The Red King - Michael A. Martin [77]
He offered up a wan smile. “That’s because I do, Chris.”
“We’re still a few hours away from Oghen, Will,” said Troi. “I recommend you use them to relax a little bit.” We need you sharp, Imzadi. Not tired and distracted.
At first, he stared back at Troi as though she had just said something unutterably ridiculous. Then his expression softened as he acknowledged the wisdom of the suggestion.
Will rose from the center seat and nodded to Vale. “Take over for me up here, Commander. I’ll be down in the mess if anyone needs me,” he said, and then headed for the turbolift.
“So when was the last time you returned to Oghen?” Riker asked as his adversary studied the chessboard between them. As usual, Frane had selected the red pieces, though Riker wasn’t certain if this signified anything meaningful.
The Neyel raised his dark eyes from the farrago of red and white chess pieces arrayed before him, and stared into the middle distance of the sparsely populated mess hall as he appeared to consider Riker’s question with great care.
“Five or six oghencycles,” Frane said at length. “Years, in your Federation parlance. It was the last time I saw my father. Before his ship picked me up near the Riftmouth, that is, when the Romulans came…” He trailed off.
Riker nodded, beginning to understand Frane’s ambivalence about the world of his birth. “Your friends in the Seekers After Penance must have been keeping you pretty busy during that time.”
He glanced briefly toward one of the room’s far corners, where the four other individuals who had shared Frane’s escape pod—including a young Neyel woman and a member of a local species whose multijointed body parts possessed the remarkable ability to separate and operate independently—were seated. Ever since coming aboard, the other members of Frane’s Sleeper-worshipping sect had largely kept to themselves, evidently as suspicious of Titan’s crew as they had been of the authorities from the Neyel Hegemony. Their initial encounter with Dr. Ree, who had cursorily examined them some two days earlier in sickbay, clearly had done nothing to ease their anxiety. They tended to venture into the mess only during off-peak times such as this; only a handful of Starfleet personnel were present, since the alpha-shift lunchtime rush wasn’t due for another half hour or so.
At the moment, the quartet was taking a meal with varying degrees of evident nervousness, with the cattle-like pair of aboriginal Oghen appearing far more fearful than the rest of the group. Only the multipartite creature, evidently known as a Sturr, seemed more or less preoccupied with the meal before it, but that may have been either because he or she was utterly nonhumanoid, or because approximately half of the creature was seated and eating while the balance of its body parts had crawled over to the buffet table to obtain more food and drink. Although the Pandronians back in the Alpha Quadrant had evolved similar adaptations, Riker decided that the Sturr was easily the most fascinating sentient he had encountered in the past several years; he had to force himself not to stare, goggle-eyed.
The lone Neyel female, whom Frane had introduced earlier as Nozomi, sat vigil over a largely uneaten green salad, watching Riker and Frane with dark eyes that brimmed over with fear and suspicion. Riker couldn’t really blame her for her apprehension; she and her fellows had been through a lot these past few days, and the Neyel military—to say nothing of the Romulans—had obviously given them all good reason to consider armed authority figures guilty until proven innocent.
“The sect devotes a great deal of its time and energy to study and meditation,” Frane said in answer to Riker’s observation, then deftly maneuvered his knight from a trap that Riker had assumed the younger man had overlooked. The move reminded Riker that it would be a mistake to underestimate Frane; despite his relative youth, the young Neyel had clearly survived a great deal of adversity and knew how to think on his feet.
“Your sect also seems to have put a