by David Mack
In every direction something new captured his interest: table after table of different games of chance; exotic women of various humanoid species, either mingling with patrons or dancing around metal poles on raised platforms beneath strobing lights; aliens whose species he had never encountered before; the scent of something tantalizing or something revolting; drinks that bubbled, drinks that frothed, drinks that changed color when they made contact with one’s lips. Cloyingly sweet vapors, like honeyed cloves, mingled with the bite of acrid smoke, all of it originating in the countless ornate water pipes—or hookahs, as Scott had learned they were called—that were scattered throughout the room.
Scott felt like a child on Christmas morning.
Zett moved in smooth strides through the maze of gaming tables, which were crowded with loud, staggering, inebriated miners and prospectors. Scott assumed the laborers had come here to squander their earnings and bolster their spirits for another six months of lonely digging on another unnamed rock. Though he hoped he’d be smarter than that with his money, he couldn’t really say that he blamed them. Life on the frontier was hard and it was lonely—more for some than for others.
Zett led him aft, to one of two broadly curving staircases that ascended through a crescent-shaped cut to the deck above. The staircase was narrowest at its bottom, and it widened quickly as they climbed. As they passed the middle stair, a lithe, green-skinned Orion woman draped with several carefully overlapped strips of diaphanous Tholian silk stepped between them as she descended. Her very proximity charged the air with erotic energy. Scott’s pulse quickened at the scent of her; his eyes were drawn to her dark, voluminous cascade of unkempt curls, her pouting lips and come-hither glance….
Looking at Scott with tired cynicism, Zett said simply, “You couldn’t afford her.”
“I was just—”
“Not for an hour. Not for half an hour.”
“But I wasn’t—”
“When you’re an admiral, maybe we’ll talk.”
As the duo reached the top of the stairs, Scott noticed that the music from the lower level faded quickly into ambient background noise. Acoustic dampeners, he figured.
Unlike the lower deck of this sprawling private oasis, there were no gaming tables upstairs. In the two rear corners were doors, likely to private offices or residential quarters. The denizens of this deck, Scott noticed, were easily divided into two categories: men and women who exuded the cruel bravado and cold lethality of career criminals and gangsters, and scores of impossibly beautiful, scantily clad men and women whose sole occupation in this environment was painfully obvious.
Zett placed a firm but gentle palm on Scott’s back and guided him to stand between a pair of black carved-marble obelisks, in front of a broad dais piled high with cushions and pillows. The dais, Scott noted, was bordered on either side by the two wide gaps for the curving staircases, which nearly met at their apexes, leaving only a narrow strip of floor as an ingress. Like a moat, Scott surmised. Around it were more curving draperies. Behind it was an enormous wraparound window framing a broad panorama of the Taurus Reach starscape.
Seated in the center of all this opulence, puffing from a hookah by means of a long ribbed tube with a metallic nozzle, was Ganz, an enormous, thickly muscled, bald green Orion man in a midnight blue caftan. He regarded Scott with caution as he exhaled a plume of earthy-smelling, pale-orange smoke through his broad nose. “Lieutenant Commander Scott,” he said, his voice low in both register and volume.
“Scotty, to my friends.”
A small crease above the bridge of Ganz’s nose wrinkled into a tight knot of suppressed annoyance. “What can I do for you, Commander?”
“I was hoping you could help me procure some special spirits for my private stash on the Enterprise.”
Ganz thrust his chin forward as his eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry—did you just say you came here to buy liquor?”
“Aye,” Scott said, the minor vibrato in his voice betraying the apprehension he suddenly felt. “But no—”
“You are aware that several establishments on the station serve alcohol?”
“Aye, but not what I’m after. I—”
“If you say you’ve come looking for mandisa, my associate Zett is going to push you out an airlock.”
