Текст книги "Declassified "

Автор книги: David Mack

Соавторы: Marco Palmieri,Dayton Ward
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

12

Either the stench was less oppressive than I had experienced the night before, or I had been spending way too much time on the Omari-Ekon.

However, in all fairness, I should have accounted for all of the differences that separated that particular moment on the Orion ship from my visit the previous night. First, it was a different time of day for me to be there. Upon my arrival home from the café, I had showered, had recorded a number of notes from the day before they slipped my mind, and had laid myself down for a nap. Thus, while I previously had met Amity near the beginning of her shift, tonight I arrived near what I assumed might be the conclusion of it. Yes, she had offered to contact me following her shift as a cocktail server, but I found myself not wanting to wait. I wanted to speak with her as soon as possible.

And what a difference my timing made not only in the breathable atmosphere of the ship but in the overall mood of the place as well. While there were noticeably fewer patrons at the gaming tables, the overall noise and raucousness about the place seemed even greater, owing to the relative per capita intake of alcoholic beverages, no doubt. Wins seemed less frequent at this time of night, but they were celebrated with even more fervor.

Something else that seemed to come on with a little more fervor was the waitstaff. Not only did they seem more enthusiastic about plying the patrons with alcohol, I began to wonder whether the servers—males and females alike—were offering themselves for the taking. If that happened to be the typical situation among workers of the late shift, or something of an expectation placed on them by managers or even Ganz himself, it was a detail that Amity spared me. More likely, at least in my mind, was the possibility that management turned a blind eye to ambitious or entrepreneurial employees who chose to seize an opportunity to turn a profit from an inebriated or winning gambler.

I had been on board awhile at that point, but not long enough for Amity to have traded sections of responsibility for the bar area. Besides, she had not been keeping a lookout for me among the patrons, as she had no way of expecting my arrival. I had hoped that would be the case, as it afforded me a better chance to observe her without being seen. I must admit that my first glimpses of her in the skimpy costume worn by all the female servers did flatter her body to the point that I found myself paying much closer attention than I had intended. But that night’s visit was much more to put my mind at ease rather than get it spinning with ideas. I needed to see for myself how she managed this undercover gig of hers. From the look of things, she could manage just fine.

I noticed her fending off drunken advances and juggling a myriad of drink orders. I saw her working behind the bar as well as on the floor in the manner of a seasoned professional. And I watched as she engaged people in conversation—all sorts of them, from gamblers to servers to the hulking Orion guards. Amity immersed herself in the environment of the Omari-Ekonto a point that made me feel at least a little more secure in her decision to keep fishing for leads on stories that might get her noticed by the major news outlets.

I was caught up in the rhythm of the electronically driven music, absently staring beyond a series of multicolored spotlights and into the void, when a sharp rap shook my tabletop. I glanced down to see a full glass tumbler grasped by a slender-fingered hand. My gaze quickly followed that hand up an arm and into the eyes of the Deltan woman, Aurelie. I felt myself flinch just a little, and I hoped it was something I could easily dismiss as being startled by her arrival more so than her identity.

“Whoa! I’m sorry, I wasn’t quite here when you arrived.”

“I understand, and I take no offense, sir,” said the lithe, bald-headed woman I knew as Aurelie. I had to remind myself, however, that she had no inkling that I knew her at all.

“And I’m sorry, but I didn’t order this. It’s some kind of mistake.”

“Oh, not at all. I noticed you were dry and so I had the bartender make this for you,” she said. “It might take the edge off your bad afternoon.”

I decided to play dumb. “Bad afternoon? I’m not sure I understand you.”

“Today, at the outdoor café? I saw a man get caught in an awful accident with a dropped tray of food. I could have sworn it was you.”

“Right! Of course! You were there, too?”

“Oh, I was passing by when it happened but it would have been impossible not to notice,” she said, and smiled coyly. “I remember it was you because you looked right at me.”

I laughed in a way that I hoped did not sound too forced. “Oh, I’m sure I did. The whole thing happened so fast that all I can really remember was the noise.”

“I may never forget that crash,” she said. “So, relax. Have a drink. It’s nothing heavy but it’s very relaxing.”

I played along and raised my glass as a toast and took a drink. She was right about its being of light flavor and consistency. The only place I even tasted its potency was on the tip of my tongue and, oddly enough, my gums. “Thank you. This isn’t something I’ve had before.”

Aurelie laughed softly, at least relative to the ambient noise of the place. “I’m sure it’s not. It’s an Orion infusion, something you don’t find just anywhere. So, you’re here at Vanguard on business?”

