Q & A - Keith R. A. DeCandido [51]
Now Worf was interested. He wondered if T’Lana’s Vulcan curiosity about Q’s psychology might lead her to respond to Q’s comment, giving him the attention he craved.
T’Lana merely looked straight ahead and said nothing.
Worf stood ramrod straight in the turbolift, also saying nothing.
Q let out a long sigh. “What was I thinking? I wasn’t going to get any love from the Geordi-and-Randy show, and Jean-Luc and Beverly are as tiresome as ever. I must have been mad to think I could get a rise out of a Vulcan and the galaxy’s glummest Klingon.”
With another flash of light, he was gone.
“A pity,” T’Lana said. “I would have liked the opportunity to question him.”
“It is well that you did not,” Worf said.
“Of course. Your orders were, as I said, quite correct.”
The doors parted on the bridge. Picard was just getting up from the command chair.
Picard said, “Excellent, Number One, Counselor, I was about to summon you. Commanders Kadohata and La Forge believe they have found something on the surface.” The captain moved toward the observation lounge. “Mister Leybenzon, join us.”
La Forge, Crusher, and Kadohata were already present when Worf took his seat beside Picard. Kadohata was holding a padd, pacing beside the observation ports.
“Commander,” Picard said, “you have information.”
Kadohata nodded. “Yes, but you’ll never believe how we got it, sir.”
“All day,” La Forge put in, “we tried every scan we knew, but nothing revealed the source of the force field Lieutenant Leybenzon hit, or the yrilijk that defended the cavern. So Miranda decided to try something a little less sophisticated.”
Smiling, Kadohata said, “We bombarded the beamdown site with X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, and radio waves.”
“You’re kidding.” Crusher sounded appalled.
Holding up his hands, La Forge said, “I know it sounds crazy, but we’d tried everything else.”
“And you found?”
“The X-ray and MRI gave us something rather interesting.” Kadohata activated the holoviewer.
The upper-left-hand corner lit up with an ordinary visual image of one of the caverns in the canyon. Kadohata said, “This is the cavern in question.” She touched another control, and the upper-right-hand corner lit up with a schematic of the cavern, interior and exterior, with callouts indicating molecular composition, chemical analysis, and more. “Here’s what sensors gave us, including about a dozen different specific scans. All of it’s about what you’d expect.” The cavern matched Worf’s memory, a twisting corridor of rock, lasting about thirty meters before dead-ending.
Giving a half smile, Kadohata touched another control. “Now here’s the fun bit.” Two images filled in the bottom half. The one on the left, under the visual image, was displayed in several bright colors, which varied according to the density of the object in question. The one on the right showed only black and white and gray.
Worf sat up straight as he realized what he was seeing. The cavern entrance and the first ten meters matched on all four images, but once you went past that point, the MRI and X-ray images showed not a curving continuation of the cavern into a cul-de-sac but rather a widening corridor of rock that angled downward, finally opening into a huge area several meters wide.
Leybenzon was leaning so far forward in his chair that Worf half expected him to fall out of it. “The topography does not match.”
“Got it in one, Lieutenant,” Kadohata said. “There’s something in that cavern that someone doesn’t want us to see.”
“And we were lucky to find this at all,” La Forge added.
Worf turned to Picard. “Captain, we must send another away team and a well-armed security force to penetrate the force field.”
Leybenzon said, “I can have a team prepared immediately, sir.”
“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea, sir,” La Forge said.
“Nor I.” Kadohata sat down between La Forge and Crusher as she spoke. “We know what we do only because it never occurred to whoever built this to shield against primitive