In Alien Hands by William Shatner

Author:William Shatner [Shatner, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-07-06T09:16:50+00:00

TERRA: OFFICE OF THE CONFED CHAIRMAN

Half Moon felt sweat run stinging into her eyes as she stared across the desk at Tabitha Endicott. "I brought you here..." She began.

Then she shook her head. For some reason her hair felt heavy as old thread, dangling lifelessly from the top of her skull. It was an odd feeling, a self-aware sensitivity, as if her body had taken on the persistent presence of a bad tooth. A vast surge of greasy disgust rankled her, at what the exigencies of high office had done to her. At what she'd let be done. Once she'd been a woman, but now she was...

What?

"To hell with that," she went on. "I'm going to show you something.

Tell me what you make of it."

The room abruptly darkened, the better to focus on the holoscreen that suddenly appeared. The picture flickered slightly and had the faintest of grainy overtones, as if it had not been intended for broadcast.

The two women watched the few moments it took for the tape to run.

"That's Jim," Tabitha said flatly. "What - "

"Wait," Serena replied. She ran the tape again.

"Where is he? He looks older. And so tired... Serena, what is this?

Where did you get that tape?"

The chairman brought the lights back up. Tabitha looked tired too, she thought. Worried and worn down. She'd let her hair grow longer and didn't look as if she was taking good care of it. It lay flat against her free skull, lank and somehow colorless.

"I'm told it was shot on Alba, the home planet itself. Jim is Tabitha twined her fingers together into a nervous is on Alba? But how - you told me Alba is blockaded. Going in or out."

Serena closed her eyes. She had no intention of telling how she'd gotten the tape. How she had been viewing private hooked by interface into the state systems. How suddenly had gone dark and a voice out of nowhere said, "I am Outs/tier." : What had followed had been, she had always believed, actually impossible.

Her best systems experts, later, had been to discover how her private interface, the most highly and guarded in the entire Confederation could have. Breached. They squinched their eyes and sighed and wrung hands and said it must have been some sort of neural convultion on her part. And they'd stared at her out of the their eyes as if she were somehow crumbling, as if her mind no longer be trusted.

But she had the tape. She didn't know what it meant, what it showed: Jim Endicott standing with a group of aliens before a landscape of impossible crystal towers.

"I'm told this scene took place three days ago. That the is the Great Hall of the Pra'Loch. The conclusion is obvious Mun Alter has Jim. But he hasn't informed me of that. Can't. Maybe he can't punch a message through the But somehow I doubt it."

"It was a mistake to let him go," Tabitha said mistake. That Korkal talked me into it. Everything fast... I blame myself.

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