The Garden - Melissa Scott [38]
"Come on, Harry, we're not going to get a better offer any time soon. Just smell that stew!"
Kim took a deep breath, inhaling odors he hadn't smelled since he came on board Voyager, and his resolve vanished. The Kirse certainly weren't hostile, whatever Revek's origins might be. The captain could deal with it; he would eat.
Janeway glanced warily at the man in front of her. Behind her, she could hear voices and the chime of metal on metal as the rest of the away team helped themselves to the food spread out on the newly arrived table. They sounded subdued, and she hoped they were being cautious. No matter how friendly the Kirse seemed, there was still a great deal that was unexplained about them. Not least of which, she added silently, was this Thilo Revek.
"Mr. Revek," she said. "How precisely did you end
up here?" It was the voice she used at admirals' receptions, polite, cool, and completely noncommital, and she allowed herself an inward smile at the recognition.
Revek's mouth twitched upward, and she wondered for an instant if he recognized the social voice. "Do you mean here in the Delta Quadrant, or here on the planet?"
"Both." Janeway moderated her words with a faint smile. "But let's start with the Delta Quadrant." The winged Kirse-Night-Whispers, Revek had called it-was standing just within earshot, its wings just slightly raised, dividing its attention between her and the rest of the away team at the table. It-he?- seemed friendly enough, but she was very aware of his listening presence.
Revek ignored it, however, gave her a shrug and another easy grin. He had odd eyes, Janeway saw, a color between gray and hazel that looked almost yellow in the golden light. They didn't quite match, either, the left drifting slightly, not quite aligned with the right. That was the sort of thing that Federation medics usually corrected in childhood, and she filed the observation for later.
"I'm a native of the sector the Federation ceded to the Cardassians, had a good business there and no particular desire to pull up stakes or go to work for the local Gul, so I ended up working for the Maquis."
"And what is it that you do, Mr. Revek?" Another echo of party chat, Janeway thought, and felt suddenly light-headed. She could smell the food more strongly than ever, a butter-and-onions smell warring with the sweeter scents of fruit, reminding her how little she'd been eating, and it was suddenly all she could do not to excuse herself and attack the table.
"Computers, mostly," Revek answered, and she
dragged her attention back to him. "Shipboard systems, specializing lately in autopilots-anything that would help the Maquis pare down the number of people they needed on any one ship. I was testing one of the program/hardware matrices when I was hit by a coherent tetrion beam. When I got free of it, I was looking at this alien lighthouse that also didn't much like me, or at best couldn't be bothered with me. And the people on the planet weren't exactly friendly, either. So I started putting the ship back together- luckily I'd done a good job with the autosystem, it stayed reparable-and then I headed back home."
Janeway swallowed a stifling sense of disappointment. Until that minute, she hadn't realized how much she had been hoping that Revek had reached the Delta Quadrant by some other means, something that Voyager could use to get home again. Now, hearing the Caretaker's Array described, however crudely, she felt that hope die. Revek had come in by the same door they'd used, the same door that had closed forever at the destruction of the Array. "This hardly looks like home," she said, and heard her voice sharper than she'd meant. Night-Whisper's wings lifted slightly, a soft rustle of leathery skin, but Revek laughed.
"No, not a lot like. I came here because some people several systems back said it was a dead world, full of self-perpetuating tech, and I thought I could make something from it, maybe even figure out a way to boost my