Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

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  Just when she was about to ask again what the problem was, the entire display vanished, leaving the two women floating inside a massive gray sphere whose surface was a lattice of overlapping gold and silver grids.

  “ Melora,”said Jaza’s voice, now stripped of any semblance of emotion. “I’d like you and the rest of the team to go over the collected data and isolate any anomalies similar to what we’ve just seen. I need a timeline.”

  “We’ll salvage what we can,” said Pazlar.

  A light chime sounded, indicating that Jaza had switched off. Pazlar tapped her padd once, deactivating it.

  “What just happened?” said Bralik. “Don’t tell me we’re dumping three weeks of work over one little glitch.”

  “Just suspending it for now,” Pazlar corrected, a hint of Jaza’s pique creeping into her tone as well. “Pending data review.”

  “So what’s the big problem?” asked Bralik, drifting down to join the Elaysian.

  “Same problem as always,” said Pazlar. “Ra-Havreii.”

   “Sometimes the worst thing about a day is living through it,”her mother used to say. More than once in both her careers Christine Vale had come to know the wisdom of those words.

  As she stood in the anteroom waiting for Troi to finish whatever was taking her so long, she wished again that something, perhaps some giant bit of alien war tech still roaming the stars in search of prey, would swoop down on the starship Titanand start blasting away. Nothing too fancy or lethal-just a little combat to break up the terrors of the lull.

  It wasn’t that she enjoyed the potential for carnage created by such circumstances. She had no particular bloodlust to speak of. It was just that, during those times, she knew who she was, knew what to do, how to function fluidly when there was chaos all around. It was just easier than, well, this.

  “We’re out here to explore, Chris,” Will Riker said more than once. “Not to fight.” His eyes always sparkled a bit when he dropped one of these epigrams, as if he had a cluster of pulsars stored in his skull instead of a brain. She was all for exploration-hell, that was a large part of why she’d joined Starfleet in the first place: to set her eyes and hands on something really new. The trouble was, war got you used to the rush, the constant possibility of attack or death at the hands of an enemy. Exploration, pure exploration, was often very slow and brutally quiet.

  It took time to map the contours of an exotic stellar phenomenon or open diplomatic relations with a species that had no understanding of the concept of “I.” It took time and concentration and coordinated effort. Coordination takes unity, and unity takes-well, until this duty she thought she knew what unity meant. Life on Titanhad blown all her notions on that score out the airlock. Lately, when Titanwas performing its function, she found herself experiencing an increasing sense of dread as she anticipated the next catastrophic problem coming from within rather than without. There were simply too many variables, too many potential trouble spots for her to come up with contingencies for everything. The longer Titanwent in the quiet, the more anxious she became.

  Her nerves had, once again, taken their toll on her hair. When she was too long in stir, she dyed. When she was too long waiting for the second shoe to drop, she cut. Now she was both, so…

   It’s too red, she thought, catching her reflection in the polished surface of the room divider. It looks like Risan shimmer ink.

  The length was okay. She always enjoyed a severe cut, but, paired with the red in her uniform, well, too muchwas the simplest way to put it. As soon as she had an hour free, she’d go back to some version of blond.

  Vale had deliberately avoided visiting the counselors’ suites since beginning duty on Titan. Not only did she not enjoy people poking around in her psyche, telepathically or otherwise, she simply preferred Deanna Troi in her capacity as the ship’s diplomatic officer. There was a clear delineation between their duties then, less potential for boundary crossing.

  The command structure was in place for a reason, and those wrinkles that muddied it, say a senior officer being married to the captain, as was the case with Troi and Captain Riker-well, muddywas definitely the word for it.

  Vale’s duties as XO and Troi’s in her other capacity as senior counselor created an automatic-and not always comfortable-overlap. Overlap meant confusion. Confusion meant a drop in efficiency, something a ship with a crew as diverse as Titan’s could ill afford.

  Lives depended, quite literally, on both interspecies and interdepartmental harmony. It was another reason the Sudden Alien Attack scenario was increasingly attractive. Something like that cleared the normal frictions away in favor of duty. Without that Other to offer a binding physical threat? Well.

  If nothing else, the friction proved to her what she had long suspected: no matter the planet of origin, people were essentially the same. Too bad it wasn’t a guarantee of peaceful coexistence.

