Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [1]
Picard doubted that the armory’s original owners would have approved of the bright, jazzy music currently wafting through it, or the airy, blue lighting, or the rich, buttery fragrance that teased the captain’s nostrils.
But then, the armory was now serving as a bar of sorts—just as the cargo bay Picard had just left behind had been recast as the lobby of a rather seedy-looking spa.
In fact, if he kept walking through enclosure after enclosure and navigated correctly, he would find himself traversing bits and pieces of a great many vessels—not just Yridian and Tellati, but Klingon and Ubarrak and Orion, and on and on—a seemingly endless conglomeration of them.
Together they formed a strange and unique city—a city in orbit around a world that had never spawned life of its own. A city called Oblivion.
Or rather, that was the nickname it had been given by the earliest Terrans to frequent the place. In the original Ubarrak, it was called Obl’viaan.
Picard didn’t know how or why the first two ships in the by now immense complex had been cobbled together, or who was responsible for the cobbling. As far as he could tell, no one else knew either.
But little by little, other ships had been added—derelicts and sections of derelicts, space stations and half-destroyed hulks of space stations, some old and some relatively new, some easily recognizable and some not. And gradually, the city called Oblivion had taken on a purpose.
It had become a place where merchants of all species and backgrounds could cluster—where they could peddle their wares and work out their deals without the specter of interstellar politics looming over them.
It didn’t matter who was at war with whom, or who had offended whose leaders. In Oblivion, traders from both sides of the conflict could still carry out their transactions in peace. Nor did it matter whether they were selling medicines, high-yield plasma explosives, or the latest in exotic entertainments.
Nothing was forbidden. No peaceful commercial activity was off-limits.
But for all its license, Oblivion wasn’t a lawless place. Quite the opposite. It had its government and its rules, and a contingent of security officers who were only too happy to enforce them.
Like the orbital city’s merchants and traders, its security force was made up of many different species. And while those represented in the greatest numbers were Rythrian, Enolian, and Tyrheddan, there were also a few Vobilites, Dedderac, Lurassa, and even humans.
As Picard took in the confines of the armory, with its several humanoid denizens sitting along an obsidian bar or scattered among tables, he remarked yet again to himself how fertile Oblivion would be for scholarly inquiry.
It was especially true from an archaeological perspective—Picard’s favorite since his days at the Academy. Where else could one find the aft section of a hundred-year-old Meskmaali squadron fighter? Or a Rigelian ore transport of a perhaps even earlier vintage?
Picard would have loved to have the time to explore the place, scratching his archaeological itch at each stop along the way. But since his arrival in Oblivion a couple of days earlier, he had been forced to devote himself to this one particular portion of the city—and his study of it had been anything but archaeological.
After all, he had a mission to carry out here.
And an unusual mission it was. Quite a change of pace from his normal duties, which called for him to direct the activities of an entire starship and her crew.
In Oblivion, Picard was only responsible for directing his own activities—and keeping his identity a secret in the process. He wasn’t even wearing his cranberry-and-black Starfleet uniform, having exchanged it for a colorless set of civilian garments before leaving the Stargazer.
It was rare for a Starfleet captain to skulk around undercover, much less to do so entirely on his own. However, on this occasion he had no other option.