No Surrender - Jeff Mariotte [14]
The one in front—a Kursican with only one eye and a network of scars across the uneven orange flesh of his face—took a couple of steps forward. He started to lose his balance, catching himself on the wall.
“Help us …” he said plaintively. “Can you help us?”
Looking past him, Corsi realized that most of them were injured in some way—bruised and battered, red and green and magenta splotches of blood spattered here and there. Some of them limped or walked with crutches, broken bones showing through torn flesh. They were in no shape for a fight, she saw. She put away her phaser.
“You were right, Doctor,” she admitted. “Let’s get that infirmary up and running.”
* * *
“Gomez to Gold.”
Gold looked up from the fuel consumption report. “Go ahead, Commander.”
Three hours had passed since contact had been made with the first group of prisoners. Nurse Sandy Wetzel and medical technician John Copper had been transported over to help Dr. Lense in the prison platform’s infirmary—or what was left of it, anyway. More groups of prisoners had been located and some basic triage performed, with the most badly injured getting priority spots in line for treatment. Some were beamed to the da Vinci sickbay to be treated by Emmett, the Emergency Medical Hologram. Duffy, Frnats, Hawkins, Drew, Stevens, and Corsi had made a sweep of the prison levels and found numerous dead in addition to the injured. Gold had kept up to date as much as he’d been able.
“We’ve been taking roll over here, as it were,” Sonya said.
“Still no prison staff?”
“No, sir. Only prisoners.”
“How very odd.”
“Yes, sir. Extremely. But there’s one other thing that’s odd, sir.”
“What’s that?”
“Either intact, wounded, or dead, every prisoner has been identified—except one.”
Gold had a feeling he already knew where this was going, but she would tell it in her own way. Rachel had a brother like that—Joshua, a doctor back on Earth. He told great stories at family gatherings, but he withheld the punch lines for so long Gold wanted to throttle him sometimes.
“Sir, the missing prisoner is Augustus Bradford.”
* * *
The Kursican Regent was named Aulyffke. The image on the da Vinci viewscreen was that of a squat, toad-like fellow with a voice like ground glass and skin almost as orange as a pumpkin. He sat in an oversized chair in an ornate room of his palace. At his side stood his Chief Magistrate, Juhstraffe. Behind them, extravagant draperies in shades of yellows and oranges clashed, to Gold’s eyes, with their skin color.
For his part, Gold was flanked by Bart Faulwell, the da Vinci’s language and cryptography specialist, and Carol Abramowitz, the ship’s cultural specialist. She had been briefing him for the past couple of hours on Kursican culture and mores, but the more he learned about them, the more he thought they sounded like an incredible race of jerks.
Aulyffke wasn’t proving him wrong.
“You have lost the most heinous criminal on the Plat,” he accused.
“Excuse me, Regent Aulyffke,” Gold replied. Bart had coached him on the proper guttural translation of the name. “But I haven’t ‘lost’ anybody. By the time we got here, the entire prison staff, our own ambassador, other visitors, and this one particular prisoner, were already gone.”
Carol whispered in his ear. “I wouldn’t stress the fact that they did nothing to help the situation,” she reminded him. “He won’t take it well.”
Gold nodded—imperceptibly, he hoped, to the Kursicans.
“Nonetheless, you are there, close at hand, while we are here on our planet,” Aulyffke went on. “It seems like you would have more opportunity to find these missing individuals—most especially including the terrorist Bradford—than we do.”
“It seems to me,” Gold argued, “that during the time it took us to get here, they could have gone anywhere. For all we know, they’re right there on Kursican with you.”
“They are not,” Aulyffke insisted.
“Be that as it may,” Gold said, “we have done what we came here to do, which