Текст книги "Well of Souls"

Автор книги: Ilsa J. Bick

Соавторы: Ilsa J. Bick
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Chapter 24

“Ten days,” said Su Chen-Mai, pacing. His moon-shaped face was as purple as an overripe Denebian plum. “Ten days, and you haven’t picked up a thing, Kaldarren. We have to nothing to show for our time, nothing!”

Kaldarren sat, his eyes tracking back and forth. Chen-Mai was having another tantrum, and Kaldarren knew from experience that it was best to wait him out. It helped that after eleven hours of crawling over rubble, he was too bone-tired to argue.

They were in the biosphere’s common room where they took their meals and had their arguments. The room smelled of men’s sweat, sour canned air, and the apricotlike aroma of Catrayan porridge Kaldarren hadn’t been able to force down because his stomach was in knots. He wanted something to drink though; he’d even settle for some of that awful bourbon Rachel liked so much. The air filters in the Cardassian biosphere were relics. The longer they stayed, coming and going and bringing more dust and debris that adhered to the electrostatic charges they built up on their suits, the more Kaldarren’s mouth tasted like grit.

Chen-Mai frothed. “And what do you bring back? Just some useless artifacts.” He swept a dismissive hand at a trio of sculpted stone figures. “Nothing valuableat all!”

Spoken like a true mercenary, not a scientist. Well, there was a saying for it, something he’d picked up from Garrett: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Kaldarren ran a finger over the rough stone of one figure. The statue was of a chimera, part lizard (snake?)and part woman but with the folded wings of a bat. The left edge of the stone had fractured, distorting what Kaldarren thought was the face. The figure bore some resemblance to what the Cardassians claimed were ancient Hebitian artifacts—specifically, the Hebitian god of the Underworld. As he remembered it, the Hebitian god was usually rendered as a dragon alongside the king who was portrayed as a plump, white, slumbering, bull-like Cardassian toj’lath.

But this figure was altogether different. For one thing, it was a woman, not a man, and for another…Kaldarren’s finger traced the chiseled features. The stone had suffered over time, but there was the faintest suggestion of a half-mask of some sort, one that covered the face down to the nose. The mask was very odd. As far as he knew, the lore about the old Cardassian religion made no reference to masks of any kind. He wouldn’t know for sure until he could study the statue under a high-resolution magnifier, and access a database to check on similar finds, if any. The Cardassians weren’t known for their openness.

Kaldarren looked up at Chen-Mai. “I guess it depends on your definition of value. This isvaluable. There’s nothing like it in any collection as far as I’m aware.”

Chen-Mai’s black eyes sparkled like polished stones, but he didn’t stop moving. “Don’t play games. You know exactlywhat I’m talking about. These statues, these potsherds and other things you’ve found, they’re not why we’re here.”

“I know why we’re here,” said Kaldarren. He swallowed, and felt his throat ball with the effort. “Chen-Mai, has it ever occurred to you that there might not be anything topick up? Maybe our information is wrong.”

Chen-Mai stopped his pacing long enough to fix Kaldarren with a poisonous glare. “That’s not what the legends say. That’s not what yousaid when you read them.”

Chen-Mai had done the translation but Kaldarren decided to be charitable, and prudent. “Maybe we were wrong.”

“Iwasn’t wrong, not then and not now.”

“All right. You weren’t wrong.” Kaldarren lifted his hands in a weary, well-what-do-you-wantgesture and let them fall to the table. One of the boys (Jase, probably, he had always been a messy eater) had left a halo of crumbs. Kaldarren pressed the pad of his right forefinger to the table, dabbing up crumbs that he rolled between his fingers.

Thinking about Jase made him tense. The boys had been very quiet at dinner that night. True, there wasn’t a lot for them to talk about; no school, and both Kaldareen and Leahru-Mar were gone most of the day. But Kaldarren couldn’t recall a time since they’d come to this planet when the boys had been so… guarded.Kaldarren considered the word then found it apt. Yes, they had been guarded,both of them. In fact, Kaldarren had been tempted to probe Jase for an instant, just to see.

