The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [15]
After a long minute’s hesitation, though, she realized that she could not just stand by and do nothing. Walking back to the child, she hesitantly put a hand on her head, between the little antennae, feeling the fluffy down of the white hair, the small, round, warm skull beneath it. Something twisted inside her when she felt the child’s grief. “Thala,” she said softly, projecting calm and comfort as strongly as she could. “Please, do not go on like this. You will find new friends, wherever you go …”
“But they won’t be you,” the child gasped between those small keening wails.
“Thala, listen to me.” Selar kept her voice soft but allowed a note of authority to enter it. “Are you listening?”
“Yes …”
“I swear to you on my honor that I will not leave the Enterprise before I see you settled. Do you understand? I will not accept this position until arrangements have been made to safely deliver you to your new home, wherever that may be.” She thought of what a lengthy delay might mean to her chances of taking the position and resolutely squelched the thought. Someone had to take the responsibility for seeing that Thala was properly cared for, and she was the child’s physician and teacher. It was her duty.
“You … promise?”
“I have just said so.”
Small blue fingers reached up and tightened around her own. “Thank you, Selar.”
“Now, try not to worry. Doctor Crusher and I are doing everything possible to ensure your well-being.”
“I know.”
Selar heard the tremor in the small voice, but, seeing that Thala was trying to regain her composure, she overlooked it. The Vulcan also ignored her own small surge of relief that the decision brought—relief that she could now delay even further the day of reckoning when she would have to face her family—and Sukat and his family—back on Vulcan.
“I don’t know, Sonya,” Geordi La Forge said to the young olive-skinned woman who was checking readouts on the Enterprise’s warp engines under his supervision. “This entire assignment gives me the creeps. Ships that are there one moment, gone the next—I don’t like the sound of it.”
Ensign Gomez pushed back a lock of her shoulder-length dark hair, then made a notation in the engineering log. “It’s probably just some renegade Ferengi or pirates or something. Maybe outlawed Klingons. You watch, the moment they see the Enterprise on their screens, they’re going to be scared spitless and run like hell.”
“Maybe … ,” La Forge said. “I’d agree completely if only that Klingon ship hadn’t disappeared. Tackling a ship full of Klingons is not something most pirates would contemplate in their wildest dreams. And you know the contempt the Klingons feel for the Ferengi. They’d fight to the death to avoid the dishonor of losing to those greedy little trolls.”
“Well, maybe it was another ship full of Klingons.”
“The last thing Klingon renegades would want is to attract the attention of an official Klingon vessel. The empire would send out an entire squadron to avenge a cruiser, if necessary.”
Gomez glanced up, thought a moment, then shrugged. “You’re right. This is kind of a weird assignment, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It reminds me of stories I read about Old Earth, when they had sailing ships.”
Gomez, who had never seen Earth, being from a colony world, was intrigued. “What kinds of stories?”
“Hundreds of years ago they had legends about places that were deathtraps for hapless sailors. You could get becalmed in the Horse Latitudes—”
“I didn’t know that horses lived in the ocean,” Gomez interrupted. “I thought they were herbivorous land mammals.”
“They didn’t—don’t—” Geordi said. “Only seahorses live in the ocean.”
“Seahorses? Those aren’t horses that live in the sea?”
“No, seahorses aren’t equines. They’re … damn, I don’t know what they are. Mollusks, maybe, or crustaceans …”
“Whales? The humpback ones in that repopulation project they keep publishing articles about?”
Geordi was beginning to feel the way he often did when he talked to Data—as though he’d