Unification - Jeri Taylor [8]
A silence hung in the air. Picard apparently decided to move away from that charged subject. “Would Sarek have any idea why Spock might have left?” he asked.
And if it were anyone else, she might never have become so personal, so revealing. But talking with this man pulled feelings out of her. “If you could see him as I do… wasting in bed… whispering to himself…” Perrin looked at Picard’s kindly face and found it easier to keep going. “He wants to see his son, to heal any rifts that still remain, before he dies. But now it may be too late.”
Her voice broke and she turned away, not wanting to reveal the extent of her anguish. And yet, it felt a little better, now, having said even that much to Picard. She heard his compassionate voice behind her and knew he had been sobered by her distress. “Perrin… would you allow me to see Sarek?” She turned back to him, assailed by a welter of uncertainties. Did Picard have any idea what he was asking? Could he know how fervently she had protected Sarek from outside eyes? How could she add to her husband’s humiliation by allowing him to be viewed by others? And yet…
“If it were anyone else, I would never permit it.” She stepped forward, studied his eyes. “But you are a part of him, and he of you.”
She turned away, her decision made.
Riker was grumpy.
He stood with Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge in Cargo Bay Two, watching the activity before him, annoyance curling every nerve ending in his body. Spread out before them on the floor of the huge bay were sections of metal—big ones, small ones, damaged, immaculate, irregular, symmetrical—a hodge-podge of shards and chunks and fragments. It was a metal mess.
“The Vulcans can’t figure out what these fragments are,” he told Geordi, “but they’ve identified the metal as a dentarium alloy.”
“That pretty well indicates that they’re Vulcan,” replied Geordi. “And dentarium also means that whatever this was, it was designed for use in space.”
The two surveyed the tangle of metal for a moment. Geordi wore a metallic visor over his eyes; it shone in bright contrast to his ebony skin. Blind from birth, Geordi had undergone an operation in his childhood, which allowed him to “see” through the visor that was directly connected to his visual cortex. “From the look of the damage,” he offered, “it must’re been a high-speed impact.”
Riker acknowledged the observation. “A Ferengi cargo shuttle that went down in the Hanoiin asteroid belt. The debris was spread over a hundred square kilometers.” None of the Ferengi had survived, of course, or they might not be having to go through this time-consuming procedure. Now all they had was this heap of metal and the intriguing fact that it had been packed in crates marked as medical supplies.
Maybe those were the only crates the Ferengi had on hand at the time, thought Riker, whose interest in this whole affair was waning. He had decided that in his next life he would certainly not become an archaeolo-gist. He simply didn’t have the patience for this kind of slow, detailed reconstruction. If there were answers, he wanted them now. Restless.
Forcing himself to concentrate, he walked along the rows of metal chunks that Geordi and his crew had laid out. He picked up part of a damaged container; Geordi picked up a fragment and played his tricorder over it.
“Could it be a weapons array?” he asked. ú
“That was my first thought,” admitted Riker. “But the Vulcans don’t have any record of stolen weapons. Or stolen parts, for that matter. Or stolen anything.”
Geordi shook his head as his visored eyes roamed over the vast array of mangled metal parts. “This is going to be like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle— when you don’t know what the picture is supposed to be.” Riker nodded, trying to find a way