Finding the doorway through the sparkling waves of mist, Paris bolted for it. The duranium panels slid open for him just as he shot through them, hoping to escape.
And escape he did. The mist hung back inside the limits of Jiterica’s quarters, separating itself from him, relinquishing its unspoken claim on him.
Paris felt a wave of relief. But he also felt something else—an eerie sense of loss.
And as he made his way down the corridor, he felt a third thing. After all, he had invaded Jiterica’s self, perhaps even violated her in some uniquely Nizhrak sense.
The ensign hadn’t intended to do that. All he had meant to do was help her. But despite his good intentions, he might have hurt her to the core of her being.
And if he had, he could never take it back. It would haunt him the rest of his days.
What have I done? he thought.
Suddenly, it occurred to him that he might be compounding his invasion by running away. If he had injured Jiterica as he feared, she might be in need of someone to console her—someone to be with her.
Or would his coming back only make things worse?
Paris didn’t know. He couldn’t possibly know. Jiterica wasn’t anything like him.
Nonetheless, he had stopped and was about to return to her quarters when he realized he wasn’t alone in the corridor. Someone was coming after him.
It was Jiterica. But this time, she was wearing her containment suit. And she was moving as quickly and purposefully as he had ever seen her move.
What does she want? Paris wondered. He dreaded the prospect of finding out.
Chapter Seven
PARIS STEELED HIMSELF as he watched Jiterica lumber toward him in her containment suit, her ghostly features visible through her transparent faceplate.
Normally, she made those features reflect what she was feeling, so she could better communicate with the humanoids around her. But at the moment, her expression was blank—chillingly so.
It was if Jiterica had lost the desire to make herself appear human. Or maybe what she was feeling was just so intense that she couldn’t translate it.
Either way, it wasn’t a good sign.
Still, Paris stood there and waited for her. After what he had done, he had to.
Finally, Jiterica caught up with him. They stood face-to-faceplate, his flesh-and-blood eyes locked on her spectral ones. He opened his mouth to apologize, to beg her forgiveness.
But before he could do that, she spoke first. And what she said, in the tinny, artificial voice that her suit afforded her, was “I’m sorry.”
Paris looked at her. She was sorry? “For what?”
“For…” She hesitated. “For what happened in my quarters. I didn’t think it would be a problem if I came out of my suit for a few minutes.”
He didn’t know what to say.
Jiterica seemed to search for words. “It’s just that it’s so difficult to live inside something.”
“I’m sure it is,” he responded numbly.
“If I had known you were going to come in—”
“I shouldn’t have—”
“I thought the door—”
“I was afraid you were in trouble, or I—”
Their words tumbled over each other’s, making the entire mess unintelligible. Suddenly, they stopped and looked at each other, each reluctant to speak lest he or she interrupt the other.
Finally, it was Jiterica who broke the silence—even though she was the newcomer in terms of spoken communication. “I just wanted you to know that our…contact…was unintentional.”
Paris nodded. “On my part as well.”
Now the Nizhrak’s features did take on a humanlike expression. It was one of relief.
“Next time,” he promised her, “I’ll think twice before barging in.”
“And I will never leave my suit again. It was wonderful getting out of it, even for a short time. But getting back in was…torture.”
Paris couldn’t even imagine.
Existing in a drastically condensed form couldn’t have been comfortable for her. But achieving it in the first place had to be…well, Jiterica had said it, hadn’t she?
Torture.
“So we have achieved an understanding?” she asked.
Paris smiled at the awkwardness of her question. “Yes. I guess we have.”
“Good,” said Jiterica. “I would hate to think I had damaged our friendship.”
He was touched by her concern. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You didn’t.”
She continued to look at him. “If I could ask you a favor…?”
“Of course,” he said.
“I do not wish anyone else to know what happened just now. The suit and the difficulties I have with it are my problems—no one else’s. I can cope with them if it allows me to remain a viable member of the crew.”
Paris nodded again. “It’ll stay between us.”
If her expression was any indication, she was pleased with his response. “Thank you.”
He shrugged. “Don’t mention it.”
Picard woke with a start, not knowing where he was. Then, gradually, it came back to him.
The bomb and his aborted rendezvous. His imprisonment and escape. His slow, careful progress through the orbital city until Guinan finally brought him to—
Guinan, he thought. Where was she?
The captain got up and looked around the container-filled warehouse, but his companion was nowhere in sight. It was hardly a comforting observation.
Has she been captured? he wondered. But if she were, why wouldn’t he have been taken as well?
No, Picard told himself. Not captured. But she might have left him there for a moment, perhaps to get some food.
No sooner had he completed the thought than he heard a shuffling sound in a corner of the compartment. Dropping out of sight, he picked up his stolen phaser pistol. Then he listened—and heard the shuffling sound again.
It was coming from one of the corners of the room—an area hidden from the captain. Negotiating a path among several stacks of containers, he made his way toward the sound.
