Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [141]
Then she did what Carter Greyhorse would have thought impossible. She turned it up a notch.
As the doctor watched, spellbound, the woman attacked the air around her as if it were rife with invisible enemies. She whirled, struck, gyrated, and struck again, faster and faster, until it seemed her heart would have to burst under the burden.
Then, suddenly, she stopped…and in a spasm of triumph and ecstasy, tossed her head back and howled at the top of her lungs. The sound she made was more animal than human, Greyhorse thought, more the product of the woman’s blood than her brain.
Finally, her chest still heaving, sweat streaming down both sides of her face, she fell silent. Only then did she turn and take notice of the doctor standing by the door. Their eyes met and he could see the raw emotion still roiling inside hers.
He felt he should say something, but speech escaped him. All he could do was stare back at her like an idiot.
The woman drew a long, ragged breath. Then she went to the wall, pulled a towel off the rack there, and stalked past him. A moment later, Greyhorse heard the hiss of the sliding doors as they opened for her. Another hiss told him they had closed again.
Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that the woman was gone. A wave of disappointment and relief swept over him.
The doctor was new on the ship, so he didn’t know many people outside of Ruhalter and his command staff. Certainly, he didn’t know the woman he had just seen…not even her name.
But he would make it his business to find out.
Lieutenant Vigo was sitting in the Stargazer’s mess hall, staring at his plate of sturrd, when his friend Charlie Kochman sat down next to him and lowered a tray of food onto the table.
“Now that,” said Kochman, who was the ship’s secondary navigator, “is what I call a replicator program.”
Vigo glanced at Kochman’s tray, which featured a large wooden bowl full of hard, gray mollusk shells with dark, rubbery tails emerging from them. “Steamers?” he asked.
“Steamers,” his colleague confirmed with a grin. “It took a while, but the replicator finally got them right.” He glanced at Vigo’s plate. “You’ve got some more of that Pandrilite stuff, I see.”
“Sturrd. It is the signature dish of my homeworld,” Vigo noted.
Kochman held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, buddy…the last thing I want to do is keep a big blue guy like you from eating what he really likes. I just figured you might want to try something else sometime.”
Vigo glanced at his friend’s mollusks, which he didn’t find the least bit tempting. “Sometime,” he echoed.
Kochman chuckled. “To each his own, I guess.” And with unconcealed gusto, he used his fork to crack open one of the clams.
Vigo considered his own food again. One of the other humans on the ship had described sturrd as a mound of sand and ground glass smothered in maple syrup. But to a Pandrilite, it was as appetizing as any dish in the universe.
Usually, he amended. At the moment, Vigo didn’t have much of an appetite.
Kochman noticed. “What’s wrong?” he asked between mollusks.
Vigo shook his head. “Nothing.”
His friend looked sympathetic. “It’s Werber again, isn’t it?”
Wincing, the Pandrilite looked around the mess hall. Fortunately, Hans Werber was nowhere to be seen. “I told you,” he reminded Kochman. “There’s nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”
“Right,” said his friend. “Just like there was nothing wrong a couple of days ago, and a couple of days before that. Admit it—Werber’s on your back and he won’t get off.”
Vigo didn’t say anything in response. He was a Pandrilite, after all, and Pandrilites were taught from an early age not to complain. They shouldered their burdens without objection or protest.
However, Kochman was right. Lieutenant Werber, the Stargazer’s chief weapons officer and therefore Vigo’s immediate superior, was a supremely difficult man to work for.
He routinely held Vigo and the ship’s other weapons officers to unrealistic standards. And when they didn