Fortune's Light - Michael Jan Friedman [59]
Lyneea nodded, her gaze still focused elsewhere. “What if it wasn’t Bosch? What if it was the Pandrilite that made Norayan nervous?”
Riker thought about it. The Pandrilite’s story had seemed plausible enough, but …
“We’ve got him under wraps on that blaster charge,” he said. “It can’t hurt to ask him a few more—”
Suddenly Riker felt something hit him in the back—hard. He turned instinctively and saw a cloaked figure fleeing in the direction of the marketplace.
Lyneea cursed and clutched at him, and at the same time he felt something long and stiff in his shoulder, something that didn’t belong there, something that was beginning to hurt. Numbly he looked down at the right side of his chest and saw a bloody knife point sticking out of his tunic.
“My God,” he whispered. The pain was getting worse with each passing moment. Already it felt as if there were a hot poker inside him, searing his flesh with agonizing slowness.
He staggered against the nearest wall, Lyneea still holding on to him. There was fear in her eyes, rampaging wide-eyed fear.
The stain on his tunic was spreading quickly; he was losing blood at an alarming rate. A few drops fell into the slush at his feet, making tiny black pools.
Lyneea swallowed. “Hang on, Riker. I’m going for help.” Her voice was calmer than she looked—it must have taken quite an effort.
“No,” he told her. Not that he didn’t agree he needed help. Only the help he had in mind was orbiting hundreds of kilometers above them.
Digging into his tunic with his left hand—he had lost feeling in his right—he scrabbled about for his communicator. The pain was getting unbearable, but he clenched his teeth and forced his fingers to close about the device. As he withdrew it, he slid down along the wall to his knees, despite Lyneea’s efforts to hold him up.
Will activated the communicator with thumb pressure and got as far as “Riker to Enterprise” before the damned thing squirted out of his grasp. He tried to pick it up out of the slush, but he was cold, so cold suddenly, and his fingers wouldn’t do what he wanted them to.
He looked up at Lyneea for help, saw her narrowed eyes, and knew what she was thinking: a violation of the high-tech ban, a breach of her vows as a retainer. Technically she was wrong, but he had neither the strength nor the time to explain it now.
“Please,” he rasped. There was a blackness at the edges of his vision that was beginning to eat its way inward. “Please … Captain Picard on … on the ship.”
Lyneea’s mouth was set in a straight, hard line. The kind of help he wanted went against everything she believed in. It meant defiling, for the sake of an offworlder, what her people held sacred.
But there was no way to get any other kind of help in time to save his life. If she’d doubted that before, she had to see it now.
“Please,” he whispered again, reaching for the communicator with useless fingers. The pain was sheer agony now; it was closing down on him like a vise. And still Lyneea stood there, looking for all the world like a beast caught in a trap.
The moment seemed to stretch out forever. Before it ended, Riker lost consciousness.
Chapter Ten
FORTUNATELY, Beverly Crusher had been in sickbay when the call came from the bridge. In a matter of seconds, she’d scraped together everything she needed and headed for the turbolift.
It wasn’t until the lift doors closed and the compartment was headed for Deck Six that she began to gather her thoughts as well. And to replay her conversation with the captain, picking out the bits of information she thought she might need, skirting her personal feelings of hope and dread as best she could.
“You’ll be taking a chance, Doctor, you know that?” Picard had said. “Whoever made Will a target may make you his next one. And we won’t be able to beam you back until …”
Then the lift stopped and the doors opened and she was rushing down the corridor to Transporter Room 1. Crewmen hugged the bulkheads on either side of her, careful not to get in her way. Apparently she wasn