The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [171]
Once there, he would begin his next assignment on behalf of Section 31, the Coalition of Planets, and the people of the planet Earth.
And the great state of Florida, he thought, trying to picture the faces of his parents and his brother. He was dismayed at how difficult it was for him to imagine those faces smiling, rather than contorted with grief.
Tired of viewing the gently shifting starfield, and just as tired of the distinctly unfriendly stink-eye he was receiving from the towering, fanged purser who apparently didn’t much like passengers getting handprints on his tidy observation ports, Trip began walking through one of the narrow guest corridors toward his modest stateroom.
Once the door was securely shut behind him, he kicked off his boots, then carried them to a small closet, where he stowed them neatly. He would have preferred either canvas deck shoes- which would have been conspicuously out of place on a Vulcan, even way out in the middle of nowhere- or at least something that felt more like real leather than his boots did. Unfortunately, he had to content himself with footwear made from vegetable fiber in order to continue passing himself off as a Vulcan, who were all essentially against the killing of animals, either for food or for apparel.
Trip stepped back to the stateroom’s desk, where he had left a small data padd beside the sample case that contained the gemstones that were part of his merchant cover-identity. Raising the padd, he inserted the encryption-protected data rod. He’d been carrying the rod since shortly after he’d recovered consciousness in a stolen Ejhoi Ormiin scout ship moving at high warp through Coalition space, very close to regions claimed by the Romulan Star Empire. He had already lost count of the number of times he’d played the rod’s message- a message that had clearly been recorded in haste while Trip had been lying insensate on the cockpit’s deck plates.
He keyed the start command, and the lined and surprisingly kindly-looking face of Doctor Ehrehin- partially obscured by the environmental suit helmet he’d been wearing at the time- appeared yet again on the padd’s small display.
“I hope you will have the opportunity to view this message in safety, Cunaehr.” The old man closed his eyes, pausing momentarily as though about to correct his small name gaffe. Then he went on, perhaps in deference to Trip’s undercover anonymity.
“I truly regret the necessity of having to render you unconscious, my young friend. However, I needed to drop this vessel out of warp- but only long enough to exit in an escape pod that I will aim toward the four Romulan military vessels that still pursue us. I’ve programmed the helm to return the engines automatically to maximum warp once my pod has departed. My hope is that Valdore’s ships will fail to catch up with you, or perhaps even give up the pursuit once their crews realize that they’ve recovered me, which was their primary objective anyway.”
As on each previous occasion when Trip had listened to Ehrehin’s unexpectedly candid words, he marveled at the old man’s courage, which actually bordered on the foolhardy. After all, Valdore’s forces might well have caught up to the fleeing scout ship without destroying it, even after Ehrehin had returned to them. Had that happened, they probably would have found the scientist’s recorded message, which surely would have damned him as a traitor. Ehrehin couldn’t have believed himself so indispensable to his Empire’s war machine that he could have avoided imprisonment- or even outright execution- as a consequence. Trip could only wonder if the scientist had embedded programming inside the message designed to erase it should the wrong parties try to view it, perhaps by using the scout vessel’s internal sensors to warn the shipboard computer of the presence of