“Are you sure there’s not more to it?” Boon asked. “How do we find the right pair of twins in a city this size? Must be crawling with twins.”
Felicia flashed her smile again, the one that Will was finding more intriguing all the time. “Maybe it’s not human twins,” she suggested. “There are maps every few blocks. If the twins are a natural feature, or one of the main city attractions, they’ll be on there.”
“Worth a look, anyway,” Dennis agreed. He forced himself wearily to his feet. “You guys have been waiting around here for long enough as it is. Let’s find us one of those maps and see if we can locate some twins.”
A kiosk three blocks down Jones Street had city maps and transport schedules for the whole region. When Dennis entered “twins” on the keypad, nothing came up. But when Estresor Fil called up a city overview, the twins were suddenly apparent to all. Twin Peaks were two round-topped, still undeveloped hills—two of the tallest points in the city, it turned out, even higher than Nob Hill. Will requested a history of them, in case it would help identify where at the feet of the twins they might expect to find the checkpoint, and learned that one of the hills—there were actually more than two, all in the same vicinity, though the two called Twin Peaks were the tallest—had once held a broadcasting tower from which signals could be sent through the air to homes all over the San Francisco Bay Area, and that on clear days the view from the Peaks was considered one of the best in the region. None of which helped a bit when it came to locating their checkpoint.
They had all done enough walking, except for Estresor Fil, who had been standing more or less in one place for hours now. But majority ruled and they hopped an underground transport to the Twin Peaks area. They would have, Will suspected, plenty of walking ahead of them yet, especially if they had to circumnavigate the base of the hills in order to find the spot they needed.
He, for one, was more than happy to sit down for a while.
As the map had indicated, the burnished brown hillsides of Twin Peaks were undeveloped, left open for hikers and view seekers to enjoy, Estresor Fil’s opinion on the latter notwithstanding. But the city came right up to its edge, with houses and commercial buildings hemming it in on all sides. In many spots, the members of Zeta Squadron couldn’t even see where the hillside began because it was behind private homes, with no access to the public. They had to try to peer over fences and between narrowly spaced houses to see if they could locate anything that might be their checkpoint.
After making a complete circuit, they still had no idea what they were looking for. “Maybe we interpreted the clue wrong,” Dennis said glumly. He had stopped walking and just stood on the sidewalk, holding his envelope between two fingers like it had become something unpleasant. “Maybe these are the wrong twins.”
“Yeah, and maybe this is a stupid project,” Boon added. “I mean, if we really were an away team in hostile territory, we wouldn’t have checkpoints to look for, would we?”
“Probably not,” Will agreed. “But we would have a mission of some kind. We’d be gathering information about the place, or we’d be trying to locate a contact, or something. We wouldn’t just land someplace for no reason at all.”
“Will’s right,” Felicia said. “So is Dennis—it’s possible that we picked the wrong twins. But the assignment is as close to realistic as it can be, without risking whole classes of cadets by sending them to actual hostile cities.”
“I guess,” Boon said reluctantly.
“Perhaps we’ve been too literal about the clue,” Estresor Fil suggested. “Maybe it means something other than the foot of the hills. Is there a cobbler or something like that nearby?”
Will considered this for a moment. She was right—it was unlikely that Admiral Paris wouldn’t have worked in a twist or two. So they had to look for the less likely possibilities, even the opposite of what appeared to be the meaning. “Maybe we should be looking up,” he announced.
“Up?” Boon repeated. “You’re not making any sense, Riker.”
“Not at first glance,” Will agreed. “But ‘feet’ has multiple meanings, and one of them is as a unit of measurement. Once used, among other things, to indicate altitude.”
“Good point, Will,” Felicia said, touching his upper arm for emphasis. “I agree. We should go up.”
Boon shrugged. “I guess we can’t do any worse than we are down here. Except for the climbing part, I mean.”