“Sure,” I said, figuring it was just as easy to feed off of her cues as it was to try and fabricate a story on the fly, especially considering that I had now started to feel the action of the day begin to weigh on me. “I’m helping to install an upgraded communications array for the station. It’s a job that will keep me here awhile.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” she said, seeming to look at me a little more closely in that moment.

I took a second sip from my drink and felt an unnatural spin begin to swirl in my head. I looked at the drink in my hand and tried in vain to decipher its contents.

“What’s in this, anyway?” I managed to ask.

“It’s special for you, sir. A house blend.”

“Well, I hope you’re ready. By the time I’m finished with this, I’m going to be incredibly charming.”

She chuckled a bit. “You’re already very charming,” she said, darting her tongue tip into one corner of her mouth. “I can see why Amity likes you.”

My blood chilled and my stomach churned as I tried to clear my head. “Pardon me?”

Aurelie’s eyes narrowed into slits yet still carried the power to make me feel as if they were boring into me and cause a wave of dread that momentarily superseded my disorientation. “Get up, Mister Pennington.”

I was able to quell at least one flash of panic in my brain. In that moment, I appreciated my decision to leave my recorder at my apartment.

I went to push against the table so my chair would scoot away from it, but I evidently misjudged my strength as the whole table toppled, its metal top ringing as it struck the floor. I tried to stand but felt the floor turn to thick mud as my knees gave way under my own weight. Just when I thought I would fall to the floor, I felt a rough grip under one arm and then the other before I was hoisted into the air. I tried walking, but it felt as though only the tips of my toes were brushing the floor. I turned my head to see one of the massive green-skinned guards on my left side, then I spun my head to confirm my suspicion that a second one was on my right.

“Sorry, friends,” one of the guards spoke loudly, practically yelling into my ear as I was carried. “Got one who’s had a little too much fun tonight. Pardon us. Coming through.”

Above the din, I heard a shriek and recognized it as coming from Amity. I looked to see her rushing from one end of the gaming deck toward me, but I just kept shaking my head no and trying to wave her off. By then, my tongue felt too thick to attempt to speak, but I had no other way of warning her that Ganz and his men had connected her to me. And obviously, they knew precisely who I was.

I locked on to her rich, brown eyes, attempting to apologize and to soothe and to assure her this could be straightened out—at least those were my intentions. But just as quickly, I was carried past her, off the gaming deck and into a darkness I could not distinguish from sleep.

13

Light returned, or at least it had to one of my eyes. And that was followed by pain.

As best I could tell, I was back in the terrestrial enclosure of Vanguard. Judging from the level of light from the artificial sunrise, I guessed it was early morning. And from the cool, scratchy surface upon which the side of my face rested, I was probably lying on a paved walkway near a drinking establishment in Stars Landing. To any early risers, I simply would have appeared as a drunkard who had attempted to stumble home only to find rest and respite from his condition in the street.

I pushed myself to a sitting position and surveyed my location. I was correct in that the front door of Tom Walker’s place was a few meters behind me. I then managed to bring myself to my feet and take a look at my overall condition. My clothing was soiled and bloodied, ostensibly the result of the Orion guards dragging me about as I unconsciously endured whatever indignities they felt fit to serve me. I then looked at my hands, which for whatever reason had been spared from injury beyond a few cuts and knuckle abrasions I hoped were the results of my getting in a few wild punches rather than mere dragging. And—something for which I was equally thankful—I seemed to have suffered no joint injuries. My knees did not overly pain me to move, nor did my elbows. I felt a few twinges as I rotated my shoulders and windmilled my arms, but those were not new to my experience since regaining consciousness, anyway.

I then mustered the courage to shuffle to a storefront window and use the reflection in an attempt to ascertain the injuries to my face. Once I got a look, I wished I had waited until I had returned home. As I suspected, my right eye was swollen shut from what I assumed was repeated pummeling. My brow above the eye had been split, and blood from the wound had created a dried trickle of crimson around my eye and down my cheek, appearing almost as if the gore had been cried out rather than spilled. My swollen lower lip appeared to bear two splits, and each cheek sported abrasions I remember my mother calling strawberries when they occurred on my kneecaps. My left ear had been boxed pretty effectively as well.

“You should see the other guy,” I slurred to myself through my wounded lips, and when I did so, my attention was held by something I saw in my mouth—or did not see, to be more accurate. I pushed my lower lip down despite its throbbing protests to the contrary and spied a hole where one tooth had been.

