Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [163]
Well, Karl, let me think. First, we got pulled into the Delta Quadrant. Then we got shot at. Then we got ourselves in deep when we killed a whole mess of aliens; but, see, they were such a great power supply and…
Instead, she studied the planet. Not hard: The planet was gorgeous, like nothing she’d seen. Two landmasses: a massive desert that straddled the equator and stretched to both poles. The other jutted from the planet’s South Pole where a single, shrunken ice cap splayed over a corrugated, pitted, and denuded continent half the size of Antarctica. The rest was a darkly blue-black sea, studded with a few isolated pinnacles of jagged mountain and dense whorls of off-white clouds spinning crazily on stagnant jet streams like tops.
What caught her were the lights, flickering like sequins on black velvet. The flashes cohered at times then dispersed into wispy tendrils, or spun into tight pinwheels. The lights were denser in certain regions but thinned at others. Maybe odd pockets of high albedo; something highly reflective, maybe related to the water’s salinity-that is, if the scuttlebutt was right about how all the planet’s ice caps and glaciers had thawed thousands of years ago, disrupted thermohaline circulation the way things on Earth would go to hell in a hand basket if glaciers melted and…
She wasn’t aware that Chakotay was even there until he touched her arm. She flinched, a bad habit. “Sorry. Sir.” She started to rise but Chakotay waved her down. “I was… woolgathering.”
“I’d say more like heavy-duty daydreaming. Mind if I join you?” Without waiting for her reply, Chakotay slid into a seat on her right. His lips curled in an easy grin, and for an instant, she hated the way he was so relaxed, so… content. “You looked like you were a million kilometers away,” he said.
“Not as far as that,” she said, passing it off with a light laugh. “Just… I’ve never seen a planet that was all water before.”
“Ah.” Chakotay craned his head over his right shoulder. “Pretty. Those lights remind me of fireflies. But you missed our encounter with the Moneans. Now, that was interesting: a water world within a containment barrier. No land at all. Now, from what we can tell of this planet, there’s a lot of what used to be land underwater.” He paused then cocked his head to one side. “But a pretty planet’s not all you were thinking about.”
She hesitated, unsure. Thing was, the invitation felt kind of good. In the beginning, Tom Paris was the only person who’d gone out of his way to make her feel welcome. Harry Kim, too, probably because of Paris. But then Torres had come along, scowled-and then likely given Paris an earful because the next time Marla came to the mess, Torres was right there. Paris kind of shrugged-well, you know the wife-and Marla figured she was about as welcome as a skunk to a lawn party. So, instead, Marla sat alone, pretended she didn’t notice that three-second pause as everyone else in the place stared. Forced down food that tasted like sand. After that, she avoided the mess. Ate in her quarters or, when the walls got too close, sat in the mess, late, alone. It was okay. Nobody else to sit with, anyway; the Equinox survivors all had different duty shifts. That was okay.
But now, here was Chakotay. Maybe she’d passed some sort of test? Janeway always said she had to earn her trust. Marla felt a surge of hope and just as quickly quashed it because of something her gran said: Just because a chicken’s got wings doesn’t mean he can fly.
She said, “No, really, I was thinking about the sea, being underwater, that sort of thing.”
“You worked as an undersea geothermal engineer for awhile, right?”
“My brother’s field, really. He works smokers: geothermal vents, tapping energy to power underwater research stations. Most of those are along the East Pacific Rise off South America.