They split into two teams, Will and Felicia taking one hill, and Dennis, Boon and Estresor Fil on the other. As they climbed, the late afternoon sun bore down on them. Up here there was only stunted shrubbery, and nothing to shade them from its rays. Will commented on it, and Felicia just laughed at him. “This is nothing compared to summers at home,” she said. “We have heat, humidity, bugs—this is like paradise, here.”
“Climate-controlled paradise,” Will reminded her. “Nothing like this in Alaska, I can tell you.”
“We have cold, too, in the mountains,” Felicia said. “But maybe not like in Alaska.”
“Maybe not,” Will agreed. He picked his way up a faint trail, sidestepping the low brush as he rose. “Valdez is in the southern part of the state, well below the Arctic Circle, and it’s pretty nice this time of year. Buggy, too. Come winter, though, it’s a different story. The sun comes up around ten in the morning and has set by five in the afternoon. In between, it never warms up. There’s snow everywhere—you don’t see the ground until the spring thaw, and then everything that was snow is mud.”
“It doesn’t sound like you miss it much,” she said.
“I love it,” Will told her. “But I couldn’t wait to get away from it. Now that I’m here, I can’t wait to get off the planet.”
She shielded her eyes against the sun and looked across the way at the group climbing the other hill. “We’re ahead,” she said happily. “Maybe this summer—what are you doing for the summer?”
Will nodded eagerly. “I’ve already got my assignment,” he said. “I’m going to Saturn. I’m so anxious to get going I could explode.”
“That’s great, Will,” Felicia enthused. “You didn’t get off-planet last summer, did you?” she asked him.
“Just for a couple of weeks, to New Berlin. But I spent most of the summer in Paris. I’m due for some time off-world, that’s for sure.”
“You’ll love it out there,” she said. “Two more years after this and you’ll be assigned to a starship, and do great things.”
“Unless,” he pointed out, “we can’t find our first checkpoint and we fail miserably at this assignment. In which case maybe they’ll just give us all the boot, and I can go back to Alaska and clean fish.” They were almost to the top now, and while the views were spectacular, they hadn’t seen anything promising. Their boots were getting caked with brown dust, but that was all they’d accomplished.
Suddenly Felicia grabbed his arm, squeezing his biceps tightly and holding on perhaps a little longer than she had to. He found that he didn’t mind. “Look, Will!” she shouted. He followed her pointing hand and saw what she meant. On a flat area near the summit was a dark cylinder, obviously not a natural feature but something left there. Or transported there, Will thought, which was more likely, especially considering the lack of footprints around it.
He and Felicia rushed to the cylinder and found that it had a Starfleet insignia embossed onto it. On one side was a keypad, but otherwise its surface was blank. “What do you think we do with it?” he asked.
“Try your ID code,” Felicia suggested.
Every cadet was assigned an identity code to be used throughout their years at the Academy. Will nodded and entered his code onto the keypad. This was met by a whirring noise, and a previously invisible slot appeared on the cylinder. From the slot, a new strip of paper emerged.
“What does it say?” Felicia asked with excitement.
“ ‘Congratulations, Zeta Squadron,’ ” Will read. “ ‘You’ve achieved checkpoint number one. Your next ch
allenge will be to span the globe to find an artist, who will direct you from there.’ ”
“An artist?” Felicia frowned. “What does that mean?”
Will shrugged, palms up. “Beats me,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at the other part of their team, still climbing the second peak unaware of the discovery. “But I guess we can tell the others to come down now. Unless you want to let Boon hike around and grumble a while longer.”
Chapter 9
The captain’s office was dimly lit and suffused with a burning rubber smell that reminded Kyle of old skunk. He found himself wanting to hold his breath, but knew that was impractical. Anyway, he’d have to get used to the odor since he was going to be on the ship for a while. The captain was a Kreel’n, he’d been told. Without that small warning he wouldn’t have known what to expect, and having never met a Kreel’n—rumors, of course, but that was all—he was still barely prepared for the reality of it.
