Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [49]
The captain’s smile widened. “Oh, you are good! And that’s why we’d love to have you aboard. But only if you’re comfortable with it. All we ask is that you think about it. I promise you won’t have to compromise your principles or put your life on the line any more than you’ve had to under Kirk’s command.” She coughed. “This isn’t some antique spy movie. There’s no combat training, you’ll not be issued a license to kill or anything silly like that. We just need you to do what you do anyway, which is listen. But listen for us. The opportunities for promotion are… interesting. It would be a wise career move for someone with your skills.”
“How long will you give me to think about it?” Uhura said after they’d both let the silence go on for a while.
The captain finished her coffee and got to her feet.
“As long as you need to. Let me get you back to the party before you’re missed. When you’ve reached your decision, you can contact me here.”
She handed Uhura a communicator of a type she had never seen before.
“It’s a one-way, single-use comm unit,” the captain explained. “Activate it within one year’s time, and it’ll find me wherever I am and tell me you’re good to go. If I don’t hear from you within a year, it’ll deactivate itself, you can toss it out the airlock, and you and I never had this conversation.”
“That was the whole sales pitch?” Curzon asked, taking the empty brandy snifter from her hands.
“Pretty anticlimactic, wasn’t it?” Uhura said. “Oh, and by the way, there was no Rhaandarite captain in the fleet. I checked. But I did a little investigating of my own once I was inside SI, and managed to track her down, just to return the favor.”
“Who was she?”
“That I can’t tell you. She’s dead now, so it doesn’t really matter, but she had her reasons for remaining anonymous. And, the truth is, I was at a crossroads; I wanted to jump at her offer. But I was annoyed with the way she’d approached me, so I kept her waiting until after Kirk disobeyed orders one last time and we took the old girl for a spin out That-away. When I came back, I said yes, and here I am.”
“So all those years, even when you had command of your own ship-?”
“Yes. And before you ask, no, I never spied on anyone in Starfleet. Mostly what I did was what I always did, monitored every layer of multiphasic transmission that we passed through on our way from Here to There.”
“I’m sure there was more to it than that,” Curzon suggested.
“Well, yes, then there’s learning to interpret what you hear. What sounds like two merchant captains having a conversation about ion storms could really be a code for safe smuggling routes. What sounds like random static could be a Tholian numeric code revealing an attack plan on a Romulan outpost. If Starfleet is able-circuitously, of course-to get word to the Romulans so they can abort the attack before it happens, at some point that’s going to count in our favor.”
“Which brings me back to Cretak. Surely you two haven’t been incommunicado all this time?”
“No,” Uhura said thoughtfully, wondering if the years had been as kind to Cretak as they had been to her. “We never met face-to-face again. But we kept in touch. Sometimes not for decades, but we kept in touch. There are always ways to punch a message through, if you know how. Just a word now and then, a specially coded transmission that only the other would understand, which says ‘I’m still here, and you?’ And that’s all I can tell you on that subject, even here.”
“And eventually you ended up running the whole show,” Curzon inferred, returning to sit beside her on the overstuffed divan.
“Something like that,” she said, feeling his arm slip around her shoulders and deciding to let it stay there.
Not surprisingly, Benjamin Sisko couldn