Stardust Dreams (6 page)

The moment she heard about
the Noronian Performing Company audition, she had her new challenge. She hadn't
even realized how confined she felt in Innerworld until she imagined traveling
to other planets.

Freedom.
Even a million
miles from that dirt farm in Georgia, the word still had the power to make her
pulse race. With a smile on her face and the determination to enjoy her first
taste of outerspace, she returned to the bridge.

"Oh, my," Mar
said appreciatively as Cherry entered, then he immediately turned so that Dot
could see what had surprised him with her own eyes.

"Oh, my," Dot
repeated in a different, more concerned tone of voice. "You certainly
look… different."

Cherry laughed. "Geez,
I hope so. That peasant maiden get-up is one of the worst." Her gaze moved
to Gallant as he started to turn around then paused to adjust his eye patch. She
couldn't help but wonder why he had to wear such a thing when any physical
defect she knew of could easily be repaired by

Innerworld's medical
personnel.
What could it be hiding?

She waited for the kind of
complimentary greeting men usually paid her as Gallant quickly scanned her from
head to toe, but he swiveled back around without a word. "Well," she
said, when it was obvious he wasn't going to comment on her improved
appearance. "What do y'all do around here for fun?" she asked,
momentarily slipping back into her southern accent.

Before anyone could answer,
she walked to the side of the bridge and touched the glass. "This is
really amazing. It's practically invisible. How does it stay so clean?" She
pressed both hands against the glass then stepped back. Her prints remained
visible for only a few seconds before they vanished. "Self-cleaning, huh?"
She turned to see Mar grin at her and she smiled back.

Cherry circled the bridge,
looking out from every angle possible. "It's so dark. How can you tell
where you're going?" When she received no answer to this question either,
she walked up behind Gallant and tried to read what was on the monitor in front
of him.

Gallant tensed as he felt
her hovering over him. It was bad enough that he had made the mistake of seeing
what she looked like out of costume, with her this close he could practically
feel the energy radiating from her body. She was making it extremely difficult
to think of her as an inanimate object. "Perhaps you would like to read or
watch a video.

There's a personal viewer
in my room you could use."

"I'd rather take in
the view right here. What's this?" she asked pointing to the grid on the
screen in front of Mar-Dot.

Dot turned to her with a
smile. "That's the sector of space we're in now." She touched an
illuminated blue spot on the grid. "There we are."

Cherry bent over to get a
closer look at the other spots and configurations on the grid. "Are one of
those bigger shapes Earth?"

Dot frowned and glanced at
Voyager. "I am sure Captain Voyager would be much more capable of
answering all your questions."

With an abrupt twist, Mar
faced his captain. "Please excuse us. It is past time for our rest period,
and Dot gets quite cranky—"

"I do not get
cranky," Dot insisted as she turned her face toward Cherry.

"You do," Mar
said, stepping away from the panel, "and we should not subject our guest
to one of your moods."

"My moods!"

'You see, you are getting
cranky."

Cherry tried not to laugh
aloud at the he-she as they left the bridge, arguing back and forth in the same
voice. A moment later their voices were cut off by the door to their room and
Cherry turned to Voyager. "I guess you're used to that."

He shook his head without
looking at her. "I accept it. They're the best navigator in the
galaxy."

"So, tell me how all
of this works," she said with a wave of her hand over the panel.

"Wouldn't you rather
take your rest now?"

"You've got to be
kidding. I just rested for twenty-four hours. I'm wide awake." She noticed
that he appeared to be totally absorbed in whatever was on his monitor, and she
leaned over his shoulder to take another look.

Immediately, he cleared the
screen and turned his chair so that she was forced to move aside, while he made
some notes on a pad.

Cherry leisurely circled
the panel, mainly to see if she could get him to follow her movement. So far, he
had managed to avoid meeting her eyes except for the briefest moment, and it
was beginning to get on her nerves.

Gallant let out an
exasperated sigh. "If you think you could sit still for a few minutes,
I'll answer your questions."

Cherry smiled and looked
around the Spartan area. "I'd love to. Where would you suggest?"

"Here," he said,
and pulled a padded bench out from under the panel where Mar-Dot had been
standing. "Mar-Dot doesn't sit often, but when they have the need, they
straddle this."

Cherry sat down facing him
instead of the unladylike position he suggested. "Okay, shoot." That
almost made him look at her… but not quite.

"Shoot?"

"A Terran expression
for 'go ahead.' Tell me how all of this works."

Gallant turned his screen
back on and punched a few buttons in front of him. His eye stayed on the
monitor as he spoke to her. "Very simply, the computer oversees the basic
operations and alerts me if anything is not functioning properly. As Dot told
you, this ship was built for speed. It's lightweight and powered by a specially
customized stardrive."

He went on to explain how
the stardrive worked, but Cherry didn't understand enough about engineering to
follow, so she let her mind wander. At any rate, for all the attention he was
paying her, he could have been speaking to a piece of furniture. With every
passing moment, it became more obvious that Voyager was purposely trying to
ignore her presence.

