Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [8]
He chuckled drily. “No problem.” Then he went back to his work.
Sommers harumphed. Of all the nerve, she thought. She checked the viewscreen again to make sure everything was all right—which it was. Then, purely out of force of habit, she glanced at her monitor.
And gasped.
“Something wrong?” inquired Gardenhire, who had stopped halfway to his assigned task.
The helm officer stared at her monitor, her blood pumping hard in her temples. There was nothing there, she assured herself. It’s blank—completely and utterly blank.
“No,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
But she wasn’t at all certain of that. A moment earlier, she thought she had seen a face on the monitor screen. A man’s face, with curly blond hair and a thick mustache.
Agnarsson’s face.
Captain Tarasco regarded the handful of staff officers he had summoned to the Valiant’s observation lounge. “I think you all know why we’re here,” he told them.
“We’ve heard the rumors,” said Tactical Chief Womack, a sturdy looking woman with short, straw-colored hair.
“But rumors are all they’ve been,” said Pelletier, the perpetually grim-faced head of security. “I’d like to hear some facts.”
“A reasonable request,” the captain noted. “Here’s what we know. During our attempt to get through the phenomenon—Big Red, as some of us have taken to calling it—Agnarsson lit up and collapsed. But unlike the six who shared his experience, he survived.”
“He more than survived,” said Gorvoy, picking up the thread. “He became a superman. Without even trying, Agnarsson can absorb information at astounding rates of speed, pluck thoughts out of people’s minds…even move objects through the air without touching them.”
“According to Lieutenant Sommers,” Tarasco remarked, “Agnarsson manipulated her helm controls from his bed in sickbay. And to add insult to injury, he projected his face onto her monitor.”
Womack smiled an incredulous smile. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” the captain told her.
There was silence in the room for a moment. Then Pelletier spoke up. “You want a recommendation?”
“That’s why I called this meeting,” Tarasco replied.
“In that case,” said the security chief, “I recommend you place Agnarsson in the brig and put a twenty-four hour watch on him. And if he tries anything like tugging on the helm again, you have him sedated.”
“That sounds pretty harsh,” McMillan observed, his eyes narrowing beneath his bushy, dark brows.
“We’re out here by ourselves,” Pelletier reminded them, “in the middle of nowhere, with no one to help us. We don’t have the luxury of waiting until Agnarsson becomes a problem. We have to act now.”
“I think you’re forgetting something,” said the engineer. “Geirrod Agnarsson is a person, just like the rest of us. He came out here of his own free will. He has rights.”
“Believe me, Bill,” the security chief responded soberly, “I’m not forgetting any of that. I’m just thinking about the welfare of the other eighty-one people on this ship.”
“So it’s a numbers game,” McMillan deduced.
“It has to be,” Pelletier insisted.
“If I can say something?” Hollandsworth cut in.
Tarasco nodded. “Go ahead.”
The science officer looked around at his colleagues. “We’re all assuming that Agnarsson is going to use his abilities to hurt us—to work against us. I’m here to suggest that he may decide to help us. In fact,” he added, “I think he already has.”
“What do you mean?” asked Womack.
“When I was lying in intensive care,” said Hollandsworth, “recovering from my burns, I felt as if there were someone there with me—encouraging me, helping me to heal. At the time, I didn’t know who it was, or even if the feeling was real. But now, I think it was Agnarsson.”
The captain looked to Gorvoy. “Is that possible?”
The doctor regarded Hollandsworth. “He did recuperate a little faster than I had expected. But then, everyone’s different.”
“Then it is possible,” Tarasco concluded.
Gorvoy shrugged. “Who knows?