“Captain?” he asked hesitantly when he entered. He had been told to enter but he couldn’t see her anywhere when he went in. Unlike the neat and tidy equivalents he had seen on Starfleet vessels, this room was barely contained chaos; seemingly a storeroom for old electronic parts, a workspace, a library, and an office all in one, with no apparent division between one function and another.
“Come in, Mr. Barrow,” a voice like a rusted hinge squeaked at him. “I am here, at my desk.”
Kyle tried to follow the voice through the gloom and clutter. He had chosen the pseudonym Barrow, on a whim, because it was both an Alaskan city he had visited on a few occasions and the name of one of the most infamous fugitives in American history, Clyde Barrow, better known in association with his partner Bonnie Parker. If you’re going to be on the lam, he’d thought, you might as well make the best of it. So he had become Kyle Barrow, man of mystery.
Finally, he saw a flat surface—mostly buried under stacks of objects whose purposes he could only make the wildest guess at—and behind the stacks, a pair of black, lifeless eyes in an oddly shaped head. He stepped forward and more of the captain came into view. Her head most closely resembled, in Kyle’s experience, a pickle or a cucumber, but larger, with a greater diameter. Her skin was a dark green, and her eyes, half a dozen of them, encircled most of her head at about three-quarters of its height. Above them were nodes and ridges running lengthwise; below the eyes some perforations that might have been aural, olfactory, or some other type of organs, and below those a definite mouth, unlipped and toothless but with a tongue capable of speaking English, though with an unpleasant rasp.
“Welcome to the Morning Star, Mr. Barrow,” she said, rising from her seat and extending a hand toward Kyle. “I’m Captain S’K’lee.”
Kyle stepped forward and took the proffered hand, shaking and then releasing it. It had, as far as he could tell, ten fingers, maybe a dozen, all narrow and wormlike, with no apparent joints. Like her head, it was a dark green, or seemed to be in the dim light. Her uniform was a simple pale green tunic, belted at what must have been her waist, though there was only a third of her entire height below it. He couldn’t see her legs, or whatever was beneath the belt, and she quickly lowered herself back down behind the desk.
“Thank you for the welcome, and for the berth,” Kyle said. “I appreciate your fitting me in at short notice.”
“Better to have a passenger than not have a passenger, right?” S’K’lee asked. “Especially a paying one.”
Kyle was not used to such blatant discussion of finances, but he understood that, primitive as it was, some races still functioned on a monetary basis. He had already arranged the transfer of the agreed-upon number of credits, through an intermediary suggested by the agent back at the freight company to assure anonymity. “I trust the payment was satisfactory?” he asked.
“Yes, quite. If it hadn’t been, you would not now be aboard my ship,” she said. “You do understand that this may be quite a long trip with a number of stops?”
“I do.”
“May I ask your ultimate destination?”
“You can ask,” Kyle said. “But I can’t answer. And I wouldn’t even if I had one in mind.”
“Understood,” S’K’lee said quickly. “Then I suppose it would be pointless to ask what the purpose of your journey is, or if, by taking you, I am opening myself up to any possible legal actions?”
“You’d be correct,” Kyle told her, “in that it would be pointless to ask. Is that a problem?”
“Not at all, not at all.” S’K’lee shook her head rapidly, which had the effect of making her many black eyes seem to blur into a single oval shape. “I simply like to know where things stand.”
“Of course,” Kyle said. He had expected discretion, and was relieved to have his expectation confirmed.
“Have you seen your quarters?”
“Not yet,” Kyle replied. “But I’m sure they’ll be fine.” After the shuttle had docked at the orbital platform, Kyle had arranged for some changes of clothes and personal grooming items, then had come straight to the Morning Star. He still held in his left hand the bundle he had acquired.
“You’ll be escorted there directly,” S’K’lee assured him. “Cargo areas, engineering, environmental, and tactical operations areas are off limits to passengers. The bridge is accessible to you only by special request. Otherwise, you are free to move about the ship at will.”
“Thank you.”
“If you’d like to disembark at any stop, simply tell a member of the crew and arrangements will be made.”
“Sounds good,” Kyle said. “I look forward to the trip.”