  A certain amount of chronic discord was inevitable on long-term space explorations, even among members of the same species. You just couldn’t coop up that many people that long in what was essentially a giant metal can and not get some temper spikes. Generally, this sort of thing was self-regulating, only occasionally requiring intercession by counselors-and, once in a while, security.

  The carnivores and the herbivores, for example, had managed to ease into something like a polite truce, the former keeping the blood spray at mealtimes to a minimum and the latter respecting the effort enough not to raise a fuss over the occasional stray droplet. Progress.

  Some of the other frictions, however, still required a degree of management.

   No, you can’t remove this bulkhead, Chaka. I’m sorry the accommodations are so cramped. We’ll work something out for you.

   Yes, Lieutenant Keyexisi, I know Ensign Lavena’s quarters are still bleeding heat from yours, but we’re only talking about a few decimals of a degree. You can’t possibly feel the diff-

   He has apologized, Ensign Mecatus. Put him down. You are not entitled to a quart of his lifeblood.

  It was like being pecked to death by ducks (another of Mother Vale’s maxims). And most irritating of all, perhaps, were the troubles caused by Titan’s chief engineer: the mounting tension between him and the ship’s senior science officer, the difficulties the engineer’s…natural hedonism was causing among not a few of the crew’s female complement, and, of course, the fact that his air of complete indifference to all of it made Vale’s own pressure spike. Routinely pissing off your shipmates might make for a bumpy tour of duty. Adding stress to your XO’s day? That could get ugly.

  Dr. Xin Ra-Havreii was a genius, yes, but that didn’t count for much in stopping someone from punching him in the face. Vale had seen plenty of smart guys pounded senseless by lesser intellects who happened to be in possession of a pool cue. Jaza wasn’t quite there yet, but if Ra-Havreii kept pushing him…

  And so, here she was, waiting to meet with Counselor Troi so they could work out a tandem approach to obviating some of the more persistent issues that had sprung up among the crew.

  Only Troi had been off her game too, hadn’t she? She and, by extension, her staff were evidently leaving enough cracks in Titan’s social cement that crewmen were actually accosting Vale in the corridors to vent their grievances. Being turned into the ship’s walking complaint department had definitely breached the perimeter of her personal neutral zone.

  What the hell was Troi doing back there? She had to know Vale’s to-do list had stretched to the point where it could choke a pig. Troi’s own had to be competitively long. They’d agreed to get this out of the way, first thing, so as not to clutter up the day with missing each other and having to waste time-time in which the frictions would only grow-with serial rescheduling.

  “First will be best,” Troi had said, and Vale had agreed. It was something her mother had instilled in her along with the other little buds of wisdom.

   Clear the scrap away early, so it’s easier to see what’s in front of you.

  At this rate, First was in danger of shoving Second to Third and Third to Sixty-Seventh, and that couldn’t happen if Vale hoped to remain sane. Of course, another ten minutes cooling her heels in this damnable vestibule might push her over the brink before Troi got the chance.

  She’d never enjoyed waiting. Even when she was an officer in the planet Izar’s security force the worst part of the job had always been the stakeouts-sitting meters away from some criminal’s den on the off chance that they might come or go during the hours you were watching. You watched the clock during those times. You waited, expectant, for something previously unconsidered to occur that would shatter your whole program.

  Sometimes it came and you were sort of relieved to have been right-something bad was about to happen. Sometimes it didn’t and you were thrilled to be wrong and for things to run as they should. In either case it was the waiting that killed. In joining Starfleet she’d hoped to put that particular torment behind her.

   But, here I am again, she thought, taking in the room for the seventy-fifth time. If there’s a hell, you can bet it’s a place like this.

  The vestibule was a lot like Troi herself-understated, well put together, professional in appearance but with occasional flourishes. In addition to the walls’ muted colors, pale greens and yellows mostly, she’d hung small tapestries from various worlds. A few leafy micro vines were potted here and about, their branches extending across the ceiling in places and subtly undercutting the sense of being indoors. There was a hint of some fragrance in the air as well-traces of some exotic spice? Maybe cherasroot.

  In any case the whole place was obviously set up to put occupants at their ease, which, of course, made Vale edgy. She was just about to loudly remind Troi of their scheduled meeting when the door to the counselor’s office sighed open and a large scaly figure emerged.

  “Good morning, Commander Vale,” said the raptorlike creature genially, the words hissing out of his throat like jets of steam.

  “Morning, Dr. Ree,” she said.

