The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [94]
Once again Leydon felt stunned, just as surely as if the com officer had drawn and fired a phase pistol. “What are you talking about?”
“Just this,” Sato said, her grin amping up again. “What makes you think that you were any less handpicked than I was? You don’t really think that either Captain Archer or Commander T’Pol would choose just anybody to be Mayweather’s permanent replacement behind the helm, do you?”
Sato’s revelation nearly knocked Leydon out of her chair. Travis Mayweather’s contributions to the resolution of the Xindi affair were already well known; he was already on his way to becoming a larger-than-life heroic figure in the annals of midshipman folklore, and his recent sudden departure from Archer’s crew to take the helm of the newly launched Starship Discovery NX-04 was therefore both a perplexing surprise and a source of endless barstool speculation.
And on top of all of that had come the knowledge that Commander T’Pol—whose entire race was not renowned for either tact or tolerance of human foibles—had had a direct hand in her selection. Despite Sato’s obviously encouraging intentions, Leydon’s guts felt no less queasy than they had before. And her first-ever shift on the bridge, her shaking hands guiding the stick and rudder of the very ship that had faced down the Xindi and was even now rushing home to defend Earth from perhaps an even worse threat, was due to start in less than ten minutes.
Elrene Leydon slumped backward slightly as she struggled to find her breath. “Maybe I should go back to staring at the stars.”
Four hours into her shift at the helm, Leydon had managed to keep her stomach battened down and her hands steady. Both of those things had proved far easier to do after the ship had come out of warp on the farthest fringes of Deneva’s solar system. If Captain Archer had noticed anything amiss in her performance, he had refrained from mentioning it.
Archer’s voice came from behind her, startling her slightly. “Any sign of Romulans?”
Before Leydon could offer a clumsy response about the subspace navigational sensors showing clear, she heard the senior officers stationed aft of her begin to make their own crisp verbal reports.
“I am picking up nothing other than the expected icy and chondritic system-periphery bodies, Captain,” Commander T’Pol said. “The long-range sensor scans of the inner system detect no large-scale spaceflight activities near Deneva, nor evidence of patrols farther out.”
“Tactical is clear so far,” said Lieutenant Malcolm Reed. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t Romulan ships lurking about the system, watching us from behind the cover of some comet or asteroid.”
“True enough,” the captain said. “They can’t have put all their resources into consolidating what they’ve taken on the surface of Deneva. But I want to find out exactly what happened here before we resume our original heading toward home. We need to learn everything we can about the current strength of the Romulan force that’s taken the planet. Not to mention how the hell they managed to get through the warp-detection grid in the first place.”
“There is very little we can learn with any certainty about Deneva’s surface at such an extreme distance,” T’Pol said in tones colored by neither frustration nor disappointment. “Even with the long-range sensors adjusted to their maximum resolution.”
“Commander T’Pol is right, Captain,” Reed said, prompting Leydon to turn to see the look of concern etched on the Englishman’s craggy face. “And the longer we stay even this close to Deneva, the greater the chance that the Romulans will pounce on Enterprise with that starship-hijacking weapon of theirs.”
Archer looked unhappy, but seemed to take his tactical officer’s words under advisement. Turning toward his exec, he said only, “T’Pol?”
The frostily elegant Vulcan woman nodded, and remained seated