Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [76]
No, it wasn’t the communicator that kept the captain here, riveted in place. It was the sight of the colonists, scurrying from one part of the installation to another, escorted by grim-faced security personnel.
By now, of course, Travers had to have ordered the shields up. Picard couldn’t see them, but he was certain that if he hurled a rock at one of the buildings, it would have been deflected short of its target.
The commodore would be trying to communicate with the aliens, to find out the reason for their apparent belligerence—and to see if there were some way to dissuade them from it. But the Gorn wouldn’t respond; their own historical records showed that. They would simply wait until they had assessed and targeted all the colony’s defenses, then go to work.
As the captain watched, spellbound, a young man carried a little girl in his arms as a young woman kept pace with him. With a start, he recognized them as the family he and Julia had seen on one of their walks. Even at a distance, Picard could discern the worried expressions of the adults—their fear for their lives and that of their daughter.
They were right to be worried. The colony’s shields were no match for the Gorn’s weapons systems. Before this day was over, all three of them would be dead. The captain felt his throat constrict at the thought of it.
In all, more than five hundred colonists would fall victim to the Gorn invasion before the slaughter was complete. Once, he had seen them as statistics, to be pitied—but only in the abstract. Now, he saw the pallor of their faces in his mind’s eye, saw the way they looked back at the heavens in their haste—and he felt their dread as surely as if it were his own.
It was impossible not to. One could not be human and ignore what was happening here. One could not be made of flesh and not cry out inwardly at the injustice. These people were innocents, as Lieutenant Harold would later testify. They had committed no offense. They had only come here, to the fringe of known space, to further the Federation’s stores of knowledge.
Would they still have come if they had known that this was to be their fate? To be exterminated by an unknown enemy? To lose their lives without ever understanding why?
Again, Picard replayed Harold’s account in his mind, seeing the man plead for compassion from his enemy even after it was too late. “We tried to surrender. We had women and children, we told them that. But they wouldn’t listen.”
The captain let his forehead fall onto his forearm, which in turn rested on an outcropping of hard rock. He tried to swallow back the guilt. But he couldn’t. It roiled in his belly like a living creature, scratching and clawing to get out.
That was why he couldn’t leave this place, wasn’t it? Because he could have prevented what was happening here. Because it had been within his power to warn the colonists in time, and he had chosen not to.
Picard forced himself to look up again, to fix his gaze on the people whose doom he had sealed. It was the least he could do. If he couldn’t stop it, he would at least bear witness to it, Certainly, he owed the colonists that much.
Even as he came to that decision, the first green disruptor beams began to rain down from the otherwise flawless blue sky. Those who were still in the plaza screamed and ran for the shelter of the nearest building.
A good many of them didn’t make it. They were skewered by the slender bolts of green fire and eaten from within. As the captain watched, his eyes stinging with horror, his guts twisting, the slaughter came on in earnest. Beams of destruction walked the expanse of the plaza, claiming life after life, turning living beings into charred, smoking husks.
Then the disruptor bolts plunged into the buildings themselves, one of them striking a phaser battery. As soon as the beam touched down, the battery erupted in a conflagration of warring energies. A moment later, the other phaser battery went up as well.
The next objective was the sensor analysis section, not far from one of the ruined phaser facilities. As a bolt plummeted