Planet X - Michael Jan Friedman [69]
By then, they had figured out where the phaser assault was coming from. Seeing the Draa’kon take aim at his broken window, Sovar ducked.
A moment later, both the window and the casing around it blew back into the room, propelled by a storm of emerald fury. Afraid the wall would be the victim of the next barrage, the security officer rolled sideways over tiny pieces of glass and debris to get out of the way.
But there wasn’t any next barrage. Instead, Sovar heard a series of guttural shouts and saw a flash of pale light through the windowless opening. Crawling back to see what was happening in the street, he peered out just in time to watch a Draa’kon get hammered with a bolt of white energy.
For a second or so, the lieutenant didn’t know where the bolt had come from. Then he saw the transformed with the ridged, purple veins lumber back into view on his right, the youth’s fingers extended in the Draa’kons’ direction.
Both of his hands were glowing like small suns.
But, strangely, that wasn’t the quality about the transformed that surprised Sovar the most. The thing that stole his breath and left him numb in the knees was his realization that he knew the poor fellow. Knew him well, in fact. For he saw now that the wretch he had pitied earlier was his own younger brother.
Spurred by a new sense of urgency, the lieutenant fired at another Draa’kon and sent him sprawling. He didn’t take cover again, either. He simply fired again, folding another of the invaders.
The last Draa’kon took careful aim and probably would have killed him with an energy blast, except he found something was grabbing his ankle. Looking down, the invader saw a pair of slender hands tugging at him.
Quite possibly, Shadowcat would have dragged the brute below the level of the street and left him there, but that wasn’t Sovar’s style. Before the mutant could carry out whatever scheme she had in mind, he stunned the Draa’kon with a burst from his phaser.
As if that were her cue, Shadowcat floated up through the surface of the street, brushing her hands against one another. The lieutenant recognized it as a human gesture of accomplishment.
“We came, we saw, we conquered,” the mutant quipped.
However, Sovar wasn’t in a jesting mood. Climbing through the opening where his window had been, he regarded the transformed who had been his brother—who was now kneeling in the street, attending to a comrade suffering from exhaustion. It made the lieutenant’s stomach tighten to see his kin in such a hideous state.
“Erid … ?” he said tentatively.
Surprised by the use of his name, the younger Sovar looked up and found its source. For a moment, he stared at his older sibling, as if finding it hard to believe he was standing there.
Then his mouth twisted with hatred. “Get out of here!” he bellowed. “Leave us alone!”
The lieutenant winced at the venom in his brother’s words. The Draa’kon’s blasts couldn’t have hurt much worse, he told himself.
“You need help,” he told Erid. “All of you.”
“We need nothing from the likes of you!” his brother rasped.
Then, as the security officer watched, his brother picked his friend up in his arms and started to walk away with her.
Chapter Twenty-five
CRUSHER FOUND PICARD on the bridge. He was sitting in the command center, gazing warily at the image of the Draa’kon vessel on the viewscreen.
With Riker and Troi gone, the seats on either side of the captain were empty. As the doctor sat down in one of them, Picard glanced at her.
“They’re all stable,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “Except Archangel, of course.”
That drew the captain’s interest. “Oh?”
“I’m not sure why,” Crusher told him, “but he’s recuperating a lot more quickly than I expected.” She paused. “Did you read my report on him?”
“I did,” Picard replied, turning back to the screen.
“Then you know Archangel has something unusual in his blood. Not a healing factor, like Wolverine’s, but some kind of techno-organic material.”