Vanguard - 1 - Harbinger by Star Trek

Author:Star Trek [Star Trek]
Language: deu
Format: epub
Tags: \Star Trek
Published: 2011-01-02T07:58:42.418000+00:00

“Cleavage, actually. Emasculation and titillation are oddly connected in the male Klingon psyche.”

Where a human might have sighed, Jetanien groaned. “Please don’t have an affair with him.”

“Wow,” she said. “You really don’t understand Klingon politics, do you?”

Sandesjo sat in the commissary and picked at her breakfast of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, and toast with jam. Everything about it revulsed her. Its aroma, its color, the fact that cooking had leached all the flavor from it—no one, she was convinced, could ruin a meal like humans. Even their coffee was weak. For the sake of keeping up appearances, however, she made the effort to eat and pretend to enjoy herself. Later, before her work-day overwhelmed her, she would slip away to the lavatory and sneak a couple of tuQloS pills to help her body take some sustenance from the human food she was forced to consume.

Most of the seats at her table were empty. The mess halls and commissaries usually were packed in the hours immediately preceding and following the shift changes, and again during the staggered mid-shift lunch breaks. This morning, however, the main commissary on level seventeen was almost deserted. The last time Sandesjo had seen this many available seats during a prime dining hour was during the station’s first week of operation, when the engineering staff—profoundly irked that their long haul up from the bowels of the station’s power-generation core always left them scrounging for seats and settling for the least-popular menu items—had sent up a team early, to fake a radiation leak and clear out the upper-decks personnel, so the engineers could enjoy their choice of entrées in peace and comfort.

The signal device on her belt beeped. She glanced down. It was from Turag. The code he’d sent her was an instruction to check in as soon as circumstances allowed. “Yes, sir,” she muttered, figuring that anyone who overheard would assume she had just been summoned by Jetanien. She downed the rest of her coffee in one scalding gulp, then stood and walked her plate to the return counter, where she abandoned it still half-full.

Turning toward the door, she collided with Lieutenant Ming Xiong, the A&A officer who seemed to be invited to an inordinate number of high-level meetings with Jetanien and Reyes.

Xiong glanced at the plate Sandesjo had turned in. “Not hungry this morning?”

“I’m on a diet,” Sandesjo said.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “The ‘drop everything for Ambassador Jetanien’ diet?”

She nodded once. “Ah…you’ve heard of it.”

“Who hasn’t?” He smiled shyly at her and shifted his weight awkwardly. Breaking eye contact, he glanced away toward the chow line. Looking back, he said, “Guess I better get on line before Farber eats all the eggs.”

“Probably a good idea.” She stepped around him. “Enjoy your breakfast, Lieutenant.”

“You too,” he said, then hastened to correct himself. “I mean, I hope you did, you know, have a nice breakfast.”

Tossing her straight, cinnamon-hued hair with a turn of her head, she cast a flirtatious look back over her shoulder at him.

He finished his farewell with a simple, “Have a nice day.

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