Ring Around the Sky - Allyn Gibson [18]
Gomez shook her head. “I never knew.”
“That my parents raised dogs?”
“No,” said Gomez with a smile, “that children ever liked peanut butter and jelly.”
Faulwell laughed. He set the book down on his desk and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t imagine you dropped by my cabin to talk about childhood.”
Gomez’s smile upturned at the corner, and she nodded slowly. “I have a little project for you, Bart.”
Faulwell gave a noncommittal shrug. “Public or private?”
“Private.”
“What do you have in mind, Commander?”
She handed him her padd. “How good are you at analyzing writing styles?”
“I’m a linguist, not a literary scholar.”
Gomez smiled. “You’re the one reading twentieth-century fantasy fiction.”
Faulwell shrugged. “Just because I work with words on a daily basis doesn’t mean I have any special facility with style analysis.”
“I can think of no one better equipped for this little project than you.”
Faulwell looked at the proffered padd and reached out gingerly. He looked directly into Gomez’s eyes, and in that moment took the padd from Gomez’s hand. “You don’t believe Eevraith glasch Tremen,” he said, reading the author’s name off the padd, “wrote this text?”
Gomez shook her head. “I have my doubts.”
Faulwell called up the document and looked at the first page. “Original text in Tellarite.” He looked back up at Gomez. “This will definitely stretch some mental muscles.” He paused. “Sounds like a challenge. It might take weeks.”
Gomez nodded.
“What do you want to know?”
Gomez took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I want to know who the author is.” She paused. “The real author.”
Chapter
6
Gold stood at the ready room window as he listened to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and looked out over the da Vinci’s saucer at the Ring and Kharzh’ulla beneath it. From the ship’s position in orbit the damaged Ring segment could not be seen, but behind the ship Gold could see an elevator thousands of kilometers distant move out of the terminator and into the dawn. Few sights he had seen in his Starfleet career could inspire such awe at the power of technology to add to the beauty of nature. The Dyson Sphere Montgomery Scott and the Enterprise-D had discovered represented the ultimate in stellar engineering. The Kharzh’ullan Ring was so much smaller than that, but no less impressive. Planets always held a fascination, each unique in its coloring, its features, and space stations reflected the sensibilities of their designers. Here, however, was a synthesis of both the natural and the artificial—functional, yet inspiring.
He heard distantly over the strains of violins the sound of the door chime. He sighed, asked the computer to mute Vivaldi, and took a seat behind his desk.
Gomez and Tev entered the ready room, and they took their seats opposite the desk.
Gold leaned back in his chair. “Anything to drink?”
Both Gomez and Tev shook their heads.
“How did the surveys go?” Gold asked.
“Exhausting,” said Gomez.
“Long,” said Tev.
Gold nodded. “Care to elaborate?”
Gomez looked to Tev. He nodded, and an unspoken communication passed between them.
“The Kharzh’ullan plan won’t work,” she said.
Gold folded his hands together and lazily tapped the tip of his nose. “Why?”
Gomez bobbed her head from side to side in thought, then scrunched the side of her mouth. “The Kharzh’ullans’ makeshift solution—using the structural integrity fields—actually damaged the elevator shaft more than the Jem’Hadar attack did. Pattie found stress fractures all along the shaft. The SIFs held the structure too rigid, and it wasn’t designed to take that kind of stress.”
“They had the right idea,” said Tev. “The system’s design was rather ingenious—the Ring holds the elevators up, but that centrifugal force would have pulled the elevator apart eventually. The structural integrity fields were meant to hold the elevator together. Ironically,