Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [8]
“Have they given any indication of what they want?” he asked, pulling aside his covers and swinging his legs out of bed.
“None,” came the answer.
“Very well,” said the captain. “I will take it here in my quarters.”
“Aye, sir.”
Padding across the carpeted deck to his closet, Picard took out a clean uniform and slipped it on. Then he sat down in front of the small, space-efficient workstation in the anteroom of his quarters and accepted the communication.
Instantly, the Federation insignia on the screen—a disk displaying a field of gleaming stars resting in the embrace of twin laurel wreaths—gave way to a different image entirely.
It was that of a woman, and a very beautiful woman at that. She had long black hair gathered into a ponytail and eyes the color of rich, dark chocolate. And it wasn’t the first time the captain had seen her…
Though the last time had been in another galaxy.
Ben Zoma moved his bishop from level 2 to level 3 on the three-dimensional chessboard, then sat back in his chair. “You really think ‘brilliant’ is the right word, Lieutenant?”
“I do,” Urajel confirmed from her seat on the other side of the table as she studied the multilevel chessboard with her shiny black eyes.
She was an Andorian, one of the brighter stars in Mister Simenon’s engineering section. And she had a refreshing way of speaking her mind that had always appealed to the first officer, though never more than now.
“I have served with some remarkably resourceful people,” Urajel continued, speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the buzz in the observation lounge, “and I can’t recall any of them devising such a novel way to communicate.”
She was talking about the maneuver Ben Zoma had pulled off just a handful of days earlier. Stuck in an unfamiliar craft that he had borrowed from an armada of hostile aliens, prevented from contacting the Stargazer—or any of the other Federation ships lined up against the invaders—by jamming signals, he had nonetheless found a way to defuse the situation.
After all, the aliens didn’t really want to fight. They just wanted to retrieve someone who belonged to them, an individual whom the Federation would willingly relinquish once they confirmed his true identity.
But it was Ben Zoma’s job to get that information across—at the very least, the part about the possibility of avoiding bloodshed—before the battle got under way.
So he took a roll of flat, pale foodstuff, dyed it with a message Picard alone would understand, and sent it floating out into the void. Seeing the message—a reference to the Picard family vineyard—the captain sent up a red flag. And soon after, what might have been a bloodbath of historical proportions was rendered moot.
It was the cleverest thing he had ever done. And being human, he wanted Urajel to go on complimenting him. But he couldn’t be too obvious about it.
“You know,” said Ben Zoma, “you’re liable to give me a swelled head with that talk.”
Urajel made a sound of disdain. “You wouldn’t hesitate to remonstrate with someone who had done a poor job, would you? Then why stint on praise?”
“Because it’s embarrassing,” he explained.
The engineer looked at him with a gleam of skepticism in her eyes. “With all due respect, sir, you don’t seem embarrassed in the least. You seem quite pleased.”
“Only because I’m trying to accept what you’re saying in the spirit in which you’ve said it.”
“I see. So you’re merely being open-minded, receptive to the perspectives of another culture.”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“You’ve got it,” the first officer told her.
“That might be the most obvious lie I’ve heard all day.”
The first officer watched Urajel’s gaze flicker over the game’s three boards. “You think so?”
“Yes, sir. And by the way,” she said, transporting her queen from the third level to the first, “checkmate.”
Ben Zoma stared at Urajel’s queen, which along with her rook had placed his king in an untenable position. Somehow, he had overlooked that possibility.
Smiling