Tooth and Claw Page 3

  “Well, by way of food or drink, anyway,” Guinan said. “And I think I have just the thing for you. You’re the adventurous type, I hear. The bold explorer, yes?”

  Akarr’s words came more garbled than usual by the underlying purr. “You have heard rightly.”

  “I have this drink . . . I’m looking for someone to try it and give me their honest opinion. Problem is, I can’t get anyone interested; it’s too different-looking. Do you think you might . . .?”

  Akarr didn’t hesitate. “Of course. I would be glad to help you.”

  “Wonderful.” She nodded to the other end of the bar. “Come this way, and I’ll fix you right up. You know, this drink has a long history of use by warrior cultures . . .”

  Riker listened long enough to hear Akarr’s confident noise of reply and turned away, his back to the bar and his warming whiskey in hand. He had a good idea which drink Guinan had in mind, and he didn’t want any part of it. Given Akarr’s propensity for challenges, he didn’t want to be in evidence if the being decided to facilitate Guinan’s data-gathering by daring others to drink the thing. Double dare, he thought, just about able to imagine Akarr saying it.

  No, double trouble. And come morning, he and La Forge would take it with them to Fandre. But for now— there was throat-warming synthehol and good company. He caught La Forge staring glumly at his own fizzy drink, and arched an eyebrow at him. La Forge gave him a wry grin and hoisted his glass; Riker matched the move, and simultaneously they declared, “To the Ferengi!”

  Chapter Three

  “SORRY I’M LATE,” Beverly Crusher said as the door to Picard’s quarters opened to her. “One of the evacuation doctors wanted to consult on the specific wavelength variation affects from the Ntignano—” She stopped, looked at him sitting by the morning teapot, at the steeping tea, at the single, stark bloom offset on the low table, and shook her head at herself. “Never mind. You don’t need to know all that. Not the details, anyway, though you should be aware of our concern for the refugees. That sun simply isn’t reacting as predictably as we’ve been told.”

  “Beverly,” Picard said, sitting back on the firm cushions of the couch, tugging his uniform jacket down, and . . . waiting. Then, “Why don’t you come in? Have some tea. It should be just about ready.”

  “Yes,” she said, her expression sheepish. “Of course.” And came in to sit beside him, shedding her turquoise lab coat and resting it neatly at her side. “I’m sorry. I got off to much too fast a start today.”

  “Then here is your chance to remedy that.” Picard handed her a teacup—one of the modern ones, this morning, sleek and perfectly insulated—and she accepted with a smile.

  After a sip or two and a few moments of companionable silence, she said, “What do you truly think of your chances of talking to the ReynKa, Jean-Luc?”

  “My chances of talking to him are excellent.” Picard offered her a small smile and admitted, “My chances of communicating with him seem less certain. If he’s anything like his son . . .”

  “Akarr is a child, trying to get what he wants. Surely the ReynKa will deal with the larger issues, the lives at stake? Especially since we’re offering him and his son all the . . . daleura we possibly can?” But she shook her head. “Did you see the look on Will’s face in the conference room yesterday?”

  “I could have seen that look with my eyes closed,” Picard said. “And I’m not making any assumptions about Atann. I have great respect for Nadann Jesson, and the best she’s been able to do is keep their minds open to continuing discussion—as far as I can tell, she hasn’t directly broached the subject of using the charted corridor, although certainly the Tsorans know that is why we’re here. And Atann . . . you know, I had the distinct impression that his intense interest in acquiring our assistance with the Fandrean shields had more to do with the future of the kaphoora hunts, and not much at all to do with Fandrean safety.”

  She stared at him over her half-lifted cup. “Then . . . he won’t be much impressed with the fate of a planet he knows nothing about.”

  Picard shook his head. “That is quite likely so. But if I can find some way to couch the issue in terms that he understands, that he respects . . . well, then I might have some chance.”

  “And let’s hope this kaphoora goes well, if that’s what they care about.” Crusher sighed, her breath making little ripples in the surface of the tea. “I don’t envy Will this one. How many hours is he going to be stuck in a shuttle with Akarr?”

