Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [55]
“Kent, what are you going on about?” asked Lieutenant Pazlar, who was seated opposite Norellis, on Dakal’s right. A Martian aquifer fizz—naturally carbonated water drawn directly from the subsurface permafrost outside Utopia Planitia—and a Tarkovian broadleaf salad sat on the table before her.
“Romulus,” Norellis said. “It’s just not the kind of mission I expected this ship to go on, much less on its maiden voyage. And it certainly isn’t what I had in mind when I chose my scientific specialties at the Academy.”
Next to Norellis, Lieutenant Eviku, one of the ship’s xenobiologists, turned his hairless, swept-back head toward him. “Not this again,” the Arkenite said. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t use these dinners as a venue for your complaints?” Eviku’s domed forehead dipped toward Norellis with a slight air of menace.
Norellis held up his hands. “Hey, I’m not complaining. I’m just feeling a little…impatient, is all. After all the emphasis the captain put into outfitting and crewing this ship for exploration, sending us to Romulus feels, I dunno, like a slap in the face. It’s like we’re all on hold until this political nonsense is over.”
“For what it’s worth, Kent, I don’t completely disagree,” Pazlar said. “Don’t get me wrong. Since I joined Starfleet, I’ve had to deal on the fly with everything from a major war to a full-blown, planetary-scale disaster. So I’ll cope with whatever weirdness Titan’s missions throw at us with only minimal griping. All the same, I’d rather be charting unexplored solar systems and new stellar phenomena than settling power-sharing treaties.”
“I second that,” Dr. Cethente said, situated next to Pazlar. Cethente’s simulated voice, translated from the bioelectric impulses that constituted its normal mode of communication, emerged from the combadge belted around the center of its unusual body with an undertone of wind chimes.
The only nonhumanoid scientist present at the Blue Table, astrophysicist Se’al Cethente Qas was also the one that Dakal found the most disquieting—though not for the reasons some of the crew seemed to be reacting to Dr. Ree or the other nonhumanoids aboard Titan, none of whom bothered Dakal at all. What troubled him was the fact that Dr. Cethente looked suspiciously like a lamp that had once belonged to Dakal’s paternal grandmother back on Prime. Cethente was a Syrath, whose exoskeletal body had the same fluted quality that was prevalent in Cardassian design. The astrophysicist was shaped, in fact, a great deal like a three-dimensional sculpture of the symbol of the Union: a high dome on top, tapering downward almost to a point before bottoming out in a diamond formation that Dakal knew was the Syrath secondary sense cluster. Like the primary cluster that was the dome, the diamond was dotted with bioluminescent bulges, glowing with the telltale green light of its senses at work, soaking up information about its environment omnidirectionally. Four slender, intricately jointed arachnid legs extended in four directions from the body’s narrowest point, giving Cethente a solid footing on the deck, while an equal number of tentacles emerged at need from equidistant apertures just under the dome.
In repose, and with its tentacles retracted, Cethente seemed quite the inanimate object. But to Dakal, the doctor looked so much like the lamp in his grandmother’s dwelling—and which had so consistently unnerved him as a child—that after first being introduced to it, Dakal briefly suspected the Federation of having sent a Syrath operative to spy on his grandmother.
Norellis took a sip of his bubbly drink—some form of synthale, Dakal suspected—and turned to