  “Please forgive me for delaying Counselor Troi,” said Ree. “I believe she’ll be with you in a moment.”

  “No problem,” said Vale. “Not discussing anything that needs my attention, were you?”

  Ree’s sloping reptilian face cocked to one side and his tongue licked out at her twice.

  “Not at all, Commander,” he said. “This was strictly a routine visit.” His Pahkwa-thanh morphology made the subtleties of Ree’s expressions difficult for Vale to read. Sometimes, when he was amused, for instance, his un-blinking yellow eyes gave the impression they were tracking prey. Still, she thought she might have detected a mild stiltedness to Ree’s words, as if he was perhaps not speaking the precise truth. Or it could have been something totally alien to her human sensibilities and untranslatable.

  The doctor complimented her on her choice of hair pigment and then was gone, the claws on his feet scratching softly against the carpet as he passed.

  “A little too much red, no?” Troi emerged from the main suite, gesturing for Vale to join her inside.

  “No peeking inside my head, Counselor,” said Vale jauntily. “We’ve talked about that.”

  “None necessary,” said Troi with a smile that seemed to Vale a little forced. “Just years of enduring intense fashion criticism at Lwaxana’s School for Wayward Betazoids.”

   Nice try, thought Vale, taking in Troi’s demeanor. But I’m not buying.

  Unlike the doctor, Troi was an easy read. Though she covered it well, the counselor looked, for lack of a better term, like hell. Despite the strictly professional pose and demeanor, there were little hints that, to Vale’s eyes at least, added up to something other than happiness lurking behind her mask.

  Her eyes were red-rimmed and flat, totally absent their normal inky sparkle. Her mouth was set, stiff, as if to say, Smile, what smile? I have no idea what a smile is or why I should want to make one. Her skin, normally a deep olive, was now nearly as pale as Vale’s own.

  You didn’t need police training to see she’d been crying. It wasn’t a leap to conclude Ree had given her some unpleasant news.

   Routine visit, huh?she thought. I’ll bet.

  Troi gestured for Vale to take the seat opposite hers. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “No problem,” said Vale, easing down into the soft cushion. She had to restrain herself from asking about Ree’s house call.

  “I’m fine,” said Troi, having obviously plucked the feeling out of her mind despite her earlier denials. Betazoids. “Dr. Ree’s visit was just routine.”

   Sure it was, thought Vale, and regretted it instantly. Troi had obviously “felt” her skepticism then as well. Vale resolved to redouble her efforts to develop her emotional shields. Jokes aside, she knew Troi better than to think she would invade Vale’s privacy, but one of the things that helped to make her so effective as a multispecies therapist was the way her patients’ feelings “leaked” out of them, and it wouldn’t do for the ship’s first officer to be that readable. Despite their time together as crewmates, Vale didn’t yet know Troi well enough to keep track of all the subtleties.

  The moment passed and Troi was all business again, for which Vale was grateful. This was going to be hard enough on its own.

  “So,” said Troi. “Shall we get to it?”

  “Absolutely,” said Vale, punching up the relevant notes on the screen of her padd. “We have a few fires to put out. I think your staff should coordinate with Mr. Keru’s once we settle on a game plan.”

  “That sounds fine,” said Troi, her face now little more than a mask of calm. “Why don’t we start with the worst and work our way up?”

  “The worst. Right,” said Vale, scrolling. “There are actually a couple of contenders for the bottom spot.”

  “Choose one.”

  “All right,” said Vale. “That would be the Ra-Havreii situation.”

  It took Torvig a few seconds to process the question. It wasn’t the wording that confused him or the fact that the question had come from Lieutenant Commander Jaza-though what the science officer was doing this far belowdecks was puzzling.

  It wasn’t even that he’d been surprised, mid-task, by the Bajoran’s arrival or that said task currently had most of Torvig’s body ensconced in the bowels of a ceiling access grid so that only his head and neck were visible from the corridor below. No, what froze Torvig’s mental gears was the question itself.

  “Well, Ensign,” said Jaza, his gray eyes glaring up out of his brown face, his arms folded in a configuration that Torvig had come to understand was meant to express displeasure. “I’m waiting.”

  “Sir,” said Torvig, craning his neck so that he could meet Jaza’s eyes. At the Academy a cadet had tried to saddle him with the name Ostrich. Torvig had discouraged it, finding the allusion inexact at best. “Regrets, but I don’t understand your meaning.”

