Enforcer
La'an looked over the crowded sea of tables in the food court, sporting not a small number of Starlet uniforms among them, and scowled. A moment later, Jenna caught up to her holding a large, colorful ice cream cone.
"It's Rigellian Raspberry," she explained. "The waffle cone is Lebanese cedar. You sure you don't want one?"
La'an regarded the ice cream cone and considered the constituent elements. "I think I'd rather fellate a salt vampire."
Jenna almost choked on a tongue full of ice cream. "Oh gawd….you're bad! That image is going to be seared in my mind. We'll be fighting the Klingons or something and you'll be at your station all like 'phaser lock achieved, and I'll have this mental image of you going down on a salt vampire and start laughing uncontrollably and totally forget to plot an intercept course for Ortega's and then we'll get blown up.'"
"The blind spots," La'an said.
"What?"
"We need to check the blind spots. Look for any traces of their DNA."
"You think they…what?" Jenna began mouthing the ice cream to protect her teeth.
"What do we know about these kids?" La'an asked, then brought out her tricorder.
"They were into each other," Jenna mumbled past the ice cream.
"Right. But we also know where they lived." La'an activated the tricorder's holo-emitter and projected Concorde-IV. "Indira lived on campus at a University in CramBa Province here—" she pinpointed a location on the Northwestern hemisphere. "While Ren lived with his family in the MorKell District here and attended classes at the local university. They were a full planet apart." She nodded knowingly at Jenna, who held her gaze as she crunched into her cone with her sharp, white teeth.
"They didn't have time to date at home. They went to class during the day, and worked at night. They had to steal time together when they could, when they had it, and when they were together. And that means…" She waited for Jenna to finish the thought.
Jenna swallowed. "The blind spots," she answered.
"The blind spots," La'an nodded. She deactivated the tricorder and produced a data pad with the list Downing gave them. "We just need to decide which one to start with."
"Which one is closest?" As Jenna craned her neck to see the datapad's display, La'an was startled by a huge shape looming in her peripheral vision.
"You have dropped this object."
La'an spun, her hand instinctively reaching for the phaser on her hip, aware of Jenna recoiling beside her, as she faced the thing that had spoken. It wasn't what she expected—she didn't know what to expect, but it wasn't…that.
The gunmetal robot was little more than a vaguely-streamlined box on a a set of treads, and topped with an absurd, wedge-shaped head. The "chest" area sported heavy search lights as well as built-in panels of some sort. A glowing, red scanner on the front edge of the head swept relentlessly left to right to to left. It was like someone had manufactured a child's drawing of a robot, La'an thought. No, she amended; a child would draw something more realistic. This science fair project looked like it had trundled out of a cinema story from the 20th century. Back when the only robots brainlessly assembled automobiles and delivered packages. A small, sharp claw on an outstretched, spindly arm offered a clump of napkins.
"You have dropped this object," it repeated again in its gruff, slightly-metallic voice.
La'an and Jenna started at the robot, then awkwardly looked at one another.
"What the hell is that thing?" La'an asked.
"Oh, sorry," Chief Rensslar said as he rounded the corner of a designer hat boutique. "That's just one of our autonomous janitorial robots. I should have mentioned them."
"Janitorial robots?" La'an looked the thing over. "It can't be much of a janitor with those skinny arms."
Rensslar shrugged. "They clean up litter, small spills, prevent obstructions, empty the refuse bins, that sort of thing."
"You have dropped this object."
"And they recover lost objects," Jenna said, reaching out to take the napkins so slowly and tentatively, she might have been petting a shark.
"Uh, yeah. It should have just thrown those away." Rensslar said. "They've been a little wonky since the ion storm last week. Ops has a work order in to give them a full diagnostic, but then the Winter Wonderland simulator went haywire and wouldn't stop snowing, and that too precedence, so…" He thew up his hands.
La'an rolled her eyes. Jenna, her fingertips barely touching the wad of napkins, summoned heretofore untapped reservoirs of courage and snapped them out of the robot's claw as quickly as snakebite.
"Er…thanks," she said, giving the robot a little wave.
"Thank you…have a nice day." Its arm folded in next to the thing's bulk, and it rolled away with a pronounced whir of its treads. Mall patrons got out off its way, but otherwise paid it little mind.
"Weird," La'an said.
"They came with the station," Rensslar said.