Star Trek_ A Choice of Catastrophes - Michael Schuster [37]
Sulu moved back to the command chair and sat down. “Course set, Mister Farrell?”
The navigator checked the plot to the left of his console. “Yes, sir. We are laid in for Mu Arigulon.”
“Maximum impulse, Mister Rahda,” Sulu ordered. McCoy was impressed by how quickly his deep bass voice had regained its authority, given how uncertain he had sounded a few moments ago.
You always mask your own uncertainty in complaints and crabbiness. Sulu masks it in authority and carries it off. Give him time and he’ll be as good as Jim. But everyone will always see straight through you.
“Maximum impulse, aye,” Lieutenant Rahda said. “Engaging engines.”
As she pushed the controls forward, McCoy imagined he felt the ship’s power throb through the deck beneath his feet. He quickly moved to the railing above the command chair—he didn’t quite trust Sulu and Rodriguez’s assertion that nothing would happen, and he wasn’t going to be tossed around again like last time.
As the Enterprise crept up to a significant fraction of light speed, McCoy tried not to let himself relax. He was afraid that whispering voice of self-doubt would creep in when he did.
FIVE
Stardate 4757.7 (1529 hours)
The shuttlecraft Hofstadter sat forlornly in the rain.
Ensign Antti Saloniemi was inside, reading and rereading the text on his data slate. It was almost impossible to concentrate: Petty Officer Emalra’ehn had left the side hatch open a crack when he’d gone on a quick patrol, and the whistling of the wind across the gap was driving him mad. He’d been warned against closing it by Emalra’ehn, who’d wanted to be able to get back in the shuttle quickly in case something came up.
“Visualization: orange vegetable of mysterious provenance,” he read aloud. What is this?
The UT baseline provided by Mister Scott had turned out to be an excellent starting point, though it was naturally better with more technical language. Right now he was trying to read the scroll found by the Columbus. It had come out scrambled. Best as Saloniemi could tell, it was a children’s book. Strangely, the language didn’t seem to have any verbs, which meant that the translations were hard to parse.
“Impairment of orange vegetable’s forward motion.”
His eyes zipped back and forth across the curvy lines on his slate: waves, circles, dots, curls. He found it helpful to examine the original text so he could get a feel for it. On the surface, the squiggles bore a marginal resemblance to Old High Vulcan script, with their curls and crossed lines, but you might make the same connections between old Terran cuneiform and written Klingonese. Making baseless assumptions was one of the worst things you could do when studying new languages.
“Intersection with blue fruit. Collision! Chaos! Exclamation of—”
The hatch came open the entire way, letting a blast of wind and rain into the shuttle. Saloniemi jumped as he looked up, but it was only Emalra’ehn stomping in, his poncho leaving cascades of water all over the deck. The hatch shut behind him.
“Find anything?” the Deltan said.
Saloniemi shook his head. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“Nothing. Just plants. And water.”
“Doesn’t that make your job easier?”
Emalra’ehn took off his poncho and deposited it on an empty seat. “It makes you complacent. Slow and stupid. If nothing happens for a few hours, you start to think it’s like that all the time. Then, when something does happen, it comes as a surprise and kills you. You don’t want that.”
Saloniemi couldn’t help but laugh. “No, I definitely don’t want that.”
The security guard’s face was deadly serious. “I’m not joking.”
“I know that. Believe me, I do. But the way you said it…” He let the sentence trail off, rather than say anything that would make the other man angry or feel insulted.
“Ah. I get that a lot.”
“You do?” Saloniemi regarded him with surprise. “What, exactly?”