Words logjammed one after another in Scott’s throat as he shifted gears in midsentence. He had come here hoping to acquire a bottle—or a case—of the rare Orion aphrodisiac, on the assumption that, because they were outside the official borders of the Federation, a loophole might have made it accessible at last. Unfortunately, the stony gaze of the gangster in front of him made it apparent to Scott that he was not the first one to have entertained this notion—nor the first to have dared to bother Ganz with it.
“Of course not,” Scott lied, his prevarication as obvious as it was desperate. “In fact, I was going to ask you or your”—he looked around at the coterie of thugs, who were inching closer—“your esteemed colleagues to recommend something exotic.”
“Something exotic,” Ganz repeated, an evil grin broadening his face. “I think we can accommodate you after all, Commander Scott.” He turned and bellowed across the room, “Reke! Come here!” One of Ganz’s shabbier-looking henchmen staggered away from his table on the far side of the room. Ganz pointed him back the way he’d come. “Bring the bottle.” The bedraggled hoodlum turned, snagged the bottle with a broad sweeping grab, and resumed plodding toward the dais. When he reached Scott’s side, Ganz held up his hand, and Reke stopped. Pointing at Scott, Ganz said, “Give him the bottle.”
Reke looked at Scott, struggling to focus through eyes dilated with intoxication. Perplexed, he looked down at the bottle in his hand, then glanced pleadingly at Ganz, who scowled back. Cowed, Reke thrust the bottle toward Scott, who took it.
The chief engineer stared at the bottle for a moment, then lifted the cork and sniffed its aggressively pungent contents. “Good God, man, you could strip dilithium with this! What in blazes is it?”
Wobbling on his feet, the henchman belched. Through a thick gurgling croak, he forced out the words “It’s green,” then he doubled over and vomited on Scott’s left boot.
Imagining himself back in Starfleet basic training prior to the start of his academy classes twenty-odd years ago, Scott simply pretended that nothing was amiss. He didn’t flinch. His posture remained straight. Eye contact with his host was unbroken. Ganz nodded at him, apparently satisfied with what he had seen. “Enjoy it in good health, Commander.”
“I will. Thank you…. What do I owe you?”
“Call it a gift,” Ganz said. “I don’t do business with Starfleeters. Too many…complications.”
“Right,” Scott said. “I see. Mighty generous of you, then.”
“You know,” Ganz added, “if I was you right now, I’d be—”
“Leaving,” Scott said enthusiastically. “A capital idea.” Scott lifted his soiled boot free of Reke’s mound of ejected stomach contents and shook away the larger chunks. He gestured his farewell to Ganz with the bottle of green mystery booze, then departed without another word to the Orion boss.
Zett was at Scott’s back by the time he reached the stairs to the lower level. “I trust you can show yourself out?”
“Aye, count on it.”
Despite Scott’s assurance, Zett shadowed him all the way to the airlock and escorted him into the corridor beyond. He offered up his unctuous, jet-black grin. “A pleasure.”
Scott was halfway down the corridor to the station core before he heard Zett head back inside Ganz’s ship. Only as he rounded the corner did Scott permit himself a heavy sigh and an unheard, softly muttered retort of “Wankers.”
Rana Desai’s feet dragged like leaden weights. Exhaustion had left her feeling like a shell of herself. She had expected to be home more than two hours ago, but a flurry of last-minute work had made this evening into just one more of a long series of painfully late nights in Vanguard’s office of the Starfleet Judge
Advocate General.
Turning the corner toward her quarters, she imagined the look on her boyfriend’s face. She had wanted to let him know about the delay that kept her and two of her lawyers trapped after-hours in the JAG office, but she hadn’t been able to steal a private moment to relay the bad news. He’ll understand, she hoped. It’s the nature of the job. He knows that.
Her door swished open as she approached, and she entered to a faint aroma of grilled fish. She stopped at the dining table. A pair of still-burning tapers had consumed themselves to within half an inch of their bases. At her place, an immaculate plate was flanked by gleaming silverware. Her water goblet was filled. An open bottle of Jadot Pouilly-Fuisse stood behind her tulip-shaped wineglass.
