Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [65]
Had Zetha been amazed to learn that she would be going with the away team? There were not words enough in her vocabulary to encompass her amazement. Yet nothing showed on her face. She would find acting the part of a Vulcan, when the time came, easy enough.
So the Crushers had accepted her, and even the ancient one named McCoy, who otherwise seemed so abrasive, had found a smile for her.
“Zetha, is it?” he’d asked, deigning to appear in full for a change instead of as merely a voice or a floating head. “My, aren’t you a pretty little thing! Or am I allowed to say that? My guess is both our worlds allow an old geezer like me to say pretty much whatever I want. Feel free to tell me to shut up.”
“I would not do that,” she said, repressing the urge to smile for the first time in a long time. Aemetha would have liked this one, she decided.
But this Sisko, Zetha thought, watching him out of the corners of her eyes. What does he want? He is in charge, and it is a given that I will obey his restrictions. Does he think I know how to operate this ship or, more to the point, how to sabotage it? He speaks of food. Perhaps he intends to cook some elaborate meal, and I can praise it and win his trust that way. If he knew what I have had to eat or not eat in order to get to this point…
“Are you hungry?” the Lord had taunted her on the third day of the survival course.
“Are you?” she shot back, for the sheer pleasure of watching his hand half-curl into a fist involuntarily before he became aware of it.
“Tanclus fainted during the forced march today,” he told her instead.
“Did he? Tanclus is twice my size. He needs twice as much food as I do.”
“And you think that makes you stronger?” the Lord sneered.
“If you say so, Lord,” she said, waiting for the blow to fall. For once, it didn’t.
I cannot do the impossible, she thought now, getting up from the seat Sisko had assigned her and heading for Selar’s lab, letting Sisko have the stars to himself. But I will do the best I can.
They were two days into the journey before she understood what the problem was.
Crew quarters on Albatross were cramped; the four of them lived, ate, and slept in a single compartment. There were two bunks, one atop the other, built into each side, and a table in the center that did service for meals from the nearby replicator or the minuscule galley adjacent. At other times, it served as map table, writing desk, showcase for the one prized Vulcan orchid Tuvok had brought with him, or anything else any of them might be working on.
It wasn’t the crowding. On cold nights, she and as many as a score of other street brats had bundled together under the piles of clothing in Aemetha’s salon to keep warm. It was because the tidiness and order reminded her of the barracks, and it was because she dreamed.
Chapter 10
The day was overcast and chill; it had been raining. She and Tahir had finished their purloined meal in the alley behind the Orchid and were loitering in the main square near the Senate, watching vids in the window of the Bureau of Announcements, when it happened.
Scroungers’ Second Law: Hide in plain sight. The shadow of the Senate was always replete with scroungers, forgers, black marketeers, operating under the premise that there were more guards per square meter here than anywhere else on Romulus, and where better to conduct one’s illicit business than right beneath their noses because, in their bureaucratic smugness, the powers that were assumed no one would dare?
Thus she and Tahir, having earlier in the day relieved a priggish apothecary of two crates of simple remedies that might keep the foundlings’ winter-long sniffles from becoming something deadlier, were celebrating by filling their own bellies first for once and watching snippets of the narratives that people who had vidscreens could see in the comfort of their homes.
There were two rows of screens, usually reserved for official announcements,