Broken Bow - Diane Carey [35]
“Who? What planet is that?”
“It’s not a planet. It’s an organization. The planet is Earth.”
“Good for you. The visitor’s center is on Quintash Plaza.”
“Thanks very much. Before we go, would you answer a few questions for us?”
“There’s a manual on the wall in the corridor. Read it,” the alien rumbled. “Next time, approach from the mountains. Less crosswind.”
“Thank you again ... I’d like to know whether a Klingon vessel of any kind came through here about five or six of your days ago.”
“Five or six days? Do you realize how much traffic we process in a single day?”
“You must keep records,” Archer suggested, glancing at Hoshi. “This was a one-man Klingon scoutship.”
“What species are you?”
“Human. We’re called humans.”
As if congratulating him, an alarm went off and lights flashed on the dockmaster’s console. The dockmaster hammered on what might have been a keyboard, then checked a monitor.
“Elkan nine, raise your approach vector by point two radiants!”
When the alarm stopped, the dockmaster hammered something new into the keyboard and the monitor changed.
“It was seven days ago. A K’toch-class vessel.”
“Does it say who he was here to see?” Although the question was probably out of line or classified, Archer took his best shot at getting what he wanted.
“What it says is that he arrived at docking port six and was given a level one biohazard clearance.”
Archer kept from clapping his hands—he would never have given up information like that just for the asking! At least this guy had no such guardrails. “You don’t seem very interested in what people do here.”
“Our visitors value their privacy,” the dockmaster said, even though he had just handed over information Klaang probably never wanted known. “It wouldn’t be very tusoropko tuproya plo business they’re in.”
Archer flinched at the sudden change in sounds and looked at Hoshi, who busily adjusted the communicator/translator.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Rigelian uses a pronominal base. The translator’s just reprocessing the syntax.”
Who cared? Archer avoided telling her nobody was interested in how it did what it was doing, as long as it succeeded and he could keep talking to this person.
“Do you have any records of a Suliban vessel coming in around the same time?”
“Suliban? I don’t know that word. Your device must still be malfunctioning.”
The dockmaster went back to his work, turning his idea of a shoulder to the newcomers. If the body language of a mollusk was anything Archer could trust, he got the idea the alien was all done talking. Had he asked the wrong question? Or the exactly right one?
He motioned to Hoshi, muttered another useless thank you, just in case he needed it later, and led the way out into the corridor.
“He’s lying,” she told him immediately.
“I know. But he has no reason to tell us anything. He’s probably more scared of whoever wants him to keep silent.”
“Why would he be?”
“You saw the Klingons and the Suliban. They’re both a little more rugged than you and I appear to be. Whose threat would you take more seriously?”
“Then we still don’t know anything.”
“We know for certain that Klaang was here.”
“We knew that before, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” Archer agreed. “But now, if I read my dockmasters correctly, somebody else will know we’re here looking for him. Let’s go down to the Plaza and appear obvious, shall we?”
The main downtown area was an ancient, towering, weatherworn complex that seemed to have been constructed over several decades. Architectural styles ran the gamut here, as did the age of the buildings. In some cases, new structures were built right on top of old ones, without bothering to demolish. The city was swirled on the outer reaches with inhospitable subarctic terrain and constant winds and snows. Plumes of steam blasted constantly from geothermal vents that kept the buildings from freezing.
Within the city itself, things were about twenty degrees warmer than the spaceport complex, just from the tightly clustered