Broken Bow - Diane Carey [34]
Enterprise
Shuttle deck
“Once we’ve tied down, we’ll be descending into the trade complex. It’s got thirty-six levels.”
Archer paused and looked at T’Pol, indicating that she should take over. The crew should become accustomed to hers as the voice of the science officer.
“Your translators have been programmed for Rigelian. However, you’ll encounter numerous other species. Many of them are known to be impatient with newcomers. None of them have seen a human before. You have a tendency to be gregarious. I suggest you restrain that tendency.”
“You forgot to warn us about the drinking water,” Tucker complained as he belted his jacket and took one of the communicator/translator devices she was handing out to the landing party.
Archer didn’t make any comments. If she was going to keep sniping at them with sentences like that, then she deserved what she got back. Beside him, Tucker, Reed, Mayweather, and Hoshi Sato were veritably twitching with anticipation. A new planet! Strange new worlds.
T’Pol didn’t even get Tucker’s comment. She went on to the next thing. “Dr. Phlox isn’t concerned with food and water. But he does caution against intimate contact.”
Archer glossed over that one, disliking the idea of treating his command staff like cadets on leave. “The Vulcans told us Klaang was a courier. If he was here to get something, then whoever gave it to him might know why he was taken. That was only a few days ago,” he added optimistically, “and a seven-foot Klingon doesn’t go unnoticed. T’Pol’s been here before, so follow her lead.”
He gave her a glance of what he hoped was confidence.
“Where do we rendezvous if we find something?” Hoshi asked.
“Back at the shuttlepod. And no one goes anywhere alone. From what I’ve heard about this place, it’s an alien version of an Oriental bazaar. Don’t stop to buy trinkets. Ask simple questions, get direct answers. If you don’t like what you hear, move on. There are a lot of people down there, or versions of people. Don’t get swallowed up. Watch each other. Clear?”
Whether it was or not, they were on their way. The six-seat subwarp shuttlepod was functional, but not really comfortable, and the trip down to the planet seemed longer than it was.
Mayweather brought the pod into the atmosphere and found himself bucking snow-torn slopes and high winds.
“Approaching what appears to be a landing deck.” He squinted out the windshield. “I see a trail of lights. Runway, possibly.”
“I’d say this spaceport accommodates all kinds of craft,” Archer confirmed, just to make them all feel better. They might be strangers here, but they were coming to a place that was used to strangers. Coming into a cosmopolitan spaceport would be much easier to tolerate than invading a tribal clutch or a village.
In fact, when they finally found the landing pad in the whipping veils of snow, their shuttle turned out to be the smallest thing around, in a swarm of dozens of ships coming and going at the same time. The sight was eerily familiar to anyone who recognized a travel center. Something about it was reassuring to Archer, as they approached and were received as a matter of course. No fanfare, no ceremony, no warnings or threats.
Beacons and trails of blue and yellow landing lights branched out in patterns both distinguishable and not, at least enough to get them down safely. T’Pol used her knowledge of this place to secure a parking spot where the shuttlepod had a chance of not being plundered, and they immediately disembarked and broke into teams.
Trying to appear casual, Archer went first to the dock-master’s control tower. After all, something had to come and go from here with Klaang aboard. He certainly hadn’t popped in out of thin air, so there had to be a trail.
He and Hoshi were ushered through a tubular construction with lots of bridges into a central control area with windows on every side, couched by banks of controls and broken every few seconds by the sweep of a beacon from the runways. The dockmaster himself was a huge burly alien preoccupied with traffic.
“Pardon us,