Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [35]
She looked as if she was about to say something. But before she could do so, her eyes opened wide in response to something behind him.
Picard turned and saw a security patrol passing by—three officers, all of them scanning the faces in the crowd. One of them had a padd in his hand—no doubt with a picture of Picard on its tiny screen.
They had taken it just before they placed him in his cell, hoping to match it up with a file in their database. Of course, they had been unable to do that.
But it was coming in handy now. Picard resisted an impulse to flee, knowing it would draw the security team’s attention. Instead, he just stood there, letting the officers study him as they did those around him.
At first, he thought he had escaped their notice. Then one of them stared directly at him—not just for a moment, but for what seemed like an eternity. His heart started to beat harder against his ribs.
They’ve seen through my disguise, he told himself, and got ready to run.
But just as he was about to take off, the officer’s gaze moved on to the fellow beside Picard, and kept going. The captain breathed a sigh of relief.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and knew it was Guinan’s. “Looks like Dahlen did a good job,” she said.
“So it does,” he agreed.
Chapter Nine
OLIJ MERANT SURVEYED the crowded lobby of the Zartani hotel. Then he turned to his glinn and, in a voice intended to inspire confidence, said, “I’ll be right back.”
Tain, his features impassive but his eyes very much alive, said, “I have no doubt of it.”
Merant wondered if his superior meant something more than he was saying. As it happened, Merant often found himself wondering that.
Tain was clearly more intelligent than Merant or any of the other Cardassians assigned to this mission. No one in his right mind would have questioned that.
That was why he had been promoted to the rank of glinn—because he saw angles others did not. But it seemed to Merant that Tain flaunted his superiority a little too much, in large ways as well as in small ones.
He would have said so, too, but it would surely have cost him his life. So he remained quiet and obedient, and did everything his glinn asked of him—no matter in what manner his glinn chose to ask it.
Merant turned to Beylen and Karrid, who had accompanied him and Tain to this place. Then he said, “Come on,” and started in the direction of the hotel’s front desk.
It was a handsome-looking place, representing the most well-to-do of the Zartani establishments Tain had identified. Its low-ceilinged lobby, which was decked out in a variety of burnished metals, had been a Dranoon captain’s yacht.
The hotel proper lay beyond it, in a separate and larger but equally well appointed Enolian derelict—or so the Cardassians had been given to believe.
As Merant led Beylen and Karrid through the crowd, he knew he was in a precarious position. Having been entrusted with the task ahead of him, Merant didn’t dare fail.
Not after Tain had already taken him to task for failing to snare Demmix in the plaza. Not after the glinn had reminded him of the penalty for repeated failure.
Merant almost wished that Tain hadn’t named him second-in-command on their arrival here. He had been a lot happier before his promotion. He had worried less.
He was reminded of an old saying: “Those who fail the Union aren’t demoted—they are eliminated.”
But he had no intention of being eliminated.
Merant wasn’t going to fail. He wasn’t even going to think about failure. He was going to find Demmix and please his glinn—no matter what it took.
With that resolve in mind, he approached the front desk, which was a converted control console of some kind. The name of the hotel, the Northern Sky, was painted in small, tasteful Zartani letters on the front edge of the console.
The Zartani manning the desk was bigger and considerably broader than most members of his species. He thrust his chin out as the Cardassians approached him, projecting what seemed to Merant to be a bit too much like defiance.
“Is