Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [5]
Gerda was waiting for him with her arms folded across her chest, a lock of yellow hair dangling and a thin sheen of perspiration on her face. He had expected to find disapproval in her expression, maybe even disgust at the clumsiness he had exhibited.
But what he saw was a hint of the look she had given him in the corridor. A hint of admiration.
It made Greyhorse forget how Gerda had bludgeoned him, though his throat still burned and his ribs still throbbed and there was a distinctly metallic taste of blood in his mouth. In fact, it made him eager for more.
“Tomorrow?” she asked.
He nodded, inviting waves of vertigo even with that modest gesture. “I’ll be here.”
Gerda tilted her head slightly, as if to appraise him better. She remained that way for a moment, piercing his soul with her eyes. Then she turned her back on him, pulled a towel off the rack on the wall, and left the gym.
Greyhorse watched her go. She moved with animal grace, each muscle working in perfect harmony with all the others. When the doors hissed closed behind her, he felt as if he had lost a part of himself.
How he loved her.
Chief Weapons Officer Vigo looked at his friend Charlie Kochman, contemplating the experience they had just shared. Then he broke out in a broad, toothy grin.
“You like it?” Kochman asked.
“I like it a great deal,” Vigo told him.
“Thought you would.”
Vigo considered the wooden sharash’di game board that sat between them, with its skillfully carved terrain and its clever simulations of various natural features. It was really quite a work of art—the kind the ship’s lounge seldom saw.
But the game itself . . . it was like nothing he had ever played before, either on his homeworld of Pandril or anywhere else. And he couldn’t wait to play it again.
“And you say you picked this up on Beta Nopterix?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. From an Yridian. He wanted to sell me the game, so he taught me how to play. Interesting, eh?”
Vigo nodded. “Quite interesting.”
Kochman, who was one of the ship’s navigators, smiled back at him. “And guess what, buddy? It’s yours.”
Vigo didn’t understand. “Mine?”
“That’s right. It’s a birthday gift.”
The weapons officer held up his large blue hands. “I can’t accept it. We don’t celebrate our birth anniversaries on Pandril.”
“But we celebrate them on Earth,” Kochman reminded him. “And as my friend, I can’t imagine that you’d deprive me of the opportunity to celebrate yours.”
When he put it that way, it was hard for Vigo to turn him down. “I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“Say thank you,” his friend advised.
Vigo looked down at the board, then flashed another expression of delight. “Thank you, Charlie. Thank you very much.”
Idun Asmund, the Stargazer’s primary helm officer, was almost finished with her dinner when she saw Pug Joseph approaching her with a tray of food.
As Joseph got closer, steam from his meal wafting in front of him, he seemed to notice that Idun’s plate was already empty. “Aw, geez,” the baby-faced, sandy-haired security officer said, making no effort to conceal his disappointment.
She looked up at him. “Lieutenant?”
“It’s all right,” he told her stoically. “I guess we can talk some other time.”
There wasn’t anything that demanded Idun’s attention at the moment. “What was it you wished to talk about?”
Joseph set his tray down and pulled out a chair opposite the helm officer’s. Then he looked around to make sure no one in the mess hall was listening too closely.
“Actually,” he said, leaning forward, “I wanted to talk to you about your voice.”
Idun wasn’t sure what she had expected the security officer to ask, but that wasn’t it. “My voice?”
Joseph nodded enthusiastically. “You’ve got a way of making people listen when you speak. Your sister has it too. I want them to listen to me that way.”
“In my experience,” Idun said, “people do listen when you speak. You’re widely liked, Mr. Joseph.”
“Liked,” he conceded. “But not respected. And a security chief has to be respected.”
Security chief? Now Idun was