Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [55]
“Then if you were me,” Riker asked, “you’d bend the rules? You’d ask the Bon Amar for help?”
The Betazoid smiled wistfully. “I’m not you, Will.”
And yet, he had a feeling which way she’d go.
The first officer grunted. “Thanks, Counselor. For your help—all of it.”
Troi shrugged, gently patting Riker on the shoulder. “It’s my job,” she said, “to lend support to my commanding officer in times of duress.”
He returned her smile. “And you’re damned good at it.”
Then she was on her way to the door, and those other responsibilities that awaited her. Riker waved to her as she departed, leaned forward in his chair, and eyed the computer screen.
The Bon Amar…
“Last time, I got the impression Commander Hronsky wasn’t so eager to see me down there,” noted Picard.
They were descending the metal stairs that led to the colony’s sensor control facility. Julia looked back at him and winked.
“I don’t think he’ll notice,” she said. “He’s too busy accepting congratulations from everyone. Besides, he’s always been a lot more close-to-the-vest than he has to be. I mean, you’re not exactly a Romulan spy.”
No, the captain agreed silently. He was something a good deal more dangerous, though he certainly wasn’t about to say so.
“Congratulations?” he echoed. “For what?”
“That would be telling,” she noted. “And I promised not to do that.”
Fortunately, he wouldn’t be kept in the dark for long. With Julia taking the lead, they entered the control center—only to find the place even more crowded than the last time Picard had been there.
In the middle of it all, Hronsky was holding up his hands for silence. “Calm down now,” he was saying, though his expression said that he wanted anything but calm. “We don’t know anything about them yet. We just know they’re there.”
Them? Abruptly, the captain felt a trickle of ice water slide down his back. Could it be that Hronsky had … ?
“Then the rumors were true,” observed a man with thinning hair and a red beard.
“Apparently,” replied the chief engineer.
“Are they spacefaring?” a woman asked.
“As I said,” Hronsky told her, “we don’t know a thing. What we’ve hit on could be an entire civilization or an outpost world of something much larger. There’s just no way to tell at this point.”
But Picard knew. After all, he’d been through this part of space often enough to be an expert on it—and there was only one sentient race close enough for the sensors to have detected. Only one race close enough to resent the Federation’s presence on Cestus III.
The Gorn.
The captain marveled at the bizarre irony. The colonists had had some advance knowledge of their attackers after all. Not the kind of knowledge that would have helped them, certainly, but knowledge nonetheless.
Yet history never recorded this. Which was to say, Matthew Harold never mentioned it, since he was history’s only source in the matter. Had he simply neglected to mention it? Or had he been so badly traumatized that it escaped his mind?
“So,” said Julia. “What do you think, Dixon?”
Picard returned her gaze. “It’s … very exciting,” he responded. “Very exciting indeed.”
“How in blazes did you get a fix on something that far away?” The captain recognized the voice as belonging to Travers, though he couldn’t see the man for the crowd between them.
The chief engineer shrugged. “It wasn’t as hard as you might think. I just stepped up the magnetic injection ratio in the power source. Not much, just a dozen points, the way they did it on those starships recently. Once I had all that extra juice, it was child’s play to extend the sensor range.”
Picard was still mulling over Hronsky’s discovery, so deep in thought as he considered the ramifications that he failed to hear the engineer’s words on a conscious level. However, he must have heard them on some other level, because an alarm went off in his brain.
Hronsky had done what? Stepped up the magnetic injection ratio a dozen points? But when the captain had seen the ratio last, it was already at two hundred—the maximum recommended number for this kind