Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [49]
Steve tilted toward the garage, pushing Mark in front of him. Overhead a salvo screamed in from the hills, torturing their eardrums. Ten feet from the garage, Steve shoved Mark in one fierce final dive forward as the salvo blew a hole in the street behind them.
The McClellans sprawled into the shadows together, and both fell headlong into the dimness, propelled the last few feet by the salvo’s hit outside the door. The impact blew down what was left of the front ceiling. Razor-edged steel panels, window glass, and shafts of reinforcement bar speared the entranceway and would’ve happily sliced the men in half if they’d been standing there.
Instinctively shielding his brother from the blast and the hungry shrapnel, Steve twisted at the last moment. The move was a clumsy one. It did his brother no good, but Steve plowed full tilt into a steel tool chest with his right shoulder low. His head cleared the top of the chest, but his shoulder and hip collided with the thick metal crate. Pain bolted through his neck, his shoulder, and the right half of his body. A gray cloud swam before his eyes. Stunned and suddenly lightheaded, he rolled against the tool chest in a haze, then slipped to his side on the oily floor. Felt himself rolling. Had to keep his senses … had to stay conscious …
Was his shoulder dislocated? If something happened to him—
Pain was … stay conscious …
“Steve!”
Mark’s voice. And somebody was pulling him over.
“Steve, you all right?”
Shuddering through the daze that gripped him, Steve blinked into the gray cloud and saw dust … found the outline of Mark against the dimness. Two pairs of hands pulled him to an awkward sitting position.
That was Mark right in front of him … right here, for real. Steve pulled his brother into a crushing embrace and rasped, “Thought you were dead!”
Only half the words cracked out past the knots in his throat.
“Thought you were too,” Mark responded against his ear. “Aw, Steve … what’s going on? Is this a Federation post or not? Who’s bombing us?”
The embrace almost made Steve pass out from pain and relief. His brother had him around the bad shoulder and the gray cloud was pounding at the insides of his skull. Not that he much cared.
“The Cardassians, who else?” A cloud of dust took form beside them out of the crumbling rubble. It was Dan. That tightened British-empire accent put a stylish mockery on his words. “You men are making me cry. I’ll get tears all over my tidy uniform.”
Mark McClellan looked around as Dan crouched next to him. “Leith … you could be run through a curtain press and you still wouldn’t be tidy.”
Dan Leith cracked his photogenic smile through the layer of soot on his cheeks. “This from one of the recruiting-poster brothers. Come here, young man. Are you real?”
In spite of Dan’s wry complaint, there were joyous tears in his eyes as he coiled both arms around Mark McClellan and hugged him shamelessly. The three Starfleet officers, trained by the academy, officers of the fleet escort U.S.S. Durant, hardened by thirteen months’ captivity and torture, paused here in this smoldering metal-sided structure, clinging to each other like lost kids, and pretended for a moment that they were safe.
Just for a moment. These moments were all they had to sustain them, brief flashes of hope when they found each other again, or survived a trauma they shouldn’t have. Rubbing his arm, Steve McClellan winced through the sharp bolts of pain and the unexpected emotions as his brother and their friend absorbed the fact that they were together again, all still alive.
Dan Leith pulled Mark back and put his hands on both of Mark’s shoulders, the way a parent does to a child who’s just fallen down. “Are you hurt? Did the plasterfaced bastards hurt you any?”
“They hurt me a lot,” Mark admitted. “It’s what they do. Where are we? I thought they’d dropped me in a Federation spaceport. Then the ground blew up around me. Is it a spaceport?”
“It’s a fake spaceport,” Dan explained. “The Cardies built it. They’re making us live here and defend it.”
“Fake? But there’s what’s left of