There was nothing she
relished more than a challenge and with little else to do, she decided to
accept the unspoken challenge to make him pay attention to her.

"O-o-oh," Cherry
suddenly moaned and covered her right eye with her hand.

"What is it?" Gallant
asked in a concerned tone, yet still kept his face averted.

"I got something in my
eye." She rubbed it, tugged on the lid, then moaned again.
"Drek.
It's probably just an eyelash, but I can't get it out."

Leaning closer to him, she
pleaded, "Can you see anything?" She heard him take a deep breath
before facing her, and had to forcibly hold back her smile.

"Move your hand,"
he ordered. She did. "Open your eye." She tried, but after a little
lash fluttering, it was clear she could not keep it open on her own. He hadn't
wanted to look at her, let alone touch her, but as her lower lip began to
quiver, he gave in.

Steadying his hand on her
cheek, he used his thumb and forefinger to gently pry her eye open. Her face
muscles strained against his effort for a moment before she relaxed and met his
gaze. He didn't find any eyelash or particle, but he did see a definite twinkle
of mischief… just before she tweaked his nose.

"Gotcha!" she
said with a laugh.

He jerked back in his chair
and looked at her as if she was unbalanced. "What was that for?"

Cherry shrugged lightly. "I
wanted to make you look at me, and I did it. You were being very rude, you
know. In fact, speaking of rude, you have yet to apologize."

He slowly swiveled his
chair back to its usual position and stared at the monitor. "I told you,
the importance of my mission—"

Cherry gripped the arm of
his chair and turned it back to her. "Look at me and say I'm sorry or you
won't have any peace for the rest of this trip."

Gallant decided she was
quite capable of carrying out her threat, and considering how long this trip
was actually going to take, he acceded. He looked straight at her pretty face
and murmured, "I apologize for stunning you and taking you away without
your permission."

Cherry's smile broadened. The
expression on his face was one of extreme discomfort. "See? That wasn't so
hard. And now that we got that business out of the way, tell me about this
grid."

"It's a navigational
device."

She smirked at his simple
answer. "I gathered that much. I want to know what all these blips and markings
mean. And what are all the red sparkles at the edge? It looks like the tail of
a comet or something."

Gallant realized if he
didn't answer, she would just keep prodding. "That's an ion trail."

Cherry frowned at the
screen. Dot had said the blue spot of light was this ship, and even though the
movement across the grid was slow, it looked as though the ship was following
the ion trail. The distance between the last red sparkle and the blue spot
appeared to be exactly the same as it was earlier. "You said something
about an ion trail before. Is there a ship on the other end of that
trail?"

Now it was Gallant's turn
to frown. He hadn't expected intelligence along with all her other attributes. "Probably.
But it's too far away to be picked up on the grid."

She had an inkling that she
had just learned something important, but she couldn't put her finger on it. "And
where's Earth?"

"Also too far
away." He knew she was going to have to be told the truth sooner or later,
but he opted for as late as possible. Since it was clear she would not permit
him to ignore her, he thought distraction might buy him a little more time.

"Do you play
cubit?" he asked as he reached under the control panel and slid out an
extension, creating a table between them.

Cherry shook her head. "I
don't think I've ever heard of it."

He pulled open a drawer on
his side of the table and took out four small cubes which were a differ-ent
color on each of their six sides: blue, red, yellow, green, orange, and purple.
He put them in the center of the table. Then he placed six penny-sized markers
bearing the same colors as the cubes in front of Cherry and gave himself
another identical set.

"It's fairly
easy," Gallant said. "The object of the game is to get four of each
color. After an initial toss of the cubes, you have two more tries, during
which you can reroll as many cubes as you like to try to get four of one color.
If you make a set, or quad, you put aside that color marker. The first one to
get rid of all their markers, wins."

"Sounds something like
a game I played in Outerworld a long time ago called
yahtzee"

Gallant raised an eyebrow. "Oh?
Perhaps you'll teach me that one next. Does it involve gambling?"

"Not usually."

"Then that's one big
difference. Cubit is the most popular gambling game throughout the galaxy. The
players and bystanders bet on the outcome, which color quad one will get first,
and whether or not either player will roll a quad on an initial try. It's taken
very seriously by some players."

Cherry noted the way he
made it sound like he didn't take it very seriously himself, but she had a
feeling the opposite was probably true. "So, Captain, what are the stakes
in this game?"

His answer began with a
slow grin. "I wouldn't want to take advantage of your innocence."

Immediately, her guard went
up. "Why do I get the feeling I'm being conned here?"

He asked her to explain
what she meant by that and then firmly denied he would ever do such a thing. "I'll
tell you what, we'll just play for points… until
you
decide to make it
a bit more interesting."

Cherry's intuition told her
she was still being entrapped by a practiced liar, but boredom seemed more
lethal than any snare he had planned for her. "Okay. I'll play with you,
Captain, but be warned, I'm very good at games."

His only response was
another slow grin.