Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [24]
Assuming, Reed thought as the group walked through the crooked, arched entrance, that we can continue to trust the source of our information. Though the captain had paid handsomely for a supposedly secure parking space for the shuttlepod, Reed was beginning to regret Archer’s decision not to leave at least one member of the team behind to guard the ship.
But he knew there was no time to worry about that now; he was much too busy searching the random farrago of semidarkened booths and tables for the face of the man they sought. Aliens of every description—some humanoid, some corresponding to no phylum Reed had ever seen before—drank, ate, and conversed. On a corner stage, a quintet of hairless, vaguely humanoid aliens tortured unfamiliar tubular and stringed instruments into producing atonal music, which a ceiling-mounted speaker system amplified far too loudly for Reed’s taste. He was distracted from this nuisance by a thickening miasma of recreational smoke, which seared his lungs and forced him to suppress a wheezing cough.
Archer gave the group a silent nod, and the four MACOs instantly peeled away in different directions. Covering the exits, Reed thought as Archer, O’Neill, and Chandra also melted into the shadows, each obviously intent on their own searches.
Reed reached into his native-style traveling cloak and withdrew the small handheld scanner and padd he had brought with him from the shuttlepod. Using the padd’s small display screen, he briefly summoned up the best of the pictures of La’an Trahve that Ensign Chandra had recorded at Grakka’s spaceport and studied it as he loaded it into the padd’s biometric recognition program. Because of the dim illumination—and because his quarry might well be in disguise, or might have hidden his features behind a hat or a cloak—human eyesight alone simply wasn’t a reliable guide for this kind of search.
Holding the scanner discreetly at waist level, Reed turned very slowly in place in a complete circle before moving closer to the bar that was located at the center of the dim chamber. The scanner sent out invisible, low-intensity transtator pulses across the booths and tables and bar stools. The reflected signals returned instantaneously to the scanner’s pickup, collated the resulting biometric data, and fed it into the padd for comparison with Trahve’s recorded image.
No match yet, Reed thought, still staring at the bland, mild-looking male humanoid face displayed on the backlit padd. Walking quietly, he moved on, stepping aside to allow a rather scary-looking, saber-fanged felinoid drink server to move past him with a heavy tray heaped high with beverages and fragrant, disconcertingly raw-looking meat. Reed did his best to return his focus to the hunt, pointing his scanner toward the next group of tables and booths.
“Who the hell are you? Some kind of constable?”
The voice, or at least the English version of it, was issuing from the translation matrix Hoshi had installed into his padd. The voice’s hulking owner, however, was suddenly standing before Reed on four bandy legs topped by a bulbous torso that was adorned with three oddly jointed and hugely muscled upper limbs. The creature’s chalk-white face was ringed in delicate growths that resembled feathers, and its four dark eyes glared balefully.
Perhaps I did make it a wee bit too obvious that I’m here looking for someone, Reed thought, taking a single cautious step backward.
The alien advanced on him, closing the gap, and reached for the padd in Reed’s hand. A tentacle-like limb seized Reed’s wrist in an iron grip, making good on the threat that Grakka had made a little earlier.
Reed sincerely hoped he wouldn’t have to try to shoot his way out of his current circumstances, partly because he wasn’t at all certain he could reach his phase pistol in time if he needed to do so.
He decided instead that the safest way to handle this situation was to temporize.
“Easy,