Reunion - Michael Jan Friedman [92]
Contrary to Worf’s premonition, the lift doors were closed. He took in his people with a glance.
“Phasers on stun. Be prepared for anything.”
Then, careful to keep his eyes on the doors, he touched the lift security override pad on the bulkhead.
Not that he expected the action to accomplish anything. With the technical expertise Asmund had demonstrated, Worf fully expected that she’d jammed the door-opening mechanism, which would force him to find an engineer capable of bypassing or otherwise nullifying her handiwork.
Much to his surprise, however, the override worked. The doors opened.
The security officers tensed, training their weapons on the interior of the compartment. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary. There was no one inside.
Muttering a curse, Worf took a step forward-and noticed something on the floor of the lift. Grunting, he went in and picked it up. A communicator. He turned it over in his hand. Asmund had led him on a merry chase. And he had been too concerned with more complicated explana-tions for her behavior to consider the simplest one of all.
What was the expression humans used? About failing to see the forest for the trees?
The fugitive had asked the computer for Morgen’s whereabouts and then programmed the lift for that destination— with a stop on deck four, just to prolong the chase. And while her communicator was buying her time, she was using it to serve her purposes. He should have known she’d try something like this, the security chief told himself. He should have known. He scowled. Asmund could be anywhere on the Enterprise now. Absolutely anywhere. He had no choice but to have his people comb the ship for her, inch by inch. And Morgen … he had to contact the Daa’Vit, alert him to- “Lieutenant WorMore
The Klingon turned at the sound of his name. He was a little startled to see Morgen standing there, casting a curious eye over the proceedings.
“Is something wrong?” the Daa’Vit asked innocently. Worf’s scowl deepened. “That,” he growled, “is one way of putting it.” The bleeding from her temple had stopped, but Asmund’s head hurt mercilessly. Taking a deep breath, she leaned back against the cargo container and tried to put her thoughts in order. By now, she thought, they would have found the communicator in the turbolift. And begun the search in earnest. But it was too late. Avoiding the use of the lifts completely, she’d found an entrance to the cargo bays on deck thirty-eight and slipped inside.
Fortunately, the bay’s manifest had told her it had the kind of cargo she needed. And the Enterprise crew had
been every bit as efficient as it was reputed to be; the dolacite containers she sought were all in their proper locations. Used extensively these days to line the insides of warp nacelles, dolacite was the only substance routinely carried on Federation starships that could foil internal sensor systems. By hiding among containers full of the stuff, Asmund had effectively rendered herself invisible to the ship’s internal security systems. She glanced at the phaser in her lap. Picking it up, she felt its reassuring heft.
Under other circumstances, it might have been a liability to her. After all, every phaser was hooked in with the ship’s computer-to prevent the use of power levels at which a random blast could punch through a hull wall. And with that kind of hookup, it wasn’t all that difficult to scan the Enterprise for phaser locations—there were only a few dozen of them on board.
It was certainly a lot easier than trying, to find a single human bio-profile among a mostly-human population of more than a thousand individuals.
But the dolacite protected her from that kind of detection as well. Which was a good thing. She needed the phaser. You’ve bought yourself some time, she mused. You’d better put it to good use.
If only her head didn’t hurt so much.
All in all, Beverly decided, they’d been pretty fortunate. Not only had Simenon’s strategy gotten them out of the slipstream,