Melora’s expression shifted toward concern. “That might not be the best approach. When I asked you to come down here, I said I had two things to show you.”
Vale pointed a pair of fingers at the simulated suns. “This is not two things?”
The astrophysicist shook her head and floated closer. “The energy patterns aren’t all we found. Hsuuri’s data chimed with something I’ve been tracking ever since we passed that protostar cluster last month.” Melora tapped in more commands, and Vale’s lips thinned with the brief head-swim that came as the stellar cartography lab reconfigured itself once more, this time rushing out to show a larger part of the sector. A few faint clouds of blue faded into existence here and there, most of them small dots, some of them as large as the ship—or a planet. She could intuit a vague pattern in their dispersal, like a spiral.
“What am I looking at?”
“Regions of subspace instability. A little like the ones the Rhea encountered a while ago out in NGC 6281. Nothing too dangerous, but I’ve been liaising with Lieutenant Commander des Yog and the conn team to ensure that we’re steering clear of them. Just in case.”
Vale nodded. “Right. I got the report.” Regions of spatial distortion were not as uncommon as most people thought; the uniformity of space was actually far from it, but most warp-capable vessels moved through the pockets of faint instability without issue, just like an oceangoing ship cutting through waves across the surface of a sea. It was only when the waves got high—when the distortions became more pronounced—that problems occurred. Where the change in energy states was sharp, it could be enough to throw a vessel out of warp or worse; but so far, they had seen nothing like that in the region, and with the Federation’s advances in variable-geometry drives and encasedfield warp-transfer algorithms in the last decade, most ships had an easy ride.
“I don’t have a theory for this,” Melora admitted. “There’s more spatial stressing in this sector than we’ve seen anywhere else since we came to Canis Major. It could be warp-field effects from first-generation interstellar drives, naturally occurring phase-barrier distortion…” She shrugged. “I’m still gathering information.”
“We’ll tread carefully, then.” Vale looked away. “You think this is connected to the double-star system?”
“It’s possible. Another good reason to go and take a look. We might learn something from the locals, if we can ask around.”
Vale stepped back. “All right, you’ve sold me. I’ll brief the captain. Get me a report covering the high points so I can give him a little show-and-tell.” She smiled. “Not as impressive as this one, I grant you…”
“Already done,” said Melora. “The report’s in your personal data queue.”
“You wrote it up already?”
“I’ve been in here all day, Commander,” said the Elaysian.
“Oh. I thought, um…” Vale trailed off. “Never mind. Thanks, Melora.” She turned to leave, but Pazlar swam forward, moving alongside the catwalk.
“What?” asked the other woman. “You thought what?”
“It’s just that… well, Doctor Ra-Havreii was off-shift today, and I just assumed you two were—”
“Together?” The Elaysian’s expression cooled.
Vale cursed inwardly. I should stop talking now.
“We’re not joined at the hip, Christine,” continued Melora. “Is that what people think?” And just like that, they were suddenly having an entirely different conversation.
“I have no idea what people think,” Vale said lamely. “I’m only the first officer. I just tell them what to do.”
“You’re the worst liar ever.”
“You only say that because you don’t come to the captain’s poker nights.”
Melora’s pleasant face grew concerned. “Is my relationship with Xin a matter of popular discussion among the Titan’s officers, then?”
“No.” The lie fell from her lips automatically, and Vale almost winced at the baldness of it. She sighed. “Okay, yes.” Melora opened her mouth to speak, but Vale talked over her. “But what did you expect? Xin’s never been the type to keep to himself. And this is a starship; it’s like a small town. There’s only three hundred fifty of us onboard, and people like to talk. It’s what enclosed communities do.” She nodded toward the hologram of the twin suns. “Those two aren’t the only stellar couple people are interested in around here.”
“Very funny,” said Melora in a way that made it clear she thought exactly the opposite.
“Look, I know how you feel. I’ve been in the same situation.” Unbidden, Jaza Najem’s face rose briefly in her thoughts. Vale’s relationship with the Titan’s Bajoran science officer had been brief but just as talked about. All these months later, all the time that had passed since he’d been lost on Orisha, and she still felt a moment of pause at the thought of him. She shook it off. “What I’m saying is, don’t worry about it. A few weeks ago, people were talking about Deanna and Will and their new baby. This week, it’s you and Xin. Next month, when Lieutenant Keyexisi enters the budding cycle, it’ll be him.”
“I don’t like the idea of my personal life being discussed as if it’s the plot of a holodrama.”
But Ra-Havreii does. The thought popped into Vale’s head the moment Melora spoke. In the first officer’s opinion, the Titan’s chief engineer liked his reputation a bit too much, trading on his iconoclastic behavior and—until recently—his cavalier attitude toward members of the opposite sex. The man was a genius, that was without question, but Vale had to admit that on occasion his attitude chafed on her. At times, she felt he was too contrived, too brazen about being brazen, as if it were a mask he’d worn so long he’d forgotten how to take it off. In her time as a peace officer on her native Izar, in the years before she’d joined Starfleet, Vale had seen the same thing in dozens of people—suspects, mostly.
