Ghost Ship Part 2

"We're firing into its atmosphere to get feedback readings. Even though its core is unignited, the planet is putting out three times the energy it should, mostly in long-wave radiation. We have to be on alert in case of shock waves or gravitational recoil-"

"Data," Riker snapped, wis.h.i.+ng there was an off switch. He silenced the android with a sandpaper look, then turned back to Troi. "I should've told the computer to bypa.s.s standard procedure and not call you up here. It's my fault."

She put out her hand in what began as an appeasing gesture, but as she spoke it turned into the kind of move a woman makes when she wants to steady herself. "No ... it isn't your fault...."

The captain floated in at Riker's left. "What's bothering you, Counselor?" he asked, gently but with an edge of impatience.

Her kohled eyes narrowed beneath those drawn brows. "I heard something ... in my mind ... "

"Can you describe it?" Riker asked. A twinge ran up his spine. Her muted telepathic talents always made him nervous. It wasn't exactly disbelief, because no one could dispute the existence of Betazoid mental traits, but it was a kind of distrust.

She backed up a step. "I'm sorry ... " She blinked, took a deep breath, and pretended to recover. "Captain, I'm sorry for the interruption. I didn't mean to disturb your tests. Please excuse me."

Before either of the men could speak, she made a quick and nervous exit.

Riker stared at the lift doors. "I've never seen her act that way," he murmured.

Data rose and came a few steps toward the ramp. "Is Counselor Troi ill?"

"It's something else," Riker decided quietly, more to himself than to Data.

"She behaved abnormally."

Now he drew his eyes from the lift and struck Data with a look that would have bruised had it been a Ghost s.h.i.+p blow. "I don't think you're anyone to judge," he barked.

Picard tilted his shoulders as he turned, saying, "Permission to leave the bridge, Number One. Temporarily."

"Thank you, sir," Riker said. "I won't be long." He had to restrain himself or he would actually have bounded for the lift. He cast one more acid glare at Data before leaving the bridge.

Picard smoothed the moment with a calm extension of the science tests. "Continue phaser bursts at regular intervals."

Data drew himself away from the stinging, confusing reaction Riker had given him and settled into his usual station at OPS on the forward deck. "Science stations are receiving continual information from the planetary core now, Captain." He lowered his voice as he had often heard humans do, and to LaForge said, "Commander Riker is annoyed with me."

LaForge shrugged. He glanced at the android, but saw not what human eyes would see. The android's bodily heat was unevenly distributed throughout the high-tech body, a body far denser than that of a human body of equal volume. The sections of infrared were localized into hot spots, more defined than the infrared blobs in a human body, and LaForge could easily discern the places where organic material was fitted in to intricate mechanics. Data gave off an electromagnetic aura, but he wasn't exactly a toaster oven.

"You could try being a little less stiff," LaForge suggested. "Learn some slang or something."

Data's lips flattened. "Slang. Colloquial jargon, nonstandard idioms, street talk ... it's often inaccurate. I have tried to incorporate that speech into my language use, but it does not seem to flow."

"That's because you use it as though it still has quotation marks around it. You use individual words instead of the whole meaning of the phrase. You've got to try to use slang more casually."

"What purpose does it actually serve?"

LaForge leaned toward him and delicately said, "It makes you approachable. Give it a swing."

As his lips silently traced that last word, a perplexed expression overtook Data's features. Unlike the times when he worked too hard at his expressions and ended up looking like a vaudeville clown, these moments made him look much more human than any he could force, these moments when unexpected emotion simply popped up on his face. "Swing ... a child's toy, a sweeping maneuver-oh! An effort. A try. Yes, swing. I'll swing. Computer, show me all available dictionary and dialect banks on Earth slang, rapid feed."

The computer came to life on the panel before him and its soft feminine voice, in a delivery much more at ease than Data's own, asked, "What era's slang would you like, and what language?"

Geordi LaForge settled back into his lounge and mumbled, "I always thought you needed a hobby."

