Reunion - Michael Jan Friedman [63]
The killer had known the blackout was coming. Had been able to find Morgen at just the right time, under just the right circumstances. The attempt’s failure might have come down to the-only unlooked-for element-the doctor’s presence. By being there, Crusher had given the murderer three targets instead of two. And that might have meant the difference between a timely rescue and a bloodbath. If she hadn’t thought to go looking for the Daa’Vit, or if she hadn’t arrived before the blackout … the assassin might have succeeded. And Daa’Very might have found itself without a monarch. She couldn’t avoid the thought: it still might. They had no more idea who the murderer was now than they’d had after the fiist incident.
He could even get me here, she mused. Even here in my own quarters. At any moment she might turn around and see those phaser beams stabbing at her again. Or maybe something else-something equally deadly.
No. The murderer is after Morgen, she assured herself. That’s what all the evidence suggests. Alone, you’re safe. Before she knew it, she’d taken out the box of tapes. And a moment later she was rummaging through Jack’s recorded messages again. Seeking security in the sound of his voice? Maybe. And why not? She had never felt so safe with anyone as she had with her husband. She selected a tape at random—comj as she had before. And as before, as she read the stardate, she recalled her circumstances at the time.
It was the hardest part of her stay in San Francisco. Still plugging through med school. Still pre-Wes, though many of her friends at the time were either pregnant or raising young children. And still waiting for that first shore leave, missing Jack terribly.
Maybe not the most riotous time in the life of Beverly Crusher. But that didn’t mean Jack’s tape would be gloomy as well. It always seemed his most upbeat messages came when she needed them the most-as if he’d had a sixth sense about her that transcended the thousands of light-years separating them, What the hell. Without giving it another thought, she popped the tape into the player.
“Hi, Bev. I hope things are as exciting fbr you as they are for me.”
comCrusher closed her eyes and smiled. Just what the doctor ordered. “We’ve just gotten back from Coryb, the fourth planet in the Gamma Shaltair system, where we were surveying the Coryb’thu civilization as a precursor to formal first contact. Up until now, the only surveys I’d been on were the flora-and-fauna kind—comnever anything that involved a living, breathing civilization. You can’t imagine what it
was like walking through their cities, brushing against them, exchanging smiles with them-and none of them ever suspecting that you weren’t one of them. Kind of eerie and exhiliarating at the same time. And whenever it got more eerie than exhiliarating, there was Ben Zoma or Pug or Idun nearby to haul me back to reality.
“The funniest part was having to wear these prosthetics that Greyhorse designed for us. The Coryb’thu are basically humanoid, but the middle part of their faces extend forward into kind of a snout. The prosthetics created the same effect. And they weren’t even all that uncomfortable. The only problem is they take a while to remove, which is why I’m still wearing mine as I speak. We cut a deck of cards to determine the order in which we’d have our faces restored to us-and I picked the two of diamonds. Oh, well. You know what they say-lucky in love, unlucky in prosthesis removal. And speaking of love-either that relationship of Greyhorse’s ended as soon as it began, or I really was seeing things. I’ll keep you posted on that.”
Greyhorse’s relationship? Beverly shook her head. There could hardly have been two subjects farther apart in her mind than romance and the former medical officer of the Stargazer. She wondered who the lucky girl might have been-assuming, of “course, that it hadn’t just been Jack’s imagination