Chapter TWO, part two

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Originally uploaded by Randuwa.

Elsewhere aboard the large vessel, the deep silence of sleep or its equivalent was broken only by the distant but all-pervading vibration of the driving warp engines. In his quarters on deck five, Commodore Robert Wesley, in command of the Lexington, Lay curled on one side like a cat, sound asleep. Across the gallery in his quarters, Branfield lay sprawled on his back across his bed, one boot still on, the other on the deck. Five days and nights of alarms and skirmishes were taking their toll, the added burden of being Chief of Security on top of all of his other responsibilities. If LeAnn Talbot, the former CS, hadn't perished on their last mission, things might've been different. But they weren't, so Branfield slept the drugged sleep of approaching exhausting.

Not far away, however, a sleeper awoke and opened his eyes. The room, a single, was dark and still. He sat up, then put his feet over the side of the bed, unconsciously wiggling his toes in the thick pile of the throw rug. Giving no thought to the incongruity of this luxury aboard what was essentially a ship of war, he rose and padded over to the revolving closet/bureau, flicking on the lights in passing. Sliding the closet door aside, he removed from the bottom of the space a slim attaché case. Sliding the door shut behind him, he padded into the work area and took a seat at the desk, setting the case on the surface before him. Thumbing the locks, he let it flip open. His movements calm and measured, he removed a book entitled “The Aegis of Despair.” Quite a heavy tome, it appeared to be well handled; this in an age when it was simpler to read books in tape form. Yet hardbound books were still common enough not to arouse undue notice. The man open the book to page 97, revealing that the interior pages had had their centers removed, leaving only a centimeter wide boarder all the way around. In the cavity thus created sat a rectangular solid of some clear substance measuring approximately five centimeters thick, by ten wide, by fifteen long. It fit the cavity quite snuggly, and was warm and vaguely gelatinous to the touch.

Setting the book, with its odd contents, to one side, the man took from a small styli pouch in the case a particular stylus in the shape of an old-fashioned fountain pen. Taking the cap off, he set this aside and began to unscrew the point from the barrel. Setting the latter aside also, he held up the ink receptacle and began to unwind the fine gold wire wrapped around it with delicate fingers. Soon he held a nearly invisible strand of wire some 35 centimeters in length. Carefully he began to impress this on the yielding surface of the clear substance in an apparently predetermined pattern. When this task was complete, he put the stylus back together and returned it to its place. Next, he removed a small stapler (tapes hadn't completely done away with forms in triplicate) and opened it out, then proceeded to staple the wire at equal intervals with tiny gold staples. Soon only the two ends of the wire rose above the surface a millimeter apart. The man put the stapler away.

Taking out his travel alarm, he set it for 1800 hours two days hence, or the night of their scheduled arrival at Babel, site of the finals and pageant that would see Les Mesdemoiselles Federation, one for each species, crowned. This done, he removed the service panel from the bottom of the prism-shaped clock and, with the tweezers from the manicure set, lifted out both the tiny isotopic energy cell and the even smaller integrated circuitry chip that ran the clock. This latter was hardly a millimeter square and ridiculously simple. Screwing a jeweler's loupe into his eye, the man transferred the assembly to the block, where he slipped the chip's infinitesimally small contact rings carefully over the wire ends, then bent these delicately back to make the connection firm. Very gently, he pressed the shielded energy source down into the block until it was flush with the surface. This done, he closed the book carefully and replaced it and his tools, as well as the cannibalized clock in the case, then snapped it shut and returned it to the closet exactly as he had found it. Closing the door and switching off the lights, he returned to bed. Seconds later, he was asleep. In the morning, he would remember none of this.