Abruptly there was a sound on the quarterdeck, something akin to a growl, but as quickly it was gone and replaced by the resonant ba.s.s of Lieutenant Worf as he stared at his monitor.

"Not possible!"

Captain Picard drew his attention away from the blue giant and approached his own command chair, behind which the horseshoe rail arched upward and across the tactical console. Past that, Worf stood with his back to the bridge, staring at his status monitor as though his dissatisfaction could bore right through it. Of course, with a Klingon, that might very well be the case.

Pulling up the automatic extra measure of calmness he found himself using with Worf, Picard urged, "Lieutenant? Something?"

"I'm not sure I saw it," the Klingon spat.

But Security Chief Tasha Yar twisted her toned body without taking her hands off her tactical console and told him, "I saw it too."

"Saw what?" Picard demanded.

"An energy pulse, Captain." The girl pushed back a lock of her boy-cropped blond hair. "A huge one. Across the entire solar system."

Only one step carried Worf all the way forward to Tasha's side. "Very sharp and powerful, sir, a refractive scan. Like an instant sensor sweep."

"It was too quick-fire for sensors," Tasha shot back.

"Then what?" Worf boomed. "There's no trace of it now."

Picard used their argument to cloak his movement up the ramp to tactical, where he peered over the controls. There was nothing showing. "Could it have been an aberration? Feedback from our experiments?"

"Sir, it came from outside the solar system," Tasha said, her throat tightening around her voice as it always did when she let herself get excited.

"Track it."

"Nothing left to track," Worf said coa.r.s.ely.

Picard raised his head. "Don't use that tone with me, Lieutenant. There is no crisis yet."

Worf's big brown face didn't look in the least apologetic, given a particularly animalistic texture by the riblike cranium of his Klinzhai racial background, the strain which had emerged dominant during the last Klingon purge. He was imposing; in fact, he was downright terrifying, because the other crew members could always see that controlling himself was plain work for him and someday he just might lose the fight.

"Sorry, sir," he rumbled. "It was there during our last phaser burst, then it was gone." He placed his big hands on the tactical board and burned a glare through the forward screen. "I don't like it. It's like being watched."

Picard stood back on his heels for a contemplative moment, his handsome eyes wedging. "Could be another vessel. Let's make sure they don't miss us. Saying h.e.l.lo is part of our job. Put sensors on wide scan. Lieutenant Data, you handle broadcast of standard hailing frequency with greetings in all interstellar languages and codes as well as automatic universal translation."

"I'm hopping to it."

"Lieutenant LaForge, take us out of orbit. Disband further testing of the gas giant until we ascertain the trim of the solar system."

"Aye, sir. Disengaging orbital condition." LaForge pressed his fingers to the signal controls on the beautiful board at wrist level and just that easily drew the ma.s.sive stars.h.i.+p out of the gas giant's gravitational envelope. During that maneuver, while the s.h.i.+p was safely under control of the navigational computer, he took a moment to glance left to Data.

When he looked at the other crew members, he saw the layerings of infrared that he could intensify as needed, he saw blood running through arteries, arterioles, capillaries, and so on, but he saw them better than a computer would because his brain acted as interpreter and he was more intuitive than any computer. Over that infrared image, like a nylon stocking drawn over a mannequin, he saw skin and a hazy s.h.i.+ne of fine skin hairs. The mannequin appeared to be lighted from within, and had a slight glow.

But Data-Data was a work of art. Geordi alone could see the exotic materials, brilliantly blended, the different levels of heat and coolness, the different densities where metal met synthetic, where synthetic met organism, and where all meshed. He saw the density of Data's body, and all the million tiny electrical impulses that kept him working and ran like swarms of insects through his body when he worked a little harder or concentrated a little more or called up more strength. But it wasn't like looking at the computer stations before them or the mechanism behind the wall at the coffee/food dispenser. Not at all. Those were machines.

LaForge sometimes got the feeling that people forgot he could hear too. He had listened to Riker's tone just before the first officer left the bridge. He had heard the flutter in Data's voice when he mentioned that Riker wasn't too pleased with him. Data was mechanical, but to Geordi LaForge he was no machine.

