Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [32]
“Try your ID code,” Felicia suggested.
Every cadet was assigned an identity code to be used throughout their years at the Academy. Will nodded and entered his code onto the keypad. This was met by a whirring noise, and a previously invisible slot appeared on the cylinder. From the slot, a new strip of paper emerged.
“What does it say?” Felicia asked with excitement.
” ‘Congratulations, Zeta Squadron,’ ” Will read. ” ‘You’ve achieved checkpoint number one. Your next challenge will be to span the globe to find an artist, who will direct you from there.’ “
“An artist?” Felicia frowned. “What does that mean?”
Will shrugged, palms up. “Beats me,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at the other part of their team, still climbing the second peak unaware of the discovery. “But I guess we can tell the others to come down now. Unless you want to let Boon hike around and grumble a while longer.”
Chapter 9
The captain’s office was dimly lit and suffused with a burning rubber smell that reminded Kyle of old skunk. He found himself wanting to hold his breath, but knew that was impractical. Anyway, he’d have to get used to the odor since he was going to be on the ship for a while. The captain was a Kreel’n, he’d been told. Without that small warning he wouldn’t have known what to expect, and having never met a Kreel’n-rumors, of course, but that was all-he was still barely prepared for the reality of it.
“Captain?” he asked hesitantly when he entered. He had been told to enter but he couldn’t see her anywhere when he went in. Unlike the neat and tidy equivalents he had seen on Starfleet vessels, this room was barely contained chaos; seemingly a storeroom for old electronic parts, a workspace, a library, and an office all in one, with no apparent division between one function and another.
“Come in, Mr. Barrow,” a voice like a rusted hinge squeaked at him. “I am here, at my desk.”
Kyle tried to follow the voice through the gloom and clutter. He had chosen the pseudonym Barrow, on a whim, because it was both an Alaskan city he had visited on a few occasions and the name of one of the most infamous fugitives in American history, Clyde Barrow, better known in association with his partner Bonnie Parker. If you’re going to be on the lam, he’d thought, you might as well make the best of it. So he had become Kyle Barrow, man of mystery.
Finally, he saw a flat surface-mostly buried under stacks of objects whose purposes he could only make the wildest guess at-and behind the stacks, a pair of black, lifeless eyes in an oddly shaped head. He stepped forward and more of the captain came into view. Her head most closely resembled, in Kyle’s experience, a pickle or a cucumber, but larger, with a greater diameter. Her skin was a dark green, and her eyes, half a dozen of them, encircled most of her head at about three-quarters of its height. Above them were nodes and ridges running lengthwise; below the eyes some perforations that might have been aural, olfactory, or some other type of organs, and below those a definite mouth, unlipped and toothless but with a tongue capable of speaking English, though with an unpleasant rasp.
“Welcome to the Morning Star, Mr. Barrow,” she said, rising from her seat and extending a hand toward Kyle. “I’m Captain S’K’lee.”
Kyle stepped forward and took the proffered hand, shaking and then releasing it. It had, as far as he could tell, ten fingers, maybe a dozen, all narrow and wormlike, with no apparent joints. Like her head, it was a dark green, or seemed to be in the dim light. Her uniform was a simple pale green tunic, belted at what must have been her waist, though there was only a third of her entire height below it. He couldn’t see her legs, or whatever was beneath the belt, and she quickly lowered herself back down behind the desk.
“Thank you for the welcome, and for the berth,” Kyle said. “I appreciate your fitting me in at short notice.”
“Better to have a passenger