Progenitor - Michael Jan Friedman [34]
“Do you believe in Fate?” Emily Bender had asked.
He should have seen it coming, but he hadn’t. He had stared at her, barely managing a protest.
“It was Rayfield,” said Paxton, Ulelo’s superior in the communications section. He placed such an emphasis on the name that it broke in on Ulelo’s reverie. “You know, the one with the gray ponytail.”
Dubinski, the officer in charge of engineering in Simenon’s absence, looked skeptical. “Wait a minute. I thought Takahiro was the one with the gray ponytail.”
Paxton shook his head. “Takahiro is the one with the short hair and the mole.”
“I thought that was Saturria,” remarked Refsland, the Stargazer’s senior transporter operator.
“No,” said Paxton. “Definitely Takahiro.”
Ulelo began to settle back into his thoughts. He could feel Emily Bender’s finger pressing gently on his lips. He could hear the huskiness in her voice as she moved closer to him.
“I had a crush on you back at the Academy,” she had told him. “A big crush.”
“So we’re headed for Oneo Madrin,” said Garner, one of Pug Joseph’s senior security officers.
“That’s right,” said Paxton.
Refsland grunted thoughtfully. “Both those suns are Sol-class, aren’t they?”
Paxton nodded appreciatively. “Good memory, Bill. With seventeen planets, none of them habitable.”
“Any idea what the distress call is about?” asked Urajel, Dubinski’s colleague in engineering.
Paxton shook his head. “None.”
“Command must be concerned,” said Refsland, “or it wouldn’t have asked us to investigate.”
“It’s a distress call,” Urajel told him with a typically Andorian lack of patience. “Of course they’re concerned.”
“It’ll probably turn out to be engine trouble,” said Dubinski.
Garner, who had served with Dubinski on another ship before this one, chuckled at the comment. “You always think it’s engine trouble.”
“It’s the most common cause of distress calls,” Dubinski told her. “You can look it up.”
“Never mind all that,” said Urajel. She looked around the table. “What are Simenon and the others up to on Gnala?”
Paxton smiled. “That’s the billion-credit question, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a diplomatic problem,” Refsland noted. “The captain wouldn’t have needed the doctor and Pug and Vigo along for that.”
“Then what?” asked Urajel. She turned to Ulelo. “You’ve been awfully quiet. Care to venture a guess?”
The comm officer shrugged. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
It was at least half a lie.
Ulelo had perused Ben Zoma’s correspondence with Tanya Tresh just as he had perused every other correspondence received on the Stargazer, so he knew exactly what Simenon was facing on Gnala. He just didn’t know what Picard and his officers had planned to do about it.
“I’ve got a hunch I know what they’re up to,” said Dubinski. And he went on to describe his theory.
As it turned out, he couldn’t have been farther from the truth. But Ulelo didn’t say so because it would have meant exposing himself as something other than what he seemed.
The others eventually discarded Dubinski’s hunch and offered a half dozen of their own. But by then, the comm officer wasn’t really listening to them anymore.
He had rediscovered the thread of his ruminations. He found himself remembering Emily Bender’s kiss, the soft insistence of it. He remembered too the smell of her as she pressed against him.
And he remembered the look on her face when he denied her what she wanted of him. It was a look of pain, of humiliation, of deep and abiding disappointment.
If she had posed a threat to Ulelo before, he had magnified it with the clumsiness of his response. He needed to do something before she placed his mission in jeopardy.
As his colleagues prattled on about Simenon and Gnala, he gradually came up with a plan.
Chapter Eleven
UNTIL HE BEAMED DOWN from the Stargazer, Simenon had only heard about his people’s ancient Northern Sanctum from his father and his uncles. He