She looked at him for a moment as if surprised he could speak at all, then tilted her head toward the ceiling and wandered away. He wasn’t sure if she was indicating that he should continue going up, or if it was some form of shrug. At any rate, he was back on his own again, and he roamed through the corridor until he heard a familiar voice behind him.

“Mr. Barrow,” John Abbott boomed jovially.

“Mr. Abbott,” Kyle said. “I’m looking for the bridge.”

“S’K’lee must be having a party,” John said. “She’s asked me up as well.”

“I’ve been curious,” Kyle said. “Have you ever seen S’K’lee pilot the ship?”

“Of course, many times,” Abbott replied.

“How does she do it?” Kyle wondered. “You know, being blind.”

“That, my friend, is something she’ll have to explain to you. It’s beyond me. Just follow me, and all will be revealed.”

He led Kyle up the corridor he’d been walking down, then fiddled with a gearlike contraption on the wall that Kyle would have had no idea how to use. With a soft hiss, a panel slid open, revealing a wide staircase—its stairs short and close together, like the ship’s ladder rungs—leading up to a large, domed space that Kyle knew must be the bridge.

“Guests on the bridge,” Abbott shouted when they were halfway up. Kyle was just able to see crew members, mostly Kreel’n of course, moving about the bridge or working at various stations. The control panels he could see looked much as they had on other starships he’d visited, if a little more primitive. The walls and ceiling of the dome were all transparent and the spacescape beyond was quite beautiful.

Captain S’K’lee spun around in her chair, which was positioned in the dead center of the round room. “Welcome,” she squeaked.

“Captain,” John said before Kyle could even open his mouth. “Mr. Barrow here doesn’t believe you can fly this bucket.”

Kyle shot the man an angry glance. “That’s not precisely the way I put it,” he explained quickly. “I just asked how you could pilot, since, as I understand it, ships’ captains voluntarily undergo surgical blinding.”

S’K’lee made her laughing noise again, long and loud. “Visiting a museum once, when I was much younger, I put on a special helmet that reputedly approximated the visual acuity of humans,” she said when she had brought her laughter under control. “I was astonished that you even think you cansee. By our standards, you’re quite blind yourself, even at your optimum.”

She could be right,he supposed. With six eyes ringing half their heads, at the very least a Kreel’n’s field of vision would be much greater. And he supposed there could be advantages to depth perception, possibly making them more adept at judging distances, and maybe better able to shift from close to distant focus.

“Even so,” he said. “At least I can look out the viewscreen and see what’s ahead of me.” John Abbott, he noted, stood by silently, occasionally nodding to himself. He’d heard all this before.

“Your way of seeing—even our way—just gets in the way when doing complicated flying,” S’K’lee said. “My ship’s instruments tell me everything I need to know. In a tricky situation, the momentary gap between perception and response could be fatal, if I relied on my vision. But when I rely on the ship’s perceptions and responses, the possibility of error is all but eliminated. Seeing would only endanger the ship and crew, making me more likely to trust my own senses instead of my instruments, if they should be at odds. Hence, the blinding procedure.”

“Still,” Kyle said. “If the ship’s crew can see, it must be a bit harrowing to them when you’re at the helm in a tight spot.”

S’K’lee fixed some of her dead black eyes on him as if she were looking at him. “They trust,” she said simply. “They trust.”

Kyle glanced about at the ship’s officers, going about their routines now. They looked capable enough, and he’d had no problems with S’K’lee’s flying when they left the space station. And certainly in his years, he’d encountered much stranger things. “Thank you,” he said. “For the explanation.”

“I’m afraid I have something else to explain to you,” S’K’lee said. Kyle was no expert, but the tone of her scratchy, squealy voice seemed to have changed a little. He couldn’t make out what this change might signify, though.

“What is it?”

“You can’t see it,” S’K’lee said with a grimace that Kyle took to be a smile, “because it’s beneath us just now. But we’ve been hailed by a Starfleet ship—the LaSalle,I believe its captain said it was.”

Kyle felt his heart slam against his ribcage like a wild beast vying for release. Suddenly dizzy, he reached for the nearest control podium and held on for support. Hoping no one had noticed, he glanced over at John Abbott, who still watched S’K’lee, apparently unconcerned.

“Hailed?” Kyle managed to croak out. “Why?”

“According to its captain, we’re harboring a fugitive,” S’K’lee said. “I, of course, told them we were doing no such thing and invited them to beam aboard and search us if they chose.”

“And their response?” John asked.

“They’ll have a security squad here in ten minutes,” S’K’lee replied. “I stalled them for a while, but I thought it best to warn you both. Just in case.”

“I’m sure it’s some kind of mistake,” John said.

“Of course,” S’K’lee agreed.

“I’ll return to my cabin, then.”

“As you wish,” S’K’lee told him. “And you, Mr. Barrow?”

“I ... uh, I’ll do the same,” Kyle said. He felt like his world was turning upside down, like the temporary sense of security he had enjoyed had been suddenly shattered. In a blurry haze, he followed John Abbott off the bridge and down a succession of ladders. Finally, John looked back at him, as if surprised to see that he was still there.

“You passed your deck a while back, Barrow,” he said abruptly. He seemed a bit winded now, though Kyle thought that might have been because he’d been hurrying down ladders barely wide enough for his bulk.

“Oh,” Kyle said dumbly. “I ... I guess I lost count.”

“Got you a bit nervous?” John asked with a grin.

“Well, you know. The idea that there might be a fugitive on the ship, it’s a little frightening.”

John touched his chin and nodded. “It certainly is,” he said.

“I guess I should go back up then. To my own cabin,” Kyle said.

“I suppose. When this is all over, we’ll have a drink and laugh about it.”

“It’s a deal,” Kyle agreed. He climbed back up to his own deck and found his own cramped quarters. But should I bother going in?he wondered, half-panicked. Should I run? To where? Surely they’ve already scanned the ship, they know there are only two human passengers aboard. If I ran, all I could do would be to get myself lost, but I couldn’t hide from them for long.

He sat down on the edge of his bed, breathing deeply and trying to calm his fears. The captain hadn’t specified that the fugitive was human, had she? Starfleet might have any number of reasons for seeking out anyone on board such a big vessel. And at least he hadn’t begun having Tholian flashbacks again, he realized with some satisfaction. There was that much to be grateful for.

But he couldn’t shake the certainty that they had come for him. He was still sitting there, trying not to think about what the Starfleet Security team might have in store for him, when there was a knock at the door to his room. “Come in,” he said, and the door hissed open.

Two uniformed security officers, one an average-sized human female and the other a yellow-skinned being so tall he had to stoop his shoulders to avoid hitting his massive, shaggy head against the passageway’s ceiling, peered at him through the open door but didn’t enter. “Mr. Barrow?” the human woman asked.

“That’s right,” Kyle said.

“Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“That depends,” he answered, plastering a quick grin on his face to defuse the defensiveness of his response. “What about?”