Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [47]
“Get that fire started,” Akarr said, ignoring the fact that Riker was already assembling the under and kindling, had placed the flat button on the ground beneath it, and was prepared to pull its activating tab. “Everyone else—take a point. Use the rocks and spears, and save the tranks!”
Had they found time to make spears and gather rocks? Riker hoped it was so, but didn’t look away from his task, flinching as the tablet flared to life with intense heat and light, and wincing at the strong sizzle of the larger kindling. If it was that wet, it might well take two tablets to establish a self-sustaining fire.
One of the Tsorans shouted; Riker didn’t bother to check who, though he could tell why, even with ruined night vision. The rush of a sculper, its soft cluttering laugh of a retreat—sounds he already knew by heart. He couldn’t help the others now; he kept his focus on the fire. Adding small branches to the small tablet-inspired inferno as fast as he could, daring to try a larger branch … he hesitated, ready to snatch it away if the fire dimmed, all too aware of the brief skirmish taking place off to the side.
But the tablet fueled the flames, and by the time it died, they had a large, healthy fire blazing before the cave-enough of a fire to spook the naive sculper… for now.
And no one else had been hurt.
For now.
“Akarr!” Takan shouted from the other side of the fire. “It returns!”
“No, over here!” Rakal cried, his warning harsh with under-purr.
In front of Riker, something bounded in close to the fire, bouncing back out again before his recovering night vision could quite see what it was. Not that it mattered; he didn’t need to see it to know exactly what had happened. The sculper was back… and he’d brought his friends. Riker picked up his newly made club in one hand, and adjusted his grip on the bat’leth in the other.
It was going to be a long night.
“What is the scuttlebutt?” Data asked over the comm link, his tone just slightly off normal. La Forge stopped his work at the Fandrean communication board for a mental double take on the words, then gave his head a slight shake and returned the greater part of his attention to his work—not that he had much attention to give it. The normal dull ache of the VISOR’s interface at his temples had sharpened into a true headache, a nagging discomfort that generated the frequent impulse to remove the device. As tired as he was, one of these times he was going to have the thing off his face before he even realized what he’d done.
“I said—”
“I heard you, Data. It’s the middle of the night here, everyone else is asleep, and I keep staring at this communications board, waiting for a solution to pop into my head. Meanwhile, Worf is off in the Legacy somewhere,
and we have no idea if he’s had any luck finding Commander Riker’s shuttle, or even if he’s run into trouble himself.”
“Groovy,” Data said. La Forge’s link to the Enterprise, his link to anything outside of this museum, and he’d said groovy.
This time, La Forge did stop work, carefully replacing the spanning micro flux calibrator in its special protective tool case. “Not groovy, Data. Not groovy at all.”
“I misapplied the word? I meant to indicate support and approval of your work there.”
“Well, you didn’t.” La Forge had no trouble visualizing Data’s slightly puzzled response, the tilt of his head as he searched for more information about the subject. “This isn’t the first time you’ve used an unusual phrase. Are you off on another slang kick?”
“Not precisely. I am running an experiment. After so many of the officers in the briefing indicated a familiarity with The Wizard of Oz, I thought I would see how many other twentieth-century phrases and allusions people would respond to. I am attempting to use them casually, in the course of a conversation. It is not my intent that the phrases be noticed for themselves, but to see if the participants in