Reyes stood and stared out the broad window on the far side of the room. He downed the last dregs from the wineglass in his hand, then spoke without turning around. “I started without you.”
“So I see.” Desai picked up the serving fork and poked the untouched fillet of sea bass, which had long since gone cold, neglected in the middle of the unoccupied table for two. She placed the fork back on the platter, perfectly parallel to the fillet. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, pouring herself half a glass of the vintage white wine. “But it’s all Pennington’s fault.”
Reyes continued to gaze out the window. “Mm-hm.”
She picked up her glass, circled around the table, and joined him at the window. Trying to read his silences was still a challenge for her, but sensing his moods was getting easier. “What’s wrong?”
He looked down into the bottom of his empty glass with a forlorn expression. “Bad news from home.”
Placing one hand on his arm, she gently turned him toward her. “What news?”
“My mother.” Anguish had recast his normally intense, stoic visage into something tragic. “She’s been diagnosed with Meenok’s disease.”
Desai’s voice was a dismayed whisper. “Oh, no. What’s the prognosis?”
Reyes’s voice cracked and faltered like he was being strangled. “Terminal. A couple months, maybe.” He fought to pull in a new breath and exhaled through clenched teeth as he leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the window. “And here I am, at the ass end of the galaxy.”
Meenok’s disease was a degenerative neurological affliction that continued to haunt the descendants of Earth’s first lunar settlers. Its similarity to other, more benign conditions meant that it was almost always misdiagnosed until its final, fatal stages. Victims of Meenok’s almost always remained lucid. Unfortunately, its chief symptom during its final stage was gruesome, debilitating pain. Just about the only mitigating factor was that this suffering, though extreme, was brief. So brief, Desai understood, that there was little chance that Reyes could make the journey back to his family’s home in New Berlin on Luna before the end came.
A lonesome tear escaped from Reyes’s closed eyes. Desai took the empty glass from his hand and set it down on a corner table beside her own. Normally, she found budging him to be like moving a mountain, but tonight Reyes responded to her gentle guidance, like a vessel set adrift. With a gentle nudge, she guided him toward the sofa, eased him down onto it, then settled herself beside him.
“When did you hear the news?”
“About an hour ago. I got the message while I was waiting for you.”
Taking one of his large, weathered hands into her own, she said, “Is there anything I can do?”
He shook his head. “Funny thing about life—it sneaks up on you.” Squeezing her hands, he continued, “We get over the illusion of our own indestructibility, but we forget that our parents are mortal. Then, one day, one of the people who made you is gone…and you realize you’re next in line.”
“She’s not gone yet,” Desai said.
“No, not yet. But soon. I recorded a message…but it’s not the same. It’s not like being there.” Reyes leaned back and craned his head over the back of the sofa. She watched him study the featureless gray ceiling. He sighed. “I’d always imagined the way she’d smile when I finally told her she was a grandmother…. Then I went and married Jeanne and wasted eleven years.”
Desai nodded but said nothing; Reyes rarely spoke of his ex-wife, and she had learned that asking him questions about Jeanne or their marriage or their divorce was strictly verboten. The real reason for her reticence, however, was that this was the third time in as many months that Reyes had made some kind of oblique reference about a desire to be a father. As enamored as she was of him, she found the idea of starting a family to be premature. At times like this, she struggled not to hear her own mother’s voice chiding her: You’re not getting any younger, Rana! A few more years and you won’t be able to have children! What are you waiting for?
She pushed her back to the end of the sofa and pulled Reyes toward her. He leaned back against her torso, and she began kneading the tension from his shoulders. His muscles were rock-hard, coiled with the kind of stress that—according to Rana’s father, a doctor—would send a person to an early grave. Her delicate-looking hands clenched and pulled at his rocklike trapezius until it slowly became pliable. Reyes rasped out a half-grunt, half-sigh that spoke of pain, pleasure, and relief.