So, he had. After all my lectures about privacy.Kaldarren was embarrassed to admit it now to himself that he hadprobed his son: a light touch, nothing more.

The surprise had come the instant a finger of his thought brushed along the contours of his son’s mind. Jase had blocked him. Blockedhim: It was as if Kaldarren stood on the other side of a pane of milky glass, unable to see through to what lay beyond in his son’s mind.

How did Jasedo that? How long has Jase beenable to do that and me not even know? DoesJase even know, or is it reflex?

Aloud, Kaldarren said, “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I assumed that telepathy is a constant. That was foolish, probably. We know that some species have no known telepaths, and that one species’ telepathy may be far cruder than another’s. It’s also possible– probable,in fact—that there was something here once, a long time ago, but there isn’t now. Time wreaks havoc on many things, Chen-Mai, not just stone statues.”

“No!” Chen-Mai hurled the negative like a spear. “I presume thisprobability. You’re not the right telepath for the job.” Chen-Mai’s upper lip curled, revealing a line of yellowed teeth. There was a gap between Chen-Mai’s two front teeth, and when he spoke, Kaldarren saw the tip of the smaller man’s tongue undulating, like a fat worm.

“You’re not strong enough,” said Chen-Mai, his tongue working against his teeth. “Maybe I need a better, stronger telepath.”

“Very possibly,” said Kaldarren, soberly. “Certainly that’s your choice.”

“Choice.” Chen-Mai’s features corkscrewed. “Maybe, but I don’t have time, ormoney. Oh, but money doesn’t mean anything to you Federation people.”

“That doesn’t stop us from needing resources, or pursuing a dream. Money isn’t the only motivator, Chen-Mai.”

“Well, it is for me. I have an employer who will be very unhappy if I don’t keep my end of the bargain, and Iwill be very unhappy not to get my money.”

“We still have four days before the next Cardassian patrol.”

“Are you saying you’ll find it by then?”

Kaldarren hesitated. “Possible, but unlikely. Chen-Mai, we may have to face the fact, however unpleasant, that the translations are in error.”

Chen-Mai’s mouth opened in protest, but Lam Leahru-Mar stirred. “What if it were shielded in some way?” the Naxeran said. His frills trembled, and he smoothed them down with his left index finger in a slow, meditative gesture. “What if there isa portal, but there’s something that blocks you from finding it? If I built something that powerful, that’s what I’d do.”

Chen-Mai exhaled a noisy snort. “And where’s the power source?”

“There’s all that magnetic disturbance in the mountains,” Mar offered. “Maybe it’s shielding a power source deep underground.”

Chen-Mai gave the Naxeran a withering look. “If that were the case, there ought to be an energy signature. No machine is so perfect it doesn’t have a signature.”

Mar turned his sleek black face toward Kaldarren. “What about the ion storms? The radiation? Could they interfere?”

It was tempting to pawn off his failure on that, but Kaldarren shook his head. “It shouldn’t. Honestly, I don’t know.”

There was, of course, one possibility none of them had voiced: Chen-Mai and Mar because they wouldn’t have considered it, and he because the idea filled with him with an icy dread. What if the portaldidn’t want to be found? Or what if the portal didn’t want Kaldarrento find it, or only wanted him to find it on its own terms? A strange way to think of a machine, but telepathy was more than intimacy. Telepathy was a form of becoming something distinctly different from what you were. When a telepath touched another mind, a little piece got left behind—like a fingerprint, or a footstep in cooling tar—and imprints, done often enough for long enough, became permanent and were not washed away. So it stood to reason that a device, one attuned to and used by enough telepaths over a long period of time, might itself become…selective, perhaps even sentient.

A machine with a soul.Kaldarren suppressed a shiver. He doubted Chen-Mai would understand that,so he opted to stick to the obvious. “Let’s face facts. We’ve based this entire operation on ancient Cardassian legends. Legends aren’t facts.”

