The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [48]
Already completely outfitted in her EVA gear, Ych’a leaned over her console momentarily and pressed a toggle. A moment later, she shook her head in Trip’s direction, her slightly bulbous helmet exaggerated the motion.
“Whoever is in that pod still is not answering hails,” she said.
Trip leaned over his own console and initiated a final scan of the nearby target object, whose interior remained stubbornly obscure.
Doubting he’d get any argument from Ych’a, he said, “Maybe we’d better bring a couple of phase pistols along with the first-aid kit. Just in case.”
As far as the man knew, his life might have begun mere days earlier, or perhaps even hours. It was rather difficult, after all, to gauge the passage of time from the inside of what was essentially a small sterile room, in the absence of a sun or moons or any illumination save the dull green radiance of the little compartment’s emergency lights, its handful of faintly glowing instrument panels, and the few unblinking, uncaring stars that he could see through one of the room’s three tiny windows.
And it was even more difficult to reckon time, the man thought, when one hadn’t the faintest knowledge of the reason for his imprisonment, or why a forehead wound that he could not recall having acquired persistently seeped bright green blood, even after he had bandaged it.
He wished he could at least remember his own name. And why a dead man had shared this cramped space with him. Immediately after he had first awakened in this hellish place, he had risen from the padded chair on which he’d found himself recumbent and discovered the corpse, which lay slumped in a pool of congealing emerald-hued blood in another of the small chamber’s three couchlike chairs.
He had immediately decided that the dead man must have been a soldier of some sort, judging by his torn and scorched martial maroon-and-gray tunic, trousers, and boots, all of which suggested some manner of uniform, as did the holstered sidearm. Bolstering this perception further was his own clothing, which bore a close resemblance to the garments on the corpse in the chair, right down to the pistol on his hip.
Where have I seen a soldier before? he had wondered, immediately suspicious of the certainty he had felt, especially in such a patently uncertain environment. All he knew for certain beyond the similarities between his clothing and accoutrements and those of the corpse, had come via the dully reflective surface of one of the metal walls, which had revealed that he and the dead man bore a superficial physical resemblance to one another—both men had dark, bowl-cut hair, upswept eyebrows, and conspicuously pointed ears.
He wondered if his forehead injury might have caused the yawning chasm in his memory. He couldn’t be sure, and knew he had to face the possibility that he might never be sure, at least not to the degree to which he’d believed that the dead man, and by extension he himself, had been military men. He only knew that he had spent his first several hours of consciousness in the little room’s chill semidarkness— perhaps as much as a full dayturn—watching the corpse through the steam that rose from his own breath. He felt almost as though he was observing some solemn funerary rite, though he could access no conscious memories of any such custom.
Was this man a close comrade in arms? he thought, tormented by his inability to remember such fundamental things. Did he rescue me from whatever caused my injury? Perhaps the dead man had dragged him unconscious into this small chamber for his own safety before succumbing to his own wounds.
Which might mean that this room was no mere