Oblivion - Michael Jan Friedman [70]
Guinan looked around. “It wouldn’t be easy for Demmix to sleep in this place.”
“True,” said Picard. “But he could do it if he wished. It would just mean waking up at night according to a preset alarm and changing his gas supplement.”
“A little risky,” his companion noted. “Alarms have been known to fail.”
“Demmix’s life is in jeopardy either way,” the captain pointed out. “The Emperor’s Eye would appear to be the lesser evil in that regard.”
Guinan nodded. “I suppose.”
As they spoke, they stayed as far from the manager’s desk as possible. After all, they were fugitives from both the authorities and the Cardassians now, and a conversation with the manager—while potentially illuminating—could too easily get them into trouble.
“Besides,” Picard observed, “this is the last hull in this line. If Demmix was headed this way, as the question he posed to the footwear clerk seems to suggest, he could not have had any further destination.”
“I think I’ve found the guest directory,” Guinan said. Taking his arm, she turned him in the right direction. “See it?”
“I do,” the captain confirmed.
It was a black plastiform workstation with rounded edges and a softly glowing orange screen, stuck away in a remote corner of the lobby. Picard and his companion made their way over there and punched in Demmix’s name.
The screen advised them that there was no guest there by that name. The captain wasn’t surprised. If Demmix had taken a room there, it would have been under an alias—probably the same one he had used to book passage to Oblivion.
He said as much.
“So what do we do now?” Guinan asked. “Go room to room looking for a Zartani?”
Picard looked around for inspiration—first at the manager’s desk, then at the lobby entrance, and finally at one of the big, majestic observation ports.
And suddenly, he had a hunch—the sort that Dixon Hill might have come up with, woefully short of hard data but long on instinct. In Hill’s case, his hunches always seemed to work.
The captain hoped he would be as lucky.
“I don’t think Demmix is in a room,” he said. “I think he decided to pursue another option.”
“What’s that? Sleeping in a hallway?”
It wasn’t quite that absurd. “Follow me,” said Picard, and led the way back out of the hotel.
Chapter Seventeen
IT WASN’T A SIMPLE MATTER getting access to the Rythrian cargo hauler that Picard had spotted through the observation port of the Emperor’s Eye.
He and Guinan had to make their way through a holographic communication center full of flesh-and-blood merchants and their life-sized, ghostly correspondents before they could catch even a glimpse of a likely hatch.
“That should be it,” the captain said.
Guinan squinted as she tried to make it out in the soft, projector-lit darkness. “Where? Near that Yridian in the long, purple robe?”
“Actually,” Picard said, “he’s a hologram.”
She frowned. “So he is.”
“Look over to the right a little,” the captain advised.
Guinan looked. After a moment, she said, “I see it. But those two bruisers look like they’re standing guard over it.”
Indeed, there was a Nausicaan standing on either side of the hatch—and Picard had his share of trouble with Nausicaans in the past. But as he was trying to figure out what to do about them, they moved away—obligingly leaving his objective unguarded.
“Lucky break,” said Guinan.
“Let’s get going,” the captain said, “before they decide to come back.”
And get going they did. Weaving their way through a maze of figures both solid and ethereal, they reached the hatch and saw it iris open for them.
Their luck really was holding. Before either the Nausicaans or anyone else could take any particular interest in what Picard and his companion were doing, they entered the hatch and watched it iris closed again.
The captain found himself in a narrow, worn-looking airlock. And unlike the others he had been in, this one was T-shaped. He had a choice of advancing