“But they’re something,”said Chen-Mai. He was pacing again. “And there’s something here. Why would the Cardassians bother patrolling otherwise?”

“It’s disputed space. The Federation’s been haggling with the Cardassians over this region for years.”

Chen-Mai gave a dismissive, backhanded wave. “But the Cardassians are stretched so thin between their expansion and their conflicts with both the Federation and the Klingons, it makes no sense to worry about a region they can’t legitimately lay claim to, even if they did have bases here once, like this biosphere. But they still patrol, and why? Because there’s something here.”

“They could just be spoiling for a fight. All Federation incursions are supposed to be cleared first.” Kaldarren sighed. “Even discounting that, your somethingcould be anything. Or what if they patrol because this is the way Cardassians do things?”

Mar spoke up. “Kaldarren’s got a point. If there’s something here, why not put a contingent on the surface instead?”

“Am I supposed to know how, or what a Cardassian thinks?” Chen-Mai raged. “Ask Kaldarren! He’sthe telepath!”

Kaldarren was tempted to point out that telepaths weren’t all-powerful; Vulcans couldn’t meld with Cardassians, and he couldn’t read a Breen. Instead, he held up the masked statue. “Look, Chen-Mai, I can’t even tell you with any certainty whether this is Hebitian, or Cardassian, or, well, take your pick. Just because these artifacts happen to be on a dead planet in disputed, possibly Cardassian, space doesn’t mean that the people who used to live here are connected to Cardassia, or the Hebitians.”

“That’s not what the legends say.”

Kaldarren made a face. “The Cardassians claim that the Hebitians mayhave been telepaths. Anyway, claims aren’t proof. If true, why aren’t there modern-day Cardassian telepaths? Betazoid telepaths trace their powers back in evolutionary time. Our telepathy didn’t evolve outof us; it got stronger.”

Chen-Mai leaned forward on his knuckles. “Ah, but that’s the key, don’t you see? The Hebitians evolvedon Cardassia. They’re telepaths. Somehow, they developed a psionic portal, a gateway attuned to individual neural patterns. A properly attuned telepath activates the portal, and poof!”He leaned back, throwing his hands up and splaying his fingers, as if releasing birds. “Here one second, there the next. It explains howthey got here.”

“Ifthese ruins are Hebitian,” said Kaldarren. “A big if.That still doesn’t answer why these portals aren’t on other worlds, or why Cardassians aren’t telepathic.”

“I don’t know, and it’s not my problem,” said Chen-Mai. “All I know is, the Cardassians watch this planet—not just this region but this planet—and I think it’s because they’re worried somebody will find and then use the portal.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here,” Kaldarren said, his weariness settling on him now like a heavy blanket. They were arguing about a phantom. “Find this magical portal and access it, if I can? Other than the specs, what are you’re going to do if we find it?”

Chen-Mai’s jaw set. “You don’t need to know. Your job is to find the portal. Figure out how it works. Then you get what you want, and I get what I want.”

I don’t know what I want anymore.“And what if I can’t, Chen-Mai?” Kaldarren fixed him with a searching look. He enjoyed seeing the smaller man flinch away, worried that Kaldarren might be probing. However tempting that might be, however, Kaldarren wouldn’t reach into Chen-Mai’s mind unless he had no other choice. Probably awfully slimy in there.

“It’s not a question of can’t.You don’t have that luxury, Kaldarren. You have four days. Then the Cardassians come back, and we need to be gone.”

“What about your employer? What if we don’t find the portal?”

“You don’t have to be a mind reader for that one,” said Chen-Mai.

Kaldarren left shortly after, taking the statues with him. Lam Leahru-Mar waited until the Betazoid’s footsteps faded. Then he looked over at Chen-Mai.

“What if he can’t do it?” The Naxeran’s black skin was sweating so much he looked dipped in clear glaze. “Or what if he does, but the Cardassians catch us? We still have to rendezvous with Talma. And what are we going to do with Kaldarren and that boy of his? No witnesses, Chen-Mai, that’s what Talma said.”

