Day of Honor - Michael Jan Friedman [1]
"Hey," he said. "I need a hug, Little Bee."
For as long as she could remember, Little Bee had been her father's pet name for her. It made her tingle every time he said it.
"Oh, Daddy," B'Elanna squealed.
She ran to him as fast as she could. At the last possible moment, her father bent down and scooped the girl up in his arms, then hugged her just the way she liked it.
B'Elanna hugged him back, too. She hugged him with all her might, and she was strong for her age. Finally, she let go and he put her down.
The truth was, the girl liked her father a little better than she liked her mother. But of course she wasn't going to tell anyone that. It would only have hurt her mother's feelings.
"See you later," she said-to both of them.
Then she was out the door, running through the glare of the late afternoon sun like a wild animal. For
the first time in days, she felt a weight had been lifted off her.
They'll be fine, she told herself Just wait and see.
B'Elanna's father watched his daughter run out into the bright orange plaza, the sunlight picking highlights out of her soft, brown hair. He found he had a lump in his throat.
Little Bee, he thought sadly.
"You are a coward," his wife spat at him.
He turned to her. Every day, she seemed harder, fiercer, more determined to push him out of her life.
I should have seen it coming a long time ago, he told himself. Hell, I should never have married her in the first place.
"A coward?" he echoed.
He gazed out the window again at his little girl. His Little Bee.
"Yeah," he said. "Maybe I am."
"Hey, B'Elanna!"
The girl turned in the direction of the childish cry and saw Dougie Naismith cutting across the plaza to join her. Dougie was a tall, skinny boy with unruly yellow hair and ears that stuck out from his head.
He was also B'Elanna's best friend.
"What's up?" she asked him.
Dougie pointed to the reddish-orange hills north of the white-domed colony complex. "We found a firechute," he said. "Or really, Erva did. Come on, I'll show you."
B'Elanna looked at him, her pulse pounding all of a sudden. "A firechute? Are you sure?"
The only firechutes she knew were way on the other side of the world, where the mountains were really big. B'Elanna's father and mother, who worked as geologists for the colony, had shown them to her.
They had taken her into a crack in the earth, a deep, dark one between two towering cliffs. With her hand in her father's and her mother up ahead, lighting the way, the girl had descended along a long, twisting ledge.
At first, she had seen only a ruddy glow that chased the darkness. Then her path came out from behind an outcropping and she got a good look.
B'Elanna remembered the spiraling tongues of ruby-red flame, each as wide around as one of the colony domes and maybe five or six times as high. Of course, that was only the part she could see. According to her father, the fire had traveled a long way before it even entered the crack.
And it wasn't fire, really, though the girl could feel its immense heat on her face, pulling her skin tight across her cheekbones. It was a funny kind of energy that just looked and felt like fire-an energy trapped under the crust of the planet when the world was still forming.
At least, that was the way her father had explained it. All B'Elanna knew was that it was beautiful-so beautiful she couldn't say a word, only stop and gaze in wonder at the spectacle.
So it seemed strange that there could be a firechute in the hills so close to home. No, more than strange. Crazy.
"I'm sure," said Dougie. "Come on, I'll show you."
B'Elanna glanced over her shoulder at her family's house. Her mother hadn't told her her to stick around
the colony buildings. She had just said to be back before dinner, and that was at least an hour away.
It occurred to the girl that her parents would be interested in the firechute, too. But if she told them about it, that would distract them from the patching up they