Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [32]
But as he walked alongside Vale toward the nearest turbolift, he began wondering if he was about to discover what a thirteen-day inspection tour felt like.
Chapter Six
U.S.S. TITAN, STARDATE 56979.5
After the first week passed, Troi noticed that she was feeling increasingly restive, so much so that she booked a couple of sessions with Counselor Huilan, one of her two subordinates in Titan’s Mental Health Services department. She was glad for the presence of the hardworking male S’ti’ach. The nearly meter-high sentient, who resembled a fat, blue-furred, bipedal bear with extra arms and dorsal spines, smiled with his saberlike white incisors bared as he regarded her with his huge, fathomless black eyes, all the while patiently listening to her problems and offering occasional encouragements. Despite his small size, Huilan easily did the work of any two humanoid counselors, which was a real asset on a ship whose widely varied crew carried so much potential for interpersonal friction. After Starfleet had halved Troi’s original request for a four-person counseling staff—Starfleet Command, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that a total of three counselors, including Troi, ought to be more than adequate to handle any 350-person crew, regardless of its composition—she was doubly grateful for the little S’ti’ach’s tireless efforts on behalf of Titan’s morale.
Nevertheless, Troi was feeling uneasy by day thirteen of Admiral Akaar’s stay aboard Titan. It wasn’t that Akaar was particularly overbearing, or even overtly impolite. But the tall, imposing Capellan was omnipresent, and his constant watchful propinquity had proved palpably unnerving to more than half the crew as they struggled to finish making the ship ready for its altered mission—a new agenda that was, all by itself, creating a great deal of anxiety in a ship’s complement selected more for its scientific credentials than for its diplomatic expertise. Lieutenant Pazlar had told Troi of her frustration with the admiral, who had essentially turned the stellar cartography lab into his personal command post during much of each day’s alpha watch. Because of its variable-gravity capabilities, the delicate Elaysian had come to regard the lab, with its unique, low-g window on the universe, almost as her own private domain. Troi knew how much Pazlar valued the few places aboard Titan besides her own quarters where she could comfortably dispense with her ever-present exoframe. Akaar was literally weighing the lieutenant down, even as he more metaphorically burdened the rest of the crew.
Troi also couldn’t help but notice the admiral’s fascination with Titan’s crew composition, particularly the ship’s unusually large proportion of nonhumanoid species. Personnel such as Orilly Malar of Irriol, a double rarity in that she was both nonhumanoid and an expert in exobiology, and the partially cybernetic Choblik engineering trainee Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv, seemed particularly fascinating to Akaar. The admiral would no doubt have also spent more time closely observing the Pak’shree computer specialist K’chak’!’op—whom virtually everyone on Titan simply called “Chaka” as a compromise between the arachnoid’s complex mouthparts and the limitations of the speech apparatus of most humanoids—had the large sentient arthropod not exhibited a tendency to retreat for protracted periods into her quarters. Ensconced behind the earthen and organic-silk walls of her shipboard living space, Chaka could do her work as easily as she could anywhere else on the ship. Troi made a mental note to visit her soon and make a real effort to draw her out of her exoskeletal shell, as it were.
Is Akaar trying to prove that we can’t make such a diverse crew work? she wondered, as she discreetly watched the iron-haired fleet admiral in one of the ship’s common eating areas, where he was taking a meal on dishes that looked absurdly small before such a large man. The Capellan’s face gave nothing away, though, and he was nearly as opaque