Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [44]
Wish I’d been there, with those men in those times, taking those orders. I could’ve followed those orders and given them ten cents change! Just imagine-First Officer Spock saying, “These are your orders, Ensign Stiles.” Imagine ….
Their voices were more familiar than his own family’s, more familiar than Travis Perraton’s calming tone behind him making sure he didn’t make quite as much a fool of himself as he otherwise might, or Jeremy White taunting him while the others laughed. But it had been a good laugh… he hadn’t appreciated it back then. They were having fun, enjoying themselves all because he was with them. That was worth being laughed at. It never hurt so much, except that he let it hurt. If they were enjoying themselves, then the existence of Eric Stiles was doing some good.
He wanted to wake up. Usually he could will himself out of unconsciousness after a short struggle. Orsova commonly knocked him into a dither, and he had learned to claw his way out of the tunnel to the light place where Zevon would be waiting for him, usually stitching a cut or stanching a nosebleed. Wounds could actually heal without a tissuebonding beam.
That medical scanner, it looked like a super satellite to him after four years in a culture backed off a hundred fifty years from what he’d grown up with. Funny how quickly he’d gotten used to the downteching. Before, he’d never thought a person could get through a day without Federation flash and spark. He’d gotten through a day. “At a time:’
Oh-his own voice this time. Didn’t sound so bad. Come on, fight out of the hole. Zevon would be at the top of the tunnel, pressing a wet cloth to Stiles’s head. “Mmmm…”
“That’s it, son, wake up. You’re bound to have a headache, Don’t fight it.”
Stiles fought anyway. He defied the thrum in his skull and finally found the power to force his eyes open when he sensed there was some kind of light on the other side of the lids. Zevon would be there when he got them open.
Red lights? Familiar too… shipboard lights in an alert situation. Red, so the eyes could still adjust. Most eyes, anyway. Human eyes… “Let me get the lights.” That gravelly, homespun voice again. The codger. “Where’s Zevon?” Stiles registered his own voice and clung to the sound, which brought him all the way up to consciousness. When he could see, he realized the lights weren’t red anymore, but were a soft golden light, shining in small, obviously ship-built quarters rigged as some kind of sickbay. He saw a shelf with rows of bottles, piles of folded cloth, several pieces of medical scanning equipment, hyposprays, and a dozen other recognizable and somehow foreign contraptions. He knew what they all were, yet they were foreign to him, and unwelcome. “So I’m out,” he managed. “You are,” the old man said.
Forgetting himself for just a moment, Stiles fixed upon the old man’s face and tried to register that voice. He felt like a computer with a new search order-identify, identify. “Who are these people running this ship?” “Smugglers.”
“Why would a human ride with them? And why’d you come into Red Sector? Are you an expatriate or something?”
The old man’s icy blue eyes flickered and one brow arched. “I came because of typical pointed-eared hardheadedness, that’s why.” “Huh?”
“And once in a while a man’s got to slip into forbidden territory. Inoculations, contraband chemicals, antitoxins… makes the stars spin.” “But… if you… why would they….” “Why don’t you just relax, Ensign?”
“Ensign… haven’t heard that in a while. You better call me something else.”
The doctor tilted his snowy head. “why should I? You haven’t surrendered your commission, have you?”
“It got surrendered for me. I’m not that kid anymore. Starfleet gave up on me. I gave up on them.