Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [94]
Greyhorse sat up a little straighter. “Captain, if there’s anything I can do…”
Picard shook his head. “Nothing at the moment. But I will relay your offer to Dr. Crusher.”
The Daa’Vit trained his feral yellow eyes on the captain’s.
I know, Picard responded silently. We need to talk.
O’Brien scanned Ten-Forward from his vantage point near one of the observation ports. The place was buzzing like crazy.
“News spreads fast around here,” Eisenberg noted.
The transporter chief nodded, regarding the young man across the table from him. He’d met Eisenberg only a couple of weeks before, when the medical technician expressed an interest in joining O’Brien’s notorious poker enclave. Of course, O’Brien had had to explain about the length of the waiting list, which was longer than ten Enterprises put together.
But at the same time, he’d taken a liking to the fellow. In fact, in some ways, Eisenberg reminded O’Brien of himself at the outset of his first starship assignment. Eager but unseasoned, and a little daunted by the danger—which was considerable at the moment, the transporter chief had to admit.
That’s why O’Brien had made it his personal mission to lighten the younger man’s load. To help him forget his worries, if only for a little while. And Ten-Forward had seemed like the best place to do it—until the crowd began to pour in, all a-flutter with accounts of Ben Zoma’s discovery and Asmund’s subsequent arrest.
“Fast?” O’Brien gave out with a short, sharp laugh. “That’s an understatement if I ever heard one.” He used his glass to indicate the entirety of the lounge. “On a good day, you can start a rumor on the bridge at 0800 hours—and it’ll reach the last table in Ten-Forward before you have a chance to close your mouth.”
Eisenberg looked at him a little skeptically. “Really.”
The transporter chief shrugged. “Well, maybe I’m exaggerating just a bit. I don’t get up to the bridge that often, y’know. But I think you get the idea.”
The med tech took a drink, then put his glass down. “I guess everyone’s just relieved. Can’t say I blame them, either.” He shook his head. “Can you imagine? A murderer on board—shooting phasers, plunging knives into people…”
“Tampering with holodecks,” O’Brien added, thinking it sounded a little more benign—as long as one left out the details.
“That too. It gives me the willies just thinking about it. And for the murderer to turn out to be one of the captain’s guests…damn. I thought they served with him a while back. I thought they were his friends.”
“They are,” the transporter chief explained. “A bad apple doesn’t make a bad bunch.”
Eisenberg didn’t seem to have heard him. “You know what they say. With friends like those, who needs the Romulans?” He sighed. “You should have seen that poor Ben Zoma fellow. I’ve never seen so much blood.” The younger man’s gaze grew distant.
O’Brien eyed him mock-seriously. “Y’know, Davey, you’re starting to depress me. And that’s not easy.”
The med tech leaned back in his chair, genuinely repentant. “Sorry.”
“Why don’t you take a peek at the bright side? The woman’s been caught. She’s in the brig, where she can’t hurt anybody else.”
“I suppose so,” Eisenberg told him. For a brief moment he seemed content. Then he started to think again. “But that’s not our only problem, is it?” He glanced out the port, where the stars continued to streak by at an ungodly speed. “What about that? I heard that this phenomenon can suddenly change shape—become something else. And tear us apart like old-fashioned tissue paper.”
O’Brien could see he had his work cut out for him. “You could look at it that way—doom and gloom and all that stuff. Or you could tell yourself that Commander La Forge and his helpers will get us out of this—like they always do. And in the meantime, we have ringside seats for the greatest show in the galaxy.”
O’Brien swung his chair around to face the observation port and the flat lines