Three - Michael Jan Friedman [6]
Unfortunately, the suit was awkward for Jiterica to move. Even something as simple as standing up or sitting down was a difficult and complex maneuver. On top of that, the suit was a bulky item that took up more room than most of the ensign’s fellow crewmen.
Which occasionally made her a target for someone who wasn’t watching where he was going.
Paris looked through Jiterica’s faceplate, where he could see a ghostly female countenance. The Nizhrak was getting better at simulating a human face, he noted. A lot better.
“I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “I didn’t see you coming.”
What appeared to be a smile took hold of the Nizhrak’s face. “It’s all right,” Jiterica said in the mechanical voice the suit allowed her. “I’m not injured.”
[14] Funny, thought Paris. The technology in the suit didn’t permit inflection. And yet Jiterica seemed to have found a way to impose a tone on her voice.
A rather pleasant tone, at that.
He found himself smiling back at her. “It’s a good thing I wasn’t this clumsy that day in the shuttle. Otherwise we never would have rescued the Belladonna.”
Paris was, of course, referring to the research vessel the Stargazer had encountered a couple of weeks earlier. Caught in a cosmic sinkhole, the Belladonna and her crew were slowly but surely slipping away.
But Paris and Jiterica, working together, gave the research ship a chance at survival. And in the end, that was all the Belladonna needed.
Paris remembered how good it felt to know he’d had a part in saving all those scientists. And he remembered also how close he had felt to Jiterica, whose life had been in his hands.
He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen much of Jiterica after that, but he regretted the oversight. He had liked that feeling of closeness. He didn’t want to lose it.
“You’re not clumsy,” she told him. “I’m the clumsy one.” And she used an arm of the suit to point to its chest.
“Anyone would be clumsy if they had to walk around in that suit all day,” he said.
Jiterica’s expression seemed to falter then, and he was afraid that he had insulted her. But a moment later, the smile returned to her face.
“It is difficult,” she said. “I just didn’t think anyone here understood that.”
Paris shrugged. “I think we all do. We just don’t say it.”
[15] Jiterica looked at him. “You did.”
And the expression behind her faceplate changed again. But this time, it didn’t seem to falter. If anything, it grew stronger and more distinct—especially the eyes.
They seemed to reach right into him, even more so than a pair of human eyes might have.
That’s when Paris remembered that he had someplace to go. “I’d like to stay and talk,” he said, “but I’m due in the shuttlebay. But ... maybe we can get together some other time.”
Jiterica’s head seemed to tilt a little behind her faceplate. “Some other time,” she echoed.
Paris looked at her a moment longer. Then he made his way past her and headed for the turbolift.
But as he came to a bend in the corridor, he turned back ... and saw that she was still standing there where he had left her, watching him go. It pleased him that it was so, though at the time he couldn’t have said why.
Admiral Arlen McAteer leaned back in his plastiform chair and considered the slightly convex screen of his desktop monitor, where a swarm of tiny, bright-red dots were scattered as if at random over a stark green-on-black grid.
The grid represented the sector of the Alpha Quadrant for which the admiral and the captains assigned to him were responsible. The tiny red dots stood for the Starfleet vessels commanded by those captains.
There was a great deal going on these days in McAteer’s sector. A great deal of unrest among the [16] various species residing there. A great deal of posturing and finger-pointing and secret deal-making.
Like any admiral worth his salt, McAteer recognized these maneuverings for what they were—a prelude to armed conflict. It was the obvious conclusion. All the classic signs were there.
McAteer had already distinguished himself many