Careful, he thought.
He was little more than halfway there when he heard someone say, “Relax. It’s just me.”
Picard recognized the voice as Guinan’s. Taking a deep breath, he renewed his quest until he caught a glimpse of her. She appeared to be kneeling beside something—a much smaller and rounder container than the others in the room, made of what appeared to be white plastiform.
“Can I give you a hand?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Guinan told him.
As the captain joined her, he noticed that one of the larger containers was open, its lid flipped up and back. Peering inside it, he saw a number of other small containers, each a different shape and color.
“My food stash,” Guinan explained.
Picard nodded. “How convenient.”
Obviously, his companion had foreseen the need for a hiding place. For all he knew, she might even have hidden here on some previous occasion.
He watched her close the open container by pressing a stud in its side. Then she picked up the smaller container and slid back a rounded panel, exposing its contents.
“I hope you like feh’jennek,” Guinan said, referring to a Vobilite foodstuff that would have been indistinguishable from soy cake were it not for its lush, scarlet color.
“Love it,” the captain assured her.
“You’re lying,” she told him as she reached into the container, extracted a healthy chunk of the stuff, and handed it to him. “Actually, I don’t like it much either, but it keeps better than most anything else.”
He waited until she had taken out a piece for herself. Then the two of them sat down and had their breakfast.
“What made you stock this place with food?” Picard inquired after a while.
Guinan shrugged and looked at the floor. “I need to be alone sometimes—more alone than I can be in a hotel
room.”
He sensed that she didn’t want to say any more than that, so he restrained himself from probing further. However, her response was of a piece with the sadness he saw in her eyes.
Something had happened to her, he thought, something that affected her to the depths of her soul. Perhaps if they knew each other long enough, she would tell him about it.
But for now, the captain had other concerns on his mind. “That fellow I was supposed to meet…”
“You need to start looking for him, I suppose.”
“Yes. It’s rather important.”
Guinan frowned. “Important enough to risk getting recaptured by security?”
“Yes,” said Picard, giving out more information than he cared to. “That important.”
She gazed off into the distance. “Steej will have your description posted all over the place. You won’t get very far before someone recognizes you.”
“I’m sure you’re right, “he said. “Nonetheless, I have to make the attempt.”
Guinan regarded the human for a moment. Then her brow began to bunch above the bridge of her nose, giving him the impression that she was getting an idea.
“It could work,” she said.
“What could?” he asked.
“Everyone will be looking for a human with a healthy head of brown hair and a woman in a big hat. I can always get rid of the hat, but…”
“But what?” he prodded.
“But the hair…” she said.
The captain had a feeling he wasn’t going to like this.
* * *
Steej walked through the long, scarred hold of an Ajanni freighter that had been turned into a luridly lit bazaar, and studied the faces of everyone gathered there.
Only a handful of them looked human. And of that handful, no one came close to matching the description of the bomber or his female accomplice.
But they were still in Oblivion. The security director was certain of that.
After all, he had sent out detailed descriptions of the fugitives through the city’s security net—transmitting them not only to his own officers, but to his counterparts in the city’s other sectors as well.
Less than twenty minutes after the prisoner escaped, they had locked the city down. Ships were forbidden to leave until they were searched, lest they contain a couple more passengers than they were supposed to.
Steej winced as he was jostled by a passing Nausicaan, his ribs still sore from the phaser blast he had absorbed. “Watch where you’re going,” he snapped.
The Nausicaan turned, considered him for a moment, and said, “I will”—the closest thing to an apology that he was likely to utter. Then he continued on his way.
The Rythrian decided to move on as well, albeit in the opposite direction. He had seen enough here. He wanted to inspect the bar two compartments farther down.
Mercantile captains frequented the place when they were looking for cargo to haul. The human and his friend might have gone there to see if they could get a ride out of Oblivion, despite the security crackdown.
It was worth a look, at least. And if there wasn’t anything interesting there, Steej had a long list of other locations to check out.
His counterparts in the city’s other sections wouldn’t have been doing their own legwork on a case. They considered it beneath them.
But Steej had always taken crimes in his part of Oblivion personally, as if he himself were the victim. And in this instance, he had even more reason to do so.
He wasn’t normally the vindictive sort, but he didn’t like what the human had done to him. Steej wanted very much to get him back in a detention cell, so he could give the human a taste of what he had doled out.
Perhaps several tastes.
It won’t be long, he told himself, as he left the bazaar and walked through an exotic-clothing store on his way to the bar. It won’t be long at all.
Of course, he was dealing with a most clever team here. They had to be clever, or one wouldn’t have been able to break the other one out of the detention facility.
But Steej was clever too.
He had yet to meet the fugitive capable of eluding his dragnet—and he doubted that either of these two would become the first. Soon, they would find themselves as overmatched as all the others.
And when that happened, Steej told himself, his ribs would feel a whole lot better.
