Текст книги "Orion's Hounds "

Автор книги: Christopher Bennett

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Praise for

Christopher L. Bennett’s

Star Trek: Ex Machina

“Easily one of the best [ Star Trek] novels in print, Ex Machinais the proverbial must-read…. Bennett has woven multiple and often conflicting continuity threads in a tour de force that tells a fascinating story with flair, imagination, and weight.”

–Megan O’Neill, TV ZONE

“Attention to scientific detail is at the forefront of Bennett’s tome, as he carefully integrates scientific reality into the framework of the tale…. He’s got a solid grasp on characterization all the way throughout Ex Machina,and no one escapes his watchful eye or is considered insignificant. That’s the mark of a great writer, one who makes you care about all of the people in a story, and this is one of Bennett’s many strengths.”

–Bill Williams, TrekWeb.com

“Thought-provoking stories are one of the hallmarks of Star Trek,and stories rarely get more thought provoking than Ex Machina.…What Christopher L. Bennett has done with Ex Machinais to meld together…a story [that] cannot help but resonate with anyone who has ever read a history book or a newspaper.”

–Jackie Bundy, TrekNation.com

“Bennett has produced a glorious debut in full-length novel form…. This promising new author clearly has a lot of…character– and world-building skill. Highly recommended.”

–Daniel Berry, trekreviews.bravehost.com

“The plotting and pacing are unflaggingly excellent…. Ex Machinais one of the best of the best in Pocket’s long line of Trekfiction, launching Bennett to an instant place at the top of the writers’ pantheon.”

–Kilian Melloy, wigglefish.com

An OriginalPublication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of

Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 1-4165-1034-6

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Cover art by Cliff Nielson; background image courtesy of NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STcI), and HEIC.

Cover design by John Vairo, Jr.

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com/st

http://www.startrek.com

To Shadow and Natasha,

predators extraordinaire,

who have saved me

from many menacing pieces of string

and wrapping paper.

Sorry about the “Hounds” thing.

Acknowledgments

I’ll try to keep it shorter this time…. Thanks first to Marco Palmieri for inviting me to come aboard Titan,and to Andy Mangels and Mike Martin for launching it on its way. Thanks also to the various authors whose characters, creatures and ideas I’ve built upon here, including but not limited to Laurence V. Conley, D. C. Fontana, Maurice Hurley, Robert Lewin, Gene Roddenberry and Jeri Taylor from televised Trek and Keith R.A. DeCandido, Robert Greenberger, David Mack, the aforementioned Martin & Mangels, and John Vornholt from the print side.

For scientific and sociological concepts, I owe inspiration to Thomas J. Barfield, Freeman Dyson, Fred Hoyle, Larry Niven, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, among others. Alan Dean Foster also warrants a nod. Thanks to Nigel Henbest and Heather Couper, whose book The Guide to the Galaxyhas provided much insight into the geography of the real Milky Way, and Geoffrey Mandel, whose book Star Trek Star Chartshas done the same for the fictitious one. And thanks to the makers of the open-source Celestia astronomy simulator, which not only served as a reference but inspired my descriptions of Titan’s stellar cartography lab.

My research was assisted by too many Web sites to acknowledge, so I’ll just thank the whole darn Internet and the folks at Google in particular. Thanks also to the usual suspects at the TrekBBS, Psi Phi, and Ex Isle for technical assistance.

And thanks to Dennis McCarthy for making the star-jellies sing.

Historian’s Note

This tale unfolds from late February to late March, 2380 (Old Calendar).

Part One

Giants in the Sky

Beneath the sky’s triumphal arch

This music sounded like a march,

And with its chorus seemed to be

Preluding some great tragedy….

Begirt with many a blazing star,

Stood the great giant Algebar,

Orion, hunter of the beast!

His sword hung gleaming by his side,

And, on his arm, the lion’s hide

Scattered across the midnight air

The golden radiance of its hair.

–“The Occultation of Orion,”

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Prologue

W e swim through space, the void’s chill brisk against our flesh. We huddle closer, closer, basking in each other’s warm glow, in the caress of each other’s tendrils [love/ kinship/let’s play!]. Distant starwarmth beckons from ahead, drawing us toward it [hunger/hope]. Shall we dive beneath space, fold the starpull currents about our bodies to reach it faster? No, our need is not yet great; it is enough to swim [patience/prudence/relax and savor existence!].

