Pathways - Jeri Taylor [110]
So if he didn’t expect his father there, why would his mind have leapt to the instant conclusion that Admiral Paris was standing among the spectators on the icy slope?
The only answer Tom had for that one, he didn’t want. Because the answer was that, deep down, Tom wanted his father to see him compete and so had imagined him there even when he wasn’t. Tom’s mind, given any fuel at all, would create his father’s image and impose it on a stranger.
“Tom, you look a bit flushed. Are you feverish?” This from his mother, who was looking at him with concern. Tom shook his head, but couldn’t speak. His father and Moira stopped their conversation and looked at him, Moira’s eyes suddenly worried, the admiral’s opaque and unreadable.
Ask him, said the voice inside Tom’s mind. And the voice was right. Just speak up, ask if he was there; if he wasn’t, Tom could simply say there was someone who looked a lot like him, make a joke of it. And if he was there—well, it’d be his father who’d look foolish for not having said so in the first place.
Tom felt three pairs of eyes trained on him, waiting for him to speak. When he did, his voice rang hollow in his ears. “Maybe I’ll turn in early. It’s been a long day. May I be excused?”
And with that unremarkable statement, he rose and exited the room, leaving his family staring after him.
Skiing gave Tom an immediate, visceral sense of speed and danger, but of course it paled next to the sensations produced by piloting a starship.
Tom had been piloting since he was small, first on the simulators to which his father had access, then on small but (to him) clunky youth vessels that had to fly at certain prescribed altitudes over certain prescribed routes. More than once, he was censured and even punished for violating those careful rules. He won several shuttle derbies as an adolescent, always pushing at the boundaries of the rules.
But not until Starfleet Academy did he come to appreciate what it was like to be at the helm of a ship flying at warp speed. Not the physical sensations, of course—inertial dampers buffered the impact to the body that would accrue from achieving such incredible velocity. But what it did to the emotions was, to Tom, almost indescribable.
It had to do with control. A few delicate movements of his fingers, dancing gracefully over the controls, and massive forces began to respond—and all because of instructions from him, Tom Paris, cadet. It was heady, intoxicating.
He couldn’t resist demonstrating this prowess to Odile. She wouldn’t begin pilot’s training until next year, not having had Tom’s prior experience, and she was eager for the demonstration. But she was more of a rule-follower than Tom, and was puzzled about their middle-of-the-night excursion as they walked silently through the darkened halls of Breyer’s Hall, one of the classroom buildings.
“You do have the permission for this flight, n’est-ce pas?”
“Of course. I cleared it with Commander Barns, my flight instructor.”
“Then why are we going at this hour?”
“Because this is when the shuttles aren’t being used.”
“It feels like we’re sneaking.”
“What’s sneaky? We’re going to a transporter pad.”
“It’s dark, we’re whispering, and there’s nobody here. It feels . . . illicit. Like we’re going to get in trouble.”
He glanced over at her, went momentarily weak at the sight of her profile, and resisted the very strong impulse to pull her to him and taste those full pink lips. He sighed.
“It’s very simple. We transport to a shuttle. I take you out of the solar system and demonstrate the leap to warp speed. Then we come back. That’s it.”
There was silence as her eyes flicked over the deserted corridor. “It still feels sneaky,” she insisted, and he laughed at her stubbornness.
Minutes later they were inside one of the shuttles that the Academy kept in synchronous orbit for instructional purposes. It was a craft Tom knew well, and had piloted on many occasions. He had even, in strict violation of the rules, given it a female nickname—privately, of course, so as not to offend the female cadets, who