“I’m not all that hungry,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
Kim paused to stare at her. She seemed only vaguely present, as if her mind were a thousand light-years away. He moved to sit beside her and, taking her hand in his, brought it to his lips.
“You all right?”
She inclined her head toward him. “I am. I will be. I just… I’m glad you came by. I have something for you.”
“What?” he asked, wondering why she refused to turn and face him. She lifted her chin slightly, gesturing toward their small dining/worktable. Resting on its surface was a freshly replicated clarinet.
“Nancy,” he said, shocked in a good way, but also confused. “We can’t spare replicator rations for stuff like this.”
“I used my rations for it. Trust me, I can spare them.”
Kim crossed to take the clarinet in his hands. She had clearly used his personal database to create it: a perfect copy of the one he kept on Voyager. He brought it to his lips and played a few random notes. He was rusty, but it wouldn’t take long to fix that.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve really been missing mine.”
“I know.”
“I should play it for the baby, next time I can stop by for a bit. By the way, have you started thinking about names?”
She shook her head, a wistful expression on her face. “I honestly haven’t. You?”
“Not really. Okay, maybe I have a short list forming in the back of my head, but, you know, it’s totally up to you.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said gently.
“How do you feel about Abigail, or Allison?”
“They’re pretty, I guess.”
“But not setting the world on fire for you, I can tell.”
“There’s plenty of time,” she said.
He blew a few more notes. “I really can’t thank you enough for this. I needed it, but I didn’t want to, I mean, it seemed like an extravagance.”
“I know it feels good to take care of everyone else, Harry, but sometimes, you need to take care of yourself too. Remember that, okay?”
“I will,” he promised.
“Play something for me?”
“Any requests?”
“Whatever you feel like.”
He thought for a moment and Debussy’s suite drifted into his mind. “I was playing this one in my head the other night. Do you know it?”
He began to play, the music stirring deep wells of contentment he hadn’t touched in too long. He closed his eyes as he continued, allowing himself to fall into the gentle, haunting lullaby of the moon. When he finished and opened his eyes again, tears were falling down Conlon’s cheeks.
“Hey,” he said, rushing to her side and taking both her hands in his. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head but still did not face him. “It’s beautiful. That’s all.” Wiping her tears with the back of her hand, she added, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
Finally, she turned her face to his. He noticed immediately that there was something different about her eyes, or more specifically, her gaze. She stared in his general direction, but not quite at him.
“It started a few hours ago,” she began. “I was in the science lab, finalizing the specifications for our new benamite recrystallization matrix.” She paused as new tears threatened, but she took a deep breath and continued.
As she did so, a heavy stone landed in the center of Kim’s gut. “And?” he asked softly.
“I kept asking the computer to turn up the lights. It was hard to read the screen and I figured it was a short in the relay, but then the computer confirmed that the lights were at maximum. I didn’t want to, I mean, I wanted to see you before I…”
“Nancy, what the hell has happened?”
She sighed, inhaled with a sniff, and said, “I need you to take me to sickbay, Harry. I can’t see. I’m blind.”
14
SURFACE OF UNNAMED ASTEROID
“Fifty percent of this is silicate—oxygen and silicon. The rest is metallic,” Lieutenant Patel reported.
“I’m getting iron, nickel, palladium, and osmium over here,” Paris said.
“That’s the other fifty percent,” Patel said.
“So, almost exactly like the other four asteroids we’ve searched today,” Paris said. “I guess I was hoping for a little more variety.”
Patel laughed lightly. “I was hoping for a little black box that said ‘Property of the Edrehmaia’ on it.”
“And a button that said ‘Push Here to Activate Quantum Entanglement’?” Paris teased.
“Doesn’t seem like too much to ask.”
“It’s never that easy, Devi,” Paris said. “They don’t tell you in the brochures for Starfleet Academy, but at least seventy percent of what we do is figure out how to stave off boredom. And the other thirty percent is figuring out how to not die.”
“Shall we do direct scans of the next sector or move on?” Patel asked.
Paris was as eager to get back to the ship as Patel, but he knew if he came home with nothing, B’Elanna was just going to send him back out again tomorrow.
“We’re sure this is the cluster?” Paris asked.
“Scanners identified these fifteen asteroids as the ones from which most of the signals we detected emanated,” Patel said. “Of course, we had to account for drift over the past week, but I’d be amazed if Lasren and Waters got their math wrong.”
“Agreed. Let’s move on to sector twelve and if nothing changes, we head back to the Flyer,” Paris said.
Patel trudged ahead, her boots leaving little dusty prints on the surface of the rock. Paris left his tricorder’s scanning function active but placed it back on his belt as he caught up with Patel and fell in line beside her.
“Do you think Seven’s team is having better luck?” Patel asked.
“Hard to say,” Paris replied. “We’re due to collect her and Aubrey in
