Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [37]
“It was no disturbance, Captain,” she said, and he was certain she’d just stifled a yawn. Certain enough that it passed along to him, and he, too, yawned, discreetly behind the curl of his hand. She smiled at him, genuine and warm. “Maybe you should take your own advice,” she offered upon departure.
Perhaps he should.
But first, he’d put in a call to Lieutenants Barclay and Duffy, and tell them to initiate mapping of the corridor.
And to do it quietly.
“I dunno, Data,” La Forge sighed, crouching over a scooter pod and raising his voice slightly so the portable Fandrean comm unit on the floor would catch his words. “I can understand why they installed these tech dampers, but it seems to me that they cause more problems than they solve.”
“If that were truly the case, then surely they would have removed the dampers by now.”
Data’s voice came through with its naivete intact; in the background, La Forge heard enough murmur and movement to deduce that Data was on watch. No wonder La Forge was tired … from the Enterprise clock to the Fandrean clock with twelve hours of tight shuttle navigation in between. They’d arrived in the wee hours of the morning, and he’d managed to grab an hour or two of sleep in a museum lounge after the reception when he discovered that his guest quarters had not yet been assigned—only to rise early with the departure of the Rahjah.
And now it was late again, and he was staring stupidly at the shield-generating assembly mounted at the back of the scooter pod trying to imagine how he could adapt it to protect the shuttle engines.
Two of them. It would take two of them, at least.
“Geordi?”
“Sorry, Data.” La Forge looked up at the wall speaker, too used to working with viewscreens. “Just trying to tackle some decisions here… but no, they might well hang on to the dampers despite the trouble they cause. You’ve got to look at it from the human point of view. Or maybe the Fandrean point of view, but they’re not so very different from us.”
“I am afraid I do not follow your line of thought.”
La Forge selected a tool, tried it for size, adjusted it. “A project like this, it’s a big one. Has lots of people
who want it—and people who don’t want it. Obviously, the people who wanted it came out on top. And they’re not about to admit it has problems.”
“But the force field and technology damping combination has problems whether they admit it or not.” Data’s disembodied voice provided La Forge with a clear inner image of his puzzled expression. He smiled.
“That it does … but as long as no one admits it, they don’t have to do anything about it. And—here’s the important thing—if they had to do something about it, they’d be in a very, very embarrassing situation with the people who didn’t want it in the first place.”
“Ah. They have to eat crow. Do they have an available alternative to the force field
“Only tight orbital patrolling. And someone could still get in. It wouldn’t take many men, armed with phasers, to decimate the population of the preserve.” La Forge dismounted one shield generator, and started on the second. “Besides, orbital patrolling is aggressive, and the possibility of having to act while on patrol is threatening to the Fandreans. The shield is a passive device. It suits them better.”
“I see,” Data said, although clearly he did not.
“And to be fair, I suppose it’s not causing them half as many problems as it’s causing us.”
“Enough so they asked for your help. Passing the buck, so to speak.”
La Forge gave the air a brief, puzzled glance while he digested that one, and then nodded. Close enough.
But he still had two problems to solve. Two big problems. He clamped an antigrav handler onto one of the generators and moved it to the waiting sled—thank goodness both items were standard equipment for a cargo shuttle,