The Garden - Melissa Scott [42]
"Have we established subspace contact with the Kirse yet?" she asked, and Chakotay nodded.
"Yes. They're answering our hails now, and they've given us coordinates for tonight-not the same place we were picked up."
Janeway raised an eyebrow.
"Tuvok says they're having us beam down to a courtyard, near the center of the citadel. It means we don't have to go through their walls."
"All right." She put that question aside, and said, "The other issue is this primitive transporter the Kirse seem to have. Has Torres finished her analysis?"
"Not yet," Chakotay answered. "Tuvok has been running that data as well, checking the security angles. It's interesting that this is the one planetary culture that has anything like a transporter, and it's the one where we find another human here ahead of us. And a Federation technician, at that."
"That had occurred to me," Janeway answered. "I've asked Torres to see if she can tell whether or not this system has been influenced by Federation technology, but she wasn't sanguine about the chances." She paused. "Revek is ex-Maquis, at least by his own account. Do you know anything about him?"
Chakotay made a face. "I'd heard of him, anyone who commanded anything bigger than an orbital
shuttle had heard of him. But I never worked with him."
"Would there be any mention of him in the files we transferred from your ship?"
"Possibly," Chakotay answered. "We didn't keep too much on record, for fear of the information falling into Cardassian hands."
Janeway nodded. "I'll see what there is later, then. But let's start with what you know."
Chakotay leaned back in his chair, made a sound that was not quite a whistle. "Do you want what I knew officially, or off the record?"
"What do you mean by off the record?" Janeway tempered the question with a smile, received an equally knowing smile in answer.
"Gossip, mostly, crew members' scuttlebutt. But relevant, I think."
Janeway nodded. "Then let's hear it all."
"Thilo Revek comes from one of the really marginal settlements-the ones I suspect the Federation was glad to cede to the Cardassians. That's about all I ever heard about his background; when I first heard of him, he was running a repair lab on the NSTN-2 station."
"The Maquis base," Janeway said.
"One of them," Chakotay corrected. "As I said, I never had any work done there-the Cardassians found it first-but the people who did use it said he was an absolute genius with computer systems. Not as good with the hardware, maybe, but he had a technician who handled that. He was particularly good with automatic systems, figuring out ways to Jet the computer handle routine work without compromising crew control, or interfering with emergency procedures. And we needed that, there were never enough
trained crew to handle our ships-" He broke off, shaking his head, went on in a tightly controlled voice. "The only thing anyone ever complained about officially was that he had a real bias toward computer-controlled systems, and not every captain liked giving the computers that much power."
"And unofficially?" Janeway asked. "I haven't heard anything that could be called gossip so far, Chakotay."
The first officer smiled, the expression wry. "Unofficially ... he wasn't well liked, and I'm not completely sure why. As far as I know, he didn't have a wife or partner, or any family that he acknowledged, and I never met anyone who mentioned even a close friend. There was a general feeling that he liked his machines, the raw programs, mind you, not holodeck simulations, a good deal better than most of the people he met. Some people didn't take this well."
"I can imagine," Janeway said. She had met technicians like that before herself, could remember the disconcerting sense that the woman had been looking through her, all her interest focused not on the captain but on the ship she represented.
"The other thing I heard," Chakotay said, "may or may not be relevant, but it certainly interested me at the time.