So it had come as a surprise to her to learn that RaHavreii and Pazlar had become an item. From what she knew of Efrosian culture, the whole concept of any kind of long-term commitment was far outside the experience of males of his species. So not a lot different from some human men, then, she thought dryly.
“It hasn’t been easy for us,” Melora said quietly. “This doesn’t help.”
Part of Christine wanted to tap her combadge and summon Commander Troi or Doctor Huilan. I’m not a counselor. I’m no expert on the whole relationship thing. But she knew why the Elaysian was confiding in her: precisely because she wasn’t Deanna or Sen’kara. She sighed. “All you can do is give it your best shot. Don’t sweat the little stuff. Xin might be flighty, okay, but you’ve got a real connection. He cares about you. If you try to make it work, so will he.”
At length, her words seemed to have the right effect. Melora nodded. “Thank you, Commander. I appreciate that.” She floated up, back into the stars, and Vale left her behind, wandering out into the corridor.
See, she said to herself, I am a great liar.
The string of mumbled expletives was what led the captain to the service hatch next to the doorway of holodeck 2. A pair of long, thin legs extended out into the corridor, the rest of the torso they were attached to swallowed up by the open maintenance crawlway in the wall. A halo of tools and padds lay untidily on the deck, and every now and then, a milk-pale hand wandered out to snag a hyperspanner or laser sealer before disappearing back into the hatch.
Riker glanced at the control panel in the holodeck’s command arch. None of the touch-sensors responded to him, and the main system display was blank except for three words: “Please Stand By.”
He put down the heavy bag. For all the talk of captain’s prerogative and the like, it was actually pretty damned hard for a starship’s commanding officer to find a space in his schedule for something approaching actual leisure time. That was made worse if said captain wanted to synch up his day off with that of another officer, namely his wife, the ship’s senior diplomat. Riker’s pleasant mood lost some of its warmth to find that the hol
odeck he’d reserved for his use was off-line.
He’d planned to run a great resort program, one of his personal favorites, a simulation of an area of low-gravity parkland at the edge of Lake Armstrong on Luna. With Deanna doubtless on her way down to meet him with Tasha in tow, he did not want to disappoint them.
Riker bent to take a better look at whoever had conspired to derail his plans. “What’s going on here, mister?” he demanded.
He was rewarded with the sound of a collision as the junior officer in the Jeffries tube reacted with such shock that he banged his head on the panel. With a scrambling motion, a skinny humanoid male backed out into the corridor, shamefaced. “Uh. Captain. Sir. Captain.”
The officer’s collar was science blue with a lieutenant’s pips. He had wide yellow eyes with feline vertical pupils, pale white-gold skin, and strawlike hair. If it hadn’t been for the stubby tail that flicked from the base of his spine, the lieutenant could have passed for a more youthful iteration of Riker’s late colleague, the android Data. Cygnian, he realized, placing the species, searching his memory of the crew’s records. Which means this is—
“Lieutenant Holor Sethe, sir. Computer Sciences Department.” The officer gave him a formal salute. “I, uh, wasn’t expecting, uh, an inspection.” He rubbed the sore spot on his high forehead. Sethe blinked as his thoughts caught up with him, and he frowned at Riker’s lack of uniform.
“I know who you are, Mr. Sethe. You don’t have to salute me,” the captain replied, straightening. “We’re a bit more relaxed here aboard Titan.” He recalled meeting the young officer only once before, and he’d saluted that time as well.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Force of habit.”
Riker pointed at the control panel. “Two things. What’s wrong with my holodeck, and why wasn’t I informed?”
“Um,” began the Cygnian. “Well, nothing, and… why should you be, uh, sir? I mean, begging your pardon, but I thought this sort of noncritical system wouldn’t be a concern for the captain.”
“It is if the captain has it booked out for the next two hours.”
“But—” Sethe managed one word and then stopped dead. He reached for a padd and glared at it. “Today isn’t Friday, is it?”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Ah. Um. Sorry. My work schedule is wrong. I shouldn’t be here.” He spun in place and began quickly gathering up all of his equipment, using his wide, slender hands to fold the open access panel back in on itself. “It’s just… before this, I was serving on a largely Vulcan-crewed ship. They have a different day cycle from Federation Standard. Even after all these months, it’s been a bit difficult for me to adjust… keep slipping into old routines.” His fingers danced over the keypad, and the command arch came back to life. “It’s, uh, fine, sir. Go ahead. I’ll get out of your way. Sorry.”
Streams of program titles began a rapid scroll down the panel, and Riker searched fruitlessly for the Lake Armstrong program. “Has this database been altered recently?”
