Day of Honor - Michael Jan Friedman [9]
It didn't help. It was as if her tormentor hadn't even heard her.
Lumas felt hot tears streaming down his face. A second time, he attempted to push himself forward, but couldn't move his feet quickly enough. So instead of lunging, he simply fell.
He lay there on the floor as his wife screamed for him. As Finaea screamed for him. As little Anyelot screamed for him, twisting desperately in the grasp of her silent captor.
How could this be? Lumas asked himself. How?
Was it his fault? Had he somehow inflicted this fate on them?
"Agron!" his wife shrieked-and reached out for him.
Lumas had accomplished one thing with his fallhe was closer to her now. Close enough, perhaps, to grasp her hand. Lifting his own, he fought his paralysis and stretched it to within inches of her fingers.
Their eyes met. Lumas saw something dark and hideous in hers, something more than terror and loathing. It was as if the intruder had somehow begun to infect her with his darkness.
Feeling control flooding back into his limbs, he reached still further-and grasped his wife's hand. But as he did this, her fingers went limp, and the light left her eyes altogether.
Still he held on, unwilling to give her up, unwilling to surrender. That was when her captor pulled her away from him and raised a mechanical appendage. Lumas tried to roll out of the way, but it was too late.
The appendage came down across his head with a force he couldn't have imagined. He felt himself failing into a deep, dark emptiness-though it wasn't nearly as great as the emptiness of loss inside him.
When he woke, some time later, his world was in flames.
B'ELANNA TORRES, CHIEF ENGINEER OF THE STARSHIP Voyager, found herself standing in the center of a large, redstone plaza, the sky above her dark and dusky and vibrating with desert heat.
A hot, gritty wind caressed her face as she looked around. The circle of arches surrounding the plaza looked as if they had been carved from solid rock. But for all their majesty, they were no more impressive than the tall, rough-hewn structure that rose beside her, a flat, metal gong in the shape of a hexagon hanging from its only protrusion.
As B'Elanna watched, a tongue of pale flame leaped from the structure's goblet-shaped top. Turning to smoke, it twisted on the wind and vanished.
Suddenly, she saw movement. A powerful, barechested figure appeared on either side of the plaza.
Each one was armed with a tirpa-an ancient weapon with a curved blade on one end and a heavy bludgeon on the other.
The wind blew again, leaching moisture from B'Elanna's every pore. She had only been here a few seconds and she was already beginning to sweat.
She knew this place-or rather, not the place itself, but its type. It was the sort of age-old temple one might find on Vulcan, where the indigenous race's once-tumultuous nature had been tamped down under centuries of severe mental discipline.
But here, in this primitive place of worship, surrounded by ocher-colored wastes and the vague black shapes of far-off mountains, the prospect of violence was still very much alive. B'Elanna glanced again at the figures holding the lirpas. A half-Klingon by birth, she had never before appreciated how much Vulcans and her mother's people had in common.
Still, she hadn't come to this setting of her own free will. When B'Elanna arrived at the holodeck a couple of minutes earlier, she had called up a new program she had been building from the inside out. Or anyway, she thought she had called it up.
But her new program involved cool, dank caves and chill mists-not a hot, and desert that looked for all the world like an open wound. And it certainly didn't contain Vulcans.
No matter, she told herself Anybody can make a mistake. She simply called for the half-finished cave program again. Then she closed her eyes and inhaled, anticipating a breath of subterranean cold.
What she got was another torrid wind playing over her face, with a familiarity she was beginning not to
like. B'Elanna opened her eyes and saw that nothing had changed. She