The Battle of Betazed - Charlotte Douglas [89]
“Perhaps not half, Number One.”
“Close enough,” Ben Zoma insisted.
“Think of it as a unique opportunity,” Picard told him. He regarded a knot of a half-dozen men and women gathered around the nearest punch bowl. “A chance to pick the brains of those more experienced at this than you or I.”
Ben Zoma, like Picard, had been promoted only recently. Before being named first officer of the Stargazer, he had served as the vessel’s chief of security.
“Follow me,” the captain said, meaning to take his own advice.
Joining the group by the punch bowl, he smiled at the glances that came his way. Then, as he helped himself to some punch, he listened in on the conversation.
“Of course,” said a man with red hair that had begun graying at the temples, “I had never done anything like that before. But the circumstances seemed to call for it.”
A large-boned woman with dark features nodded. “I’ve been in that situation myself.”
A second woman grunted. She didn’t look like the type who smiled much, despite the youthful scattering of freckles on her face. “I think we all have,” she said soberly.
“I hate to interrupt,” Picard chimed in, “but what are we talking about exactly? An encounter with a hostile force? A brush with some undiscovered phenomenon?”
He sounded more gung ho than he had intended. But then, he was feeling rather gung ho.
That is, until the others looked at him as if he had placed his hindquarters in the punch bowl. There was an awkward silence for what seemed a long time. Then one of the officers, the man with the red hair, offered a response.
“I was talking,” he said, “about putting my dog to sleep.”
Picard felt his cheeks grow hot. “Yes. Yes, of course you were. How silly of me to assume otherwise.”
No one replied. They just stood there, looking at him. Finally, he took the hint.
“If you’ll excuse me …” he said rather lamely.
When no one objected to his doing so, Picard separated himself from the group and strolled to the other side of the room. Ben Zoma walked beside him, a look of bemusement on his face.
“Gilaad,” Picard said to his first officer, “is it my imagination or was I just snubbed?”
Ben Zoma looked back at the group they had just left. “I’d like to tell you that it’s your imagination, Jean-Luc, but I don’t think I can do that.”
“What I said was admittedly a bit inappropriate, given the tenor of the conversation. But it wasn’t deserving of that kind of response. Someone else might even have laughed at it.”
Ben Zoma nodded. “True enough.”
“Then why did they react that way?” Picard asked. He looked down at his newly replicated dress uniform. “Did I put my trousers on backward this evening?”
“Your trousers are fine,” his friend said. “I have a feeling it has more to do with the age of the person inside them. You are the greenest apple ever to take command of a Starfleet vessel.”
Picard couldn’t argue the point. “So I am.”
At the tender age of twenty-eight, he was the youngest captain yet in the history of the fleet. Even younger than the legendary James T. Kirk, and that was saying something.
“And it’s not just your age,” Ben Zoma said, ticking off the strikes against the captain on his fingers. “You’ve never had the experience of serving as first officer. You would never have gotten your commission so quickly if Captain Ruhalter hadn’t been killed in the course of a battle with hostile aliens. And—because an inexperienced whippersnapper like you couldn’t possibly have gotten a captaincy on merit—it was probably a political appointment.”
Picard grunted. “Thank you, Number One. I was beginning to actually feel capable of commanding a starship for a moment there, but you have managed to completely disabuse me of that notion.”
“My pleasure,” his friend told him archly. “What’s a first officer for if not to deflate his captain’s ego from time to time?”
“Indeed,” Picard said thinly, sharing in the joke at his own expense.
He looked around the domed room again and noticed a few sidelong glances being cast in his direction. They