Geordi allowed himself an indulgent gaze at Data's face as the android glowed with concentration. He saw the structure of synthetic facial bone, tiny blood-fed fibrous ligaments attached to impulse interpreters, stockinged by the cool involucrum that was his skin. Geordi saw a handsome face, unafraid of its own features, a face that could show many feelings, from courage to calculation, confusion to compa.s.sion, to those sensitive enough to see its minute changes. And Data's eyes, no matter their brimstone cast, were unfailingly gentle.

Geordi shook his head and uttered, "Machine, my a.s.s."

Picard looked up. "Lieutenant?"

"Secure distance, sir."

"Speak up, then."

"Yes, sir."

The door's buzzer sounded clearly, but Troi didn't respond to it. Once again lights played across her face, but not the lights of yellow alert. She sat at her private desk, watching a holograph simulate the motion of a patch of blue ocean water. At the ends of the foot-wide holograph, the ocean faded and became table. Dead center on the patch of churning water was a three-dimensional image of an old military vessel. It was wedge-shaped, piled high with steel-gray metal mountings that made no sense to her. On the screen at her wrist came the simple description: First iron screw steams.h.i.+p, S.S. Great Britain.

She frowned and tapped the continue b.u.t.ton. The 3-D image sucked in on itself as though imploded, twisted around a little, and reanimated into something utterly different, something bigger, flatter, clunkier, chugging across her table. The dark band of screen beneath it said: Tanker, Edmund Fitzgerald, lost with all hands, Lake Superior, Michigan, United States, Earth 1975.

Troi hit the b.u.t.ton almost angrily. Those weren't right. They weren't right. A new image came almost instantly, a big black, white, and red s.h.i.+p, very elegant and slim this time, obviously meant to carry people. People-that was right. She looked at the display band. Luxury liner Queen Elizabeth II, Cunard Line, Earth.

No ... no ... Troi's mulberry-tinted lips lost their perfect shape. No. Her finger moved again.

H.M.S. Dreadnought, battles.h.i.+p, Great Britain, Earth, 1906.

She leaned forward now as she recognized some element-the color, the demeanor of this s.h.i.+p ... closer. She tapped the b.u.t.ton again, this time saying, "This type of vessel."

"This is a naval defense/offense vessel which would be used during and after World War One," the computer courteously told her.

"Continue."

The holograph winked, and she was gazing at another s.h.i.+p of the same kind, but from a different angle as it crashed through the little round patch of sea. Its slate-gray bow rose and fell in the sea. The computer image turned as though Troi were circling it in an aircraft, to give her a complete look at it from all angles. It had a crude kind of grace about it, certainly a strength, but it had no lights at all, no colors like the stars.h.i.+p's sparkling yellow and white lights, its glowing reds, its vibrant electrical blues.

Aegis cruiser, built by SYSCON for the U.S. Navy, Earth, 1988.

The door buzzed again.

"Oh-yes; come in."

She let the old-style s.h.i.+p pierce its way through the tiny sea in front of her as she looked up to see Will Riker stride in. As soon as the door opened, his eyes were already locked with hers. How long had he been waiting out there? She faintly remembered now that the buzzer had sounded once before.

"I was worried about you," he said. He settled into the other chair and leaned one elbow on the desk just short of the holograph. The bulky cruiser splashed toward him, and yet stayed right where it was. "I didn't know you were a history buff." He nodded at the Aegis. "That's nice."

Troi tilted her dark head. "I've never seen anything like this before."

So that was the end of the easy transition, Riker realized. Something in her tone told him her statement was more significant than it pretended to be.

"What happened?" he asked, no longer protecting her from her own behavior on the bridge.

She gave him an uncharacteristic shrug with one shoulder and shook her head, a self-conscious smile tugging at her lips. "Did you see what I did? I'm so embarra.s.sed. I've never mistaken a dream for reality before. I must really have looked funny. Did anyone laugh?"