Chen-Mai had dropped into a seat across from the Naxeran. Now he fixed Mar with a baleful look. “You let me worry about Kaldarren and the boy.”

“But Mahfouz Qadir…Talma said…”

“Didn’t I just tell you not to worry?”

“Well, I don’t like it.” Mar squirmed. “Kaldarren doesn’t bother me so much, but a boy? No one told me I’d have to do a boy.”

“You don’t have to like it because you won’t have any part of it. You pilot the ship; you get around the Cardassians. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“All right.” Mar swallowed. “Fine. But I don’t want Pahl to know anything about it, you understand? He’s my sister’s boy, and I’m supposed to look out for him. He shouldn’t even suspect…”

“When it’s all over, the only thing you’ll have to tell Pahl is the truth.”

“And that is?”

“Accidents,” said Chen-Mai. He smiled hugely, his tongue working between his teeth. “Accidents happen—all the time.”

Chapter 25

The Draavids, twice as large as the Orion Nebula, were supposed to be beautiful: a maelstrom of photo-ionized gases that painted the blackness of space with brilliant violets, hot pinks, peacock greens, parrot yellows, and indigo blues. But their beauty was lost on Garrett. When they’d arrived at the Draavids two days ago, she’d spared the swirling gases and shimmering white globules that were the cluster’s protostars only a cursory glance. She set to putting her crew through their paces, hoping that work would put things right with her ship. But work hadn’t done squat for Garrett, because, damn it, she couldn’t stop thinking about Nigel Holmes.

She couldn’t sleep either, hadn’t seen the inside of her eyelids for any appreciable length of time since Halak had left three days ago. She toyed with the idea of asking Stern for a sleeper but didn’t because Stern would fuss. Garrett’s mother was a physician, so she knew doctors could be overprotective as hell.

Garrett thought about a good stiff shot of bourbon, too. Bourbon didn’t fuss and didn’t talk back unless she drank too much, and it tasted pretty good. But, in the end, she decided on coffee. (Stern would’ve said something about that being self-defeating, but Garrett hadn’t asked.)

Garrett stepped onto the bridge. The crew was an hour into gamma shift, and Glemoor was OOD, not a surprise since Naxerans didn’t need sleep.

“Anything, Mr. Glemoor?”

“Not unless you’re a stellar physicist, Captain. They’re happy as that Earth mollusk, give me a moment…yes, happy as clams, especially after I shunted power from the mess and laundry to accommodate them.”

“So long as the mess chief has power for breakfast. And I want clean socks. How are our communications?”

Glemoor screwed up his face. “Hash. We can’t even ping the nearest Starfleet subspace beacon. If we had to, we might be able to pierce the interference locally.”

“Not unless someone’s planning on running out with a shuttle.”

“Well, astrocartography might. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be caught out in there. Those jets of ionized molecular gas generated by the protostars, those Herbig-Haro formations? Take you for quite a ride, not to mention radiation, magnetic fields. But we have found a littlesomething.”

“Yes?”

Glemoor moved to the science station. “If you’ll excuse me, Ensign,” said Glemoor to the young man staffing the station who vacated his seat and stood to one side. “We’ve been collating data on infrared and radio emissions.”

Glemoor called up a red-grid schematic of the nebulae cluster on the science station’s viewscreen. “I won’t recapitulate the obvious. As you know, we’re measuring the rate of star formation by studying the conformation of those Herbig-Haros, the lobes of high-velocity, high-energy molecular gas spewed along the axis of a central, accreting disk of the protostar. And we’ve found some unusual bursts of gamma radiation.”

Garrett’s lips turned in an inverted smile. “That’s a problem?”

Glemoor’s frills vibrated. “No, just unusual. Gamma bursts are usually associated with neutronstars, because of the collision of gaseous particles accelerated by the neutron star’s accreting matter. But particles don’t collide in a Herbig-Haro. The gas particles shoot out in narrow jets along the axis of rotation, like strings attached to both the tip and the handle of a…that child’s toy.”

“Top.”