  “Six to twelve, depending on the graviton eddies. Insystem, the eddies are of smaller duration but greater frequency; the patterns often change. They’ll have to check against the charted eddies every step along the way.” He regarded her a moment, the faintest amusement on his austere features. “I have every confidence in Will, Beverly—you know that. He’ll not only be fine, he’s likely to end up saving a small civilization along the way.”

  “You’re right, of course,” she said. “He’ll be just fine.”

  * * *

  “Stand down!” Riker bellowed above the noise of the fight, charging into the back section of the opulently modified cargo shuttle to haul human and Tsoran apart from one another. He took a quick assessment of the situation—Worf, thrown in front of the uninvolved Tsorans, keeping them uninvolved and holding the two Enterprise security crew members in their seats by dint of his glare alone. Akarr—standing on the seat of his padded, double-wide chair and snarling Tsoran imprecations—and the remaining Tsoran, facing off against Ensign Dougherty, both of them bristling and bearing marks of the first clash. “I said stand down,” Riker repeated, feeling not a little like snarling himself as he inserted his shoulder between them.

  Both participants took a fraction of a step back; Riker scowled them back another as the Tsorans behind Worf subsided and Akarr himself finally stopped shouting orders. “What happened here?” Riker asked it of them all, but it was Worf to whom he looked.

  And Worf could only look uncomfortably vague. “I do not know,” he finally admitted. “It started behind me.”

  True enough, Worf had been placed in the front port seat, opposite the ReynTa’s extra-roomy accommodations. Three of his security crew sat behind him, and one sat copilot with Riker, spelling him regularly over the long and tricky journey—and for those unexpected moments when the ranking officer felt compelled to bolt from his seat and stop the brawling in the back.

  The roomy cargo shuttle allowed more space in the aisles between the seats than the medium-range personnel shuttle, and had an additional two seats in the back, along with a reasonably spacious head—not to mention Akarr’s special seating. Eight passengers on a long journey . . . Riker had hoped the extra space would keep the inevitable tensions low.

  Apparently not.

  “Mighty sybyls! This is little honor, to travel with such an escort. Can you not keep your people in line?”

  “We still don’t know what happened,” Riker said, and eyed the now shamefaced ensign before him. Her long blonde hair had come loose from its restricting clip; tendrils of it hung askew along the side of her cheek. “Dougherty?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure, sir,” she said, sneaking a glance at her opponent, trying to tuck her hair back. “I was just sitting there . . . I wasn’t doing anything in particular. I guess . . . sir, you could say my mind wandered.”

  “It’s a long trip, Ensign,” Riker said. “But that doesn’t explain what happened.” He turned her head aside to confirm that she did indeed bear the light marks of two claws near the back of her jaw, oozing but not dripping blood.

  Akarr snapped something, too fast for the universal translator to decipher, and the Tsoran beside Riker— taller than most of them, and with an unusual cinnamon cast to his coat—shifted, looking away from Akarr. Finally, his words more difficult to understand than Akarr’s, he said, “She was staring at me at an improper time. It was a great rudeness. She would not look away.”

  Riker glanced at Dougherty, who still didn’t se
em anything more than puzzled. “Did you,” he said carefully, “ask her to look away?”

  “I did,” the Tsoran said with great dignity.

  “I couldn’t understand him,” Dougherty said. “So I looked at him to ask him to repeat what he’d said—”

  Ah. One Tsoran, in some private moment that happened to fall under the gaze of a human whose mind had wandered off and didn’t even know she appeared to be staring. And then, in misunderstanding, she really had stared . . . .

  Riker was suddenly reminded of childhood territory disputes. He put his finger on my side of the shuttle! Wonderful. “It appears that both parties bear equal blame,” he said, to Akarr as much as anyone else. “Ensign, didn’t you read the contact protocol?”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “No buts,” he said sharply. “You clearly didn’t read it closely enough. Go wait for me up front, and I’ll provide you with another copy.” To Akarr and his security force—all males, as far as he could tell—he said, “I apologize for the misunderstanding. I hope in the future you’ll understand that we have little experience with your species, and that any error in manners is an inadvertent one.” He looked at Akarr in particular and said, “As far as we’re concerned, nothing has changed; this was merely an unfortunate incident that no one else needs to know about. We’ll disembark on Fandre as your formal honor escort, as planned.” Whatever the hell a “formal honor escort” was . . . but it sounded good.