Now a cloud of dust impinges, tiny specks of [coldstuff/deadstuff] flaring into briefest life as heat and vapor against our hides [tickles/fizzes!]. We drink the tiny bursts of lifewarmth, [soothing/heightening] our hunger ever so slightly. We spread our tendrils wide, stretching them longer, thinner, growing membranes between them to catch more coldstuff [need/exercise/sheer joy of changing!].

A ripple sensed from below space [curiosity/caution…familiarity!]—more kin are coming! Few, but welcome. They breach the surface, the lifewarmth and starpull eddies of their emergence washing over us, slaking our thirst, and we cry out to them in [greeting to strangers/joy at reunion!].

But wait—something is wrong [puzzlement/can we help?]. They do not return our calls. They are hardened, sheathed for defense! Are they a threat [defend/flee]? No [disbelief/compassion], they are our own, they must need our help! We cry to them [sympathy/concern], but they are still. No, now they strike out [danger!/where?]—wait, no, they strike at us! This cannot…[disbelief/agony] Their stings pierce our hides, burning us. Our breath and fluidice bleed out into the void. Our siblings’ minds cry out to us, deafening us, then fading to silence. We are dying! [loss/anguish/betrayal/Why?] No time to ask. No time to focus, to armor ourselves, we must flee! [panic/ exposed/alone!] We need help! We cry out for other minds [terror/pleading] Someone, anyone! [—who– ]Barely felt [real/imagined?]—we cry out again! [—who– ]Yes! Help us! [—who are you?– /come/desperation/ grief/ rage/—no—get out —/pain/despair/—get out of my mind– /dread/dying/why?/NO!/—NO!!– ]

Chapter One

U.S.S. TITAN,STARDATE 57137.8

“No!!”

Deanna Troi bolted upright in bed. For a moment she felt adrift in the dark, in a void whose emptiness chilled her bare flesh. She wasn’t sure where she was, or even who she was. She felt terrible fear, but did not know why.

But then she felt hisarms embracing her, bringing her home. Will. Her imzadi.Her husband. Her captain. Her anchor. When he touched her, she was never lost.

She relaxed against him, and they stayed that way for a precious moment. Then he spoke softly. “The nightmare again?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “The same sense of…intrusion…yet different. Not as malevolent.” Talking about the recurring nightmare brought unwelcome flashes of memory. It had been over three months since Shinzon of Remus and his viceroy Vkruk had raped her, using Vkruk’s telepathy to place themselves in her mind while she made love with Will; yet although the nightmares came less frequently of late, her memory of the event remained as vivid as ever, and she knew it always would. What made it worse was that it had been her second telepathic sexual assault, the first being at the hands of the Ullian historian Jev nearly a dozen years ago. He too had usurped Will Riker’s place in her perceptions, forcing her to relive an erotic memory which he twisted into a violation. It was a testament to Deanna’s love and faith in Will that she was still able to take joy and comfort from his touch today.

Sometimes it took a little work, though. Reliving those memories intensified the fight-or-flight impulse the dream had triggered, and suddenly she felt a desperate need for personal space. She clambered out of bed and moved to the windows, not stopping to don a gown first. Over the past few months, Will had grown accustomed to her occasional need not to be touched, so he didn’t follow. “Not as malevolent?” he asked, his voice gentle. “You seemed pretty scared.”

Deanna stared out at the stars, gathering her thoughts. “I don’t remember. It was as though…something else’s fear was being forced into me.”

“Something? Not someone?”

“It felt very alien. Yet…somehow distantly familiar.” She shook her head, giving a slight, nervous chuckle. “Never mind. It was just a dream. A bit of undigested chocolate.”

“You sure of that, Ebenezer?” She didn’t have to turn to see the smirk on his face. “You’ve been contacted through dreams before. Eyes in the dark,”he intoned in a spooky voice that made her laugh.

“Anything’s possible, I suppose, but there’s too little to go on.” She gazed out at the stars. “Something alien, but familiar…probably some symbol my brain pieced together, representing anxiety at the unknown. A natural enough response, considering our mission.”