* * *
Ensign Nikolas emerged from the turbolift, barely even took notice of which officers were on the bridge, and walked past them to the door of the captain’s ready room.
Picard wouldn’t be inside. He was on a mission somewhere, though the details of it hadn’t been widely circulated. But then, it wasn’t Picard whom Nikolas had come to see.
The ensign waited for the sensor above the door to register his presence there. Finally, the doors slid open and admitted Nikolas to the captain’s inner sanctum.
Ben Zoma, the Stargazer’s first officer, was sitting behind Picard’s desktop computer, its screen casting a pale green glow on his face. As Nikolas entered the room, Ben Zoma turned to him.
“Pull up a chair,” he said, indicating the one across the desk from his own.
Nikolas didn’t thank his superior for his consideration. His only response was to sit down.
Ben Zoma regarded him for a moment. Then he said, “I’ve got a security report here that says you and Mister Hanta were fighting in the mess hall. Can you tell me what was so important that you came to blows over it?”
Nikolas had been anticipating a meeting like this one ever since security got involved in the matter. He shrugged. “It just happened, sir.”
Ben Zoma glanced at the monitor screen again. “According to Hanta, you started the fight. Is that true?”
The ensign didn’t care to defend himself any more now than he had in the mess hall. “I guess,” he said, “that depends on your point of view.”
The first officer leaned back in his chair. “And what’s your point of view, Mr. Nikolas?”
Nikolas shrugged again. “I upset Hanta’s tray. His food spilled on his uniform.”
“So you’re saying it was an accident?”
“That’s right.”
Ben Zoma looked puzzled. “Why didn’t you mention that to the security team?”
“I guess I didn’t think it was important,” Nikolas told him.
The first officer nodded. “I see. Tell me, Ensign…have you been having trouble sleeping lately?”
The question caught Nikolas off-guard. Then he remembered seeing Ben Zoma on one of his more recent jaunts.
“A little,” he confessed.
“And would that have anything to do with what happened in the mess hall?”
Nikolas really didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
But Ben Zoma was relentless. “I think you know exactly what I mean, Ensign.”
Nikolas squirmed in his chair. Unfortunately, he couldn’t leave—not without his superior’s permission.
“I’m hearing things I don’t like,” the first officer said, “and not just from the security section. In the past several days, you’ve been late for two different shifts and fallen asleep in a third one.”
Actually, Nikolas had fallen asleep on two occasions—once in engineering and once in sickbay—but he didn’t feel compelled to point that out. “I’ll try to do better, sir.”
Ben Zoma chuckled. “Why don’t I believe that? Why do I have the feeling you’ll go back to the very same behavior—with maybe another fight thrown in for good measure?”
The ensign didn’t have an answer for that. Of course, he wasn’t trying very hard to come up with one.
Ben Zoma smiled, but it was clear that he wasn’t very happy. “Good officers don’t turn into bad ones overnight. There’s always a reason for it. And I want to know what it is.”
Nikolas shook his head, feigning regret. “I’m sorry, Commander. I can’t help you.”
“C
an’t?” the first officer echoed. “Or won’t?”
Again, Nikolas fell silent.
Ben Zoma leaned forward across the captain’s desk. “Does it have anything to do with Gerda Idun Asmund?”
Nikolas’s expression must have betrayed him, because he could see a sense of accomplishment in his superior’s.
“I know a little about what happens on this ship,” said Ben Zoma. “It was no secret that you were infatuated with her. And you’ve yet to explain how you wound up in the transporter room trying to stop her from abducting Simenon.”
Nikolas had gone there with the intention of returning with Gerda Idun to her own universe. It was only chance that had put him in a position to stop her from taking Simenon.
Not for the first time, he cursed the way things had worked out. Why couldn’t it have been me she came for? Why couldn’t I have been the key to her people’s survival?
Ben Zoma looked at him. “Well?”
Nikolas felt a new pang of longing. It happened every time he thought of her. Every single time.
“Gerda Idun is gone,” he told Ben Zoma. “There’s no point in talking about her.”
The first officer regarded him a moment longer, a shadow of sadness crossing his face. Then he said, “Have it your way, Ensign. Dismissed.”
Nikolas felt no sense of achievement for having stymied Ben Zoma’s attempts to uncover his pain. He felt no rush of victory as he got up and left the room.
All he felt was emptiness.
Picard felt an unaccustomed draft on his scalp.
Afraid that it was coming from an open door, he turned his head in the direction of the storage room’s only entrance. But the door to the adjoining cosmetics parlor was closed, a concession to their need for secrecy.
He had barely assured himself of the fact when he felt four strong fingers clamp down on his cranium and rotate it ninety degrees to the right.
“Calm yourself,” said a husky, feminine voice.
The captain frowned. “I was only trying to see if—”
“I’m almost done,” the voice added.
Suddenly, he felt the robe he had been wearing whisked away from him. Then two viselike hands lifted him off the stool on which he had been sitting.
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