Star Trek®: The Children of Kings by David Stern

Author:David Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Biology. The tallith’s quandary. Zandar, who seemed to be in charge of the laboratory, did not know what Deleen had been referring to.

“I have been tasked with assisting you in your analysis of the serum. This is my duty, as the tallith has outlined it.” She gestured to the LeKarz. “Shall we?”

Boyce shrugged. “Lead on.”

He supposed he’d find out what Deleen had been referring to sooner or later.

He followed Zandar over to the machine they’d stolen from Starbase 18.

“I will bring up the relevant information on the primary display,” she said, keying in a series of commands. “The molecular breakdown of the serum, its key components, and their relevant chemical analogues.”

Boyce leaned over her shoulder as unobtrusively as he could and watched her work. Right away, he saw that he was going to have to start over at ground zero. Zandar might have been a competent scientist (or not—he really had no way of knowing), but she had a lot to learn when it came to the LeKarz. The machine had come from Starbase 18 in lockdown mode, naturally. The Orions had managed to bypass the password protocols, to get it working, but they hadn’t tied in the analysis array to the main memory banks. That left half the machine’s functionality—the specialized, high-level databases Starbase 18’s personnel had either purchased or programmed in—inoperative, inaccessible for comparative purposes. The analysis they’d done—the work they’d asked the LeKarz to do—was incomplete.

“Is there a problem?” Zandar asked.

He was about to tell her that she was operating the LeKarz, in effect, with blinders on, that she should summon the ship’s top computer expert, when he realized that there could be a lot of very sensitive medical information in those databases. A lot of material the Federation might not want the Orions getting their hands on.

“Yes,” he said. “I prefer to do my own lab work.”

Zandar’s expression darkened. “I can assure you, Dr. Boyce, the procedure we followed in analyzing the serum did not deviate in any manner from—”

“Nonetheless,” Boyce interrupted, “I’d like to start fresh. With another sample of the serum.”

She glared at him a few seconds longer. “As you wish,” she said finally, and then pulled a stasis cube from a nearby storage locker.

Boyce inserted it into the machine’s input module, then stepped up beside the console.

A LeKarz. It had been a long, long time since he’d used one of these.

He reached for the controls and then realized that Zandar was standing right behind him.

He turned. “If you don’t mind, I prefer privacy when I work.”

“The tallith said I was to stay apprised of your progress.”

“Well, I haven’t made any yet, have I?”

Zandar had no answer for that. She bowed, backed off, and left him alone.

Boyce went to work.

The interface came back to him immediately. Kind of like riding a bike. It was almost as easy to override the security lock on Starbase 18’s databases. Within minutes, he found himself staring at a screen that displayed the contents of the LeKarz’s internal information clusters.

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