Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [43]
For a while, Nikolas remained in bed, marveling at her beauty. Then he traversed the floor, came up behind her, and put his arms around her waist.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
Gerda Idun shrugged. “How lovely the stars are.”
She sounded so childlike, he had to smile. “More so than the stars in your universe?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never really had a chance to study our stars. I was always too busy looking out for the enemy.”
“The Klingons,” Nikolas suggested.
“And the Cardassians.”
“You know,” he said, “as I recall, you were pretty dedicated to the resistance—pretty determined to get back to it. But I haven’t heard you complain even once about being here.”
Gerda Idun slipped her hands over his. They weren’t soft, like the hands of other women he had known. They were rough with the toil of fighting an oppressor.
Nikolas remembered being surprised at the feel of her hands back on the Stargazer. But of course, he wasn’t surprised about them anymore.
“What’s the point?” she asked him. “There’s no way for me to return to my universe.”
There might be. Though he wanted very much for her to stay, he couldn’t ask her to do so under false pretenses.
“Brakmaktin brought you here,” he pointed out. “If we can find him, talk to him, we may be able to convince him to send you back—and maybe me along with you.”
Nikolas could see Gerda Idun’s face only as it was reflected in the observation port. But strangely, she didn’t seem excited about the idea.
“I thought you wanted me to stay here,” she said.
“I do,” he told her. “More than anything. I just want you to be aware of all your options.”
She turned and looked at him askance. “All your options…you sound like Captain Picard.”
He laughed. “You serve under someone, you start to pick up their expressions.” He remembered a question he had asked himself more than once since Gerda Idun’s departure. “What’s your Captain Picard like?”
“A lot like yours,” she said, turning in his embrace to face the port again. “But not nearly as polite. After all, he wakes up every morning wondering if he’ll survive the day.”
“Just the way I pictured him,” said Nikolas. He looked around the room. “I bet he would have felt right at home living here with Brakmaktin.”
Gerda Idun patted his hand. “Maybe so.”
“And your second officer was Mister Joseph?”
“He told you that? Your Pug Joseph, I mean?”
“Uh-huh. He thought it would help if he talked to me about your being gone. But it didn’t. Nothing did.”
Gerda Idun sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said, holding her a little tighter. “We’re together again. That’s all that matters.”
He recalled the last time he had seen her on the Stargazer—trying to take Simenon, the ship’s chief engineer, back to her universe. It had been her mission all along to kidnap him, so he could help her people develop a new kind of propulsion system that would give them an edge over their enemies.
“I hope you and your comrades did all right without Simenon,” Nikolas said.
“Well enough,” said Gerda Idun. “We’re still fighting, still keeping the cause alive.”
“Did you make any progress,” he asked, “on that new propulsion technology?”
She didn’t answer. She just kept gazing at the stars.
Nikolas craned his neck to look at Gerda Idun directly. “You all right?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. Again, she turned in his arms. But this time, there was concern in her eyes. “I can’t remember anything about that propulsion system.”
He tried to understand. “You mean the technical details?”
“No. I mean anything. What it was supposed to do, how it was going to help us…it’s all a blank.”
Nikolas’s mouth went dry. Was it possible that in bringing Gerda Idun over, Brakmaktin had damaged her mind?
It made him angry to think so. He would never have yearned for her if it meant her getting hurt. He would rather have endured the pain of being without her.
“Listen,” he said, grasping at straws, “maybe you never knew that stuff in the first place.