laid down on his bed again, gazed at the ceiling and smiled an unearthly smile. “But that’s all right, I suppose…for now.”
The captain wanted to know what the engineer meant by that—and then again, maybe he didn’t. Mumbling a few words of good-bye, he left Agnarsson lying there and left the intensive care unit.
He felt an urgent need to talk with Gorvoy.
Mary Anne Sommers was learning what it felt like to be sitting in the eye of a storm.
An even dozen of her fellow crewmen were laboring around her, punctuating their efforts with grunts, sighs, and colorful language. Some of them were trying to repair the control panels that had blown up. Others were removing and replacing burned-out sensor circuits with new ones.
The helm officer wished they could have replaced the warp drive that easily. Unfortunately, she mused, they didn’t carry that spare part.
Sommers would have chipped in some elbow grease, except someone had to keep an eye on the Valiant’s progress. At impulse speed, it wasn’t all that difficult, of course. But with their shields in such ragged condition, they didn’t want to run into any surprises.
“Boy,” said Gardenhire as he walked by with a circuit board, “some people have all the luck.”
The helm officer begrudged him a smile. “Yes, I feel very lucky. I love being stranded a gazillion light-years from home.”
“Hey,” said the redhead, looking past her in the direction of the viewscreen, “watch where you’re going.”
Sommers turned and studied the starfield, with which she’d had ample opportunity to become familiar. To her surprise, Gardenhire was right. They were a half dozen degrees off course.
As she made the correction, she thought she saw something flicker on her monitor. But when she looked down, she didn’t see anything—only the black of a system whose sensors were off-line.
“Uh, Mary Anne?” said the navigator.
The helm officer shot another glance at him. “What?”
Gardenhire pointed to the viewscreen with a freckled finger. “I think you may have overcompensated a bit. You’re seven or eight degrees too far to starboard now.”
Sommers examined the screen again. And to her surprise, her colleague was on the money. The Valiant had deviated from her course in the other direction.
Sommers didn’t get it. Nonetheless, she made the necessary correction. “How’s that?” she asked Gardenhire.
He leaned closer to her. “You celebrating New Year’s a little early this year, Mary Anne?”
She looked back at the navigator, indignant. “No, I am not celebrating