Articles of the Federation - Keith R. A. DeCandido [74]
“- high-heeled shoes with the outfit. I know, ma’am. However, it is my considered opinion-and I’m sure that the entire staff will back me up on this one-that it would be extremely embarrassing and detrimental to our attempts to form a relationship with the Trinni/ek if, during the state dinner welcoming them, the chief of staff fell on her face because she couldn’t stand upright in those torture devices.”
“Oh come on, they’re not that bad.”
“Ma’am, if we’d given a ship full of those shoes to the Jem’Hadar, we’d have won the war in two months.”
“It still ruins the whole ensemble. Like designing a mansion and then building it on a swamp.”
“They do that all the time on Ferenginar, ma’am.”
“This is who you want us to emulate?”
“I bet they don’t make women wear painful shoes at state dinners on Ferenginar.”
“Up until a few years ago, they didn’t make women wear anything on Ferenginar.”
“Good point.”
“Anyhow, I’m ready to go. Been practicing my fleer/ic steps.”
“Sorry I missed that, ma’am.”
“Watch it, you, I’m a great dancer. You remember Annabella’s wedding?”
“Mostly what I remember from that wedding is Alberto’s father hitting on me.”
The president laughed. “Yeah, Paolo’s a pip.”
“So’s his wife,” Esperanza said with a chuckle, remembering the wife in question dragging Paolo away by his beard.
Esperanza hesitated. At times like this, Nan Bacco wasn’t the president, wasn’t the most powerful person in the Federation-she was just Mom and Dad’s eccentric old politician friend, Auntie Nan. Esperanza had always looked forward to her visits, filled as they had been with humor and stories and a genuine interest in what Esperanza had been concerned with, something small children rarely encountered among the adult population.
There were times when Esperanza missed that, so when they had the opportunity to be little Espy and Auntie Nan, even if only for a few moments, she treasured it.
But now the moment was past, and it was time to go to work. “We ready, ma’am?”
Nodding, the president said, “Yeah.”
Signing off, Esperanza went downstairs to the transporter station located in the chalet’s basement. Touching the intercom to the Palais, she said, “Kirti, it’s Esperanza. I’m ready to beam over.”
Kirti Chandra, the Palais’s head transporter operator, said, “They’re still getting the president ready, so I’ll take you now.”
Esperanza nodded and stepped onto the small two-person platform. Traveling with a security detail, as the president did, always meant that using a transporter was a more complicated endeavor, so it didn’t surprise Esperanza that she was ready first. Also, Esperanza benefited from her small chalet. It was a much longer walk from the bedroom to the transporter room in the spacious Chateau Thelian.
Moments later, she was in the second-floor Palais transporter bay, which was empty of all save three of the president’s security detail, Kirti at the controls, and Esperanza. Moments after that, President Bacco and two more security guards coalesced into existence on the platform. The guards were also dressed in formal wear. The two human men were in tuxedoes, the Vulcan woman wore a skintight suit embroidered with Vulcan script (not the formal wear Palais tradition would have preferred, Esperanza suspected, but the woman did need to be able to do her job, and a loose robe would not have accomplished that), and the Trill woman wore a sky-blue one-piece dress that was sleeveless with a slit up the side of the knee-length skirt, which Esperanza suspected was there more for freedom of leg movement than fashion. The final member was a Saurian of indeterminate sex, who didn’t wear clothes aside from a holster for a sidearm.
As the president and the security detail moved through the corridors toward the turbolift that would take them to the Roth Dining Room on the twelfth floor, Esperanza lingered behind as the comm in her ear beeped. Putting her hand to it, she said