The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [97]
And every rage and frustrated fury from his life channeled into his retort, all his hurt and loss, all his betrayals and loneliness. “Get out! You are not my father!”
Mika’s hands clasped around his and she swallowed hard. Her husband was stoic, betraying no emotion as his story spilled out of him. She had heard parts of it before, in moments when he had been sad or melancholy, but never the whole thing, never in such rich and poignant detail. Wesley’s wife gasped, holding in her tears. She wanted to hold him, but there was more to tell, and he needed to let it out of himself.
“What happened then?” she asked.
He gave a shuddering sigh. “After that, I met him for the first time.”
The Enterprise’s lifeboats were cubes no more than three meters to a side, arranged in rings on the dorsal and ventral faces of the starship hull, ready to accept passengers and eject themselves into the void if the vessel succumbed to some catastrophe. Normally, a lifeboat hatch would not open unless a command from the bridge allowed it, but Wesley’s idle cunning had made short work of the control systems; he had a favorite boat, at the end of one ring, the hatch out of sight from the main corridor. He could find some quiet inside, a place to brood and to sneak synthehol or just to get away. Many times he had sat in there, his hand on the manual ejection lever, wondering how much pressure it would take to fire the pod into space. One jerk of the wrist, and he would be away, thrown out of the warp bubble and deposited in the interstellar void between stars. Free to drift. Free of everything.
Wesley’s hand dropped away and he pulled his dark jacket close around his shoulders. Would anyone notice? He was tempted to do it just to see how sorry they would be when he was gone.
In the next second, the hatch below him was opening and he reacted with shock. If Yar’s security people caught him, Wes would be in serious trouble. But the head that intruded into his hiding place was decidedly nonhuman and non-Starfleet. A face of pale, silvery skin turned to him, kind eyes beneath a thick brow that belied the intelligence of the alien’s expression. The youth had a moment of recognition; he’d seen the humanoid aboard the ship some days earlier, in the company of an engineer from off-ship as part of some upgrade program. Wes recalled his mother talking about how a near accident had occurred belowdecks, where only Lieutenant La Forge’s quick thinking had stopped Enterprise from racing away into subspace. He reverted to a default surliness. “You’re not supposed to come in here,” he grunted.
“I could say the same to you,” the alien said mildly, and he pulled himself up into one of the vacant seats. He glanced around, running broad, long fingers over the walls. “So small and so complex,” he breathed, “a very clever design…. But it lacks poetry, don’t you think? It’s so functional.”
“It’s a lifeboat,” Wes retorted bluntly. “Doesn’t matter what it looks like.”
To his surprise, the alien nodded. “That’s true. What lies beneath the surface is the true measure of a thing.” He blinked slowly. “So, Wesley. Are you ready to go back yet?”
“Back?” Crusher leaned away. “Back where? What are you talking about?”
The alien frowned slightly. “Ah. Forgive me. My use of human speech is not as polished as I would like it to be. One can forget simple things when one travels as much as I do.”
“How do you know who I am?”
“I’m very well informed,” came the languid reply. “I make it my business to seek out people with…unique insights. I thought you might be one of them.”
Wesley snorted. “Unique? How I am different from every other teenager who ever lived?” The words tripped off his tongue. “I’m angry at the world, nothing moves fast enough, my life is all rules and things I can’t do…”
He got a smile. “True. But how many of your fellow adolescents have the capacity to step outside themselves and see that?”
“Seeing it doesn’t make it go away,” Wes replied. “I can’t make something vanish just by thinking