Pathways - Jeri Taylor [196]
Kes exited as quickly as she could. Desperate thoughts swarmed through her mind: Could she try to slip away under cover of night? Could she find a place to hide, to elude Jabin? Might she even find the opening to the tunnel in the dark and somehow get back to her home? But none of those seemed like viable options. She had no idea how to find the rock outcropping that contained the tunnel; the desert was black at night and she’d have no sense of direction.
Could she find a weapon and take her own life before morning? It would be preferable to what Jabin had in store, she was certain. But the Kazon didn’t leave energy weapons lying around for anyone to pick up. And the thought of something crude and uncertain, like a knife, made her queasy enough to know she could never bring herself to use it.
She lay on the rough mat, trying to think of other possibilities. Finally, she decided that she wouldn’t simply submit to Jabin’s torture without a fight. She might hesitate to use a knife on herself, but she’d use one on him in a second. She rose and moved in the darkness to a nearby table, where she knew a knife was used for cutting bread. She fumbled for it, finally felt its sheath, and, running her finger along its jagged blade, wondered how she could hide it on herself until she could use it on Jabin.
It was at that moment that she heard the first explosion.
The outbuilding trembled, and the night air was lit by an orange flash as a thunderous sound impacted painfully on her eardrums. Immediately she heard men shouting, running, calling for help. Frightened but curious, she ran to the window and looked out.
One of the ruins nearby was ablaze. With as little water as was in this encampment, it was unlikely any of it would be used for fire suppression, and the vestige of the ancient Ocampan city would be left to burn to the ground. She felt a small twinge of regret that part of her past would be incinerated in such a fashion. What had caused this conflagration?
No sooner had that question come to mind than she saw an amazing sight: a small alien ship, similar to those of the Ogla, was swooping through the night, weapons firing steadily, yellow beams of energy lancing from ship to ground, producing explosions and fire everywhere. Jabin’s men were running in all directions, shouting at each other, disorganized, trying to evade the brutal weapons fire.
Some of them had reached their own ships, and soon she saw several of them rise from the desert floor and quickly engage the enemy fighter ships. The dark night was now brilliantly alight with the incandescent glow of the weapons fire, and Kes could see well across the floor of the desert.
What she saw was an army of men approaching, running toward their encampment, hand weapons drawn. A loose phalanx of Ogla had drawn a defensive line to meet them, and soon both sides were engaged in fire, and, quickly, hand-to-hand combat.
Kes drew back into the recesses of the small building, trying to grasp the meaning of this turn of events. Who were these attackers? Would they consider her part of the Ogla camp and kill her, too? Or would Jabin’s forces be strong enough to withstand the onslaught and fight them off?
The noise level was escalating, as weapons fire erupted in an endless concatenation, and the shouts and screams of men in battle rose in cacophonous counterpoint. It was worse, somehow, to hear the sounds of the melee without seeing it, and she started to move again to the window when the door burst open and a dark figure exploded into the room.
It was Jabin. He was looking for something, pawing through the detritus on the table, pulling items out of cupboards. Kes shrank back into the corner as far as she could, curling herself into a tight ball so as to be as hard to see as possible.
Jabin finally found what he was looking for—a small hand weapon. No sooner did he have it in hand than another figure hurled itself into the room and directly at Jabin, who grunted under the impact and lost