  Akarr must have thought so as well. Although his lower mouth was pouched up in the same distinct but hard-to-read expression he’d worn in Ten-Forward, he made a motion with his hand—and then, as an after-thought, nodded in the equivalent human gesture.

  Good. And only a few more hours to go before their “full formal honor escort” arrived at Fandre, after which Riker alone would pilot Akarr into the preserve, and happily wait in the shuttle for the Tsoran to complete his prime kaphoora, snag his trophy, and present himself for a triumphant return.

  Worf stood in the narrow entrance to the shuttle conn, and Riker hesitated there, murmuring, “Do you have any idea what that was about, Mr. Worf?”

  Worf’s murmur was more like a bass hum; Riker tilted his head to catch it. “I am afraid not, sir. However . . .”

  “Share, Mr. Worf. Don’t keep it to yourself.”

  “Shortly before the . . . incident, I noted an annoying noise. I believe it was one of the Tsorans scratching. From the far back seats,” he added, in case Riker hadn’t caught the significance.

  But Riker had. “Probably not something they prefer to do in public,” he said. “But there’s nowhere else to go.” He sighed. And then some wicked little spirit made him lean conspiratorially close to Worf as he said, “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  Worf hesitated. “Do not stare at them if they are scratching?”

  “Watch where you’re scratching,” Riker said, and raised a meaningful eyebrow at Worf before slipping past and into the front cabin.

  There. At least his tactical officer had something to think about for the rest of the trip. And as for Dougherty . . . she waited next to the pilot’s seat, stiffly at attention. “At ease,” he said, sorting through the modest stowage for . . . ah, yes, the padd. He extracted it and put it in her hand. “The contact protocol for the Tsorans,” he said, ignoring the ill-concealed dismay on her face. “Don’t bother reading it; there’s not a thing about staring when they’re scratching. However, I do believe there are several of the captain’s Dixon Hill novels in the padd’s library, and you might apply yourself to them. Whatever you choose to do, try to look appropriately studious while you’re at it, will you?”

  She stared at the padd an instant, and then quite obviously decided not to question her good fate. “Yes, sir. Studious, sir!”

  “And get cleaned up—have those cuts taken care of, too. See if there’s anything that’ll hide them. I suspect that Akarr would prefer us to look undamaged.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.” She was doing her best to hide her relief, too, but without much success. Riker couldn’t help a grin at her retreating back.

  And now . . . maybe he could get back to the comparatively easy job of guiding them through the rippling graviton eddies that could easily tear this shuttle apart, luxuriously modified appointments and all.

  It seemed the shuttle’s occupants were willing to do that all on their own.

  * * *

  They did somehow manage to make the rest of the flight with no more excitement than one close brush with graviton forces, which left Riker’s copilot—one of Worf’s men, security with a pilot rating pulling double duty this time around—white around the lips and Riker grinning at him, more exhilarated than anything else. Give him a good piloting challenge any day . . . it was diplomatic assignments that turned him pale.

  Fandre presented itself as a much greener planet than Tsora, with smaller continents mostly concealed by thick banks of clouds—and, over the ocean, several swirling storm systems. Riker and La Forge brought the shuttles down through a thick and turbulent atmosphere, breaking through the clouds to land the shuttles in a precision lineup on the wet and puddled Legacy preserve tarmac, a space lit to startling brightness by large banks of lights looming at the edges.

  Before them sat the Legacy museum, the headquarters for all preserve activity—of which there was plenty of evidence. A hangar, open along its entire front length, grew off the east side of the museum; at the moment, it held only a few small personal transport devices and the beings responsible for maintaining them. Short and stout like the Tsorans but with more of a waddle to their movement, the two at the closest end of the hangar barely glanced away from their energetic argument to look up at the descending shuttles.