“Well, shit.”

I made my way back to my apartment without further incident, managing to startle only a handful of fellow pedestrians along the way, and spent a portion of my morning in gingerly attempts to clean and dress my wounds. As pain can be a clarifier of thinking as well as a duller, I managed to have my wits about me at a level I frankly did not expect, considering the potency of the drink I had been served. Then again, maybe the Orion intoxicant was created to be as quickly purged from a system as assimilated into it. In either event, I was not suffering exaggerated symptoms of a traditional hangover, as I had initially suspected.

Once I was back in order, the equally pressing matter at hand was to determine the whereabouts of Amity and hope she had not been equally brutalized. My recording device, which also served as a communicator, registered no contact from Amity, and my repeated calls to her device, which I began making as soon as I had reached my apartment, went unanswered. A hurdle I had not anticipated until that moment, however, was my ignorance of where she lived during her time on Vanguard. She had not divulged that information, and none of our few meetings had ever occurred in her quarters. In a typical situation, I would have relied on myself to do the footwork and determine the whereabouts of her living quarters. At that moment, I chose to call in some assistance and contacted Lieutenant Ginther from my recording device. He answered the audiovisual connection almost immediately.

“Security. Ginther.”He paused as the look of my visage registered in his mind. “Pennington? What the hell happened to you?”

“An altercation, Lieutenant, but that’s not the reason behind my contacting you. I need your help, and it’s urgent.”

“Well, this may be the one I owe ya. What can I do?”

“You may remember my mentioning a friend who got mixed up with Ganz and the crew of the Orion ship.”

“I do. I hoped you might have impressed upon her what I said, that she should get untangled from him as soon as humanly possible.”

“I’m afraid that she may not have gotten untangled soon enough. I wonder whether you might be able to locate her living quarters for me, so I might check on her.”

“Absolutely. What’s her name?”

“Amity Price.”

Ginther’s end of the connection went silent momentarily as, I assume, he worked his computer database. “Amity Price? A-M-I-T-Y?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have a record of any lodging for someone with that name.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not trying to be confusing. What I’m telling you is that according to the station directory of residency, she is not listed. Just a moment. Computer, broaden the name search to encompass all records including ship manifests and temporary accommodations.”

“I appreciate your efforts, Lieutenant.”

“Well, thanks, but this search isn’t going to make you any happier. According to this, an Amity Price did arrive on Vanguard about a month ago.”

“Yes! That’s the one.”

“Yeah, but then she left the station as a passenger on the same transport ship two days later.”

“What? That’s not possible.”

“Well, it’s possible if the person you’re dealing with isn’t being entirely straight with you. MaybeAmity Price is an alias. Do you have any identification information on her at all? A photo or a signature?”

“I’m afraid I don’t, sir,” I said. “I have a data card filled with samples of her journalistic writing.”

“I’m not sure what we might be able to pull from a card like yours that would prove helpful.”

“I see.”

“I am sorry, Tim. I wish I could help more. There’s just nothing at all here. If something breaks loose that I can help with, find me.”

“Indeed I will. Oh, and thanks.” I surprised myself by remembering to add my thanks before terminating the connection, as I felt stupefied almost beyond my ability to speak. I could not rule out that Amity had duped me into believing she was someone other than who she truly was, but doing so made no sense and gained her no advantage. I could discern no reason that she herself or some larger organization, including Starfleet itself, would gain anything from a play like this one. She was not an imposter, and she was not a plant. I knew this. Amity Price was real.

As real as the icy yet polite voice that just then echoed in my apartment.

“It’s all pretty simple, Mister Pennington. She’s gone.”

I wheeled around to my now open doorway to see a tall man in a finely tailored business suit leaning against the jamb. His deep black skin almost glistened in the light, as if he had been formed from a pool of crude oil.

“I beg your pardon,” I snapped loudly. “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my apartment?”

“I’m a little disappointed you can’t place me. I’m certain we have been introduced before now.”

My eyes scanned his form again, not terribly eager to play his game but hungry for answers. “Zett,” came the answer, as if summoned unwillingly. “You work for Ganz.”

“I do,” he said. “And I came to offer you information I think you will want and I hope you will take to heart.”

“What did you do with Amity Price?”

“I merely aided her in her request to be gone from the station.”

“She wouldn’t have made such a request.”

