Synthesis - James Swallow [61]
“I had hoped that we might speak,” said the hologram. “Would that be possible?”
What do you want from me? The question pushed so hard at his thoughts that for a moment, he believed he had said it aloud. Finally, he licked his lips and answered, “I don’t think that would be appropriate at this time.”
“Is it that you find this aspect difficult to communicate with?” The avatar became hazy and indistinct. “I can easily adopt another. As you find it pleasurable to commune with Lieutenant Commander Pazlar, I could mimic her—”
“No!” Ra-Havreii shook his head before the hologram could change. It reverted back to the dark-haired human once more. “No,” he repeated. “I think that for the moment, you should confine any conversation between us to discussion necessary for the purposes of my… my evaluation.”
“Understood.”
He wondered if he was imagining the slight sullenness beneath the reply.
As Ra-Havreii moved to walk away, she spoke again. “You do not trust me.”
He sighed. “How can we?”
“You created me,” she replied. “How can you not?”
SEVEN
Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv padded from the turbolift and glanced around. He was slightly confused by the opacity of the sudden orders that had brought him down to the lowermost deck of the Titan’s saucer-shaped primary hull. One moment he had been working with Chaka on a multi-modal reflection sorting program in order to track the nanosecond-swift changes that had swept through the system, and the next Doctor Ra-Havreii was commanding him to drop what he was doing and proceed immediately to the lower decks. The Efrosian chief engineer refused to give him any more information.
Torvig sniffed the air. This deck typically had little traffic, so it was odd that his olfactory enhancements detected the faint scents of several beings, from the metallic breath of a Vulcan to the musk of a number of humans. A short way down the corridor, a security guard was waiting, a weapon in her hand.
“Ensign,” said the Andorian. “This way.”
“Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa,” said the Choblik. “Is there a problem?” He inclined his head toward Pava’s phaser.
“Probably,” she said dryly. She reached forward and plucked his communicator badge from his uniform vest. Before he could comment, the lieutenant nodded at an open container on the deck, where a handful of other combadges were resting. She tossed his in to join the rest. “Orders,” she explained, before stepping out of his way. Pava pointed toward an airlock door at the corridor’s end. “Go on. You’re the last one to arrive.”
Torvig’s confusion showed in the wrinkling of his nose, and it warred with a sudden burst of curiosity. Just before Doctor Ra-Havreii had told him to come down here, the ensign had seen a yeoman arrive in main engineering and proffer a note to the Efrosian—not an electronic padd, he observed, but an actual slip of replicated paper. Whatever had been written on it had started this chain of events, and Torvig found himself both eager to see where it led and concerned in equal measure.
The corridor terminated in a small antechamber, a wide airlock similar in design to those along the exterior of the Titan’s hull, often used for the docking of travel pods or those rare occurrences when the starship was required to make a hard seal against a space platform. This hatch, however, led from the bottom of the saucer into an auxiliary craft that nestled flush with a configured landing bay. It opened to him and gave Torvig leave to step aboard the La Rocca, the captain’s skiff.
As far as he could recall, the ensign had no knowledge of the skiff actually being deployed; most missions requiring the use of an auxiliary craft were undertaken by Titan’s array of shuttles. The La Rocca was closer in dimension to a Starfleet runabout, almost a starship in its own right, and far roomier. But that said, as he entered the cabin, it now seemed cramped, every seat taken by a member of the command crew.
“Where’s the chief engineer?” said Commander Vale. She, like Torvig and everyone