Enigma - Michael Jan Friedman [9]
The admiral seemed to like people whose families were associated with the fleet. Maybe that was how he had gotten friendly with Admiral Caber.
“Paris it is,” Picard assured the admiral. Anything to get you off this ship.
Phigus Simenon, chief engineer of the Stargazer, cast a critical eye over the console screen in front of him.
Normally, it played host to operating data on any number of ship’s systems, from warp drive to waste recycling. Or else it displayed some complicated set of calculations, which no one but Simenon would even consider following without the assistance of a computer.
But at the moment, the engineer’s screen was filled with something else—images of a half-dozen lizard-like creatures, their oversized golden eyes peering at him innocently from the safety of their artificial nest.
My children, he thought.
It didn’t sound right. It didn’t feel right. And yet, there they were, irrefutable proof that Simenon had indeed made a contribution to the future of his species.
Soon, the hatchlings would be removed from their nest and given to their mother to raise. Simenon hadn’t met her, but he had heard good things about her. She would be a fine parent. The children would be trained in the ways of Gnalish society and educated in accordance with their natural talents.
And Simenon? He would do what males of his species had always done. He would stay as far away as possible, minimizing the chances of his screwing everything up.
He recalled his own mother—a stern individual who had taken no guff from anyone, especially her off-spring. Now there was a parent. He still thought of her on occasion, though he would never have let any of his crewmates know that.
Simenon could just imagine the comments—especially from the humans aboard, who seemed to have a very different relationship with their mothers than his own people did. But then, what could one expect from a species that insisted on feeding its young with maternal secretions?
It made him shiver down to the tip of his scaly tail just thinking about it. He was still doing so when he noticed that he had unaccustomed company—in the large, blue form of Vigo, the Stargazer’s weapons officer.
Along with the captain, Ben Zoma, and Doctor Greyhorse, Vigo had earned Simenon’s undying gratitude by assisting him in a grueling ritual back on the Gnalish homeworld. It was that ritual that had ensured Simenon of the progeny pictured on his screen.
At first, the engineer suspected that his colleague had come to challenge him to a game of sharash’di, a complex and apparently habit-forming conceit that Vigo had acquired as a gift from another crewman. Then Simenon saw the expression on Vigo’s face, and doubted that he had come about a game.
The engineer swiveled in his chair. “What’s the matter?”
Vigo grunted softly. “Is it that obvious that I’m troubled?”
“No more obvious than, say, a supernova.”
The weapons officer pulled up a chair and sat facing Simenon. “I need to ask you a question,” he said.
It wasn’t often that crewmates came to the engineer for advice. He just wasn’t the type to lend a sympathetic ear. But he gave Vigo’s question his full attention.
It wasn’t until Vigo was done speaking, and Simenon had seen the light of determinaton in his friend’s eyes, that he realized something about the answer he was about to utter….
It was the same as the one already lodged in Vigo’s heart.
Hundreds of years earlier, when horse-drawn stagecoaches carried passengers across the middle band of North America called the United States, the man charged with protecting the stagecoach would sit next to the driver.
In his arms, he would cradle a primitive projectile weapon known as a shotgun. Hence, the derivation of the term “shotgun seat,” which referred to the place next to the driver, or pilot, or helmsman of a particular vehicle.
It was this seat that Ben Zoma claimed