Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [8]
Besides, she’d miss the parties. The Klingon flagship K’tarra would be in town next week, and Starfleet was holding a reception for her senior officers. Sarek of Vulcan would be there trying to maintain his dignity while Thought Admiral Klaad and Curzon Dax drank bloodwine and swapped tall stories all night, and she wouldn’t want to miss that for the world. Retirement from Starfleet Intelligence meant a special kind of retirement. It meant either you submitted to having your memory selectively erased, in which case you ended up smiling vacuously when people mentioned missions you were on because you truly didn’t remember them, or else you stepped out of the limelight altogether and lived somewhere quietly, probably under a new identity and no doubt under observation, because there were things you knew that could be extracted from your mind and used with terrible consequences. They never told you that when you entered intelligence work, only when you tried to leave.
I’d miss the parties, Uhura thought. And the sense that once in a while what I do makes a difference to the cosmos at large. I don’t want to give that up just yet. But all the rest of it…
Oh, hell! Uhura thought. I’m a long way from being able to retire. But this will be my last hands-on case, I swear. From now on, I delegate. This will be a fitting swan song, the final sentence in a conversation that began in an unlikely spot on Khitomer almost seventy years ago…
“Admiral Uhura,” a stringer for the Altair Information Syndicate wanted to know, “is there any truth to the rumor that you’re planning to retire at the end of this year?”
“I’ll tell you this much,” she said seriously. “I do not intend to die at my desk.”
By now she could play the reporters like a string quartet. She wondered why they came back year after year, just as the academic year was starting, to ask her the same questions again and again, plead for a chance to sit in on the most popular class ever taught at the Academy, pester her for insights into the workings of SI that were retina-scan classified and that she couldn’t possibly give them.
But Command said interaction with the media was necessary. Keep the public informed, Academy personnel were told; let them see that Starfleet is their friend. So Uhura played along, poised and in control at the speaker’s podium, her rich contralto voice with its three-octave range caressing their auditory receptors regardless of their species.
What did they see when they looked at her? A petite human woman of African ancestry, well past the century mark, with a single wing of jet-black hair sweeping back from her brow into the aura of white hair that framed her face like a cloud, accentuating her upswept amber eyes and what at least one old admirer had once called “cheekbones to die for.”
Her heritage was Bantu, from among those tribes whose tradition was matrilineal, where sons inherited from their mothers and every woman was a queen. She held herself like a queen and moved like a dancer, and it was not unknown for her male students to fall all over themselves with schoolboy crushes trying to impress her. Nor were they alone. Part of her skill at moving among the influential of many worlds was her ability to attract the appreciation of males from a multitude of species.
She was at peace with herself, comfortable in her own skin, and it showed.
“So how did you get involved in intelligence, Admiral?” a Benzite asked, his aerator huffing between phrases.
Uhura smiled her careful official smile, no less dazzling than the range of others she possessed. Her voice went low and conspiratorial, and her