Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [13]
“Maybe not,” he conceded.
“I was telling you what happened to the Yeager,” said Obal, “and how she barely survived her encounter with the Ubarrak near Turion Prime.”
“Right,” said Nikolas, doing his best to work up some enthusiasm for his best friend’s sake—and failing miserably.
Obal’s eyes screwed up as if he were trying to look into the human instead of at him. “If you like, we can talk about something else.”
Nikolas knew what his friend was trying to do—the same thing he had been trying to do for weeks now. But it hadn’t worked in all that time, and there was no reason for Obal to believe it was going to work now.
Still, he wasn’t going to stop. That much seemed clear. Obal could be pretty stubborn when he wanted to be, especially when it came to what he perceived as Nikolas’s welfare.
“I can’t think of anything I really want to talk about,” Nikolas said, wincing at how bitter and self-centered he sounded. He glanced at his friend. “Sorry, but…” He shrugged.
“It’s all right,” said Obal. “I understand.”
No, thought Nikolas, you don’t.
How could he? Obal hadn’t seen the woman he cared about vanish in a column of light, transported not just off the ship but to a completely different reality.
A reality he would have made his own, if she had let him. But she had come to Nikolas’s universe on a mission, and she had refused to abandon it—no matter how sorely she might have been tempted to do so.
And now Nikolas would never see her again.
Obal leaned closer to him. “I know it is painful, my friend. But it does you no good to pine for Gerda Idun. You must put her behind you. You must move on.”
Easy enough to say, Nikolas thought. Impossible to do—at least for me.
Gerda Idun had shown up unannounced on their transporter pad, the apparent victim of a transporter screwup. Nikolas hadn’t seen it, but he had seen her.
She was a dead ringer for Gerda and Idun, the human twins who served at helm and navigation on the Stargazer’s bridge. And yet, she was so different from either one of them.
Gerda and Idun had been raised by Klingons, but that wasn’t the case with Gerda Idun. As a result, she was easier to read and to get along with. And before he knew it, Nikolas had fallen in love with her.
Then it turned out that her arrival on the transporter pad hadn’t been an accident after all. She had been dispatched to Nikolas’s universe to abduct the Stargazer’s chief engineer, Phigus Simenon, in the hope of shoring up a rebel cause in Gerda Idun’s universe.
Thanks to Nikolas and then Gerda, the abduction never came off. Gerda Idun was sent back to her comrades painfully empty-handed—but no more so than Nikolas, who lost the only woman he had ever loved.
Worse, Gerda and Idun still lived and worked on the Stargazer. Every time Nikolas ran into one of them, it reminded him of what might have been.
It stinks, he told himself. He had no appetite. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t even rest without thinking of Gerda Idun. And he didn’t know how much more he could take of it.
“You need to be alert,” said Obal, breaking into Nikolas’s thoughts, “if you’re to receive the promotion that the captain spoke of.”
Picard had mentioned such a possibility. At the time, Nikolas had considered it the best thing that could possibly have happened to him.
Funny. He even remembered the words the captain had used—or most of them.
“I would take special care to avoid physical conflicts with your colleagues, whether they start in anger or not. It would be a shame to mar what is becoming a most compelling case for promotion.”
But that was before Nikolas saw Gerda Idun disappear on that transporter pad. Now he didn’t give a damn if he got a promotion or not. The whole thing was an abstraction, hardly worth thinking about.
Besides, he had disobeyed Picard’s orders. He had gone to the transporter room when Gerda Idun was scheduled to leave, instead of reporting to his assignment in engineering.
The captain hadn’t seen fit