The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [42]
Riker swallowed and then pushed on with what was obviously a prepared speech. “Ah, I also wanted you to know there’s a poker game at my room this evening. We’d love to have you join us.”
That, Pulaski hadn’t been expecting. She took a breath to compose herself and then replied, “Thank you again, Commander, but I’ll have to take a rain check. I promised to meet Lieutenant La Forge in Ten-Forward. We’ll be discussing creating an elite damage control team similar to my medical teams, and then I’m going to get some much-needed rest.”
“Another time, then?”
“I’ll check my calendar.”
Before Riker could reply, she turned and slipped out of the conference room. She headed toward the turbolift, her smile growing with every step she took.
Among the Clouds
Scott Pearson
Historian’s note:
This tale is set during the latter half of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s third season.
SCOTT PEARSON
Scott Pearson was first published in 1987 with “The Mailbox,” a short story about an elderly farming couple. Over the last twenty years he has published a smattering of humor, poetry, nonfiction, and short stories, most recently his first mystery story, “Out of the Jacuzzi, Into the Sauna,” in the anthology Resort to Murder. A Star Trek fan for thirty-five years, Scott has had two previous Trek stories published, “Full Circle” in Strange New Worlds VII and “Terra Tonight” in Strange New Worlds 9. He’s grateful to Marco Palmieri for the chance to join this anthology with his first solicited sale. Scott also tips his hat to Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter, who imagined animal life in Jovian clouds way back in 1976, providing inspiration for some of the creatures herein. Scott makes his living as an editor for Zenith Press, a military history publisher in St. Paul, Minnesota, and X-comm, a regional history publisher in Duluth. He lives in St. Paul with his wife, Sandra, and daughter, Ella. Please visit him on the web at www.yeahsure.net. “Among the Clouds” is in memory of Scott’s cousin, Kevin Zegan, who loved science fiction.
“GEORDI, BEHIND YOU!” WORF’S URGENT SHOUT SEEMED TO echo inside the helmet of La Forge’s environmental suit. It was not something you expected to hear while aboard an orbital elevator stopped in the lower stratosphere of a Jovian planet.
La Forge adjusted his precarious position atop the elevator’s drive unit, several pairs of powered rollers on both sides of the support tether. The relatively thin ribbon stretched hundreds of kilometers up into space and down into Askaria’s mostly hydrogen atmosphere. Extending from the drive unit on one side of the tether was an oval passenger platform with twenty seats, while an aerodynamic stabilizer and counterweight extended from the other side.
Billowing ammonia ice clouds, red with sulfur compounds, prevailed at this altitude, but La Forge had no trouble seeing the danger. Just a dozen meters away, a swarm of hundreds of scarflike creatures, some more than three meters long, undulated toward the away team. Railings around the platform and lap belts on the seats were the lift’s only safety features. Worf and Deanna Troi remained belted in, but La Forge, placing a communication relay, was perched a few meters above the railings, his safety line bonded to the tether by phased molecular adhesion.
If they had not had a couple hundred kilometers of bone-crushingly dense atmosphere below them, La Forge would have found it difficult to be concerned about the approaching life-forms. Joyfully fluttering along the strong winds, they looked like brightly colored Argelian silks. He wondered what they used for blood; up here a hundred below Celsius was a warm day.
“Thanks for the warning,” La Forge said, bracing for the swarm of flutters (as he found himself calling them). The leading edge soon reached him, but he barely noticed. The creatures, floating up here at about half of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level, were paper-thin. But they accumulated on him and writhed with surprising strength as they tried to free themselves. Dozens stuck to the faceplate of his