Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [0]
Deep in the tangle of night-blocked foliage, slick fur slid between thickly leafed branches, making no more than a whisper of sound beneath the clamor of myriad insects crying out for the company of their own kind.
A shriek ripped through the chorus, startling it to silence.
Bones crunched.
Night in the Fandrean jungle.
“Lions and tigers and bears,” said Geordi La Forge, more or less under his breath.
Entirely without inflection and without missing a beat, Lieutenant Commander Data said, “Oh, my.”
Silence fell over the conference room. Geordi, who had not intended that his comment garner quite so much attention, winced.
Data faced that attention without any apparent concern. “The Wizard of Oz, MGM 1939 I believe Geordi was making an analogy between the imagined threat of the beasts in the movie, and the very real beasts on the planet…” And finally he trailed off, taking in Captain Picard’s thinly veiled impatience, Deanna Troi’s quiet amusement, the spark of humor in Will Riker’s eye. “But you knew that,” he concluded.
“They knew that,” Geordi confirmed. The movie was, after all, still popular enough to list in the holodeck programs.
“We did,” Troi confirmed, as solemnly as possible.
“Ah,” Data said. “My apologies for the unnecessary digression.” But he hesitated, as though he might say something else. In the end he decided against it, but Geordi knew that expression. Data’s insatiable curiosity —about something—had been triggered.
Worf stared intently at the creature on the viewscreen—an indistinct image, captured from beneath the creature as it swooped from one tree to another in the dense growth of the Fandrean jungle. Even blurred, the two barbed and prehensile tails were evident, along with the teeth gleaming in that long-snouted face, and the impression of size and strength. An arbo rata. Typical Fandrean jungle fare, according to the notations, right along with half a dozen other oversize flesh-eaters. “What does this have to do with the Ntig nano evacuation?” he asked, with much interest.
“The Tsorans control this part of space,” Troi said, “and we want to talk to them about the evacuation. They want to go hunting. Attending to their wants in this matter may well grease the wheels when it comes to our wants.”
“Grease the wheels,” Data repeated, as if he’d made some discovery.
Geordi glanced at him and decided now was not the
time. He returned Ms attention to his padd, which held the details of the Ntignano evacuation—not that he didn’t know them by heart. One prematurely doomed star system—thanks to a doomsday cult with inappropriate out-system technology on its hands—and not quite enough time to evacuate the moderately populated planet within it. He’d known that the Federation had an ambassador on Tsora, trying to obtain the charts for the hard-to-navigate area—but why the Enterprise had ended up here, he had yet to figure out. “We’ve got to concentrate on getting those people out of there, Captain, not on hunting with the Tsorans. And that means getting—or making—maps of that graviton-free corridor they’ve surveyed. It’ll cut evacuation time in half.”
“Some of the more sensitive Ntignano people are already showing signs of damage from exposure to the star’s fluctuations.” Beverly Crusher, her long-fingered hands loosely entwined and resting neatly on the table, reflected none of the challenge in her eyes as she looked directly at Picard. That do something about it challenge she always seemed to have the leeway to make.
This time, Picard just gave her a short shake of his head, nothing more. He paced to the end of the conference table and rested a hand on his empty seat. Not a good sign, Geordi decided. He’d be sitting if he were pleased with the course of things. “Counselor, perhaps you can summarize the situation for us.”
“Ambassador Nadann Jesson has done an impressive job with the Tsorans,” Troi said. “Theirs is a society based on physical prowess … survival of the fittest, one might say. They are not impressed with the Ntignano plight, and the Federation has little influence