“Exactly, a top, because a right angle is the path of least resistance against the protostar’s gravitational pull.”

“So, if there are gamma rays, are you saying you’ve found a neutron star that’s a gamma ray emitter?” (Garrett didn’t find this very exciting, or unusual. Gamma-emitter neutron stars weren’t exactly unknown.)

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Why not?”

“Because some of those protostars are moving very fast. As you can see,” Glemoor used the tip of his right index finger, “we’re holding position on the periphery and these protostars out by us, here and here, they aren’t moving that quickly, just a hundred kilometers a second, or so. But deeper into the nebulae, the protostars begin to speed up, about 700 kilometers a second. By stellar standards, that’s very fast.”

“Would a neutron star cause the protostars to speed up?”

Glemoor looked dubious. “It would have to be very large, Captain, and that’s not possible because, beyond a certain mass, a neutron star can’t hold up under its own weight. It collapses. For something to exert that much gravitational deformation of time-space andbe a neutron star, well…it would have to be pretty strange.”

“What do you want to do?” (Garrett knew what was required but wanted to give Glemoor the choice. Hadn’t her little voice chided her for not loosening up on the reins?)

“Well, one step by one step, Captain. I would like to launch a probe.”

Garrett thought Glemoor meant first of all,and not one step at a time,but she didn’t call the slip to his attention. “Do it. Let’s see what you come up with. Nice work.”

Glemoor inclined his head at the compliment and preened his frills. After a brief tour of the rest of the bridge stations—all quiet on the Western Front there—Garrett ducked into her ready room for that cup of coffee.

After the familiar blips and sounds of the bridge, the place was quiet as a tomb. She saw a good three inches of coffee still left in her pot from that morning and, after a second’s hesitation, she poured a mug; added cream and two sugars; ordered her replicator to heat only, thanks; and brooded over the machine as it complied (wondering why she was being so polite to a damn machine). Then she slid into the seat behind her desk, called up reports she didn’t feel like reading, and, in two seconds flat, was thinking about the very man she was trying very hard to forget: Nigel Holmes.

Garrett sipped her coffee and made a face. Despite the white and sweetener, her coffee tasted sour and burned. Old. Sighing, Garrett worried a stray bit of coffee grounds between her teeth. Shefelt old. Weighed down. She knew why. She’d been blindsided. Again.

First Nigel. Garrett picked the ground off her tongue and flicked it from her fingers. And now Halak. Garrett stared into her mug as if divining tea leaves. No answers there, not about Halak, or Nigel. She ran her thumb over the surface of her mug. The mug was black ceramic with tiny yellow and white stars: a gift from Jase for her birthday three years ago. She felt the narrow ridges of raised glaze etched around each star. She liked to hold the mug, cupping it in both hands, the way she used to cup Jase’s tiny face when he’d been a baby.

Hard to hang on to the people you care about. Like hanging onto dreams when you first wake up. The dreams are so vivid you think you can’t possibly forget. But you open your eyes and they evaporate, like mist from a pond under a hot sun, and the people you love are just gone.

Nigel. Those damn smugglers. Klingons, to boot. Garrett hadn’t even known there wereKlingon smugglers; she would’ve thought smuggling a dishonorable profession, but there were, apparently, just as many bad apples amongst Klingons as there were among humans. Her only solace was the knowledge that the Klingon High Council dealt with their own as harshly as they did outsiders. No exile to Rura Penthe for the smugglers. They’d drawn death instead, and Garrett hoped their executions had been very painful and very bloody, for a very long time.

Good old-fashioned revenge. Garrett swirled her coffee. Not an emotion fit for a starship captain, but she didn’t care. Twice in her life now, she’d wanted revenge and gotten it. Nigel’s death was one of those times. (The other had happened a long time ago, on Earth, when she was eighteen and her sister Sarah was nine, but she didn’t like to think about it.)

