Day of Honor 01_ Ancient Blood - Diane Carey [3]
Under the astounded eyes of his captain, the stunned security men, the frozen commissioner, and poor Engineer Jensen, who still hadn’t quite made it through the doorway, Worf took one confirming step toward the nearest couple of rows, then squished his way back to Picard.
“Sir,” he rasped, “their arms … are missing.”
“How many … like that?”
“Twenty-one, sir. Arms forcibly avulsed at the shoulder. Two of those have had their eyes gouged out. The remaining passengers’ throats have been cut.”
Standing near the entry, unable to move, Commissioner Toledano gulped, “What’s ‘avulsed’?”
Worf glanced at the commissioner, then at Picard, then the Commissioner again. “Torn off, sir.”
Not cut. Not phasered. Torn.
Sheer force.
“The blood splatters on the bulkheads,” Worf went on, “suggest the torture was done in this area. Then the victims were dumped back into their seats.”
The lieutenant of the security squad, pale with revulsion, came back from his reconnaissance of the rest of the ship and the cockpit. He swallowed a couple of times. “Sir … captain and copilot are both … the arms are the same. The steward’s over there, behind that serving cart. Guess he tried to hide. Didn’t help, though. Engine room’s pretty bad, too. Both engineers had their throats cut.”
“Some with throats cut,” Picard murmured, “some with arms pulled off.”
He squinted at the rows of seats, a hideous procession of gore from fore to aft, and he walked along the rows, now desensitized to the squish of his boots on the bloodsoaked carpet. The first two people’s facial expressions were relaxed, almost as if they could look up and say, “Hello.” Only the indelible stare of their eyes and the paper whiteness of their drained faces gave away their true condition, give or take the tunic of blood each wore. The second, third, fourth row … muscles frozen in perpetual astonishment, brows drawn, teeth bared, eyes wide. And it went that way, all the way to midships.
“These,” Worf said, “saw those in front being killed. Their faces are mottled, as if flushed with panic before being drained by hemorrhage. The murderers started up there and worked their way aft, forcing these people to watch. Then … here,” he said, stepping aft past several bodies who still possessed their arms; he paused at two corpses who were missing arms.
Picard noticed what he was getting at—those in front had their arms ripped off, then some didn’t, then two did.
“Then these two spoke up,” Worf suggested, as if relating the details of an ancient battle. “The attackers found what they wanted and came back here. And these two paid by having their living eyes gouged out before their arms were taken off.”
The two pathetic corpses, a man and a woman, slumped in their ghastly final throes. The woman’s head rested upon what was left of the man’s shoulder, her hair matted with his blood and muscle tissues.
“Commissioner,” Picard said, turning, “let me introduce you to your two witnesses.”
Poor Toledano picked his way through faint impressions of the other men’s footprints in a vain attempt to avoid the unavoidable blood soaking the carpet. “Do you really think so?”
“Our medical and forensic departments will confirm all these people’s identities in comparison with the ship’s manifest and the departure records. Assuming that someone knows who your witnesses were, I’ll bet these two are the ones.”
“Because their eyes are …”
“Yes, partly. They were obviously punished more than the others, with the intent that the message of this should get back to someone. Perhaps a lot of someones.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Word does tend to escape in these kinds of events. A memo here, a whisper there, a security officer’s spouse—it gets out. Whoever did this was counting on that, or they wouldn’t have resorted to such theatrics. They didn’t know who the two witnesses were, so they tortured everyone