Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [26]
“I hadn’t given it any thought at all,” she told him. “It’s a view. I don’t see how one would judge any given view as greater or lesser than any other.”
“Unless it was a view from which you could see what’s-his-name, that sailor. Popeye, or something, right?”
“That’s different,” Estresor Fil said quickly. “That’s a cultural study, not simply an empty aesthetic enterprise. If you were studying the view to scout for dangers, perhaps, or landmarks, then I could understand you. But just admiring it because you can see a long way? I’m sorry, I just can’t comprehend.”
“Are you sure you’re not part Vulcan?” he asked with a grin.
“Absolutely certain,” she replied, as stone-faced as ever. Her expression-eyes wide, narrow lips pressed firmly together in a straight line, tiny nub of a nose barely more than a pinch of flesh-rarely seemed to change, even though Will knew he had seen her happy and sad and worried. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel strong emotions, but her face didn’t seem to be up to the job of showing them. “Why do you ask?”
He decided to drop it. Vulcans believed in logic, but that didn’t mean that humor was completely alien to them. “No reason. Have you seen any of the others since you’ve been skulking in the doorway?”
“I have not. We’re the first.”
“I wish we could use combadges,” Will sighed.
“That would contradict the point of the project,” Estresor Fil argued. “We’re supposed to be in a hostile city, relying on just our wits and what we’ve learned of urban survival, not our technology.”
“But if we really were infiltrating a hostile city we’d still have our combadges, our padds, and our phasers,” Will insisted. “Right?”
“We might,” Estresor Fil relented. “But there might be some technology that jammed our combadges, or would allow the enemy to locate us when we used them. By the same token, our weapons might have been removed from us during capture, and we’ve just broken free. We need to follow the admiral’s rules.”
Will gave up and nodded. Admiral Paris had already been over all this, of course, and Will had expected nothing different. But he could complain about it nonetheless. Admiral Paris was a nut for the Prime Directive, as well, and Will knew that it was his philosophy that if an away team had landed in a primitive city of some kind, the use of any technology beyond the level of which the locals had attained would be forbidden. So really, there was no way combadges would be allowed on this project. They’d just have to wait until the others showed up, no matter how long that might be.
But with only Estresor Fil for company, he hoped it was soon.
Dennis Haynes made his way around the cold, abandoned island, sticking to the rugged coastline as well as he could. The old prison still dominated the interior, its thick walls crumbling now with age but still somehow sinister in appearance. Struts sticking up like grasping fingers indicated a tower of some kind, long since fallen. He couldn’t help being made a little nervous by the idea of so many desperate and dangerous people being kept behind those walls, even though it had happened a long time ago. And he couldn’t shake the disturbing knowledge that the prison had been built here because getting back to the city from this spot was no simple matter. He couldn’t remember if Alcatraz was a prison from which there had been no escapes, or just not many.
Either way, it didn’t bode well for him.
He had made nearly a complete circuit when he spotted the boat. It was an ancient contraption, made of real wood, it seemed, and it had been dragged onto a gravelly stretch of beach, leaving a furrowed path to the waterline behind it. No footprints led away from it, though, so there was no way of knowing how long it had been sitting in that spot. A day, a year, a decade? On closer examination he saw that its oar-locks were rusted. He touched one, to see if it would still swivel, but as he turned it the wood around it broke away,