Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [54]
Malcolm watched for several moments as blows rained down on his enemy, relishing the fact that the usually noisy teen was barely able to make any coherent sounds as he was beaten.
Finally, he waded into the fray, and landed more than a few blows on his erstwhile torturer. He felt his knuckles break open as he hit the jaw of the boy who had nearly drowned him, and in a flash of insight, understood that the painful reality of fisticuffs was significantly different than what the books, holofilms, and his own very active imagination had led him to expect.
“Take him out on the pier,” Malcolm said, trying to keep his voice sounding strong and confident.
He heard Leslie crying and pleading as he was dragged out onto the darkened pier toward an empty section that lay between a pair of tall boats. If anyone on the decks had heard the sounds, they weren’t showing their faces or raising their voices to object.
The group neared the end of the dock, and Morris’s pleading became more frantic, becoming a high-pitched, keening wail.
Malcolm struck him again, then again, in the face and the stomach, feeling satisfaction as Leslie’s body clenched inward.
“Should we throw him in?” one of the older boys asked, and Malcolm could hear the unfettered, stupid glee in the other boy’s voice.
“No!” Morris gasped through the blood and tears that stained his florid face. “I can’t swim!” He struggled to lift his lolling head, involuntarily flinching at the blows that he knew were imminent.
Malcolm grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up.
“Neither can I,” Malcolm said, looking into Morris’s frightened, darting eyes. “Not anymore.”
He was going to push him over the side of the pier, the boy who had almost killed him out of sheer, brutal pleasure.
And then, despite the pier’s dim lighting and the moonless night, Malcolm saw his own reflection in the wet, terrified eyes of Leslie Morris.
In that instant, he knew that he was no better than the object of his hatred and resentment, and that his actions were only serving to perpetuate a vicious, ugly cycle. The Ouroboros serpent swallowing its own tail.
He exhaled heavily, throwing his head back as the anger and violence and rage poured out of him, into the dark cloudless skies above him.
He saw a light in those skies, far away.
A star. Or a starship, orbiting high above.
Better than this.
Better than us.
He turned to one of the thugs. “Take him to the hospital,” he said firmly, ignoring their surprised stares. “He’s been hurt enough.”
As they dragged their hapless victim away, Malcolm Reed sat alone on the edge of the pier. He listened to the night-enfolded waters of the River Soar as they lapped with a gentle rhythm against the pilings and boats. Staring out across the river’s gray, fog-shrouded expanse, he could sense the water’s desire to embrace him once again, felt its overwhelming need to consume him.
But above him, dominating the river and the sea into which it flowed, spread openness and infinity.
Air. And beyond that, space.
Limitless possibility.
And maybe even redemption.
Courier Ship Helkez Torvo
Standing in the corridor of a commandeered alien vessel, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed wistfully remembered his past. And he wondered why it was that space itself was now what seemed to be consuming him, drowning him.
And not for the first time, he wondered whether becoming the very threat that the Xindi evidently feared so much was truly the best way to defend the people of the planet Earth.
Ten
Shuttlepod Two
THE LITTLE AUXILIARY CRAFT arced forward through the cloud of dust and debris, her impulse engines running at half power as her pilot guided her toward the strike team’s quarry.
Chang had to admit that Mayweather’s plan seemed to be working well, at least so far. The ensign had electromagnetically polarized the shuttlepod’s hull so that it would attract significant quantities of the dust cloud’s abundant ionized granules and debris of both the organic and