“Ah, but she did,” Zett said as he strode into my living room. “If I recall correctly, she said she wished she never had stayed on Vanguard, and that she had stayed on the ship that brought her here. So, I did what I could to accommodate her request.”

“How could you rub someone’s existence from every data bank on Vanguard?”

“She wanted to be gone, so I helped all that I could.”

“You killed her.”

“She is gone, and she will not be missed.”

“That part is absolutely not true,” I said. “She has friends all over your boss’s ship.”

“As you can imagine, we have a high, let us say, turnover rate of employees. Our workers are used to comings and goings, many of which occur on very short notice. Consequently, they find such matters . . . uninteresting to discuss.”

“Someone will look for her.”

“And they will find, as did you, that Miss Price’s arrival and departure went by largely unnoticed,” Zett said. “I would venture to say, Mister Pennington, were you someone who also would not be missed, you would have . . . left with her.”

“But I do have a bit of an exposure issue these days,” I said, “and that might work to my advantage should I continue to make visits to the Omari-Ekon.”

“However, it would not work to the advantage of your known associates. I would be disappointed to see . . . Mister Quinn, for example, follow Miss Price away from the station. Wait, I should correct myself, if I may. I would not be disappointed at all.”

If Zett was going to push a button with me, he had just pushed it. Putting myself at risk for my job is acceptable for me—but never at the expense of someone else’s health and safety. I did not have to respond to Zett for him to recognize he had made his point. My bruised, fallen face and aching, slumped shoulders likely communicated that for me.

“I believe we have reached an understanding, then,” Zett said, “and I thank you for your time and attention.” And the door slid shut.

I stood in my silent, empty apartment that morning for I have no idea how long, wishing that Amity Price merely had been sent away so intently that I almost had myself convinced of the possibility. I imagined her walking down the boarding ramp onto the first shuttle away from Vanguard to pursue every big story she ever hoped to write during a big career elsewhere on the frontier—a place where a reporter and a story can make a difference without getting people arrested or hurt or killed.

It was a place where I had not been for a long, long time. And maybe it was time to go.

14

“You look like hell, son. I don’t mind tellin’ ya.”

“Doctor Fisher,” I said, “should I ever need a refresher course in candor, I trust you will be available to teach it.”

As the chief medical officer was leaning in so close that I thought our foreheads would touch, I more felt him laugh than heard him. When I had arrived, he happened to be milling about the reception area of Vanguard’s medical center cradling a mug of coffee in his large hands—practically in the same place that I had left him after my attempt to see T’Prynn. As soon as he spotted me, he ushered me back into an exam room personally rather than have me wait on an available medic.

I sat on an edge of the room’s only biobed as Fisher tended to my wounds while demonstrating his apparent habit of talking his way through procedures. I had to wonder whether he did this to steady himself as much as to soothe me; regardless, it seemed to work. I humored myself by trying to predict where he would choose to pause in a given sentence.

“This autosuture I’m . . . using here . . . runs a little slower than a dermal regenerator,” he said as he passed the device over my right eyebrow. The ice-blue glow of its emitter shone through my eyelid, and I could feel my skin tingle in response. “But I . . . use it on places like this because . . . it’s more precise. Newer isn’t always . . . better.”

“Not always,” I echoed.

He clicked off the autosuture. “You can open your eyes now. I know your lip is still pretty sore, but hold it down a minute while I recheck the root of that tooth I replaced.”

I complied despite the jolt of pain my action delivered, then I looked down my nose into his eyes as he peered into my mouth.

“Mm-hmm. Now, how did you lose this again?”

“I’m not able to tell you. I woke up this morning and it was gone.”

“Woke up or regained consciousness?”

“Little of both?”

Fisher raised the tip of a bone-knitting laser to my gumline, and I watched a hair-thin beam lance from the device and onto me. The sensation was different from the autosuture, but equally soothing.

“Got someone you can talk to about . . . all this?”

“Not really,” I said, still holding my lip down so he could work.

“Care to talk to me?”

“Not really.”

“Okay, then. You can let go now.” I saw the beam snap off. “I can give you something that will take the edge off your pain. This may not be what you want to hear, but for facial wounds such as yours, sometimes it’s best to let the swelling subside naturally before we rush right in and fix anything.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“I’m glad you concur.” Fisher did not look up from putting away his surgical instruments, but that did not silence him. “Did you ever track down Doctor M’Benga?”

“Actually, no, I didn’t. I’m certainly still interested in T’Prynn’s condition. It’s just that, well, I’ve had a few matters to attend to.”

