Spirit Walk_ Enemy of My Enemy (Book 2) - Christie Golden [86]
A sigh. “What a mess. Lights,” called Crell Moset.
Kaz leaped. It was pathetically easy, almost an anticlimax after the years of dreaming of this, both as a living being and as a collection of memories contained in a symbiont. Moset was a scientist, not trained in combat, and he went down far too easily for the moment to be satisfying.
“Dr. Kaz,” he gasped.
“Not Doctor,” Gradak hissed, his face within a centimeter of the alarmed Cardassian’s. He pressed the coolness of the phaser to Moset’s throat. “Gradak Kaz.”
“I—I’m sorry, I don’t recognize that name.” The Butcher’s voice had crawled higher in fear. It was sweet to hear.
“Of course you don’t,” drawled Gradak. “Nor would you know the name Vallia Kaz. Bajoran. Beautiful. Dead.”
“Oh, dear,” said Moset.
“Yes, now you’re starting to understand,” Gradak said. He ran the muzzle of the phaser along the curves of the Butcher’s brow ridges, along the thick tendons that stood out from his neck. Almost a lover’s touch. And indeed, there was rapture and delight for Kaz in the gesture. He was enjoying this with a savage pleasure that thrilled him.
“You experimented on Vallia, and killed her. You killed hundreds. There’s a reason you were dubbed the Butcher of Bajor.”
“It was necessary for my research,” Moset began. “Research that would benefit millions.”
Gradak uttered a blistering oath and shoved the phaser under Moset’s chin and tightened his finger. Moset whimpered—actually whimpered—like an animal.
“The thing that makes this frustrating,” said Kaz in an almost conversational tone, “is that you really believe that. You don’t exult in your evil. You hang on to this ludicrous notion that somehow what you did was all right. That the end truly justified the means. That finding a cure for a disease made it all right to murder hundreds in the attempt. That turning innocent people into monsters and foisting powers onto them that they couldn’t possibly handle was a good thing. You wanted your own little group of sycophants, didn’t you?”
“No! I wanted to show that we can change, can evolve—”
“You named the littlest one after your father, Moset. The most malleable, the most impressionable, the easiest to teach to love you. What do you think that means?”
“I—I—”
“You’re not stupid, I’ll give you that, but you are blind. Can’t you see? You can’t change how history will judge you!” He was screaming now, spittle flying off his lips to splatter in Moset’s face. “You can’t make it all right! But on some level you know what you’ve done, and that’s why you’re so hungry for acceptance and approval. You know you’ve committed atrocities and you want to atone, but you won’t really let yourself see it. So around and around you go, Moset, like a dog chasing its tail, craving a pat on the head, but until you can really comprehend what you’ve done you can’t do anything but go in circles.”
Something flickered in Moset’s eyes, something haunted and unspeakably sad. Elation shuddered through Kaz.
“I really was trying to save lives,” Moset whispered. Suddenly his face crumpled and he began to sob. “I’m a healer…I’m not a butcher…I want to make things better for everyone….”
Kaz pressed the phaser in more firmly and tightened the trigger.
“Do it,” gasped Moset, tears streaming from his eyes down into his ears. “I don’t want to look inside anymore…I don’t want to see this….”
Jarem Kaz braced for the inevitable. He had known what he was doing when he surrendered the Kaz body to Gradak; had known that the man was out for revenge—Moset’s life for Vallia’s. That Jarem would have to live with the consequences. He’d accepted that, and waited for the sound of phaser fire.
It didn’t come.
Gradak Kaz spat in Moset’s face and rocked back on his heels, still keeping the phaser trained on the Cardassian. Moset blinked and tried to focus.
“You’re—you’re not going to kill me?” he whispered.
Grinning, Kaz shook his head. “I came for revenge,” he said, “and I got it. I held up a mirror and you finally caught