Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [99]
“There was only one crewman on duty?” Worf asked.
“That is correct. The Stargazer was a deep-space explorer, remember. Constellation-class. We didn’t carry the same kind of crew that the Enterprise does. We didn’t need to.”
The Klingon nodded. “Of course. Please proceed.”
“I called for McDonnell, but there was no answer. What I should have done at that point was alert Pug Joseph. But I was young and cocky—and besides, I didn’t expect that there was really anything very wrong. So I took a look around.
“Finally, I found McDonnell. He was stretched out behind one of the shuttles, either dead or unconscious. Later, I found out he had only been knocked out. But at the time I wasn’t sure, so I rushed to his side. And as I bent down to see him, Gerda leapt down on me from her perch on top of the shuttle.
“She must have hit me pretty hard. The next thing I knew, there was the taste of blood in my mouth. My vision was blurred and my ears were ringing too loudly for me to think. I didn’t know it was Gerda attacking me. I wasn’t even certain I’d been attacked. I just knew that something bad had happened, and that I should try to keep it from happening again.
“As I tried to get my bearings, I caught a glimpse of something swinging toward me—something long and heavy-looking. Just in time, I rolled away; it missed me. There was another blow, which I also managed to elude. Gradually, I came to realize that my life was in jeopardy—and that it was Gerda who was jeopardizing it, though I couldn’t understand why.
“By the time Gerda came at me again, I had made a further connection with reality: I recognized the weapon she held in her hands. It was a rikajsha stalk. What the Federation science manuals refer to as Klingon ironroot.”
The reference prodded Worf’s curiosity. “Rikajsha?” he repeated. Ironroot grew only on the Klingon homeworld. “Where did she get it?”
“From the ship’s botanical garden,” Morgen explained. “Gerda brought it aboard when she signed on with the Stargazer. Apparently, she was planning my assassination even then—arranging to have a weapon at hand that need not arouse anyone’s suspicion. After all, it was only a long, skinny garden plant—even if it was capable of breaking someone’s skull when placed in the right hands.”
“Actually,” Worf told him, “Klingon legend is full of references to the rikajsha being used as a weapon. I assure you,” he said, “I would allow no such plants in the botanical gardens of the Enterprise.”
Morgen nodded. “I know. I checked.” A pause. “At any rate, I couldn’t avoid Gerda’s attacks forever. That first blow had been a telling one, and it put me at a severe disadvantage. Before she was done, she’d broken one of my arms in two places and cracked a couple of ribs. But I was able to reel and stagger around long enough to avoid being killed before help could arrive. And arrive it did—compliments of dumb luck.
“It seems a crewman named Stroman, a geologist with a bent toward charcoal sketching, had been doing studies of some of the specimens in the botanical garden. Noticing that the rikajsha was missing—had been violently uprooted, in fact—this crewman notified Pug Joseph on the bridge. Picard and Ben Zoma overheard and wondered about it, and they contacted Gerda. Seeing it was she who had brought the plant there in the first place, they thought she might know something about it.
“Unfortunately—for Gerda, not for me—their call went unanswered. Gerda had left her communicator in her sleeping