Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [99]
Stiles started toward the scout, pausing only when the ambassador took a step on his injured leg and crumpled to one knee. The sergeant stepped forward to assist. Stiles met the uniformed guard with a fierce shoulder butt to the chest.
“Back off” he snapped, and took the ambassador’s arm himself.
None of the other guards made any attempt to touch them further. Stiles escorted the ambassador into the scout and to the first of only three passenger seats. They were in custody.
Stiles straightened and maneuvered to take the next seat. As he raised his eyes to scan the interior of the scout while the guards came aboard, he found himself no longer seated but rather standing ramrod straight and stating at a mounted photograph in a gilded frame on the port bulkhead.
After a wicked choke, he blurted, “Who in salvation is that!”
The sergeant, just coming aboard, glared at him as if he and the ambassador were complete idiots. ‘That’s our provost of the works. He saved half the planet from the Constrictor. He developed a way to predict the waves. He sponsored engineering schools and guided architectural renovations all over the planet. Don’t you even know who you came to see? We owe him our lives.”
The idling engines of the scout roared in his ears as Stiles stood riveted to the carpet. His voice gravelly, he managed, “I owe him a couple things too …. “
Spock surveyed the picture briefly, seeing that something more than a portrait of a guy beside a tiger oak desk was going on here. “Mr. Stiles? Do you have something to say?”
Confused, demolished, Stiles blinked at him, at the sergeant and finally again at the picture.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I know how we can get in. Tell the ‘Provost’… that Eric Stiles is back.”
Chapter Twenty-one
“STILES. ERIC STILES. You didn’t die. They cured you somehow.” “Orsova. Somehow, it figures.”
In one withering instant, all of Eric Stiles’s fears and visceral reactions bonded into a single living form. There, behind an enormous orange-and-black desk carved out of that wood that reminded Stiles of tiger oak, except even stronger, backdropped by polished paneling and a dozen plaques and awards, there sat the drunken mess that had represented misery to him for four years.
Orsova was less slovenly than before, indeed had lost weight, though he still carried the wide shoulders and stocky build that came naturally to so many native Pojjana. His black hair was now shot with gold their idea of getting older-and he no longer wore the uniform of the prison hierarchy but the tweedy suit of a Pojjana planetary official. Stiles had only seen that uniform twice before in person. A long time ago.
Orsova sat behind his huge desk, which had hardly any work upon it, and scoured Stiles with the look of a man who was being shown both the past and the future in one picture.
How could events turn this way? How could a devious slob like that become somebody with a title? “God in a box,” Stiles chafed, “what am I seeing?’
His words barely scratched from his throat. As he stood staring, he thought perhaps that only Ambassador Spock, standing with some effort at his side, had heard him at all.
He felt Spock’s peripheral glance. But the ambassador never said a thing to him about his reaction to the person they were both standing before. This was crazy. This was a dream.
Spock stepped forward, favoring his bloody leg, to draw the provost’s attention away from Stiles and onto himself.
“Provost, I am Ambassador Spock of the United Federation of Planets. Fifteen years ago I was the emissary to your government. We are here to negotiate the greening of Red Sector. Circumstances have caused the Romulans to need Federation assistance. On an Interstellar Temporary Pass, we have come here to make an offer. The sector can be reopened, allowing for trade, assistance, technological exchange, and limited diplomatic relations without requiting membership. We can help the Pojjana in many ways-agricultural efficiency,