“After the refit at Utopia Planitia, aye, sir.” Sethe nodded. “The Corps of Engineers used the opportunity to tweak a lot of minor systems. They had a Bynar team in here running upgrades to all the holotech.”
Riker recalled a mention of that from the files that had crossed his desk in the days and weeks after the massed Borg attack on the Alpha quadrant. In the aftermath of that bloody, destructive conflict, the Titan had been just one of many Starfleet ships sent back to lick their wounds in spacedock. Since the Titan had left the Sol system on her ongoing mission of exploration, the captain had been in the holodeck only a handful of times, certainly not enough to appreciate the full scope of any improvements.
Sethe opened the doors and jogged into the bare, graysteel chamber, pausing to adjust one of the holographic emitter grids built into the walls. “Okay, sir. I think we’re good to go.”
But Riker’s attention was elsewhere for a moment. Amid the menu of simulations available, he spotted something that gave him pause. Without being quite sure of the impulse that drove him, he tapped the screen.
From the featureless metallic space, smoky walls of careworn wood emerged in swirls of photons; clusters of tables appeared and fanned out across the floor, before a bandstand illuminated by the halos of pinlights. In moments, an authentic New Orleans jazz club had constructed itself around them. A faded sign above the shadowed bar spelled out a name in backlit stained glass: “The Low Note.”
Riker stepped in through the arch, and his face split into a wistful smile. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Excellent emulation,” remarked Sethe. “These newer Eight-Bravo-series holodecks have five times the processing power of previous units. You can really see it in the sim-persona generation,” he added, warming to the subject as the doors sighed shut behind him and melted into the illusion. “Computer?” He addressed the air. “A character for the captain, please.”
The captain turned, about to belay Sethe’s order, but in a whirl of light and color, she was suddenly there, all stunning dark eyes and absolute poise, dark tresses framing a generous mouth. The dress she wore sparkled like captured lightning in the club’s sultry gloom.
“My name is Minuet,” she breathed, “and I love all jazz except Dixieland.”
“Because you can’t dance to Dixieland,” Riker said to himself. He shot Sethe a sharp look. “You picked her?”
The lieutenant shook his head, surprised by the captain’s tone. “Um, no, sir. The holodeck did. It’s a predictive system, based on the environment, your current psychometric profile, your personal data, the kinetics of your body language, speech patterns…”
“I haven’t seen this holoprogram in years,” he said, circling the woman. “The last time was aboard the Enterprise, when we were docked at Starbase 74.”
“Did you miss me?” Minuet took a step toward him, a wry smile playing on her lips.
Sethe nodded once more. “You see how she’s reacting to you? That’s demi-intelligent subroutines at work, heuristic learning in picoseconds. The longer the program runs, the more it learns how to read you, to better tailor the experience.”
Minuet’s hand reached out and touched his arm. “Are you going to play?” She nodded toward the bandstand, where a trombone had appeared.
“Computer, freeze program.” Riker said it with more force than he meant to, enough that Sethe flinched. The woman stood there in front of him, suspended in time, as beautiful—perhaps even more so—as she had been the first time he had seen her. “The Bynars,” he heard himself saying, “they hijacked the Enterprise during a maintenance stop. They used a variant of this program to… keep me occupied.”
Sethe grunted. “Oh, I heard about that. They used the ship as a backup for their planetary database, didn’t they?” He gestured with the padd in his hand. “But that’s the Bynars for you. They’ve always been a bit twitchy.”
Riker’s attention was elsewhere. Suddenly, he felt uncomfortable; the hologram brought up old memories that he had thought long forgotten. Just for a moment, he was the man he had been all those years ago, standing in this place, with this woman, living this dream. From that perspective, it felt as if an age had passed. Then he had been a rising star, first officer aboard the fleet flagship, with countless new frontiers ranged out before him… and a universe of choices.
But he was different now. Riker was surprised by a faint stab of regret. Now he was the captain, a husband, and a father, and while the frontiers were still there, it might be that perhaps the freedoms had lessened. The thought sat uncomfortably, and with a sigh, he pushed it away. His lips thinned, and he spoke again, this time firm and definite. “Computer, end program and reboot. Load simulation Theta-Six-Nine. Lake Armstrong.”
The club and the woman became ghosts and faded into nothing. The photonic haze rippled once more, and the chamber became a lakeshore beneath a tall, curving atmosphere dome.
“Is there a problem, sir?” asked Sethe, nonplussed by the captain’s reac
tion.
“No problem,” said Riker.
In the middle distance, the holodeck doors reappeared and slid back. Deanna walked in, singing quietly to their daughter, the child carried high against her chest. She wore a sand-colored summer dress, and her hair was up. His wife took Tasha’s tiny hand and pantomimed a wave toward her father. The little dark-eyed girl laughed, and her mother echoed the sound.
Deanna smiled, and Riker found himself mirroring her, that tiny dart of regret melting away beneath a warmth like the sun coming out.
“No problem at all,” he told the lieutenant. “Carry on.”
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 2