Stern told her to give it up, this guilt she had about Nigel. The problem was no matter how many times she went over the scenario, she came to the same conclusion: Nigel should be alive. He wasn’t, and that was because she hadn’t trusted her own instincts. No, that wasn’t right. Garrett’s eyebrows met in a V.She’d gone by the damn book. If she hadn’t, Nigel would be alive.

First rule: A ship in distress took priority over all other considerations. Everything else came second. Hell, everything else was third.

Reminding herself that Nigel had volunteered didn’t ease the pain. So when the Klingons opened fire on the very transport ship they’d been trying to pirate, she had a choice. Rescue the transport crew, or rescue Nigel.

First rule. First duty: A ship in distress had priority.So the transport crew was alive because Garrett had gone by the book, and Nigel wasn’t—for the same reason.

The atonal buzz at her door made her jump. Garrett checked the time: 0315. Who…? “Come.”

The door shushed, and Tyvan stepped through. Garrett’s surprise swiftly gave way to concern. She and the psychiatrist hadn’t spoken since Halak’s inquiry, though Stern said she’d given her colleague a tongue-lashing: “He didn’t know anything about my autopsy findings, and you shook him up pretty good, and I said buster, you want to be in the loop, come to staff meetings and stop acting like you’re on one side of a portal and we’re on another, and when the captain says jump, you say how high,ma’am, that’s what I said.”“Doctor? Is there something wrong?”

Tyvan crossed to stand before her desk. He carried a padd. “No, Captain. I just thought you might want my fitness report on Bat-Levi.”

“Fitness report? On Bat-Levi? At thishour?”

“Well, you’re up, I’m up,” Tyvan said, proffering the padd. “Actually, I think you’ll find that her performance has been exemplary, even with all the stress.”

Replacing her mug on her desk, Garrett took the padd and quickly thumbed opened Tyvan’s report. “I’ve had no complaints.”

“You took a risk, asking for her.”

“Before her accident, her record was good. She had a career in front of her. Very bright woman. I wanted to give her an opportunity. As for her physical limitations, well…” Garrett shrugged. “People make interesting choices.”

“Yes, they do. All the time.”

“But.” Garrett tossed the padd onto her desk. The padd clattered and ticked against glass. She gathered up her mug, sipped bad coffee, swallowed. “You didn’t come to discuss the obvious, though between you and me, I wish she’d get those servos fixed.”

“Have you told her?”

“I hinted.”

“Maybe a direct approach.”

“Like an order?”

“I had a strong suggestion in mind.” Tyvan’s lips moved in a faint smile. “I’ve found that people tend to respond better to suggestions.”

Sounds like you got a boot in the rear from Jo, you ask me.“Okay, I’ll strongly suggest it. So, now that’s settled,” Garrett said, as she pushed away from her desk and crossed to the small round glass table with silvered chrome legs that squatted by her observation window. Dropping into a scallop-backed, cushioned armchair covered in mauve fabric, she waved Tyvan to a chair opposite. “There’s something else on your mind, Doctor. That wasn’t a question, by the way.”

“But not quite an order.”

Garrett’s lips curled into a half-moon. “Take it as a strong suggestion.”

Tyvan sank into cushions, settling his long frame, and Garrett noticed that even though he was a very thin man and his eyes were a soft cinnamon-brown and very mild, there was nothing insubstantial or weak about the El-Aurian. Bet he’s made of strong stuff, and he’d have to be to survive what happened to theEnterprise– B and come right back aboard her successor.

Tyvan lifted his chin, sniffed. “What isthat you’re drinking? It smells burned.”

“Day-old coffee. Want some?”

“No, thanks, I’m not that masochistic. At least it smells better than Klingon coffee.”

“Never developed a taste for that stuff.” Garrett didn’t bother adding that she had no reason to love Klingons, or anything Klingonese. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well, to be frank, Captain…May I speak freely?”

“Go.”

“Well…you.”

Garrett’s eyebrows headed for her hairline. “Me?”

“And the crew. It’s all in there,” Tyvan hooked a thumb at the padd lying on Garrett’s desk. “Second report after the one on Bat-Levi. Unofficial, of course.”

