Synthesis - James Swallow [21]
“That’s not fear,” noted Vale. “That’s prudence. I mean, how many times have we been burned by the Borg queen, how many people have we lost to them over the years? It’s right to be wary.” She shook her head. “I thought the same thing when I boarded that wreck.”
“News travels fast,” said Troi. “It’s an anxiety the whole crew is experiencing.” She shook her head. “The wounds from that last confrontation at Axion… they’re still close to the surface.”
Vale felt a sudden pang of sympathy for Troi. When that monstrous moment had come, when the Borg had been massing to destroy them all, it was Deanna who had been forced to hear the screams of their tortured psyches. The other woman must have sensed it, and she glanced at her, gave a wan smile.
“Well, any hearsay ends right this minute,” Riker snapped, shrugging off his moment of introspection. “I want my people focused on the task at hand. Frankly, I’ll be happy if I never have to hear the word ‘Borg’ again as long as I live.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Vale agreed with feeling.
“If I could think of a more polite way of expressing it, I would do so.” The tentacular fronds on either side of K’Chak’!’op’s broad head moved in lazy flicks; the locator modules on their tips translated the gestural movements into language, combining it with the snaps and ticks of the big arthropod’s mouth parts to let the vocoder unit around her neck reply in Standard. “You are completely wrong. Sir.” She acknowledged his rank as a sort of afterthought.
Zurin Dakal sighed as it became clear that the interchange wasn’t going to conclude anytime soon.
Chaka—as the Pak’shree was known—stood vertically, her segmented body taking up a large space in the compact cybernetics lab, making it near impossible to move around her without a mannerly dance of excuse me’s and do you mind’s. Her dark, gemlike eyes were all set on Lieutenant Sethe, who was as far away from her as he could get and still be in the same room.
For his part, Sethe stood with his arms folded across his chest, his pallid face rigid, golden eyes narrowed, and stubby tail occasionally twitching. He glared at a padd in his hand, as if it were the device’s fault that the Pak’shree disagreed with him. “Your opinion is noted, Specialist,” he replied, putting acid emphasis on her rank.
She didn’t notice. “But it’s good that you’re thinking in the right direction. It’s really quite clever of you.”
Zurin wondered if the patronizing tone of voice generated by Chaka’s translator module was just some peculiarity of its programming or if it was accurately expressing her mannerisms in the closest way it could. Whatever the answer, the sharp snap of Sethe’s tail showed that the lieutenant wasn’t impressed by it. The disagreement had spun out of Sethe’s initial reading of Peya Fell’s tricorder scans, the analysis of the device they had recovered from the alien wreck. While Chaka had opined that the nexus core appeared to operate on a framework similar to duotronic technology, Sethe’s first thought was that it was a bubble-memory system. The Pak’shree argued that duotronic tech was much more resilient and therefore much more likely to be used by a spacegoing species, but she did her viewpoint no favors by talking down to the Cygnian and utterly ignoring the fact that he was her superior officer. Not that Sethe himself helped matters; in his own way, the officer was also quite idiosyncratic.