Security - Keith R. A. DeCandido [34]
“I was wondering that, myself,” Hawkins said with a wide grin.
Corsi let out a long breath. “I guess I should tell you all that Mr. Stevens and I are a couple.”
Still grinning, Hawkins asked, “With all due respect, boss, was that supposed to be a secret?”
Corsi laughed, and the others did the same—except Lauoc, who didn’t really laugh so much as smile enigmatically. “Yeah,” she said, “it was a secret—from me.”
A little while later, Corsi went back to her cabin, having determined that Lense was in sickbay. She had spent the better part of an hour just talking with her people, and she found it to be quite pleasant. Hawkins was a good deputy, and she had herself a security team that was as good as any she’d served with.
Eventually, though, she excused herself. There was something she needed to do.
She entered her cabin, went to the replicator and asked for a glass of water, then sat at her desk. With a shiver, she recalled that Caitano had asked the replicator for a glass of water before he dropped dead in his cabin. Stop being an idiot, she admonished herself.
Entering several commands into the comm station, she opened a channel to the Enterprise.
A few minutes later, the deceptively innocent-looking face of Christine Vale appeared. She had cut her hair and changed its color since that day on Izar—it was currently brown and in a pixie cut, as opposed to the long auburn it was then—but she still looked very much like the detective Corsi had naïvely assumed to be incompetent ten years ago.
“Commander Corsi!” Vale seemed stunned. “Is something wrong?”
“No, Lieutenant, nothing’s wrong at all, I just—” She hesitated. “I just wanted to tell you something, Christine, something I should’ve told you a long time ago. You should be proud of what you’ve accomplished. I know I am—proud, that is, to be in the service with you.”
Now Vale looked even more stunned. “Uh, thanks, Co—ah, Domenica. Thank you very much. I—I can’t begin to tell you—” She took a breath. “I owe it all to you, you know.”
“Like hell. You don’t owe anything to me, Christine—you were the one who figured out that it was Dar. It took you less than a day to see something that I managed to miss for eight years. All I did—” Her voice caught. Until yesterday, she hadn’t talked, hadn’t thought, about this, and it still was like rubbing an open wound. “All I did was shoot him. Anybody could’ve done that.”
“That’s good of you to say, Domenica, but—I don’t think I could’ve done what you did.”
“Sure you could’ve—because you’re good security. We deal with the unexpected and keep people safe. And that doesn’t come from outside.” She smiled. “I just hope that Picard and the rest of those guys know what they have there.”
Returning the smile, Vale said, “Well, if they ever forget, I’ll be sure to send them to you.”
“You do that. Take care of yourself, Christine—and take care of your ship.”
“You do the same, Domenica. And thanks.”
Corsi closed the connection, then got up and headed to the door, thence to the security office. True, she wasn’t on duty, but like Lauoc said, that was just a technicality. She had a ship to protect.
About the Author
KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO is the co-developer of the S.C.E. series, and has also written or co-written eight previous eBooks in the series. His other Star Trek fiction includes almost a dozen novels (most recently Articles of the Federation, a look at the politics of the Federation, Enemy Territory, the third book in the I.K.S. Gorkon series, and A Time for War, a Time for Peace, a USA Today best-seller), novellas (Ferenginar: Satisfaction Is Not Guaranteed in Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Volume 3 and Horn and Ivory in Gateways: What Lay Beyond), short stories (most recently “loDnI’pu’ vavpu’ je” in Tales from the Captain’s Table and the forthcoming “Letting Go” in the tenth-anniversary Star Trek: Voyager anthology Distant Shores), and comic books (the Perchance to Dream miniseries). Keith has also written novels, novelizations, short stories, and