Vale smiled, touched by his sincerity. How very Zen he is,she thought. Not to mention attractive and single.Perhaps when they weren’t preoccupied with an urgent mission she could arrange to spend some time with him. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone on a date.
She forced the thought aside. Jaza wasn’t just a colleague—he was a subordinate. Dating him would therefore be absolutely inappropriate.
As inappropriate as marrying him?asked a peevish voice in the back of her head—the same voice that had raised her initial objections to Captain Riker’s decision to make his wife a member of his senior staff.
She noticed then that Jaza was staring at her curiously. Had he been having any of the same thoughts?
Before the awkwardly silent moment could stretch further, the computer let out a staccato series of beeps. New blocks of text and graphics began scrolling in columns onto Jaza’s monitor.
“Hmm, this is odd,” he said, frowning as he studied the emerging data. “Our long-range scans are picking up some kind of spatial anomaly. It appears to be located inside Romulan space only a few hours away from Romulus itself at high warp.”
“What kind of spatial anomaly?” Vale asked, resisting the urge to immediately tap the combadge on her chest and call the captain to the bridge. It was the kind of move she would have made without hesitation while serving as security chief aboard the Enterprise.But she was in command in Riker’s absence, and he was probably on his way up to check in with the newly arrived alpha shift anyhow.
“Readings are all over the place right now,” Jaza said. “I’m picking up spatial and gravimetric distortions. Also intermittent signatures of duranium, tritanium, and polyduranium.”
Vale tensed. “Hull metals. Ship debris?”
“Possibly.” Jaza shrugged. “There’s too much spatial distortion right now for me to say for certain. I’ll try to boost the sensor net’s resolution further, but I’m not sure how much more I’ll be able to squeeze out of it. It’s too bad the anomaly doesn’t lie directly along our present heading.” He resumed working over his console, intent on his stream of scrolling data. On Jaza’s monitor, a false-color image of the anomaly began to take shape between the columns of numbers. It was an irregularly shaped green-and-orange cloud that reminded her of an angry lobster.
“Keep me apprised,” Vale said. Something about the anomaly’s appearance nudged at the back of her mind, giving her a vague feeling of unease.
Spatial anomalies and starships never seem to be a good mix,she thought, considering the hull metals Jaza had detected. She found she was unable to think of any pleasant, happy ways they might have gotten there.
Leaving Jaza to his work, Vale stepped down from the science station and took a seat in the command chair. Her eyes trained on the wide forward viewscreen, she studied the void that lay between Titanand Romulus, grateful for the sight of its countless—and mercifully nonanomalous—stars.
“I’m certain he didn’t mean anything by it, Will,” Troi said in a hushed tone. She was nearly overwhelmed by his intense feelings of frustration.
“I wish I could believe that, Deanna,” Will said just as quietly, his brows rising like thunderheads as he walked alongside her down the corridor. “But he’s been critiquing my command style since the moment he came aboard.”
Troi put her hand up to his arm, stopping him. “No, Will,” she said once she was satisfied that they were alone in the curved passage. “I’m certainhe didn’t mean anything by it. You have to grant that I can read into these things a bit more reliably than you can.”
She could hardly wait for this element of their first mission to be over with. This morning, uninvited, Admiral Akaar—all spit-and-polish, as usual—had joined them for breakfast in the mess hall. His unsolicited criticism of Titan’soff-duty casual clothing policy had rankled Will, leading to their hasty departure after the meal.
Troi lowered her voice. “Look, Will, I’m not wild about his presence here either, and neither is Christine. And I know how he feels about your placing me in your command crew. But until the conclusion of this mission— yourmission—you need to ignore his slights and to focus. It’s not worth the frustration to dwell on this.”
Will let out a long breath through his nose, his puffed-up chest and shoulders deflating a bit. His expression softened as well, and he appeared to be about to say something when an odd gurgling noise came from the doorway just ahead of them down the corridor.
The door slid open, and the gurgle became louder as Ensign Aili Lavena stepped out, drops of water from her boots spattering the carpet in the corridor. She was attired in her modified uniform, which included the hooded hydration suit that kept her skin from drying out in Titan’s standard M-class environment areas. The door to her quarters closed behind her, once again muffling the aqueous background noises coming from within.
Lavena looked down the corridor and saw Will and Troi standing there. “Good morning, Captain. Counselor.” Her voice sounded slightly muted behind the transparent rebreather mask that loosely covered her face. A small cloud of vapor rose around its edges as she spoke. “I hope the waterlock system didn’t startle you. Some of the landlubbers seem to find it a little disturbing.”
Troi recalled having seen the engineers making the retrofits that had enabled the Selkie conn officer to enter and exit her nonstandard-environment quarters. But neither she nor Will had actually heard Lavena’s customized ingress/egress system in operation before. It certainly stood to reason that the tons of Pacifican seawater the system had to restrain wouldn’t be completely unobtrusive. It sounded disconcertingly like the flushing of a humanoid commode.
“Not at all,” the captain said. “We were just having…” He paused momentarily, and Troi noticed a peculiar if fleeting emotional undercurrent that almost broke the surface before vanishing utterly.
“We were just having a conversation,” he said, his composure once again rock solid.
“Very good, sir,” Lavena said, her head cocked to one side. “I’ll see you both on the bridge.” As the ensign turned and walked away, Troi glimpsed a transitory emotional highlight coming from her as well.
Though short-lived, it was not unlike the one Will had just quashed.
Will began walking forward again, but Troi placed a hand on his arm, holding him in place. Once Lavena had rounded a bend in the corridor, she turned him toward her.
“What was thatabout?” she said, keeping her voice low even though no one else was within earshot.
He surprised her by actually blushing slightly. “Leave it alone, Deanna. It’s nothing.”
She smiled, her eyes narrowing involuntarily. “It’s notnothing. I felt something coming from both of you.” The sentiment she had barely glimpsed in them both was finally beginning to make sense to her. “It was almost… carnal,for lack of a better word.”
“Deanna,” Will said, his voice deepening, imploring. He was clearly becoming intensely uncomfortable.
No wonder Pacifica was always such a popular shore-leave destination for dashing, unattached young Starfleet officers,she thought. Grinning, she slugged her husband playfully on the shoulder. “You dog!You and Lavena on Pacifica?”
Will resumed moving forward down the corridor, his blush intensifying and spreading to his ears. “It was a long time ago, Deanna,” he said in a near-whisper. “Just once, and right out of the Academy. And I only just nowrecognized her.”