Enigma - Michael Jan Friedman [48]
“Thank you,” said Picard. “I have been told that you will be calling the shots. Do you have a preference as to where I deploy the Stargazer?”
“For now,” said Sesballa, “no. We can deal with that after I see who joins us and what we’ve got to work with.”
“Did you receive my communication?” asked Picard, keeping his question vague for the benefit of Sesballa’s bridge officers. “The one concerning my officer?”
“I did,” said Sesballa. “And I have discussed the matter with the other captains here. To this point, none of us has experienced a similar problem.”
That was good news, at least. “Nonetheless,” said Picard, “we should continue to monitor the situation.”
Sesballa nodded his hairless, silver head. “My thought exactly. We will speak again, Captain.” And he signed off.
Once again, Picard found himself looking at the defense formation. He turned to Wu, who had come up to join him.
“None of them have rooted out an informant,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t have any.”
The captain shrugged. “Captain Sesballa said they would continue to investigate.”
Of course, there was the possibility that Ulelo had been one of a kind—the only informant in the entire fleet. If that were so, Picard had to marvel at the fate that had placed such an individual on the Stargazer, and the Stargazer alone.
Ben Zoma would have worn himself out ribbing his friend about it. Only you, Jean-Luc.
Frowning at the viewscreen, Picard wondered where his first officer was at that moment. On a starbase, he hoped—somewhere safe, somewhere far from the aliens’ pattern of incursion.
Of course, if the invaders continued to have their way with Starfleet’s finest, no place in the Federation would be safe for much longer.
Ulelo sat in his cell and kept his eyes closed as long as he could. That way, he could avoid distractions and focus on the images assailing his mind—the images that seemed more important to him now than ever before.
Because he wasn’t just seeing places anymore. Now he was seeing people in those places. In the forest, at the diamond-dust shore, on the parched, black plain…
Some of them were engaged in activities Ulelo readily understood, running a race or collecting leaf samples or some such thing. But others were doing things he didn’t understand at all, things that didn’t look the least bit familiar to him.
And—this was the strangest part of all—the people he saw in his visions didn’t look alien to him. They looked like humans.
Why should that be? he asked himself. Were there others like Ulelo in those places, dedicated as he was to serving the aliens who lived there? Had he seen them at some point? Known them?
Had those other humans gone back to their starships as he had, their missions much the same as his? Were they serving on their ships even now, operating undercover as he had operated undercover—unaware that Ulelo had been apprehended by his crewmates and incarcerated?
Not that he could do anything about it. He was penned up in the brig. He had no way to contact anyone, to tell them that they were doing wrong.
But what really troubled him wasn’t the possibility that there were others like him, transmitting data on other starships. It was what had troubled him all along—the fact that he couldn’t remember for certain, one way or the other.
That morning, as he woke from sleep, he thought he had caught a glimpse of the truth that had been eluding him—an image that looked back at him squarely, rather than sliding past the corner of his vision. It was a human, like himself, but a female. She was in a room, not unlike Ulelo’s quarters on the Stargazer.
And she was speaking to him. He couldn’t hear her, but he could see her mouth moving. She was trying to tell him something—something important, judging by her expression.
But for the life of him, Ulelo couldn’t figure out what it might be.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS ONE THING to survey the vastness of the aliens’ cargo bay from the vantage point of an airlock. It was another to walk around the perimeter of the