Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [48]
Ulelo nodded. “I’m happy, too.”
Then his friend did something really unexpected. She got up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek.
He didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, Emily Bender filled the silence after a moment.
“Get going,” she said. “I don’t want to make you late.” Then she went through the sliding doors and left him standing there.
Ulelo looked down the corridor to the turbolift that would take him up to the bridge. It was empty.
And even if it hadn’t been, his crewmates were unaware of his secret transmissions. They knew the com officer as a man they passed in the hallways or worked alongside or with whom they attended holographic concerts.
But no one knew him for what he really was.
So there was nothing to stop Ulelo from relieving Lieutenant Paxton on the bridge, sitting down at the communications station, and doing what he had intended to do.
Nothing except himself.
But at the moment, it seemed, that was enough.
Ulelo couldn’t bring himself to transmit another packet of strategically important information. He just didn’t have the stomach to go on betraying his friends.
Especially Emily Bender.
He tried to imagine the look on her face if he was caught and his activities exposed. He tried to imagine the shock, the disappointment.
What would Emily Bender say to him if he were apprehended? Ulelo couldn’t imagine. Or maybe he just didn’t want to.
She had opened her heart to him. She had given him things he didn’t think he had ever had before—things like friendship and camaraderie, and trust. He couldn’t repay her by continuing with his mission.
But what about the comrades to whom Ulelo had been transmitting—the ones who sent him here in the first place? Didn’t he owe them his allegiance as well?
It was a hard choice to make. He wished he could recall more, so he could know if he had made such a decision before, and what the outcome had been.
But he didn’t remember. His past was a haze, punctuated only occasionally with points of clarity.
In the absence of experience, Ulelo had to go with his feelings. He had to go with his heart. And his heart was telling him to think of Emily Bender.
With that in mind, he headed for the bridge. But this time, he wasn’t going to transmit any secrets. He was just going to man the communications panel.
And ignore the reason he was here.
As Enabran Tain led his men past an exotic pet shop, deep in the hold of an old Jadaral grain ship, he found himself pausing to examine the specimens in the shop’s display window.
A tiny Klingon targ, its jaws slavering, probably less than a week old but already as vicious as it would be as an adult. A Regulan eel bird, dark and rubbery-looking except for its curious, diamondlike eyes. A Kavarian tiger bat hanging upside down from a metal bar in its cage, its wildly striped wings wrapped about it like a second skin.
As he watched, the tiger bat shuddered, seemingly caught in the throes of a disturbing dream. The Cardassian couldn’t help smiling to himself.
He had always been intrigued by the behavior of subsentient species. As a boy, he had gone out of his way to find and study them in the sparsely forested hills about his home.
Tain recalled an instance when he was not more than nine years old. One of his friends caught an idaja—a delicate, insectlike life form with long, graceful legs and wings that changed color in the sunlight.
His friend decided it would be fun for him to pluck the idaja’s wings off. Tain didn’t like the idea. He told his friend to hand the idaja over.
When his friend refused, Tain beat him bloody, nearly blinding him in one eye. By that time, the idaja had fallen from his friend’s hand onto a patch of bare, dry ground.
With the utmost care, Tain picked the creature up and examined it in the brassy sunlight. Its wings fluttered, changing from green to blue and then to yellow.
Remarkable, he had thought.
Then he caught one of the idaja’s wings between his thumb and