Garrett unfolded from her slouch and, reaching forward, put her mug on the table. The ceramic clicked against glass. “What’s up?”

“Actually, it’s what’s downthat worries me: morale.” Tyvan leaned forward and let his clasped hands hang over the points of his knees. “Morale isn’t good right now. I believe the term you used with Dr. Stern was…in the toilet.”

“I may have said something like that.”

“I disagree with your assessment. I don’t think what the crew’s feeling right now has anything to do with depression. True, Batra’s funeral was very hard, for some more than others.”

Garrett wondered about Castillo but held her tongue. It wasn’t her place to ask Tyvan if the young ensign had seen him, and Tyvan probably wouldn’t say unless he had concerns about Castillo’s job performance.

Tyvan said, “But the crew’s horrified about Halak, and not necessarily because they think he’s done anything. With a few exceptions, they simply don’t believe Starfleet Intelligence. They… weknow that our mission to the Draavids is just to get us out of the way. We know you can’t refuse, but that doesn’t stop us from being angry.”

It was on the tip of Garrett’s tongue to protest that, no, every assignment was important, but she didn’t. The crew—Tyvan—was right.

“Plus, the crew’s beginning to second-guess themselves, rehash things from the past, wonder whether or not they made the right decisions, whether their commanding officers know what they’re doing.” Tyvan gave a sheepish grin. “Me, too.”

Tyvan said it all innocuously enough, but it was as if he’d read her mind. Don’t be ridiculous. He’s a psychiatrist. He’s a Listener, not a Betazoid.Garrett said, “What do you suggest?”

“To be honest? Sometimes it helps to think of us like a bunch of kids.”

“Doctor, some of them arekids.”

“Okay. So if a kid falls, what happens?”

“He cries?”

“Wrong. Most of the time, if it’s not serious and there’s not a lot of blood, he looks to the parent first. The parent’s reaction tells him how he ought to react. If the parent gets upset, so does the child. He’ll cry. But if the parent stays calm…”

“The kid stays calm,” Garrett finished, impatient now. She had a son, for crying out loud; she didn’t need a tutorial in Parenting 101. “Are you suggesting that I’m not sending them… youthe right message?”

“Depends on the message you want to send, doesn’t it? Let me put it this way, Captain. If you weren’t having second thoughts about your own abilities, or rehashing the past, you wouldn’t be human. Now I know part of a captain’s job is to dissect what she perceives to be her mistakes. Otherwise, you can’t avoid them in the future.”

“This is something peculiar only to captains? I suppose you don’t rehash?”

“After you chewed me out and spat out the remainder faster than a photon torpedo?” Tyvan laughed. “I’d better.”

Garrett couldn’t help but grin. “I didn’t mean that.I meant, in your work.”

“Oh, that.” Tyvan made a dismissive gesture. “All the time. Except you can’t keep looking to the past when you’ve got to deal with the present. My patients aren’t static, you know. They change from day to day, session to session. But I’ve learned over time that the important stuff keeps coming back up, and so I try not to worry too much about what I think I’ve done wrong. I figure there’s almost always a second chance, a third. I’m not suggesting that a doctor, or a captain, should ignore the past. But stayingin the past, brooding over past errors, will just get the doctor—and his patient—into a rut.”

“Or a captain,” said Garrett. For some inexplicable reason, she glanced at her mug of old coffee. “You think I’m in a rut?”

“Areyou? We’re both up at an ungodly hour. We’re not sleeping.”

“What’s your excuse?”

Tyvan shrugged. “I wonder if I misread Halak all along. I brood over mistakes I make with patients, things like that. And you, you’re wandering the ship, haunting the bridge. Drinking old coffee.”

“I’m just minding my ship. Putting my house in order.”

“Oh, that sounds like something Lieutenant Glemoor would love to store away in his stash of Earth idioms. You know, now that you mention a house…Freud said that whenever a house appears in a patient’s dream, the house represents the dreamer. So when we say that we’re putting our house in order, we’re talking about us.”