Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [157]
“There are no Moyani, Lessing,” she said.
“You’re wrong,” he said, pushing himself painfully into a sitting position. “I’m building one, right now.”
That’s what the symbols on the display represented: chromosome pairs-genes. Lessing had input them into the device and now it was using energy from the power core to grow some kind of genetic hybrid. Or it had been until she suspended the process.
“I saw that look on your face,” said Lessing. “When you passed me in the hall, I saw you, Lieutenant. I saw that same look on every face on the Equinox every day.”
She hit him again, hard, in the sternum. He gasped as more bones cracked.
“Don’t you dare compare yourself to me,” she said, barely containing her rage. “I’m no murderer.”
“You were about to sacrifice these people to get us home,” said Lessing, spitting a little blood. “What’s the Klingon word for that?”
“They aren’t people,” said B’Elanna plaintively, though she wasn’t as sure of it as she had been a moment ago. “They’re just templates. Recordings.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Either the revival process finishes, right now, or they die. I don’t think there’s enough power to get Voyager home and resuscitate the Moyani as well. So, you have a choice to make, Lieutenant. What’s it going to be?”
For a moment B’Elanna just stood there. Then she let out a long howl of such complete anguish that it was more like the wail of a banshee than anything a living being might make. It was a sound Noah Lessing knew well. It was the sound of defeat.
Ashamed, weary, beaten, she leaned on the control facet and said softly, “Resume tool function.”
The image on the display immediately resolved itself into a humanoid shape. The glowing facets, so diminished before, now blazed with their cool blue light. A body began to assemble itself on one of them.
It wasn’t human, exactly, but close. So close that B’Elanna thought she found the face taking shape in front of her familiar.
“Lessing,” she said in a broken little whisper. “Whose DNA did you use to make this work?”
“Salutations, B’Elanna and Noah,” said the man who had just come into being. Around him, on all the other glowing facets, other familiar humanoid forms were assembling themselves. “This avatar is for the First Speaker of the Moyani.”
Maybe so, thought B’Elanna. But you look a helluva lot like Maxwell Burke.
“Many thanks for rebirth,” said the First Speaker as the Moyani vessel came alive around them and his crew scattered into the transport tubes, presumably to resume their normal duties. “B’Elanna may address this avatar as Ssymko.”
He stepped down from his glowing crystal facet and stretched out his hand. Still a little stunned by the sudden appearance of over fifty alien beings, B’Elanna hesitated.
“Be at ease,” said Ssymko. “The Moyani are happy to carry the strings of debt.”
The words were strange but the voice and the smile were vintage Max Burke. Disarming. She took his hand, finding it pleasantly warm to the touch. He was wrapped in some kind of pheremonal aura as well-something that reminded her of cinnamon and honey.
For a moment she lost herself in the aroma and the strange pictures it brought to her mind.
She had a flash of an alien landscape-great crystalline spheres floating in a vast multicolored cloud of gas. A nebula? The spheres were surrounded by scores of tinier flittier things that made B’Elanna think of the kites she had flown as a girl. Was this the Moyani home environment? Was this their natural form?
Before she could probe deeper, the image was gone and she was staring once again into the large half-sad eyes of something that looked like her friend.
“Does B’Elanna understand?” said Ssymko. She was surprised to realize she did. These creatures used scent to communicate as much as they did sound. Amazing.
“You’re going home,” she said.
“That must be our function,” said Ssymko. “We must regain that true proximity.”
“We’re trying to get home too,” she said, suddenly desperate. Maybe, now that they were revived, the Moyani could help her get around the power-sharing