She could feel his excitement at the mission that lay before them, and she shared it even without her empathy. Titanand her crew had been meant for pure exploration, but had been forced to defer that mission when Starfleet had assigned them to head a diplomatic task force to Romulus, assisting with the rebuilding efforts following Shinzon’s bloody coup and subsequent self-destruction. Right afterward, Titan’s aid in the search for a lost Romulan fleet had led to a fall down an extradimensional rabbit hole into the Small Magellanic Cloud, over 200,000 light-years from home. In theory, that had been an explorer’s dream come true, but dealing with the destruction caused by the Red King entity and the rescue of the Neyel from their disintegrating homeworld had left no chance for real exploration. And then it had been back to Starbase 185 for two weeks of repairs and debriefing, and another two weeks and change moving out beyond Federation space, past Beta Stromgren, past Kappa Velorum, and finally, last night, past the farthest benchmark laid by Olympiaon its Beta Quadrant survey eight years ago. From this point on, nobody knew what lay ahead.

It was not an unusual experience for an explorer, of course, and it was a welcome one; yet it naturally brought trepidation too, as any new undertaking did. Perhaps that was all there was behind her sense of alien-yet-familiar dread. Maybe it was heightened because from here on, they were completely on their own—no real-time contact with Starfleet Command, no starbases to offer rest and replenishment, no other starships able to reach them in a hurry. She had gotten a taste of that during their recent sojourn in the galaxy next door. But in an odd way there was something even more daunting about doing it on purpose.

She felt Will’s gentle skepticism, reminding her that she sometimes overanalyzed, an occupational hazard. “Probably,” he said aloud. “But keep a mental eye out, just in case.”

Now she did turn to him. “Aye, aye, Captain,” she said with an insouciant salute.

He looked her over, reminding her that she was thoroughly out of uniform. “Must be cold over by the windows. Wanna come back to bed?”

“No, thanks,” she replied after a moment. Somehow she didn’t feel chilled anymore; it must have been a relic of the dream. “I don’t think I could get back to sleep right away. Maybe I’ll go for a walk to clear my head.”

“All right, then.” She sensed the disappointment that he quickly reined in. She knew he regretted that he couldn’t always be the one to make her feel better, to take care of her. But she also knew he understood how it was for her. Not long before her ordeal with Shinzon, Will had suffered his own ordeal, held hostage and tortured by the dictator Kinchawn of Tezwa. He still had his own occasional nightmares, and though he’d cherished her comfort and support, still there were times that he needed to deal with them on his own. After all, in the wake of being victimized, degraded and depersonalized, it was healthy to reassert one’s independence, to find one’s own inner strength.

Deanna went to the closet, slipped on a light blue wrap and a pair of sandals, and headed out the door. She sent a light mental caress Will’s way, only to find that he’d already drifted off again. Still, his serenity in slumber was a pleasant sendoff.

Strolling the corridors of Titanfelt somewhat like an exploration in itself. It was still a fairly new environment to her—a new class of ship, a new set of crewmates. More importantly, that crew was the most diverse one in Starfleet’s history, including many species Deanna had never personally met before. The Federation had always striven for diversity in principle, but in practice had tended toward fairly segregated crews. It wasn’t a formal policy; people generally just preferred to work among those with similar customs, outlooks, and environmental needs. Even in the absence of outright prejudice, segregation tended to result from simple complacency, the unresisted impulse to seek the familiar. So maintaining true equality took conscious effort, and sometimes the effort fell prey to other priorities, or to simple neglect. There had been occasional attempts to challenge that status quo, most notably Willard Decker’s Enterpriseexperiment of a century before. But reconciling the needs and attitudes of radically different species posed many challenges, and with the loss of Decker on his crew’s maiden voyage, some of the impetus for greater diversity had been lost. The technology for balancing so many species’ environmental and medical needs had been less advanced then as well. So over the ensuing years, things had settled back into a less challenging status quo. Certainly some progress had been made; during Deanna’s tenure on the Enterprise-D and -E, over a dozen species had been represented among the crew. However, it was still fairly unusual for humanoids and nonhumanoids to crew together routinely.

