Lost Time by Ilsa J. Bick Read Free Book Online Page B

to believe in other than money and science. Deep down a person wants to believe in something greater, whether those are prophets, gods, heaven, hell; angels and demons and everything else in between. Life doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
    “No.” Gold’s gaze flicked to his ring, and he felt the prick of an old pain in his heart. “But you forgot one thing that’s even more important than being a martyr to a sometime god.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “Love,” said Gold, looking up from his memories of a girl who blew a kiss twenty years ago as she boarded a shuttle—and then disappeared without a trace, taking everything that was best with her. “You forgot about love.”

Chapter
8
    N og and Gomez and Hawkins looked at each other. “That didn’t sound good,” said Nog.
    “You’re telling me.” Gomez wasted a few seconds trying to reestablish contact. “Hell.” Then she felt something; no, correction: she didn’t feel anything. Well, not as much anyway. “The rumblings…the station’s not moving as much.” Gomez opened a channel. “Conlon, how you doing?”
    “Deflectors are up and running. I’ve just got to work on this manifold relay circuit and get it to settle down, but I’ve managed to stabilize a portion of the station around the central core and habitat ring. I wouldn’t be so sure about those pylons, though. Anything we feel here is about eighty times worse out there.”
    “That is not what I wanted to hear,” said Gomez. “We just lost contact with the da Vinci. ”
    “What?”
    “Relax, it’s probably nothing,” Gomez lied. She frowned over her readings. Her tricorder had enough range to confirm that the temporal-spatial displacement waves were now propagating in all directions, reaching out far enough to wash over the Kwolek. “I don’t think it’s lost -lost. Probably just moved out of communicator range.”
    “Without telling us?” Then, after Gomez told her about their last communication with da Vinci, Conlon said, “ That doesn’t sound good.”
    “Yeah, that’s what Nog said. Look, I’m going to secure the shuttle on one of the runabout launch pads. Beam-out will be faster than walking and now that we’ve got the deflector going, probably safe. I’ll check for the da Vinci with the Kwolek ’s sensors. They have better range.” She looked over at the Ferengi. “You okay here, Nog?”
    “Sure,” said Nog, though he didn’t seem too happy about it. “I got stuff to do, and Soloman’s not going anywhere.”
    “I can go to the shuttle,” said Hawkins.
    “Negative that. You’re security, remember? So, you and your nice, shiny phaser rifle watch Nog’s backside. I’ll be right back.”
    Snapping her tricorder shut, Gomez slung the strap over her shoulder and tapped her combadge to contact the shuttle’s computer for a beam-out. An instant later, she heard the familiar whine. Her skin tingled as the annular confinement beam caught and read her pattern while the transporter’s phase transition coils simultaneously disassembled her body into a phased matter-energy stream.
    But after that initial second of dematerialization, when her mind invariably froze for the span of a heartbeat, she saw something. In the stream. With her. Stasis or not, Gomez could still think, and her brain digested the suggestion of a face—yes, a fac e, because this wasn’t some thing. The pattern was some one, and she registered that one’s eyes widen in shock—just as the realization of who that was smacked her in the face as solidly as a good, hard slap.
    No. It can’t…

    Sonya Gomez was fit to be tied. The Gettysburg ’s matter/antimatter reaction chambers were acting up, and she was still struggling with that pesky intermix…. She exhaled, blew hair away from her face because she was flat on her back, futzing with the damn valve, her hands smudged with grime.
    Her combadge trilled. “Gomez.”
    “Commander, we’ve made it to the rendezvous site. The Li ’s chief