“It won’t be comfortable, but it’ll be long,” S’K’lee told him with a grating, huffing noise that he guessed was her version of laughter. When she finished, she asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to know, about the ship? About me?”
There was, in fact, but he was hesitant to bring it up. She had already evidenced her sensitivity to his privacy; he didn’t want to disregard hers.
“There is one thing,” she said, “that most of your kind seems to want to know about Kreel’n ships’ captains. If you’re curious, feel free to ask. I assure you it isn’t a problem for me to talk about.”
“I’m sure we will,” he answered. “At a later date.”
She made a grimace that he could only assume was a smile. “Very well, very well. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Barrow. I trust you’ll have as pleasant a voyage as is possible, under the circumstances. I need to prepare myself now—I like to pilot out of the dock myself. I’ll arrange for someone to escort you to your quarters.”
“Thank you, Captain S’K’lee,” Kyle said. Behind him, the door shushed open and he knew he was dismissed. He stepped through it and there was already a crewman coming toward him. This was also a Kreel’n, a male he guessed, though he wasn’t at all sure, with a deeper chest and broader shoulders and a head that was more squash-shaped than cucumber. He saw now that the Kreel’n did indeed have very short legs for their body size—this one was as tall as he was, but its legs were no longer than his were from the knee down.
“Right this way, Mr. Barrow,” it said, sweeping its wriggling mass of fingers in the direction from which it had just waddled.
Unlike the captain—and this was what he so desperately wanted to ask her about, though he had sensed, and apparently correctly, that in spite of her invitation it was really something that ought to wait until he knew her better—this Kreel’n’s eyes had the glimmer of life and intelligence in them. The stories he had heard about Kreel’n captains, which he had been unwilling to credit until just now, seemed to be true, though he couldn’t imagine why it would be a good idea.
They were, so the rumors went, surgically blinded before assuming their commands. Six eyes, none of which worked.
Maybe there was some sense to it, but for the life of him Kyle couldn’t fathom what it was.
* * *
His cabin was as promised—not particularly comfo
rtable, but adequate for his very basic needs. Since the Morning Star was of Kreel’n design, it was probably handy that in spite of their physiological differences humans and Kreel’n were about the same size. The room had a bed, toilet facilities that would meet his requirements, and a replicator. At the end of the bed was a trunk in which he could store his few belongings. The trunk’s lid was flat and could, he supposed, be used as a seat as well.
As in the captain’s office, the lighting was dim when he entered, but after examining the controls for a few moments he was able to override the default setting and increase the brightness a bit. The light glowed from walls that were otherwise unadorned, instead of being concentrated in specific fixtures.
All in all, there wasn’t much to entertain him on a long trip, he figured. But he hadn’t even begun to see the rest of the ship. As much as he intended to keep to himself, in order to preserve his privacy, he guessed he’d be spending some amount of time in the public areas. Maybe they had a gym or a holodeck, or both. A library would be good as well. Kyle wanted a lot of time to think, to reflect. But he also wanted to stay sharp, in body and mind, for the conflict that was sure to come.
He stowed his small bundle and then turned to the replicator for a cup of coffee. It would not, he knew, be as good as the real thing he brewed back home. That was a pleasure he’d have to forgo for a while, in the interest of survival. When he withdrew his cup from the replicator, it was the right color, and the aroma was good. Steam wafted from the surface. He brought it to his lips and sampled it.
Replicator coffee, he thought, disappointed in spite of himself. The same the universe over. As he drank, a Klaxon blared throughout the ship, signaling its imminent departure. Kyle sat down on top of the trunk, bracing himself for any sudden jolts, especially considering the pilot’s disability. But the launch was as smooth as any he’d experienced. He sat on the trunk at the end of his new bed and sipped his coffee, realizing he hadn’t had any solid food in hours. Once they were well under way, he’d do something about that. For now, though, he was content to drink his Java knowing that his most immediate troubles were slipping farther and farther away with every passing moment.
STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2355-2357 - Deny Thy Father Page 8
