Unification - Jeri Taylor [28]
“I’d appreciate that,” the beard said.
“Helmsman,” said Dokachin with a touch of command in his voice, “lay in a heading one-four-one by
two-zero-eight. Ahead slow, two hundred kph.”
They’d realize he knew his way around ships before he
was done. Knew his way around before most of them
had been born, probably.
He noted that the helmsman didn’t act on the command until the beard had nodded to him. That was irritating for an instant, until the beautiful wom-an fastened these melting black eyes on him and said, in her haunting voice, “It must be so difficult to keep track of all these ships. How ever do you do it?”
Dokachin smiled at her. He’d pegged her right away as a woman of intelligent curiosity. She would appreciate the near genius of his classification procedure, with its dozens of systems and subsystems. His peers found it so complex and intricate that they had trouble following it, but Klim was sure that this woman would not only grasp it but value its elaborate mysteries.
“Well,” he said, settling himself next to her, “the first problem is the initial gross assessment. Now, you may think that’s a simple task, but that’s where people get into trouble right at the start.”
The woman nodded, and Klim knew he had her riveted.
Riker gazed at the viewscreen as they navigated their way toward the T’Pau. They moved at a cautious pace through the immense graveyard of ships, skirting their way carefully through the ghostly flotsam. Occasionally Riker would recognize a name or a design; once Worf announced that they were passing the Ghandi, a legendary ship whose exploits Riker had studied at the Academy, and whose last explorations he had chronicled in a junior thesis. He was stunned to see the ship whose crew he had described in intimate detail, floating immobilized and impotent in space, a burned-out shell that had been the victim of violence while on a nonviolent mission, as though its name had determined its fate. He briefly held his hand over his heart as they passed by, in tribute.
To his rear, he heard the steady, droning tones of Klim Dokachin, describing to Deanna in crushing detail his record-keeping mechanism. Riker briefly tuned in.
“… and then you have to make subcategories according to tonnage. Some people like to classify by propulsion system, but I find that can lead to confusion. A galaxy-class ship like this one, for instance, employs a fifth-phase reactor. But you might find that in a scout ship, too. It gets messy.”
“I can see that,” murmured Troi, and Riker smiled to himself. Her eyes must be glazing over by now.
“Commander,” interjected Worf’s brusque voice, “we are approaching the designated coordinates.”
“On screen,” said Riker, and everyone turned expectantly to see the Vulcan ship. What they saw was the starfield—empty space.
Klim Dokachin’s jaw dropped when he found himself staring at section eighteen-gamma-twelve and there was no ship in sight. One moment he had held the beautiful woman enraptured with his discourse on the surplus depot, now he was staring at what seemed to be proof that his immaculate record-keeping sys-tem was faulty.
He felt the others looking at him, puzzled, as he stepped toward the screen. “Where is it?” he breathed, staring at the starfield as though he could will the Vulcan ship to appear. “What happened to it?” Check the coordinates, his mind told him, and he stepped to the console, tapped carefully. Glancing over his shoulder he found the ship had not magically appeared. “These are the correct coordinates,” he found himself saying apologetically.
The beard spoke. “The T’Pau is missing?”
“The T’Pau,” began Klim intently—and then he looked up at the starfield, and back at the array of faces looking expectantly at him—”is missing,” he intoned.
The beard’s eyes narrowed. “How could a ship disappear from your depot?”
Klim began to feel chastened. His professional integrity was being questioned. He drew a deep breath and turned back to the console. He would not crumble before