Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [33]
Picard pointed to the name at the top of the list. “How about this one?”
Ben Zoma frowned as he sat in the center seat before a viewscreen full of static stars, one of them the brilliant, young sun around which Oblivion and its mother planet revolved. It had been several hours since Picard’s scheduled rendezvous with Nuadra Demmix, and they still hadn’t heard from him.
“I wonder,” said a familiar voice, “if what they say about a watched pot is true of a watched star.”
Ben Zoma turned and saw Wu. She hadn’t been on the bridge a minute ago. But now she was standing at the first officer’s side the way he sometimes stood at the captain’s.
“It never boils?” he ventured.
The second officer smiled. “In literal terms, it doesn’t work very well. But I think you get the idea.”
“I suppose I do,” he said.
Wu glanced at the screen. “What do you think happened?”
Ben Zoma shrugged. “Maybe somebody recognized the captain and decided he’d bring a good ransom. Maybe he ran into trouble with some thieves. It could have been any of a hundred things.”
The second officer nodded. “Do you still want to wait?”
He could feel his teeth grinding together. Not for a minute, he thought. But what he told Wu was “There’s more at stake here than the captain’s life. I’ve got to give him a chance to finish what he started.”
Even if it means arriving too late to rescue him? Ben Zoma asked himself.
Even then, he answered grudgingly.
“By my count,” he said out loud, “he’s still got almost sixteen hours.” He glanced at Wu. “But you might want to think about putting a team together—in case sixteen hours goes by and we still haven’t heard from him.”
She nodded. “No sooner said than done.” And she left the bridge to carry out his order.
As Picard emerged from a long, unusually narrow airlock into a space that looked as if it had once been a hangar for small vessels, he saw an electronic sign suspended from the high, rounded ceiling.
It communicated something in bold, red Zartani characters. Unfortunately, the captain couldn’t read Zartani.
He looked back at Guinan, who had followed him in. “Any idea what that says?” he asked.
She studied the sign for a moment. “The Heavenly Meadow. It’s where an ancient teacher earned his divinity by wrestling with an immense, talking worm.”
The captain looked at her. “How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “I get around.”
By then, they had reached the hotel’s front desk, which was situated just beyond the sign. It was smooth, rounded in the front, and fabricated from a ruddy alloy that clashed with the pale silver of the walls.
The fellow sitting behind it was a Zartani. But then, that made sense. After all, he was running an establishment that specialized in Zartani accommodations.
As Picard and Guinan approached the hotel manager, he regarded them with a discernible wariness in his shiny black eyes. But he had to have guessed that neither of them was there to secure a room.
“Can I help you?” he asked, his breath laced with a sharp scent—the product of a seed his people liked to chew.
“I hope so,” said Picard. “We’re looking for a friend—a Zartani, as it happens. We think he may have spent the night in your establishment.”
The Zartani let out a laugh. It was an ugly sound by anyone’s standards. “You think I have time to stand here and answer idle questions?” he asked.
He thrust a long, bronze thumb over his shoulder. Following it, Picard saw the corridor full of doors that started just behind the front desk.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” the Zartani said self-importantly, “I have a hotel to run.”
Picard could feel the ripple of muscles in his jaw. There were lives at stake here, his own not the least of them. He would be damned if he was going to let this chortling buffoon withhold the information they needed.
“Now listen here,” he said, his voice clipped with frustration. “We haven’t come this far to be—”
But before he could finish, Guinan held a hand up in front of him. “What my companion here means,