Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [74]
“Nah?” echoed the android.
Geordi smiled. “Just discarding a theory, Data. Nothing to be concerned about.” He got up. “Come on. Maybe we can finish those subspace field calculations before I conk out completely.”
Data looked at him in that puzzled sort of way. He was doing that less and less these days—but the engineering chief must have hit on a colloquialism with which the android wasn’t yet familiar.
“Conk out,” La Forge repeated. “As in stop due to lack of sleep.”
As understanding registered on his face, Data rose too and followed Geordi out of his office.
Picard had never been more grateful for his ready room. Right now he needed time. Time to think. Time to absorb the sights of Cadwallader stretched out on a biobed and the corridors of deck seventeen blackened with phaser fire.
Time to put aside Worf’s insistence on claiming responsibility—which had sounded so much like Pug’s comments twenty years before, after another, equally horrible occurrence….
In a little while he would return to his command chair. He would exude confidence. He would inspire others.
But not just now. For a moment at least he would lean back and close his eyes and try to obtain some perspective on the whole bloody mess.
Obviously, Cadwallader was no longer a suspect. The captain had read enough Dixon Hill stories to know that a murderer might injure himself to avoid suspicion—but Cad had been hurt too badly for him to believe that. And besides, the phaser had been in someone else’s hands; both Beverly and Morgen had sworn to it.
Picard chewed the inside of his cheek. He couldn’t help but feel that he was overlooking something. That there was a clue huddling in some dark corner of his brain, waiting only for him to shed some light on it.
I should know who is doing this, he told himself. I was their captain, for godsakes. I should have some insight into them.
Indeed, how could he ask Worf or Will to find the killer when he couldn’t? Who knew Idun and Pug and the others better than Jean-Luc Picard?
The answer welled up unbidden. Jack. Jack Crusher knew them better than their captain—better even than their own mothers, in some cases.
Yes. Jack would have known who was trying to kill Morgen. People had trusted him with secrets they entrusted to no one else. After all, how could anyone with that earnest, well-scrubbed farmboy face be capable of betrayal?
And in an uncomfortable way, the captain had been jealous of that quality in his friend—hadn’t he? Picard shook his head. He hadn’t thought of that for a long time—his envy of Jack Crusher.
It had never gotten in the way of their friendship, certainly. Nor had Jack ever known about it. But there was something in the young Jean-Luc Picard—the one who had taken command of the Stargazer with somewhat less assurance than he’d let on—that yearned to be loved the way Jack Crusher was loved. Not just respected or admired, but loved.
In time, of course, he had gotten over that. And it was precisely then that he realized he was loved—though in a slightly different way. People seemed to have an affection for Jack the first time they met him. In the captain’s case, love was something earned over the course of days and months and years.
And who was to say which kind of love was better? Certainly not Jean-Luc Picard, for whom affairs of the heart were still more dark and terrifying in some respects than the farthest reaches of the unknown.
The captain gazed at the empty chair opposite him. Ah, Jack…
For a moment Picard imagined his friend sitting on the other side of the ready room desk, his long body folded up into the most businesslike posture he could manage.
“A problem, Jean-Luc?”
The captain nodded. “A big one,” he confirmed.
“Anything I can help with?”
Picard sighed. “There is a killer on board, Jack. One of our friends—and he or she is after Morgen.”
Jack’s features took on a more serious aspect. “Trying to accomplish what Gerda couldn’t.”
“Exactly. And I haven’t a clue as to which of them it is.”
His friend nodded grimly.