Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [52]
“I’ll tell him,” said Serenity.
Then she departed Picard’s ready room as brusquely as she had entered, leaving him to his logs.
Chapter Twelve
“FOURTEEN MINUTES and five seconds,” Nikolas said, glancing at the chronometer set into the upper right-hand corner of his Ubarrak control panel.
That was how long it would take them to get within com range of the nearest Federation outpost. Of course, that was only his best guess, but he had confidence that it was a good one.
Gerda Idun was sitting at one of the other bridge consoles. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so excited.”
He turned to her. “I thought my galaxy was going to be enslaved and I was going to have to watch, and now it’s possible none of that will happen. Instead, I get to be with the love of my life. Is it any wonder I’m excited?”
She rolled her eyes. “When you put it that way…”
He felt uncomfortable with Gerda Idun being so far from him—a few meters, at least. She hadn’t been that far away since he found her in the corridor.
However, Brakmaktin had relinquished control of the bridge half an hour earlier, and Nikolas didn’t want to make any mistakes. Hence, his concentration on the helm controls and Gerda Idun’s on the communications panel.
“Tell me again about Earth,” she said.
He had done so several times before, but she never seemed to tire of it. Of course, it was a subject world in the universe she thought she came from, its cities subjugated or destroyed. And he made sure never to tell her about the same place twice.
“There’s a city called New Orleans,” he said, “at the mouth of the Mississippi River, where it meets the Gulf of Mexico.”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Gerda Idun.
“The old part of the city is called the French Quarter. It’s a neighborhood of narrow streets with jazz bars and trinket shops and some of the best restaurants in the world.
“The best of them, for my money, is a Creole kitchen called Sisko’s. It’s a hole in the wall, really, just starting out. The guy who owns it does all the cooking himself, so everything comes out the way he wants it.
“Man, your mouth waters as soon as you walk in. The gumbo, the jambalaya, the rémoulade…nobody makes a rémoulade like Sisko. And the crawfish are as sweet as sugar cane.
“But what I really remember is Sisko’s baby boy—must have been just a few months old the night I was there, and already the kid had a pair of lungs on him. I swear he drowned out the horn music from next door. It got to the point where his dad couldn’t hold him and serve food at the same time, so he looked around and stuck me with the little guy.”
Nikolas smiled to himself. “Go figure, he quieted down as soon as I cradled him in my arms. Got this look on his face too, like he was in heaven. One of my pals told me I had a knack with kids, but Sisko just laughed.
“Then I got a whiff of the kid and I realized why. It wasn’t me who had quieted him down. It was a bowel movement.”
Gerda Idun couldn’t stop smiling. Nikolas’s story hadn’t been an elegant one, but he guessed it had hit the spot.
He checked the chronometer again. “Nine minutes and twelve seconds. Last chance to head back to the comforts of Ubarrak space.”
“You know,” Gerda Idun said, “you’re a very silly man.”
It was exactly what the original Gerda Idun had said back on the Stargazer. “Am I?”
“Without a doubt,” she told him.
Nikolas basked in her presence. She wasn’t the Gerda Idun he had known before, but that mattered less and less all the time. She was exactly the way Gerda Idun would have been if she had been transported to Nikolas’s universe a second time.
“What are you going to say?” she asked. “When we establish a com link, I mean?”
He hadn’t given it any thought. “This is Andreas Nikolas of the cargo hauler Iktoj’ni, seeking assistance…or something like that.”
“But you’re not on the cargo hauler Iktoj’ni,” she pointed out. “You’re on an enemy warship.”
“It won’t be a problem,” Nikolas assured her. “I’ll explain before they get too suspicious.”
Of course, they would scan the cruiser and find