  “It’s a simple question, Ensign,” said Jaza. “Are you trying to kill me?”

  Unlike his own people, the Choblik, who enjoyed precision, humanoids like Commander Jaza often used colorful imagery to convey information rather than simply stating it outright. Other Choblik had mentioned difficulty in processing this idiomatic quirk. Most chalked it up to the fact that, generally, humanoids eschewed the cybernetic enhancement that defined Choblik existence. The more time Torvig spent in the company of humanoids, the more he found himself agreeing with this assessment.

  It was sad, he thought, their aversion to biomechanicals. A couple of extra cognition chips or an added posterior appendage could work wonders for a being’s outlook.

  “I don’t believe so, sir,” he said eventually, still doubtful that he had a full grasp on his superior’s meaning. His long neck ached from holding this position. The servo at the end of his tail was caught on something. “It is certainly not my intention to cause you harm.”

  “That’s odd,” said Jaza, apparently meaning the opposite, “because I’ve just had to pull three of your colleagues out of the ship’s guts, each of whom were engaged in hardware upgrades that had been specifically designated as off limits until the end of our current mission.”

  “We were informed that the mapping operations were essentially complete, sir,” said Torvig.

  “Informed,” Jaza repeated, his eyes narrowing as he leaned closer to Torvig. “Informed by whom?”

  “Do I understand you to mean,” Jaza asked Ensign Rossini, “that Commander Ra-Havreii himself instructed you to do this?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ensign Rossini. He was obviously still a bit shaken by Jaza’s sudden appearance in engineering as well as by the pointed questions the science officer had started asking. He still stood where Jaza had found him, one foot on the bottommost rung of an access ladder, the other on the deck. All around them a cluster of Rossini’s fellow engineers went about their business tending the great pulsating tower of controlled matter/antimatter reactions: Titan’s warp core. Rossini’s hyperspanner dangled forgotten in his left hand while his right held tight to one of the upper rungs. “The chief said you’d have wrapped up the mapping by 0600 and we should get on with the upgrades.”

  Jaza’s only response was a slight narrowing of his eyes.

  “Did we screw up the mapping, sir?” Rossini asked in real distress. The boss might have no sense of team play, but his staff certainly did. “We would never have started the upgrade if the chief hadn’t-”

  Jaza held up a hand for silence. Rossini watched as the Bajoran scientist drifted over to a nearby console and tapped in a few commands.

  “This is an elective upgrade, isn’t it, Ensign?” said Jaza as the data he’d requested appeared on the screen before him. “None of these systems is anywhere near failure, correct?”

  “No, sir,” said Rossini. “I mean, yes, sir. I mean, you’re right, sir. These systems are all performing to spec. But Dr. Ra-Havreii says he wants Titanto be the first ship to return to the dock in better shape than she left it, so-”

  “Thank you, Ensign,” Jaza interrupted. “Can you tell me where I would find Commander Ra-Havreii at this precise moment?”

  “Probably in his quarters, sir. Truth is, he’s not spending much time down here anymore. Just comes through, makes notes, and tells us…”

  Rossini trailed off. Jaza was already on his way out of engineering.

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?” asked Vale.

  Troi made a show of putting away whatever had been occupying her mind. “I’ve been listening,” she said. “Dr. Ra-Havreii has been a concern of mine for some time.”

  “But you haven’t done anything about it,” said Vale.

  “He hasn’t exhibited any truly aberrant behavior,” Troi said. “The anecdotes are troubling, yes, but they don’t add up to an actual pathology.”

  “You’ve been around the man,” said Vale. “And you’re a telepath. You’ve got to know something’s going on with him.”

  “I’m an empath, Christine,” said Troi. “I’m only half-Betazoid. My telepathic abilities are limited.” The words came out in what to Vale was a stilted manner, rife with something like bitterness-odd for Troi. She was neither of those things as a rule. “And the accuracy of my empathic abilities varies from species to species. Efrosians are…complex.”

  “The point is,” said Vale, “I shouldn’t even be involved in this. The fact that I am says somebody’s falling down on the job.”

  “You’re blaming me?” said Troi. “Is that what this is about?”

  “I’m asking you to do your job,” said Vale. “If I have to have an official on-the-record conversation with Ra-Havreii…”

  “I’ve been at this a lot longer than you, Christine,” said Troi archly. “I think I know how to-”

  “You can’t play the old veteran card every time, Counselor,” said Vale. “ Titanisn’t the Enterprise. We’re on our own out here, naked. We don’t get to swap Ra-Havreii out for a better model.”

