Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [67]
A stocky man with graying temples seemed on the verge of making a move. The captain froze him with a glance.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said.
The man scowled. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Who are you, anyway?”
Picard ignored them, lowering his gaze to the level of the power-source monitors. He didn’t like what he saw there. Pressure in the containment vessel was up markedly. Punching a few raised pads on the console, he saw that the trend was accelerating. Another couple of hours of this and it would have been too late to stop the process.
But it wasn’t too late now. At least, not according to the captain’s calculations. There was still time to keep these people alive, at least for a while.
He was just about to reduce the magnetic injector ratio to two hundred when he heard the doors to the place slide open and felt a hot breath from the air outside. Whirling, Picard saw a single figure silhouetted in the brightlight.
“Damn,” spat Travers, starting toward the limp body of his chief engineer. “What in the name of heaven is going on here?”
The captain realized that, with his body in the way, he’d been blocking the commodore’s view of his phaser. Instantly, he remedied that.
Travers’s eyes opened wide as they fixed on the weapon. Then, slowly, he looked up to meet Picard’s. For a moment, the man just stood there, trying to decipher the situation—to find an option worth pursuing.
If he were a character in a Dixon Hill novel, he might have tried to “make a break for it.” As it was, the commodore seemed to know when was out of luck. Of course, he wasn’t going to step inside until the captain asked him to. There was still a chance that someone might spot him and realize that the sensor control section had been taken over.
“Please,” said Picard. “Come in.”
Frowning, Travers complied. The doors swept closed behind him as he got down on his haunches to look at Hronsky. Satisfied that the engineer was still alive, he looked up at his antagonist.
“I’m curious,” he said, “about how you expect to get away with this.”
Very simple, thought the captain. I don’t. Not unless I can figure out a way to signal my first officer, and quickly.
But what he said was “Never mind that, now. Move over here, with the rest of your people.” He gestured with his phaser, to make it clear as to what he wanted Travers to do.
En route, however, the commodore appeared to notice that the doctor wasn’t standing with everyone else. She was right in front of the power control console. Travers put two and two together.
“No,” he said, his eyes screwing up in his face. “Not you, Julia. Not you, too.”
“I believe him,” she told the commodore, refusing to lower her gaze. “Though I don’t expect anyone else to.”
“That’s good,” Travers replied, not bothering to keep his scorn out of his voice. “Because no one else here is that gullible, as far as I can tell.”
Julia didn’t say any more. She knew that she would be called to a court-martial for helping a mystery man sabotage the sensors’ power source. And her only defense would be the readings in her tricorder.
If Picard were the judge advocate assigned to the case, he was sure he’d have a difficult time finding her innocent. So would anyone else. But apparently, the doctor had already accepted that prospect.
“If it is any consolation,” said the captain, “I do not plan to disable your power source. Only to make it impossible for you to tamper with the injection ratio—in the short term, at any rate.”
Glancing back and forth between the console and the colonists, he remembered to keep his phaser aimed at the latter with one hand, while he worked at the former with the other. Before long, he had discovered the subprogram that governed the action of the magnetic injectors. Adjusting it, he instituted an elaborate password system to stand guard over the alteration. Then he stood back.
Travers was glowering at him. “We’ll meet again, Mr. Hill. You can count on that. And when we do, you’ll have occasion to regret this incident.