27
Three days sober, Cervantes Quinn had no idea what to do next. His last few months had been little more than a hazy wash of intoxicated mishaps, punctuated frequently by afternoons impaired with hangovers brutal enough to kill a bull moose, and occasionally by stints of a day or more in the brig to “dry out,” as the station’s chief of security had quaintly put it. Ever since the mind-meld with T’Prynn, he had felt strangely at ease. His body still craved the anesthetic pleasure of alcohol, but now his mind had the strength to refuse its temptation.
Staring at himself in his bathroom mirror that morning, he had marveled at how much damage he had done to his body in so short a time. After spending nearly two years drilling his middle-aged form back into shape, he had reduced himself to a pear-shaped blob of humanity in a tenth of the time. The only thing masking the return of his jowls and double chin was a heavy growth of salt-and-pepper beard whiskers.
After lingering under the soothing warmth of his first real shower in close to a week, Quinn had spent the morning roaming the station’s seemingly endless circular corridors, riding its many dozens of turbolifts from the uppermost public levels of the station to its lowest. By midday he had taken to wandering the narrow lanes of Stars Landing, peeking through the windows of shops where he couldn’t really afford to buy anything, and averting his eyes from all the places in which he had inebriated and humiliated himself in recent weeks.
Now it was late afternoon, and his stomach growled, his hunger an echo of a more profound emptiness that seemed to define his existence. He knew he wouldn’t starve aboard the station, despite being destitute. If the Federation was good for nothing else, one could always turn to it for a free lunch, topped with a heaping scoop of pity and smothered in self-righteousness. They wouldn’t foot the bill for a decent meal at Cafй Romano, but they’d gladly serve him a tray of reconstituted organic slop in their public cafeteria. I’d rather starve, he told himself, but he knew that was just his pride talking. When he got hungry enough, he would take their charity and wolf down whatever gruel they gave him. And he might even say “thank you,” if he could bear to look anyone in the eye.
Pushing back against the gnawing, acidic sensation in his gut, he crossed Fontana Meadow and admired the rich color of the lawn. It reminded him of Kentucky bluegrass, but it seemed much more resilient in the face of heavy foot traffic and sports activities, which made him wonder if it might be Rigelian mountain grass. The one thing he knew for certain about it was that it made for a very comfortable place to sleep—unless one happened to be there at 0315 when its automatic sprinkler system activated.
His meandering brought him to a halt in front of the lone Denevan dogwood planted at the edge of the meadow, beside a paved walkway that ringed the terrestrial enclosure. In front of the tree was a large plaque of brilliantly polished metal, not yet old enough to have acquired the slightest patina of tarnish, affixed to a large, broad rock. The plaque was inscribed:
IN PROUD MEMORY
USS BOMBAY NCC-1926
“OUR DEATHS ARE NOT OURS; THEY ARE YOURS;
THEY WILL MEAN WHAT YOU MAKE THEM.”
Three years I avoided this spot, Quinn moped, and he knew why. Thinking of the Bombay always reminded him of his misadventure on Ravanar IV, a badly planned burglary gone wrong. At the time he had thought the most serious fallout of his botched theft would come in the form of retribution from the Orion crime lord Ganz. Instead, he’d learned that by damaging a sensor scrambler he’d been hired to steal, he had unwittingly exposed a secret Starfleet operation—and that exposure had incited an attack by the Tholians that resulted in the eradication of all life on Ravanar IV, as well as the destruction of the Bombay and five Tholian warships.
I made one mistake and sent all those people to their doom. His thoughts fixated on that bitter reflection. No wonder Karma has it in for me. Nothin’ I do could ever make that right.
Amid the soft patter of distant footsteps and happy voices, he heard one set of footfalls close at his back—and then they stopped. Someone was standing behind him. He turned, half expecting a confrontation. Instead, he was met by the placid presence of T’Prynn.
“Hello again, Mister Quinn.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned back toward the tree. “Hey.”
The Vulcan woman stepped forward to stand beside him and regard the dogwood. “Time is of the essence, so forgive me for being brief. It seems my superiors at Starfleet Intelligence have decided that you’ve outlived your usefulness.”
Quinn couldn’t help but laugh. “Hell, I could’ve told them that five years ago.”
“I don’t think you understand their sentiments,” T’Prynn said. “I’ve been given explicit orders to covertly terminate your life at my earliest opportunity.”
Disarmed by her candor, he wrinkled his brow as his lips curled into a crooked half-smile, half-grimace. “You don’t say.” He let out a snort of cynical amusement and wondered if maybe this wasn’t a blessing in disguise. “Can I at least trust you to make it quick and painless?”
“I have no intention of obeying this order,” she said. She discreetly slipped a modestly sized vinyl-wrapped packet into his right hand. “I have prepared a new identity for you. It is complete with a long history of good credit, solid employment, shifting residences on several different worlds, and an education similar to the one you earned in your youth.”
He sneaked a look at the black-wrapped package in his hand. “And what am I supposed to do with this? Apply for a loan? I think a few folks around here might still recognize me.”
T’Prynn seemed mildly irked by his reaction. “Do not be obtuse, Mister Quinn. I have arranged for you to be smuggled aboard a colony ship leaving in an hour from Docking Bay Twenty-nine. It will carry you beyond the periphery of explored space, to the far frontier.” She looked back at the tree. “Inside your travel packet is a credit chip encoded with a small fortune. Budgeted wisely, it should be more than enough to finance your new life in exile.”
It sounded as if she had thought of almost everything. He eyed her skeptically. “What about my biometric profile? Won’t it trip me up if someone scans my DNA or my retina?”
“Normally, yes,” T’Prynn said. “However, it appears that when I notified my superiors this morning of your assassination, I accidentally erased your biometric file from all Federation databases, both military and civilian, public and private.” She shot him a coy glance. “Officially, you do not exist, and you never have.”
Quinn was flabbergasted. He stared at the packet and stammered.
“I . . . I don’t know what to say.”
T’Prynn offered him her hand. “Say farewell . . . Mister Panza.”
He smiled and shook her hand. “Thank you.”
Then he stepped away, walking quickly toward Stars Landing.
T’Prynn sounded confused as she called after him. “You have less than an hour to reach your ship. I suggest you go directly there.”
He paused and looked back. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it.” He resumed his hurried pace toward the station’s civilian center. “There’s just one thing I have to do first.”
Tim Pennington smiled awkwardly at the two human civilians, a man and his wife, who loomed over him while he tried to chew his mouthful of food and autograph the top page of a stack of hard-copy printouts of his collected columns and features that they’d thrust in front of him. He scribbled his initials and swooshed a crude circle around them as a flourish, then swallowed his food as he handed the pages back to the husband. “There you go.”