The minds behind Titan’s mission had wanted to change that. This new generation of Luna-class explorer ships—a prototype design mothballed when the Dominion War had forced a shift toward more combat-oriented starships—had been revived after war’s end, promoted as a reassertion of Starfleet’s core ideals of peaceful exploration and diplomacy. For years, Starfleet had been forced to focus on mere survival, and many of its ideals had needed to be compromised in pursuit of that goal. Some had been compromised without so great a need—as Deanna and Will knew better than most, after their experiences on the Ba’ku planet and Tezwa. Many in Starfleet felt it was essential to reaffirm a higher set of values than survival alone, to remind the peoples of the Federation that it was more important to live forsomething than simply to stay alive. Hence the ambitious new mission of Titanand its eleven sister ships—emissaries to the unknown, questing out in all directions, hands extended to friends not yet met.

But if these ships were to represent the Federation, it was resolved, then they must represent it in all its diversity. If they stood for peaceful coexistence with future neighbors, then they must stand for peaceful, eager coexistence among the Federation’s members. Hence the Great Experiment was spawned, reviving Willard Decker’s dream and going it one better—or twelve better.

Will Riker had been a natural choice to carry forward that dream—even aside from the striking similarity of their names and aspects of their life histories. For as long as Deanna had known him, William Thomas Riker had been a passionate xenophile, not merely tolerant of others’ differences, but positively delighted by them. He took an unabashed, childlike glee in learning about other cultures, sampling their cuisine, their customs, their music, their art—and in his bachelor days, their sexual customs as well. (Which didn’t trouble Deanna in the least; on the contrary, his range of experience in that regard had benefitted her greatly. Though she couldn’t always say the same about his experiments with alien music or cuisine.) The chance to captain a crew with so many different species on board, many of which he’d never worked alongside before, had been a dream come true for him.

Will had been a gregarious first officer on the Enterprise,popular with his crewmates, organizing poker games, dinner parties, and other crew activities. So far, after a hesitant start and a little prompting from Deanna, he had proven a gregarious captain as well, as fascinated by his crew as by the unknowns that lay outside. It made for high morale among the crew, and Deanna was gratified by that.

However, it also gave her a lot of work. Eager to learn about his crewmates’ diversity, and to prove it was an asset to a starship crew, Will had encouraged the expression of cultural idiosyncrasies that a more conservative captain might have discouraged in the name of discipline. To be sure, Titan’s personnel were all professionals, all perfectly capable of self-discipline, and did not use that liberty as an excuse for irresponsible or outrageous behavior. Still, with so many different value systems interacting, some friction was bound to arise.

Deanna’s wanderings brought her to a case in point: the mess hall. Glancing inside through the windows inset in the doors, she resisted an urge to recoil at the sight within: the predators were feeding. It was hard enough for the members of a single species to agree on what constituted appealing cuisine and acceptable table manners, let alone the members of multiple species. But this was particularly so when several of those species were obligate carnivores.

In the first weeks of Titan’s mission, Dr. Ree, the ship’s dinosaurlike Pahkwa-thanh chief medical officer, had asserted his predatory identity by putting on flamboyant public displays of his rather savage approach to ingesting large, bloody chunks of raw replicated meat (and sometimes real raw meat, courtesy of the Klingons whose vessels had accompanied Titanon the Romulan mission). It was a bold gesture of the kind Deanna would expect from a predator, a forthright assertion: This is what I am, and if you wish to accept me you must adapt to it.It was also typical of the doctor’s cutting sense of humor, the kind of wit that pulled no punches and shocked people for their own edification. And at first it had just been accepted as one person’s eccentricity—although Deanna had noticed that many in the crew took careful note of Ree’s routine and sought to schedule their dining at different times.

But then the ship’s other predatory crewmembers, including the Caitian lieutenant Rriarr, the Betelgeusian ensign Kuu’iut, the S’ti’ach counselor Huilan, and the Chelon biologist Kekil, had begun to join Ree, making something of a ritual out of it, and a very messy one at that. Among most predatory species it was not only socially acceptable but virtually obligatory to play with one’s food; not only was there the instinct to play as practice for the real thing, but the metabolism of a hunter was geared toward a period of intense physical activity prior to feeding. (Back on the Enterprise,Data had discovered that playing with his cat Spot before dinnertime often improved her appetite. Worf, who had inherited Spot after Data’s death, had adopted the same practice when Deanna had mentioned it to him. Worf had been reluctant to take the cat at first, since Klingons as a rule were not fond of cute, furry things; but lately he seemed to have changed his tune. “The cat’s softappearance is deceptive,” Worf had told her in a recent letter. “Spot is in fact fierce, cunning, uncompromising, and supremely self-assured. What she wants, she demands, or simply takes. She has the heart of a warrior,” he had concluded—high praise indeed from him.) The predators’ dining ritual gave literal meaning to the term “mess hall,” and made many other crew members increasingly uncomfortable—particularly those from herbivorous species, some of whom saw it as a deliberate act of intimidation.