“Kind of figured,” the physician said. “Typically, I would not circumvent Doctor M’Benga in matters of his patients. But being that you are here and all, I can make an exception in this instance, if you would like to see her.”

“You would do that?” I was genuinely surprised by the offer and had not even considered asking Fisher, given our last conversation. But I was not about to turn him down now, regardless of the fact that, physically and emotionally, I was as close to being a candidate for the biobed next to T’Prynn’s as I had ever been. “Please, I’m happy to go.”

Fisher led the way out of the exam room and down a corridor to an area marked with a simple sign: Isolation Ward 4. He pushed open the door and we entered silently. Fisher did not break stride as he approached T’Prynn lying on the diagnostic bed, whereas I found myself unconsciously slowing my pace. “Come ahead, Mister Pennington,” Fisher said, “I assure you that you’re not going to wake her.”

The Vulcan’s features were stoic yet soft as she reclined motionless, while tones from the biobed indicating her heart rate, respiration, and brainwave activity combined to create a rhythmic accompaniment to her apparent restfulness. On occasion, a nurse would come by to read a monitor or check a connection or even just to pause and place a hand on T’Prynn’s. There was no way of knowing whether such gestures made a difference in her treatment or whether the unconscious woman even noticed them, but the routine seemed to comfort everyone involved in her care.

After a few moments of being in T’Prynn’s presence– moments during which my thoughts did not wander outside what was happening right there—Doctor Fisher motioned me out of the ward. I followed him, noticing as we went back into the corridor that a breeze somehow had brought a chill to my cheeks. Then the physician reached over to pass me a disposable handkerchief.

I raised it to my cheeks and wiped away rivulets of tears. Evidently, without even realizing it, I had wept while standing with T’Prynn.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and it was Doctor Fisher’s. “Tim, let’s take a walk.”

I followed him to a small staff lounge with a door that he closed for privacy’s sake. I sat in an armless upholstered chair and he took a seat in an identical one opposite mine. “I apologize, Doctor,” I said. “I’m not really sure what came over me in there.”

“You’re not the first to have that experience, and you won’t be the last.”

“Experience? I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It’s not easy to see someone in her condition, and an emotional response isn’t uncommon. Your reaction could stem from a number of things. It’s pretty obvious you have a lot of things going on in your world. I’m certainly aware of the history you share with T’Prynn, of the personal pain and loss she brought about for you. Doctor M’Benga even has this theory that T’Prynn or any other Vulcan in severe psychotic distress might be able to project a shadow of what they are feeling while in a comatose state. Think of it as a distress beacon from one psychic to another. And he suggests that in rare instances, the signal from the beacon is strong enough to be picked up by anyone around it.”

“Is that possible?”

“With those people, who the hell knows,” Fisher said. “But M’Benga hasn’t offered that theory yet to anyone but me, so treat that one as off the record.”

I laughed a little. “Right.”

“So, am I close?”

I mulled my words a bit before speaking. “My mind keeps returning to her breakdown. The pain I saw on her face. I thought seeing her in a state of calm and peace would help me rationalize that her pain is over, and push that image out of my mind.”

“Maybe you can push that image out of your mind by helping in some way,” he said, “if not her then definitely yourself. If you have been hanging on to your anger at her, if you have been feeling spiteful or hoping for retribution, what might be anchoring her pain in your mind is a good dose of guilt.”

“Oh, there’s plenty of that to go around, believe me,” I said. “With Reyes in the brig, T’Prynn in a coma, Quinn caught in the crossfire of an Orion mad as hell at me, and an entire Federation frightened about the return of ancient, wrathful aliens, hell, I’m the life of every party in the whole damn quadrant.”

“Oh, so you did all that by yourself.”

“Didn’t I? I got in this job—hell, I stayin this job—because I want to help put things right, not to be the architect of doom for everyone I know. But I’m not putting many things right these days.”

“Then consider this, Tim,” Fisher said. “Maybe you don’t try to engineer positive change one quadrant at a time or one planet at a time or one station at a time. Consider doing what’s right by one individual at a time. When you change one life for the better, you can get to feeling pretty damn good about the world. Why the hell else do I stay in medicine?”

“It’s not for the free coffee?”

Fisher smiled and nodded at me, then gave me a clap on the shoulder while rising from his seat. As we walked back toward the reception area, I could not help but look back toward Isolation Ward 4, where I knew staff members were checking readouts, holding hands, and changing the world one life at a time.

But the only life I wanted to change in that moment was my own.