Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [87]
The captain reached for Julia’s ankle and pulled, toppling her, removing her from harm’s way. Dropping his rifle, he reached for her with his other hand as well, to pull her to him, to comfort her in her terror.
Then he saw the green energies swirling around her leg, and he instinctively pulled both his hands back. Julia fell to the floor, breathless in her agony, gripped tight by the knowledge of what was happening to her. As the disruptor field enveloped her, picking her apart like a flock of maniacal birds, she raised her eyes to Picard’s.
“Jean-Luc,” she blurted, reaching out for him. Defying his instincts, defying the nightmarish forces that devoured her, he reached back.
But where her hand had been, there was nothing left. And when he looked again into her eyes, there was only hellfire looking back at him. Then that too diminished, and Julia was gone.
In the wake of that sight, the captain couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t even see for the tears that filled his eyes. The only sense that worked was his hearing, and that was consumed with the thunder of the Gorn horde.
“Hill!” rumbled a voice nearby.
Picard turned. Blinking away his tears, he saw Commodore Travers, a nasty gash in his temple oozing blood. The commodore took him by the shoulders and shook him.
“Come on,” he rasped. “Damn it, man, it’s down to you and me!”
The captain nodded and sought out his phaser rifle. Finding it, he raised it and sighted on the nearest grouping of Gorn. And seeing their serpentlike faces, the inhuman savagery dripping from their fangs and lighting their eyes, he almost pressed the trigger.
But in the end, he didn’t. Because, first and last, he was Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Enterprise. And no matter what cruelties he had witnessed this day, he could not mar the future.
It proved his undoing. Together, the Gorn trained their weapons on Picard and fired. The last thing he saw was the white-hot fury of their converging disruptor beams.
Picard had braced himself for the hideous sensation of being plucked apart by the Gorn’s disruptor fire. But as he knelt there, he was surprised to see that they had missed him somehow. And that wasn’t all that surprised him.
He was no longer in the wreckage of the colony’s administration building. He was somewhere else, someplace that looked vaguely familiar. And then he guessed where that was—and what had happened to him.
Judging by the look of the chamber he found himself in, he was back on the alien space station. And the flash he had seen, the white-hot flare that he had mistaken for the blaze of disruptor energies, was nothing more than the aura given off by the aliens’ transporter process.
He had no sooner come to that conclusion than the door on the far side of the chamber slid up—and revealed Commander Data standing in the corridor outside. The android beckoned, making no mention of the captain’s torn and dirtied garb.
“There is no time to explain, sir,” he said, his voice tinged with just the slightest hint of urgency. “We must get to the shuttle.”
The shuttle? Picard wondered. Why not the Enterprise itself? Then he realized: the Enterprise would have been needed to search for him.
“I’m coming,” the captain promised. And he traversed the chamber in several quick, long strides.
Once out in the corridor, Picard could see why time was of the essence. Taking note of the light patterns that ran helter-skelter along the length of the bulkheads and back again, he realized that the station was caught in the throes of another mounting power surge. And if he’d had any doubt, the thrumming in the deck confirmed it.
“This way,” said the android, leading the captain down the corridor. As Picard looked about, it seemed to him that they were in the area between the control room and the airlock—headed in the direction of the latter.