Huilan himself, one of Deanna’s assistant counselors, had worked out a solution, rearranging shifts so that the predators would have their mealtime at the quietest part of the night shift, and have the mess mostly to themselves. It had alleviated the problem, but Deanna wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. It seemed too much like the kind of “good fences make good neighbors” policy that this ship and crew were intended to challenge. But there were practical reasons for it, and at least it was an acceptable stopgap until something better came along.

Deanna felt she should stop in for a few minutes and say hello—watch them eat, maybe even try joining in as Will had once or twice. It was something she’d have to do if she wanted to overcome her own revulsion at the sight, and come closer to truly connecting with these crewmates of hers. Yet when she saw them tossing bloody chunks of meat and bone at each other, wrestling them into imagined submission and tearing into them with their fangs and beaks and tusks, it was all she could do not to become physically ill. In the wake of her nightmare, the sight seemed to inspire in her a sense of identification with the prey, a visceral urge to flee and hide. Letting out a shudder, Deanna decided that bonding red in tooth and claw could wait for another time, and briskly strode away. Maybe she was being a bit of a hypocrite, but she was off duty and it was the middle of the night, so that was her prerogative. Besides,she thought, the bloodstains would never come out of this wrap.

She wandered the corridors aimlessly for a time, greeting crew members when they went by but not seeking conversation. There were more people out than she was used to seeing on a starship’s “night” shift; but then, there was a greater range of diurnal cycles represented among the crew. Some species slept only every few standard days; aquatics like Ensign Lavena slept infrequently, generally with only half the brain asleep at a time; and several of the predators were adapted for short-burst activity and needed extended sleep periods. It had been a challenge reconciling duty cycles.

From around an intersection just ahead, coincidentally enough, Deanna heard the distinctive gurgle of water draining from the entrance lock to Lavena’s water-filled quarters. Rounding the intersection, she was surprised to see, not the Pacifican flight controller, but Dr. Xin Ra-Havreii, Titan’s designer, and now her chief engineer following the death of Nidani Ledrah during the Romulan affair. The Efrosian was wearing a robe and toweling off his long, white, dripping-wet hair and mustache, and Deanna realized he must have been engaged in an affair of another sort. She would have turned away and left him his privacy, but he spotted her and gave a wide, unabashed smile. “Counselor Troi, what a welcome surprise to see you!”

“Doctor,” she replied, keeping her tone casual.

“I hope you’ll pardon my appearance. Ensign Lavena and I were having the most intriguing…discussions. Selkies have such lovely speech, don’t you think? So musical, so nuanced, much like Efrosian languages. You can’t truly appreciate it out of the water.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard.” She was not that surprised to see him emerging from a female crew member’s quarters; Efrosian sexual ethics did not generally include the concept of monogamy, and he was an attractive, charismatic individual. She was sure that Lavena was not the first to reciprocate his wide-ranging interest in the ship’s female crew members. But she was gratified that Ra-Havreii had demonstrated a tendency to be discreet about his liaisons; if she wished to satisfy her curiosity about how an air-breather could engage in sexual relations with the water-breathing ensign, she could always ask Will. (Well, that wasn’t quite right; Lavena had been in the amphibious phase of her life cycle when Will had known her nearly two decades ago. In a sense, Will had been in a different life stage then as well, and today he was more uneasy about the tryst than Deanna was.) That aspect of Ra-Havreii’s behavior, at least, was not typical of Efrosians; a people with an extensive oral tradition, they tended not to consider an event fully real until they’d spoken of it to someone else. Ra-Havreii was evidently willing to accommodate more conventional mores in that respect if not in others. Though she had no doubt he kept a detailed audio journal of his encounters.