Half an hour later, his neck and shoulder muscles once again feeling like human flesh instead of marble, Reyes was asleep in Desai’s arms. She leaned down and kissed his deeply creased forehead. Her stomach growled and gurgled softly from beneath him, but rather than risk waking Reyes she ignored her hunger and decided to try and get some sleep instead.
It had been a long day, for both of them.
Human rituals, by definition, were already half-alien to Spock. Their curious predilection for self-intoxication as a means of stimulating interpersonal communication only enhanced Spock’s sense of having little in common with the majority of his shipmates on the Enterprise, even after being aboard for more than twelve years.
The retirement party for Dr. Piper was to be, Spock had heard chief engineer Scott proclaim, “a ripping good send-off.” That, too, confused Spock. Piper was scheduled to remain with the crew until they returned to Earth roughly ten weeks from now, at which time Starfleet Medical and Starfleet Command would assign the Enterprise a new ship’s surgeon. Celebrating the end of Piper’s service while it was still in progress seemed premature, and Spock had said as much to Captain Kirk earlier in the evening, when the ship’s senior officers had congregated here in Manón’s, a cabaret lounge in Stars Landing.
“Just kick back and enjoy yourself, Mr. Spock,” Kirk had said to him. “It’s a party. He’s earned it…. We all have.”
Spock was uncertain what, precisely, constituted the value of a party, or against what standard one could be said to have “earned” it as a reward. It was “an intangible fringe benefit of socializing with humans,” his former commanding officer, Captain Christopher Pike, had once explained to him. Tonight, however, lacking Mr. Scott’s interest in imbibing alcohol, Dr. Piper’s yen for telling ribald stories, or the captain’s penchant for making impetuous advances toward unfamiliar women, the half-Vulcan officer concluded that “benefit” was not necessarily the word he would have selected for this category of experience. Astrophysicist Sulu and communications officer Uhura, at least, displayed a greater sense of decorum as they sipped at their juice drinks and held themselves at a slight remove from the senior officers’ increasingly unfettered revelry.
Clutching his empty glass, Spock got up from his chair. No one else in the group seemed to notice. After moving even a few meters away, he could tell immediately that the Enterprise group was currently the loudest one in the nightclub. There was a fairly substantial clamor of overlapping voices, but Piper’s and Scott’s guffawing laughs pierced the din. Other tables of Starfleet officers and civilian residents were casting furtive, irritated glances in his shipmates’ direction.
There was a line of people three layers deep at the bar. Spock waited his turn, and used the delay to examine the details of the spacious, s
oftly lit club. High ceilings gave it good acoustics, but the dim illumination concealed the room’s height, creating a more intimate impression. Squat, movable chairs, ottomans, and tables, combined with oversized floor cushions, permitted the patrons to group themselves comfortably in both small and large numbers. Most of the clientele appeared to be well-to-do civilians or commissioned Starfleet officers. A group of Bombay personnel whom Mr. Scott had asked for directions had indicated that Manón’s, despite being a privately owned establishment, served as the de facto officers’ club on Vanguard. There was a real officers’ club on level sixteen, one of them had said, “but no one ever goes there.”
He placed his glass gently on the polished stone bartop, just past an imaginary midpoint dividing line. The bartender snatched up the glass as he darted over from one side. Eyeing Spock, he deposited the glass—with a dexterity that bordered on sleight-of-hand—into a sanitizer. “Another ice water, friend?”
“Yes, please.”
A pleasant, soft purr of a voice turned Spock’s head. “Ice water?” An elegantly dressed woman stood beside him with her back to the bar. “I do love a big spender,” she added. To the best of his recollection, he had never seen her species before. She was pale and, by most humanoid species’ standards, quite aesthetically pleasing. The irises of her large, almond-shaped eyes were vaguely feline and shimmered emerald-green. Her nose was tiny almost to the point of being imperceptible. She wore her multihued hair in an ornately coiffed swirl, like a breaking wave. Her off-the-shoulder dress could at first be mistaken for black, but a closer inspection revealed that it was an intensely saturated purple, like that of the ripest plums. In a very literal sense, she radiated warmth.
