“You’ll be the second to know,” Quinn said, powering up the navigation computer. Bridy turned and left the cockpit while Quinn continued prepping the Dulcineafor its next journey.
Looking up, he caught his worried reflection in the cockpit’s canopy. How do I get myself into these messes? Why can’t I master the fine art of saying “no” to beautiful women?He reclined his chair and palmed a sheen of sweat off his forehead and over his gray crewcut. Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.
4
Kajek found the rhythm of his own breathing hypnotic in the deathly silence that permeated his ship, a compact Andorian outrider he had never bothered to name. Outside his capsule-shaped cockpit’s wraparound canopy yawned the blackness of eternity, an endless void peppered with stars to mask its hideous emptiness.
The lean, wiry Nausicaan lounged in the broad, enveloping pilot’s seat. Most of his ship’s primary systems were in a low-power standby mode. Even the life-support system had been set to minimal levels, and the spacecraft’s artificial gravity had been deactivated. If not for the safety restraints crisscrossing his torso, Kajek would have long since floated out of his seat.
Zero gravity didn’t bother Kajek, but the bitter cold did. Several hours in the dark had dropped temperatures inside his ship to near-freezing. His exhalations spawned great gray plumes that dissipated ever more gradually. In the past hour, vapor condensed from his breath had started to fog part of the forward canopy. More troubling to him was the slow loss of sensation in his fingers and toes. He disliked wearing gloves in the cockpit because any that were thick enough to keep his hands warm interfered with his ability to operate the ship’s secondary control panels, which controlled such systems as sensors and access to the memory banks.
Only the passive optical sensors remained fully on line. Kajek had set them to monitor the Starfleet vessel Endeavour,which was twenty light-minutes away orbiting Zeta Aurigae IV, the same world to which Kajek had tracked Zett Nilric’s stolen argosy, Dulcinea. A magnetic disturbance above the southern pole of Zeta Aurigae III concealed Kajek and his ship from the Endeavour’s sensors, enabling him to spy on it at relatively close range while hiding in plain sight. His only concern was that if the Dulcinealaunched while the Endeavourwas on the far side of the fourth planet, he might not notice its departure until it was too late to track its escape vector.
It had been several hours since the Nalori ship had landed inside one of Endeavour’s shuttlebays. Kajek grew concerned that perhaps he had missed the Dulcinea’s exit—and then the bulkheads parted at the aft end of the Starfleet vessel’s lower hull. He spread his outer fangs in a broad grin. There you are. He permitted himself a low chortle, which clouded the air with a spectre of his breath.
As the Nalori vessel exited the shuttlebay and maneuvered to break orbit, Kajek clicked his outer fangs against one another. It was a nervous habit, one he had struggled to overcome but so far had failed to suppress, an unwelcome tic caused by his tendency to engage in obsessive-compulsive behavior. In many ways he had channeled that psychological trait into useful habits. His attention to detail and ability to plan ahead had made him a very effective bounty hunter. He always knew his current equipment inventory and the status of his ship’s fuel and provisions. His personal logs and files on bounty targets were alphabetized, meta-tagged, and thoroughly cross-referenced by more than a hundred criteria.
I am not crazy, just organized.
He leaned forward to observe the sensor data. Where are you going? Show me your destination. His quarry maneuvered clear of the Endeavourand broke from orbit. Not heading back to Vanguard, apparently. The small vessel came about on a bearing that would take it toward the Klingon Empire. A bold move. Seconds later, the Dulcineajumped to warp speed and moved beyond the range of Kajek’s passive sensors. Kajek kept his attention on the Endeavour.
Patience,he reminded himself. Don’t let your lust for the hunt make you careless. He watched and waited as the Endeavour’s standard orbital pattern took it beyond the curve of Zeta Aurigae IV. As soon as the Starfleet ship vanished from his sensor readout, Kajek pulled off his gloves, switched all his ship’s systems to full power, and engaged his active sensors to confirm the Dulcinea’s heading.
Still on course,he noted. He pulled his gloves back on and briskly rubbed his hands together. He called up a star chart and looked ahead along the Dulcinea’s trajectory, curious as to what populated systems lay along that heading. They seem to be treading a fine path between Gorn space and Klingon territory. Are they en route to one of the border worlds, perhaps?He ruled out Chirlow—it was a mostly automated mining operation on a volcanic greenhouse planet inhospitable to organic life. Likewise, he doubted they would be bound for Mazur Prime, a desolate ball of sand that the Klingons used as a toxic-waste dumping ground.
Ruling out those worlds brought him to Seudath: a major port under Gorn control, it received a fair number of alien visitors and had a sizable population of aliens, as well. Checking its position against a more precise analysis of the Dulcinea’s heading convinced Kajek that Seudath was the humans’ destination. He engaged his ship’s impulse engine, maneuvered clear of Zeta Aurigae III’s magnetic field, and set his navigation computer to begin calculating a warp-speed course that would enable him to reach Seudath ahead of the ever-elusive Mister Quinn.
The course coordinates appeared on his helm.
Engaging the warp drive, Kajek watched the stars melt into bright streaks blurring past his ship, and he felt a surge of excitement. There was nothing he loved so much as the hunt, and never so much as when the prey could fight back.
The chase begins.
Quinn lay in bed, half asleep, listening to the steady thrumming of the Dulcinea’s warp engines. Despite his grave misgivings about his and Bridy’s new orders from Starfleet Intelligence, the ship was cruising on autopilot toward Seudath.
It’s not like I could’ve talked her out of it,he mused. Lord knows I would if I could. He turned onto his left side, trying his best not to wake Bridy, who lay beside him, wrapped around a body cushion like a shipwreck survivor clinging to flotsam. Her wavy dark brown hair spilled across the sage-colored pillows. As Quinn tugged on the sheets to try and cover his chest, Bridy stirred, blinked once, and squinted at him. He whispered, “Sorry. Go back to sleep, darlin’.”
“In a minute.” She sounded groggy. “Trouble sleeping?”
“A bit. At least I can enjoy the view.” That made her smile. It had been a few months since they had escaped a bloodbath on Golmira with their lives. Since then they had shared a bed—a fact that Bridy had stressed needed to be concealed from her superiors at SI. Quinn understood her need for discretion, but he hated having to hide the true nature of their relationship even from their friends. He adored Bridy and still found it hard to believe she was his lover. Not only was she smart and beautiful, she was more than twenty years his junior.
He reached out and stroked a stray lock of her hair. It felt like silk beneath his fingertips. Can I really be this lucky? Does any man deserve a woman as perfect as her?When he was with Bridy, he could almost forget his own checkered romantic history. The death of his first wife, Denise, had stunned him, driven him to seek relief at the bottom of a bottle and look for escape in the ranks of a mercenary company. Since then he had been married three more times, each one a triumph of hope over experience. But I was a drunk then,he reminded himself. A broken man. This is different. Gazing at Bridy, he felt peaceful. She’s different.