But that was not something she wished to dwell on. “Actually I’m glad I caught you,” she said. “I’d been hoping we could schedule a talk in the near future.”

He spread his hands wide. “I’m at your disposal, Counselor. If you’d like to accompany me back to my quarters, then once I get changed I can offer you a drink and we can discuss whatever you like.”

“That’s very gracious, Doctor, but I was thinking of a discussion along more formal lines.”

Ra-Havreii grimaced, without losing his good humor. “In your office, no doubt. I saw quite enough of counselors’ offices following the Lunaincident, thank you. They’re all so calculatedly nonthreatening, so self-conscious in their attempts to put one at ease that they become oppressive.” Ra-Havreii, Deanna knew, had blamed himself for some time after the fatal accident aboard his prototype ship. For a time she had been concerned that Ledrah’s death from an engine-room explosion would have reignited the doctor’s guilt, but instead he seemed to have handled it constructively, embracing his new post as an opportunity to make amends for his past and move forward with his life. The problem now was that it wasn’t the only thing he was interested in embracing. “If you wish to discuss my personal life, where better than in my personal abode, where I can truly feel at ease?” he asked in a reasonable yet jaunty tone. “And where I will do my very best to make you feel equally at ease.”

Deanna didn’t need her empathy to sense the seductive undercurrent in his words. “Doctor, you know perfectly well that I’m a married woman.”

“A condition which the Betazoids I’ve known have been rather flexible about.”

“Well, I’m not one of them. And you’re not fooling me, you know.”

“Ahh, as perceptive as you are beautiful. What am I not fooling you about, my dear?”

“Efrosian or not, you know better than to seriously try to seduce the wife of your own very human captain. You’re only trying to distract me.”

“Perhaps I’m only trying to distract myself. Even without serious intent, flirtation with a lovely, intelligent lady is a worthy entertainment in its own right.”

“If you say so,” she told him. “But taken to excess, or where it’s unwelcome, it can be disruptive. Lately your flirtations have been growing more frequent, and there have been one or two complaints. From Ensign Panyarachun, for example. She has to work with you every day, and she’s told you more than once that she finds your attentions distracting.”

“Ahh, but would she be so distracted by them if she weren’t intrigued? I’ve made it clear there’s no pressure on her to respond. I’m simply…expressing my admiration.”

“But she’d like to be admired for more than just her looks.”

“And she is! I find her skills to be exemplary. I wouldn’t be so intrigued with her otherwise. If I only wanted a beautiful face and body, the holodeck is at my disposal.”

“Then if you respect her mind, Doctor, you should respect her wishes as well, and keep your relationship strictly professional.”

“As you do with the captain?” At her glare, he said, “I meant no disrespect, dear Counselor—I simply have trouble determining where you think the line should be drawn. It’s a strange way of thinking to me. Where I come from, it’s considered somewhat rude notto flirt with someone of your preferred sex. And the concept of a professional relationship being asexual by definition…well, back home we feel very differently. Sex among colleagues is encouraged; it’s an excellent way to learn to respect each other’s needs and work together for mutual gain.”

“It’s different for humans like Tasanee Panyarachun. Surely you’ve been in Starfleet long enough to know that.”

“Long enough to find that the lines are more ambiguous than is generally claimed. Besides, isn’t this ship all about encouraging cultural exchange, getting past the dominance of human ways of doing things? Who’s to say my way isn’t worth trying, hmm?” he asked with an impish leer. “It seems to work well enough on the command level.”

“Maybe your way would be worth trying, ifeveryone agreed to it. But for now, just leave the ensign alone.”

“All right,” he agreed grudgingly, “but I guarantee you she’ll regret it.” He furrowed his snowy brows. “On the other hand, maybe there’s something to be said for playing hard to get. It might get her to chase me. And nobody could object to that, could they?”

He stopped at a doorway, which slid open on his approach. “Well. Here we are at my quarters. So either we can end this fascinating discussion on coworker sexual relations, or you can come in so we can explore the issue in greater depth.”

“In that case, Doctor, I’ll leave you alone with your thoughts.”

He clasped her hand in a gentlemanly manner. “Rest assured, my dear, they will be mainly of you.”

She smirked. “So long as they’re about what I said, not what I’m wearing.”