Pathways - Jeri Taylor [36]
He quickly realized that wasn’t the way to dispatch a Cardassian. He couldn’t get his hands around the wide bands of cartilage. He gave one quick chop to the throat and heard a heartening grunt of pain, and then, using his grip on the man’s neck cords, let out a huge yell and began hammering his adversary’s head against the rock.
The Cardassian kicked at him, raked his face with his hands, thumbs probing his eyes, but Chakotay kept screaming and pounding, smashing the man’s skull against stone, all the rage of his pain driving him, ignoring the sudden pressure he felt on his eyeball, twisting his head to elude it, pounding, pounding, remembering his violated home, his parents, the friends of his childhood.
He wasn’t sure how long the man was still before he realized it. He dropped the neck cords and shoved himself off the Cardassian, whose head lolled awkwardly to one side, the back of his head a matted sponge of blood and bone.
Exhausted, dizzy, perspiring, gasping for breath, Chakotay put his hands on his knees and bent over, needing blood to his brain. Things stopped spinning and he slowly stood upright, hearing once more the strange plaintive cry of the trapped snake. It was hungry, and had been denied a potential meal. How long would the Cardassians keep it down there, starving?
He knew others might have been alerted, but he wasn’t going to resist the sudden compulsion. He stripped the Cardassian of clothing, and then dragged his body to the pit and rolled it in. There was a sudden cessation of the serpentine squealing, and Chakotay peered over the edge.
The wrist beacon was still illuminating the pit, in which the massive reptile was slowly entwining the Cardassian’s body in its coils, not realizing that its work had already been done. No matter. In time, it would feed.
He moved to the first isotane canister and activated it, used his tricorder to insure that the chain reaction had begun, and then touched his combadge. “Chakotay to Liberty. One to beam up.”
In the seconds before dematerialization, it struck him that in Starfleet’s mind, he was now not only an outlaw, but a murderer.
Afterward, there was no particular remorse for the act, which, though passionate, was in self-defense. But what enveloped him instead was far more profound, and far worse.
He had somewhat expected that taking a Cardassian life would expiate the rage and grief that he felt after the destruction of his home village. He had promised vengeance, and had taken it. A debt had been paid.
But there was no satisfaction in it. Instead, the leaden weight of an awful realization had lodged in his heart, crowding out everything else, spreading, eating like a cancer through his mind, consuming everything.
His last words to his father had been spoken in anger.
Kolopak had died with the memory of his son’s furious rejection of everything he stood for. His soul had been burdened by the venom of Chakotay’s anger, his death tainted by that estrangement. His father believed in an afterlife— was he now doomed to carry that last awful moment with his son throughout eternity?
It was unbearable. Chakotay moved in a daze, thinking of nothing else, feeling nothing else, stunned and distraught. He announced that they would take a brief respite from their guerrilla actions, and they put down at one of the secret strongholds the Maquis had established on friendly planets. Chakotay shut himself in his quarters under the pretense of scrutinizing future plans, but in fact he was in the grip of a paralyzing apathy, unable to wrench his mind from the overwhelming guilt that had enveloped him.
Seska, of course, tried desperately to draw him out, preparing food for him herself and bringing it to his quarters, where it usually went uneaten. She’d even scoured the planet for edible mushrooms to make him a soup which he favored, certain he would show some enthusiasm for her efforts.
She entered the spartan quarters of the stronghold and put the tureen down in front of him, lifted