  “You’re in no position to lecture me, Commander,” Troi snapped.

  Suddenly all Vale could think about was the argument she’d had with her mother after announcing her intention to join Starfleet.

   There have been Vales in Izar’s Peace Office for generations. You’re spitting on your heritage!

  There were ugly words and uglier feelings between them then, all tangled up in the dance of mother and child and all of which had been resolved to remain unresolved years ago. Why would she think of that now?

  The moment passed.

  Vale blinked, unsure how things had spiraled this far so fast. “That’s where you’re mistaken, Counselor. As first officer, it’s my duty to make sure the ship runs smoothly. When something impedes that, I have to take steps. This is step one.”

  For a moment it seemed that Troi was about to respond with something caustic. It was now clear to Vale that she was worked up about something other than their conversation. The counselor sat, composing herself by degrees, breathing deeply. When she was done, when her mask of serenity had reassembled, she stood, indicating that, for her at least, this meeting was over.

  “I think we understand each other, Commander,” she said. “I’ll have a proposal for remedying the Ra-Havreii problem by the end of the day.”

  “And the other situation?” Vale asked, rising to her feet.

  “That’s not your concern.”

  Vale hated what she was about to say, but it was too important to the well-being of the ship and its crew to leave unsaid. “I’ve noticed the captain’s been a little slow off the mark lately as well.” In fact, Riker had been stiff as a board for the last two weeks, and he also had consistently deflected Vale’s concerned inquiries. “Is something going on between you two that I can-?”

  “As I said,” Troi interrupted, “whatever is or isn’t between me and Will is our concern, not yours. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have duties to attend to.”

   But it is my concern, Deanna, thought Vale, as the doors to the counselor’s suite whispered closed behind her. And I can see I’m going to have to move on to Plan B.

  She waited until she was around the bend in the corridor before tapping her combadge. “Vale to Counselor Huilan.”

Chapter Two

  T he Federation archive at Memory Alpha described the Bajoran people, sometimes called the Bajora, as “one of the very few humanoid species that have managed to achieve balance between scientific progress and their organizing spiritual lifeview. Bajorans account for this harmonious integration of faith and reason by citing these lines from the Eighth Song of the Prophets:

   “ ‘One hand holds the stone, the other the spark. To make fire they must come together.’ ”

  Jaza wasn’t precisely sure why that particular line kept running through his mind as he pounded on Xin Ra-Havreii’s door, but he found himself identifying with the stone.

  Jaza considered himself a fairly even-tempered person, never quick to judgment or anger. He and Titan’s chief engineer had discussed the delicacy of the mapping endeavor at length almost a month ago. Titan’s ultrasensitive sensor nets had been painstakingly recalibrated to detect and probe this uniquely configured dark matter system.

   Titan’s sensors were state-of-the-art. Even in their base configuration they were orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything outside the equipment sported by the very newest stationary observation arrays.

  In their current setup, specific to Titan’s charting of the darkling phenomenon, even the slightest spike in ambient radiation could completely obviate all their readings, forcing them to start again.

  Ra-Havreii had, it seemed at the time, been in total agreement with the need for his people to do absolutely nothing that could upset the balance of software and hardware that Jaza and his team had taken days to create. “I know you wanted to upgrade several systems,” he had said. “But if you can hold off until we’re done, it would be much appreciated.”

  He remembered the conversation perfectly. He had expected it to be contentious, as Ra-Havreii had lately seemed increasingly self-absorbed, ignoring anything that fell outside his own specific area of expertise and showing little concern for the work of departments other than his own. Jaza assumed this was due to Ra-Havreii’s having spent the bulk of his Starfleet career not in the field but in R&D labs, which, traditionally, took a more feudal approach to interdepartmental diplomacy.

  More than once in recent months, Jaza and his people had been forced to scrap or suspend ongoing experiments because some of Ra-Havreii’s staff were tinkering with systems their superior had deemed in need of attention. The episodes put considerable strain on their professional relationship.

  In this case, however, Jaza’s fears proved unfounded. His meeting with Titan’s chief engineer had been cordial, almost jovial. Ra-Havreii had played him a selection of strange Efrosian music-all chimes and strings-even offered him a glass of Andorian ale, which Jaza had politely declined.

