“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?”