  Riker sat in the pilot’s seat for a moment after landing, staring at the great gray arc of the forcefield rising to the left of the shuttle. The artificial light slid smoothly off the field perimeter, but nothing about the forcefield seemed to discourage the jungle-like growth climbing the sides several stories high, heavy and healthy and still reaching upward.

  The Fandreans might not be able to sort out their field problems, but they certainly had green thumbs.

  Well, there was no putting this off. Riker stood and had the shuttle occupants arrange themselves as dictated for the ReynTa’s entrance at the Legacy museum, where a reception, attended by Tsorans and Fandreans alike and rife with media and newscasters despite the late evening hour, waited only on Akarr’s presence. Akarr, flanked by Riker and followed by his six personal escorts—who were in turn followed by Worf and his six security officers, moving with as much precision as possible given the differences in the Tsoran and human stride length—led the way, under the scrutiny of innumerable data recorders pointed in their direction.

  Riker, much as he hated to admit it, was impressed. Whatever his diplomatic deficiencies, Akarr had not exaggerated the importance of this event. When the museum doors opened, a crowd surged around Akarr—and so did his escort. At Riker’s nod, the Federation escort closed the distance.

  It was a losing proposition, but Akarr didn’t seem to mind; he also seemed to consider Starfleet’s job completed, and after some moments of being jostled and ignored, Riker drifted aside. The noise in the crowded museum made it impossible to engage the interactive displays, but there were plenty of stills and holos to look at. Life-size holos.

  It was quite a big museum.

  Riker studied the gliding arborata hologram, finding it even more impressive than the viewscreen image in the conference room—its size truly apparent, matching his own torso even without the span of the thick skin between its bat-like forearms and heavily clawed back legs, and its teeth gleaming in an opossum-shaped muzzle. He took special note of the action of its barbed tails; most of the animals highlighted here had two tails in some configuration—like the sholjagg, a broad-chested, barrel-legged ground-hunter that had a long primary tail with a shorter secondary tail riding the spine of the first. Looking at its w
ide, copiously toothed mouth, Riker couldn’t imagine it ever had occasion to employ the tail barbs. What, after all, would be so foolish as to chase that? Skiks, maybe. He circled around a holo of skiks in action, a large, darting flock that attacked in strafing runs, spitting digestive poison as they flashed overhead.

  He found Worf eyeing the cartiga display. Its shoulders came to Worf’s midsection, and at intervals in the display, the animal’s rocky territory phased into sight, proving the worth of its patterned, rippling fur; the creature all but disappeared.

  Worf seemed not to notice. It was the cartiga’s teeth he looked at, and the massive, semiretractable claws.

  “Mr. Worf,” Riker said, “you look like a man with a certain gleam in his eye.”

  “I only regret that I am not to join this hunt,” Worf said, seeming almost mesmerized as he added, “The honor of combating such an animal . . .”

  “Aside from the fact that there’s no room in the shuttle”—for the ReynTa, his six men, and their supplies in case the hunt should last a number of days filled the shuttle to bursting—“I’m sure that’s exactly why you’re not coming.”

  Worf tore his eyes away from the cartiga for the first time. “Commander?”

  Riker leaned in, not that discretion was necessary in this noisy celebration. “The competition, Worf. He doesn’t need the competition. He wants all the glory for himself this time out.” And probably the next time out, for that matter, for Riker understood that any time a ranking politician on Tsora lost popularity, he’d stage a kaphoora to earn daleura . . . and approval.

  Hmmm. Not a bad idea, come to think of it. He could think of a few Starfleet admirals . . .

  La Forge squeezed through one last set of Fandreans into the relatively open area around the cartiga. “Finally!” he said, straightening his uniform. “I’m all for getting to work on those forcefields, but to discuss the fine points of harmonics in this? No, thank you!” Then he seemed to realize he was all but between the paws of the leaping cartiga, and moved aside. “Nice kitty.”