"Laugh?" Riker said saucily. "You should've seen them. Captain Picard had to be wheeled off the bridge, Worf was-"

"Oh, you!" She swatted his nearest knee and chuckled at herself again.

"I wouldn't worry about it," Riker told her, lounging his big frame back in the chair. "Everybody does something like that sooner or later. The more stoic you are, the worse the goof-up seems."

"Am I stoic?" she asked, the smile broadening again.

"I don't know, Counselor," he said. "I don't remember the last time I looked at you and only saw the professional. I've got more flowery things to remember about you."

Troi pursed her lips, leaned forward, ignoring the holograph of the s.h.i.+p as it continued its nonvoyage, and propped her chin on one hand. "Tell me, Bill. Make me feel better."

"No fair. Figure it out for yourself. You of all people could do it."

Settling back, she said, "That's not very comforting for a person who just dashed onto the bridge in a frenzy."

Will Riker's bright eyes flashed before her impishly. "You want comfort? How's this? I was a.s.signed as second officer on a destroyer right after my promotion to lieutenant commander-about a thousand years ago, if memory serves. I got my a.s.signment at Starbase Eighteen, and keyed the coordinates to the new s.h.i.+p into the transporter, stepped on the pad, and boom, there I was. I strutted around being the almighty second officer, puffed up just like a souffle, and we were ten hours out of s.p.a.cedock before I figured out I had beamed myself onto the wrong departing s.h.i.+p."

"Oh, Bill! Oh, no ... "

"And the s.h.i.+p I'd landed on wasn't a destroyer, either. It was the U.S.S. Yorktown-an Excelsior-cla.s.s stars.h.i.+p, heading out on a two-year mission. Her captain made Picard seem like Francis of a.s.sisi. They'd already been delayed four days by diplomatic entanglements, and here's Second Officer Riker having to report to the real second officer."

Her hand was clapped over her mouth by now, and she parted her fingers enough to burble, "What did they do?"

He spread his hands. "What could they do? They turned the whole s.h.i.+p around, this huge s.h.i.+p, and they came all the way back through s.p.a.ce to rendezvous with the destroyer I was supposed to be on. So there was the destroyer, having to meet a stars.h.i.+p just to pick up its second officer, who was supposed to have reported in ten hours before."

"Oh, dear ... "

"So quit complaining."

"Is that a true story? You're not making it up to make me feel better?"

"Make it up? Deanna, n.o.body sane could make up anything that punis.h.i.+ng. It's like a practical joke somebody plays on a bridegroom on his wedding night, except I did it to myself." Shaking his head musingly, he added, "I could never quite look at a transporter platform the same way again. I always wonder if I'm going to end up beaming into somebody's shower by mistake. And the worst was yet to come. Two years later, I really was a.s.signed as Yorktown's second officer and I had to report to that captain again!"

She giggled, bringing an unlikely girlishness to her demeanor. "Did he remember?"

"Remember? First thing he asked was if I'd been hiding in the hold all this time."

Their laughter entwined and filled the dim room, chasing away the discomfort.

As Riker watched her custodially, he noticed she had picked up on his feelings and was actually doing the blus.h.i.+ng for him. At first he was tempted to draw back within himself, but he knew it didn't matter. With Deanna, holding back showed up like a beacon. There was no point. He wished he could be this relaxed with the other members of the crew.

They sat together, grinning at each other, warm in their mutual memories and the privacy of a relations.h.i.+p and a past they had allowed no one else on board to see. It was like starting fresh, with a whole new life, with their attraction to each other getting a second chance, because no one else knew. No one else on the entire s.h.i.+p knew.

Breaking his gaze at her gentle face, Riker looked at the unlikely holograph beside him and asked, "You had a nightmare?"

Her expression made his smile fall away. He forced himself not to say more, to give her a chance to answer in her own time, while he indulged in the presence of her troubled onyx eyes.

"A nightmare," she murmured. "But in this nightmare I could feel the emotions of the strangers in it. It was nothing I recognize ... sharp images of things I know nothing about. Names I've never heard."