  “Have to stay sharp,” he’d told the engineer. “It’s not every day one finds concentric belts of exotic matter asteroids in orbit around a neutron star,” he had said. “We may never see anything like this again in our lifetimes.”

  Ra-Havreii nodded in all the right places and stroked his mustache wistfully while making little affirmative noises in his throat at each of Jaza’s requests. When they were done, Jaza had gone off to his work on the sensor nets in the sure knowledge that he and the engineer were on the same page.

  But Ra-Havreii had instead reverted to type. More than reverted-this disruption of Jaza’s work was tantamount to the engineer’s throwing down a gauntlet. Weeks of recalibration, of code writing, of direct probing and observation could have been wiped clean because of an impatient chief engineer. It would be several hours before Jaza would know if the current sensor maps had to be scrapped. Pazlar, Dakal, and the others were poring over the data, looking for signs of corruption. Before they delivered their verdict, it was very possible that the brilliant and famous Dr. Xin Ra-Havreii’s next entry into the record books would read, First Efrosian in history to be strangled by a Bajoran.

  “I know you’re in there, Commander,” Jaza said. “Now open up or, by the Prophets, I’ll have the transporter chief beam me in.” After the engineer had seen fit to ignore the door chime, Jaza had resorted to pounding on the door.

  “You’re wasting your time,” said a soft feminine voice passing behind him. The words were accompanied by the rush of displaced air tinged with the barest hint of something like hyacinth. He turned to see who had spoken and was treated to the rear view of a familiar humanoid female in black Starfleet exercise uni, jogging toward the other end of the corridor. Without looking back, she added, “He’s with Ensign Evesh right now.”

  Then she disappeared around the far corner, her long golden braids bouncing in time with her easy gait. Jaza stood there for a moment, feeling the same strange tightness in his chest as before, the same chill in his skin. And for a moment, his thoughts of confronting the Efrosian engineer completely vanished.

  By the time Jaza arrived at Ensign Evesh’s quarters, Ra-Havreii had gone from there as well. The ensign, a muscular little Tellarite, was just heading off to her duty shift. Jaza noticed that the thick hair that formed a sort of mane around her head was still a bit damp, as if she’d just come from a shower.

  “He left ten minutes ago, sir,” she said with more than a trace of ruefulness. “Apparently, he isn’t one to linger.”

  It seemed, in addition to his other eccentricities, Ra-Havreii made a habit of removing his combadge whenever he felt like it, effectively defeating the computer’s ability to easily track him. The man could be anywhere on the ship at this point, and Jaza, his frustration having finally squelched his anger, accepted defeat.

  He sighed, leaning heavily against the corridor wall, and considered just exactly how he was going to convince the captain that Titanwould need another month to properly map Occultus Ora.

  “It’s not particle bleed,” said Hsuuri, her syrupy voice now rife with concern. Her ears and whiskers twitched nervously. “Not random field distortion.”

  The lights were up to full in the sensor pod, and the team had gathered around the various collation nodes to sift through their mountains of raw data.

  “Of course it’s not random distortion,” said Klace Polan, a little too aggressively to Dakal’s mind. The Catullan ensign had a habit of starting conversations with an attack of some sort. “The core has been on dampers for weeks now.”

  There were murmurs of agreement from the others, each of whom was deeply focused on some particular facet of the results of their scans.

   “I’m sure Commander Jaza will be triple pleased to hear what it is not,”said aMershik, tentacles from his upper cluster dancing across several consoles at once as his segmented eyes pored over multiple data streams. His combadge made him sound as if he were speaking through a mouthful of suet, but his tone was unmistakably sarcastic, as usual. Thymerae were like that-always looking for the gloom in a bright sky. “But it would be agreeable if he could be told what itis as well.”

  “About half of the gravimetric readings check out so far,” said Fell, a bit too brightly. It was clear she didn’t want aMershik’s dour demeanor to infect the others. “The initial baseline scans look sound.”

   “How many times must this one inform you, Peya Fell,”said aMershik. “Optimism without facts is-”

  “ ‘Wasted intellect,’ ” said the others in chorus. Berias let out a good-natured chuckle, his gray skin darkening with pleasure.

  After a month working so closely, all of Jaza’s team were well used to the Fell and aMershik Traveling Festival of Sarcasm. Deltans and Thymerae were polar opposites as far as species ethos went. Rumor had it these two had been rankling each other since their first Academy days.