Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [78]
Yes. The Iconians. A male, and a female, both named Smyt. Both dead. Lying there, faceup in the snow, mere feet away from the great gateway. And words… words etched in the snow by the male, just before he died, carved in the snow with a hand so frozen and useless that it was not much more than an iced club of meat. The words had been: Giant Lied. What the hell did that mean? What giant? What had he lied about? Why had the male Iconian felt so strongly about this that he had used his final moments of life to report this transgression? The Iconians… grozit, they had… they had caused trouble… so much trouble, for two races… for himself… for Shelby…
Shelby…
Calhoun lay there, flat on his back, arms and legs splayed, trying to put together the pieces of his body and the pieces of his life, the ground hard and gritty beneath him, the heat of an unknown sun pounding down upon him, his extremities starting to tingle with the resurgence of blood circulating to them. And that was when he remembered Shelby.
Elizabeth Paula Shelby, captain of the good ship Trident, who had been swept away along with him to the frozen world that had for a time, at least promised to be their final resting place. She had been there… with another man. Yes, yes, it was starting to come back to him. A man named Ebozay, leader of a people called… called… what? The…
“Markanians.” The word was barely a whisper between cracked and bleeding lips, and the voice was hardly recognizable as his own. Indeed, he almost thought it was someone else for a moment before he realized with vague dismay that, yes, it was he who had spoken.
Yes, that was right. Ebozay of the Markanians. He had wound up on the wasted, frozen world along with Shelby. Then they had fallen into a crevasse, and Shelby survived, but Ebozay didn’t. Simple as that.
“Shelby” was the next word Calhoun managed to get out, obviously one that was nearer and dearer to his heart than “Markanians” had been. He said it again, a bit louder this time, and had no idea whether anyone was going to respond. It was at that point that he realized he was blind.
No… no, not blind. But his eyes were closed, and absurd as it sounded, he didn’t have the strength to open them. He was trembling, his body seizing up, and he coughed once more. Shelby… Shelby had been unconscious in his arms. He had cradled her, like a groom delicately transporting his bride over the threshold on their wedding night, but there had been nothing remotely romantic about it. She had been unconscious, freezing in his arms, injured from her fall and the frostbite, and he had held her as if he could will his own body heat into her in order to save her.
It hadn’t worked. Naturally it hadn’t worked; it was a ridiculous notion. And yet that was all he could think of to do, as exposed and relatively naked to the elements as they were, with the snow and wind pounding at them as if angry that they had the temerity not to roll over and die instantly upon being faced with their predicament.
Calhoun had spat out curse after curse, cried out against the unfairness of their circumstances, had simply refused to believe that it was going to end there, on some nameless ice world who-knew-where. Certainly after everything they’d been through, that couldn’t be anything approaching an equitable finale for their lives.
“It’s… not fair,” Calhoun grunted.
And a voice from nearby, rough and hard and disinterested in hearing any sort of griping of any sort, said, “Life isn’t fair. Deal with it.”
It had been so long since he had heard that voice that, at first, he didn’t recognize it, except in the way that one does when one thinks, Damn, that voice is familiar, I should really know it. And then it came to him, roared toward him with the ferocity of a star exploding in fiery nova.
“Father…?”he whispered, and that was