String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [5]
He looked at the chronometer on the navigation console and saw that his shift was almost over. If Harry’s “hmmm” meant what it usually did, then Chakotay would insist that Tom end his shift early. “Nobody wants a tired pilot during a crisis.” Even more frustrating, a crisis also meant that B’Elanna could not be pried out of engineering.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Harry was just clearing his throat. Maybe, maybe, maybe…
“Captain?”
Damn!
Tom lost the battle to not look back over his shoulder and saw that Captain Janeway was in the middle of conferring with Chakotay about some changes in maintenance rotations. She didn’t even look up from her padd, but said, “Yes, Mr. Kim? Something?” A beat passed. “Eyes front, Mr. Paris. The unknown is that way.”
Swinging back around, Tom wished that he had looked at Harry instead of the captain. One could determine a lot about his friend’s state of mind from his posture. Risking censure, Tom quickly peeked over his left shoulder and felt mildly reassured. Harry was staring at the long-range-sensor readouts, a small, bewildered notch at the corner of his mouth. This was good: whatever it was he was looking at, Harry didn’t consider it a threat. Tom noted the slight slump in Harry’s shoulders, which was also a good sign. If he was alarmed, he would be standing up straight, ready to leap into action. But that wasn’t what Tom saw. This was Curious Harry; Science Geek Harry had spotted something on the long-range scans that he thought the captain—a science geek of the first order—would find interesting.
“An unusual binary, Captain.”
Tom felt his brow wrinkle. He suspected that if he dared to turn and look at Captain Janeway, he would see the same expression on her face.
Before the captain could respond, another voice—clipped, dry, and devoid of any emotion except for condescension—said, “Binary stars are among the most common phenomena seen in this—or, let me assure you, Ensign Kim—any other galaxy. How is this one unusual?”
Harry glanced up from the scanner. “Hello, Seven,” he said. “I didn’t hear you come on the bridge.” Briefly, several months earlier, Harry had attempted to initiate a romantic liaison with the former Borg drone, a fantasy that Seven had unceremoniously crushed. For a short time thereafter, Harry had felt awkward around her, so Tom was happy to see that this had passed and that Ensign Kim now understood that he was merely another one of the horde to be crushed beneath Seven’s imposing high heel.
“Harry,” the captain called. “You have my attention….”
Harry manipulated controls, and a window opened on the forward viewer, revealing a star system chart. “Here,” he said, and a small red arrow appeared beside two of the circles. “Here’s an ordinary yellow star right in the middle where you’d expect it.”
“Right,” the captain said.
“And here’s the second star—a white dwarf.” The pointer moved out to a point approximately halfway between the central star and the edge of the system. The white dwarf was so small as to be invisible until Harry overlaid an image of the gravimetric and radiation fields it was producing. Also visible was a thin trail of stellar matter drawn from the larger star across the void down into the gravity well around the white dwarf—the accretion disk. Tom was slightly surprised to see a white dwarf pulling material from such a distant source, but a quick mental calculation showed that it was within the realm of possibility—barely. What, he wondered, was the big deal?
Apparently the captain felt the same way. “I’m waiting, Harry.”
The pointer clicked on three dully glowing blue spots between the two stars. “These planets: I’m reading life-forms on all of them.”
Tom felt everyone on the bridge pause. Some—like him—were mentally consulting their Astronomy 101 notes and realizing, that, yes, this was a big deal. Planets situated between a binary pair would be bombarded with exotic radiation from up and down the spectrum. On his console, Tom punched up the sensors and saw that the accretion disk around