Enigma - Michael Jan Friedman [40]
Paris turned back to his controls. “Aye, sir.”
Ben Zoma watched the stars wheel across the shuttle’s observation port. Finally, they stabilized, a sign that he and his crew were pursuing their new course.
He would have liked to send a message to the Stargazer, letting Picard know what they intended, but he couldn’t take the chance that it would be intercepted and deciphered. It was a risky enough venture even without that.
In fact, Ben Zoma couldn’t remember the last time he had taken this big a chance, or had so much riding on how he fared. Rolling the dice, he told himself, as he settled back in his seat and steeled himself for what was ahead.
Chapter Ten
FOR PERHAPS THE FIFTIETH TIME since they had made the decision to change course, Ben Zoma watched Admiral McAteer drift over to the shuttle’s control console.
Craning his neck over Chen’s shoulder, the admiral gave their navigational monitors the once-over. “How’s it going?” he asked the security officer.
“Fine, sir,” said Chen.
“Good,” said McAteer. He turned to Paris, who was manning the helm again. “You?”
“Good here too, sir,” said the ensign.
The admiral nodded. Then he stretched a bit, as if that had been the main purpose of his excursion, and returned to his seat in the aft part of the vessel.
Once Ben Zoma was sure that McAteer was behind him, he smiled to himself. The admiral was obviously one of those people who just didn’t feel comfortable delegating responsibility. It was a wonder that the man had come up so far through the ranks, considering how difficult it was to accomplish anything in Starfleet without putting some faith in one’s subordinates.
Ben Zoma believed he understood now why McAteer’s relationship with Picard had been so rocky. If the admiral had a hard time trusting people, he would be that much less inclined to place his trust in a rookie.
The first officer, on the other hand, was perfectly content to get some rest and let Chen do his job. So, apparently, were Ramirez, Garner, and Horombo, who were tilted back in their seats and sleeping soundly.
Ben Zoma shut his eyes too. After all, he didn’t know what they would encounter on the aliens’ supply vessel. It might be a long time before he got another chance to sleep.
One moment, Ulelo was in the Stargazer’s brig, gazing miserably at yet another in a long string of security officers through the sizzling haze of a confining energy barrier.
The next, he was beset by images he couldn’t quite grasp. Images that nagged at him as if he should know them, but remained just beyond the pall of his conscious mind.
An expanse of fissured, black earth stretching to a double sunset of pale gold. A dense, azure forest, the underbrush giving off its own light in the otherwise impenetrable gloom of tree-shadow. A bloodred tide pawing insistently at a shoreline of dazzling, diamond-dust beaches.
And a dozen other sites, each more unfamiliar and unlikely than the one before it.
He hadn’t seen these things on any Starfleet mission. He was reasonably certain of that. But the memories were so vivid, so real as they clung to the edges of his vision, that he was certain he had seen them somewhere, on some occasion he couldn’t seem to dredge up in its entirety.
Finally, after torturing himself for hours, Ulelo believed he knew where he had seen the fissured plain, and the azure forest, and the bloodred tide. On the planet of the people he had worked for. It had to be.
He didn’t remember being prepared for his mission on the Stargazer, but he must have been. Otherwise, how would he have known what to do, or how to go about it? And it made sense that his preparation would have taken place on his masters’ homeworld.
Yes, he told himself for perhaps the hundredth time—for the more he said it, the easier it was to embrace. His masters’ homeworld, a place so alien, so unlike anywhere else…
Where what seemed like a carpet of soft, white ground cover was actually an army of tiny, vicious predators. Where rust-red pellets fell from the sky in savage twists of wind, only