Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [57]
And now he had snared one of them.
If Picard was to keep Steej from snaring the other, he had to adopt a different approach. It was no longer enough for him to pose as a Cataxxan. Now he had to conceal that identity every bit as zealously as his own, or find himself sharing a detention cell with Guinan.
As for locating Demmix…the difficulty factor had been raised considerably. After all, the captain would be looking over his shoulder the whole time. There were only so many Cataxxans in the city, and Steej’s officers would be seeking one who fit the captain’s general description.
Picard’s only logical course of action was to abandon his mission and ask Ben Zoma to beam him out. But he wasn’t going to give Demmix up so easily.
And he wasn’t going to give Guinan up at all.
It didn’t matter what it cost him to free her. She had risked her life to break him out of his cell. He would be damned if he wasn’t going to return the favor.
As Picard thought that, he emerged from the hatch into the next hull—one of the seedier-looking ones he had seen in Oblivion. It housed a multitude of tiny shops, quite a few of them empty—the result of business failures, apparently, since they showed evidence of having been occupied once.
More important, there was no sign of Steej’s men—at least, not in uniform. But the captain couldn’t rule out the possibility of undercover officers like the ones who had come after him and his companion.
Pulling his collar up around his ears and looking down as much as possible, he made his way through the maze. Fortunately for him, it was a lot less populated than the adjoining hull, so there were fewer people around to identify him.
This place also appeared less reputable than the shopping area. Picard got the feeling that the people he passed here didn’t care whether he was a fugitive or not, and might even have been fugitives themselves once.
He hoped that was the case. Obviously, that sort of atmosphere would work in his favor.
Still, Picard hadn’t gotten more than halfway through the maze when he sensed that someone was following him. His first impulse was to run again, but he contained it.
After all, no one had accused him of anything, or ordered him to stop. For all he knew, it wasn’t even the authorities behind him. It might have been someone else entirely, with an agenda he hadn’t even considered.
In any case, the captain didn’t think it would hurt to take a look.
Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a quartet of Cardassians. Normally, they wouldn’t have represented any particular danger to him.
But he had learned that there were Cardassians on Demmix’s trail, searching for the Zartani just as Picard was. And if he had heard about them, they could as easily have heard about him.
His expression must have betrayed his thoughts, because one of the Cardassians chose that moment to reach into his tunic and pull out a hand weapon.
Picard was still armed, but he didn’t want to get into a phaser battle—not with the numbers game quite clearly in his adversaries’ favor. And even if he emerged the winner, it would only attract attention to him.
So he took the only other course open to him. He made a run for it, as he had in the shopping area.
There was a moment when the captain was certain he was going to be hit with a disruptor beam squarely in the back. Then the moment passed and he was tearing around a corner, following the idiosyncrasies of the maze.
With a chorus of muffled curses, the Cardassians came after him. But Picard had been a fair runner at one time, and the maze assisted him by keeping his pursuers from getting a clear shot at him.
He was thinking he could get out of this bind, embracing the possibility that he could reach the next hatch and lose the Cardassians somewhere down the line. Then he turned a corner and ran into something that changed his mind for him—something not only unexpected, but hard and unyielding.
It took the captain a moment to realize that