Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [212]
Jomar stopped in his tracks. “Is something wrong?”
Picard declined to answer the question. “Put Santana down and back away,” he said.
The Kelvan hesitated for just a moment. Then he knelt, placed the colonist on the curved surface and retreated from the spot.
Picard pointed to Santana with his phaser. “Gilaad,” he said, “make sure she’s still alive.”
Ben Zoma tucked his weapon away and moved to the woman’s side. Then he felt her neck for a pulse and looked back at his friend.
“She’s still with us, all right. I—”
Before he could get another word out, the tube filled with a hideous, high-pitched scream and Jomar began to change again. Faster than Picard would have thought possible, his human attributes melted away and a swarm of long, dark tentacles took their place.
Picard raised his phaser and aimed it at the center of the monstrosity. But before he could press the trigger, he felt something clammy close around his hand. With a twisting motion that nearly broke his wrist, it wrenched the weapon out of his grasp.
By then, Ben Zoma had drawn his phaser—but he wasn’t quick enough either. As Picard watched helplessly, Jomar snatched the man’s phaser away with one tentacle and lashed him across the face with another.
Ben Zoma crumpled, stunned or worse. Picard started forward to help his friend, but a moist, black tentacle grabbed hold of his ankle and a half-dozen others knocked him off his feet.
Looking up, he saw a pair of tiny, gray orbs glaring at him above an obscenely pink maw. He tried to crawl away, but he was still held fast by the ankle. Unable to escape, he watched helplessly as a swarm of tentacles slithered toward his throat.
Picard fought some of them away, but he couldn’t fight all of them. He felt a tentacle snare one of his wrists, then the other. And finally, as he growled out loud with the effort to free himself, he felt a third tentacle begin to close around his throat.
The Kelvan’s grip tightened and Picard’s breath was cut off. He tried to claw at the muscular piece of flesh around his windpipe, but his wrists were too well constrained. Deprived of oxygen while his exertions made his need for it even more urgent, he saw darkness closing in on him.
Ben Zoma, the second officer thought. His friend was his only chance now—if he was still alive.
Suddenly, there was a flash of red light. Phaser light—Picard was certain of it. But Jomar’s tentacle didn’t let go.
Then he saw the flash again, even brighter than before—and this time, it had some effect. The Kelvan seemed to stagger under the impact and lose his grip on his victim’s wrists and ankle.
A third flash, and Jomar lost his stranglehold as well. Picard slumped to the floor and drew in a deep, rasping breath.
His instincts told him to run—to get out of range of the Kelvan’s deadly tentacles. But he resisted the impulse and did something else entirely. He sought out his captor’s face—if it could indeed be called a face—and drove his fist into it as hard as he could.
The yellow eyes blinked and the pink maw let out a blood-chilling scream—not out of pain, Picard thought, as much as surprise. Apparently, the last thing Jomar had expected was a punch in the nose.
It threw the Kelvan off-balance and made him that much more vulnerable to what followed—an intense, red stream of directed energy that got through the mess of dark tentacles and hammered Jomar’s grotesque torso.
The Kelvan collapsed, his long, snakelike limbs flying in every direction. He looked disoriented, his maw opening and closing, his gray orbs half-lidded with dark flesh—but not yet out for the count.
Then yet another blast battered his slimy black head…and it lolled to the bottom of the tube, senseless.
Picard kicked away a tentacle that lay across his foot and turned to his rescuer. He was eager to thank his friend Ben Zoma for his dramatic and timely phaser assault.
Then he saw that it wasn’t his friend at all. It was Pug Joseph, staring wide-eyed at Jomar with