Ring Around the Sky - Allyn Gibson [34]
“You didn’t—” Gomez began.
Faulwell shrugged. “The computer has a fine reading voice, Commander. It wasn’t as if I had anything better to do this mission.”
“But you did, Bart. You could have gone on one of the tourist parties.”
Faulwell shrugged. “Believe me, Commander, I’m glad I wasn’t on Fabian’s restaurant tour of Prelv.”
Gomez laughed. She’d heard how Stevens landed in sickbay after beaming back to the ship. Kharzh’ullan cuisine didn’t sit well with the da Vinci’s tactical specialist.
“Thank you, Bart. I owe you for this.”
“We’ll worry about that another day,” he said as he stood. “Get some sleep, Commander. You look like hell.”
“I will, later, once these reports are out of the way.” She smiled. “You’d better get back to that book I interrupted. Anthony would never forgive me for keeping you from it.”
As the doors to Gomez’s cabin opened, Faulwell nodded. “Good dreams, Commander.”
Gomez reclined on her bunk. She needed a change of pace from the traditional post-mission stress and began reading Faulwell’s report on the dissertation. Ten minutes later she fell asleep, exhausted.
In the center of the mess hall Tev again sat alone, a plate of those twigs—according to Lense, it was called coun’unr, and it aided middle-aged Tellarites like Tev with their digestion—in front him and padds scattered across his table. Gomez went to the replicator and asked for chicken teriyaki and rice. The plate materialized, and she walked to Tev’s table and took a seat across from him. “Mind if I join you?”
“I was attempting to work, Commander,” said Tev. He fingered the coun’unr on his plate, and plucked one of the dried leaves in his mouth. He indicated the padd before him. “Captain Gold asked for the mission reports at 1500 hours, and I have much work yet to do.”
“If you wanted to work, you wouldn’t do it in public,” said Gomez with a smile.
Tev glared at her. “Perhaps.” He shrugged.
Gomez paused. “I want you to take a look at something.” She proffered a padd to Tev.
He looked at it, then at her, and finally took it. “What is this?”
“Something I had Bart research for me.”
“Why should I care, Commander?”
Gomez shrugged. “I don’t know, Commander. You might find something of interest in it.”
He flared his nostrils in annoyance, called up the file loaded on the padd, and began to read. He thumbed through several pages, his eyes ranging back and forth across the text. He glanced up at Gomez from time to time, shook his head, and read more. Reaching the end, he sighed, snorted, and handed the padd back to Gomez.
“Aetiu khieth,” he said.
“Romulan?”
Tev nodded. “Roughly translated, aetiu khieth means ‘damned to the seven hells.’ ”
Gomez smiled sardonically and shook her head wearily. “How did you ever learn Romulan curses?”
He shrugged. “Kharzh’ullan society can be rather…conservative, so I turned to Romulan curses to express myself, as the Kharzh’ullans wouldn’t understand what I said, but I could express what I really felt.”
“But you could have used any language—Vulcan, Klingon, Andorian. But Romulan, though—why?”
Tev sighed and scrunched his nose. “Why not?”
“What did you do, Tev? Sit in your room and study Romulan on your own?” She shrugged. “That seems rather dull.”
“Perhaps.” He paused and looked meaningfully at Gomez. “I had few friends in my youth. Eevraith was one of them. I needed…hobbies…to keep the mind occupied. Math and science provided little challenge for me. Language, however, proved more difficult, and why not Romulan, a language that few knew? I must commend Bartholomew for his detective work. I hadn’t thought the evidence would be so transparent.”
Gomez leaned back in her chair. “If it’s any consolation, I thought he would do a simple style analysis on the Ring dissertation. It never occurred to me that there might be hidden messages within the text.”
“Blame it on the cleverness of youth, Commander.”
“Then the paper was, in fact, yours?”
Tev’s nostrils flared. “Of course. We wouldn’t be having this conversation