Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [26]
What more could she ask of a CO?
“Besides,” Riker added, “do you really think Titan’s head counselor would have let me get away with ignoring an issue like this?”
Vale found herself chuckling, suddenly far more at ease about the prospect of venturing into the strange, unknown world called “the command track.”
“All right. I think you’ve just sold me. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“There’s still another problem. And I’m afraid it’s also Commander Troi–related.” Before he could respond, she pressed on: “If I’m going to be your exec, that means that Commander Troi is going to have to report to me, just like the rest of the crew.”
“That’s right,” he said, his mien serious.
Vale’s left hand went back to her collar, and her finger once again traced the outlines of the two and one-half pips that identified her rank as that of lieutenant commander. “But Deanna’s a full commander. She outranks me.”
An almost impish grin suddenly crossed his face. “I’ve already come up with a solution to that problem. Report to Titan, and you’ll have that third pip—Commander. But you’d better hurry. Offer’s good for a limited time only.”
Vale took a step backward, momentarily stunned. She couldn’t have been more surprised if he had just sprouted wings.
“But I only got promoted to lieutenant commander a few weeks ago,” she said after the seeming eternity it took for her voice to return.
“So?”
“But you can’t just…promote me again.”
His grin broadened.
“Can you?” she added.
“Never tell the captain what he can and can’t do,” he said. “Didn’t we just establish, yet again, that I’m infallible?”
Laughing, she extended her right hand. He took it in a firm grip. “Looks like I’d better inform Captain Picard that he’s going to need to find a new chief of security,” Riker said.
“If you don’t mind, sir,” Vale said, disengaging from the handclasp, “I really ought to be the one to do it.”
He nodded. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“Will you be heading back to Utopia Planitia now, Captain?”
“Not right away.” He turned and moved toward the door, which hissed open for him. “There are a few…farewells I want to make first.”
She nodded, surmising that he would want to see Geordi and Worf again before departing. And sometime before his return to Titan he would need to have some time alone with Captain Picard.
Thoughts of the Enterprise’s rock-steady captain, who was even now breaking in an almost entirely new crew, precipitated a renewed surge of guilt over her decision to leave. Get a grip on yourself, Christine. Didn’t the captain say he’d support whatever decision you made?
Riker paused in the doorway. “Oh, and Christine?”
“Sir?”
For the first time, he made a show of looking directly at her bare feet. “When you report to Titan, don’t forget to bring your boots.”
Chapter Five
U.S.S. TITAN, STARDATE 56944.2
“Look out!” yelled astrobiologist Kenneth Norellis as the tool kit slipped from his grasp. Reacting instinctively, he grabbed vainly for the falling implements—and simultaneously lost his grip on the ladder. The artificial gravity took him, and he plunged nearly two meters straight down through the vertical shaft of the Jefferies tube.
He landed in a heap at the bottom, a moment after his tool kit sprayed its cargo of spanners and stem bolts in every direction. The impact forced a surprised yelp out of him, in addition to abruptly pushing most of the air from his lungs.
“You okay?” said Melora Pazlar, poking her head into the Jefferies tube’s shaft from a horizontal access tunnel.
“Dammit!” Norellis said, massaging his right knee, through which pain was now flaring with near-nova intensity. “I can’t believe I just did that,” he hissed through clenched teeth. And for what? A diagnostic analysis of a tertiary backup holographic imaging relay. I might be walking wounded, but it’s pretty damned certain