Daedalus's Children by Dave Stern

Author:Dave Stern
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science-Fiction:Star Trek
ISBN: 9780743489041
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Limited
Published: 2004-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Travis, though, was stuck.

He had six more hours to go on his shift, and there was no way he could do anything now until that time was up. And what if he was wrong, anyway? What if he’d just taken considerable risks with his own safety and Cooney’s for nothing?

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He’d been so absorbed in thought he hadn’t heard their approach.

He looked up and saw Westerberg.

The man smiled.

“You want to break early?” he asked. “I had too much coffee.”

Their eyes locked. Travis felt like he could read the man’s mind.

Cooney had sent him.

“Yeah. Sure,” Travis said, standing. “Getting hungry anyway.”

Westerberg settled into the helm chair. “See you in a few.”

Travis turned to go.

Peranda was standing in front of him.

“Mayweather, is there a problem?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” Travis said. He forced himself to smile. “Westerberg’s doing me a favor.”

“A shift change. It’s early for that, I believe, isn’t it?”

“Like I said—he’s doing me a favor,” Travis said.

“Out of the kindness of his heart?”

“Out of my inability to sleep,” Westerberg said. “Not that big a favor. You’ll cover the next one for me Travis—right?”

“We’ll talk about it,” Travis said.

Still, Peranda didn’t move. He eyed the two of them—Travis and Westerberg—for a moment longer. Finally, the colonel nodded. “All right. Go.”

Travis moved to the turbolift.

Footsteps fell into place beside him. One of the Denari soldiers.

The two stepped inside the turbolift together. Travis’s last sight of the bridge was Peranda, spun all the way around in Captain Archer’s chair to watch him leave.

He nodded to the soldier next to Travis, who nodded back in return.

Not a good sign, Travis thought. The colonel suspects something.

They rode the lift down to E-deck in silence. The soldier followed him out, heading toward the mess. Another bad omen. They had soldiers with them all the time—heck, the ship was crawling with them—but this one was following him, specifically. To see what he did.

Which meant he couldn’t go straight to Cooney. Peranda would know something was up then. But he didn’t have time to waste. Cooney had told Peranda he’d be back in half an hour, and a big chunk of that time was gone already. And even assuming Travis was right about who was out there, he still didn’t know how to go about contacting them, much less trying to get them back aboard Enterprise. That would require a miracle of sorts. Or at the very least, a remarkably good sleight-of-hand. A magic trick.

The old saw—Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic—popped into his head.

All at once, Travis had an idea. The beginnings of one, at least.

He refined it as he entered the mess. The soldier stopped at the door, joining the other guards there.

Cooney was seated by himself, at a table near the observation window. Ryan and Yee were the only other ones in the room, seated next to the kitchen entrance.

Travis walked past them and joined Daedalus’s engineer.

“You know,” Cooney said as Travis pulled out a chair, “that guard is watching you.

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