Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [82]
“Really? What does that smell like?”
He was annoyed by the flippancy in her voice. “It smells like chicken. What do you think it smells like?”
“I don’t know, Mac!” she said with a frustrated wave of her arms. “I never noticed blood having a particular scent, and death is more concept to me than something definable by one’s nose.”
He took a step toward her, looking down at her, and he felt a looming darkness behind his eyes. “That, Eppy, is because you’ve never been up to your elbows in it.”
“Screw you, Calhoun,” she shot back. She faced him, her hands on her hips. “Maybe I wasn’t a teenage warlord, hacking my way through corpses stacked five feet high, but I had a starship and crew dying around me when I fought the Borg, so don’t tell me what I know and don’t know, all right?”
“Fair enough,” he said mildly. “In that case, the smell in the air should be slightly familiar to you.”
She took a deep breath, then admitted slowly, “It is. Slightly.”
“Come on.”
“Where?”
He pointed to the Keep. “There.”
“Why there?”
Shrugging, Calhoun asked, “Do you have a better idea?”
“Good point,” she said.
They started walking. Somewhere along the way, Calhoun reached over and took Shelby’s hand. It felt warm and comforting, and not only that, but he couldn’t believe how quickly and thoroughly he’d recovered from near death. All the discomfort was forgotten, the paralysis gone from his feet and fingers. Even more remarkable was Shelby’s recovery. It had seemed to Calhoun that she’d been perhaps a few heartbeats away from death, and yet now here she was, as hale and hearty as he was, walking at a brisk distance-eating stride that easily matched his.
They crossed the plain, approaching the mountainous area where the Keep was ensconced. Little clouds of dust were kicked up under their feet, and the dirt crunched beneath their boot soles. “The sun’s setting,” he said abruptly.
She blinked, apparently surprised by the gravity of his pronouncement. “So? Suns do that. At least once a day, as I recall.”
But Calhoun shook his head, racking his brain, trying to remember. “There’s… more to it, though. I… remember the sun starting to set… I think… didn’t see it through, though. And… I know I didn’t I see it rise… so how…?”
“I don’t know, Mac. I don’t know why a gateway would drop us on Xenex, I don’t know why I’m feeling so completely recovered in such a short period of time…”
So she had noticed…
“… but what I do know,” and she squeezed his hand, “is that I’m with you. And that’s the most important thing. Together we can handle just about anything.”
He smiled at that. The vote of confidence seemed ever-so-slightly naďve on her part, but he certainly wasn’t going to say that. Instead he appreciated the sentiment for what it was.
Calhoun was about to reply to her when a sudden explosion tore the air.
It froze Shelby and Calhoun in their tracks and they looked ahead to the Keep, eyes wide, as one of the lower sections suddenly erupted in flames. People were running, screaming, shouting defiance. Another section of the Keep exploded, and people fell off the parapets, arms pinwheeling in futility as if they were hoping they could grab hand-holds from the very air.
“Come on!” shouted Calhoun, yanking on Shelby’s hand.
She stayed where she was, looking at him incredulously. “You want to head toward that?!” she demanded. “You’re crazy!”
“We have to!” he told her.
“Forget it!” she said. “We’re not budging from !”
Calhoun heard it, smelled it before he actually saw it: a giant, flaming mass of burning slag, descending from overhead, a misfire from a catapult that was falling well short of its target namely the Keep. It was, however, descending right toward the two Starfleet officers, and it was too large, nowhere to run, and even as Calhoun yanked on Shelby’s arm to try and get clear of it, he knew in his heart that it was too late.
The slag struck them, crushing their bodies and obliterating them, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.
And so died Mackenzie Calhoun and Elizabeth Shelby, without ever having a chance to see the