Survivors - Jean Lorrah [33]
“He said she’s tough,” said the other voice. “Damn it-I’m gonna limp for a week!”
“Yeah, well, me ribs’ll be sportin’ a nice bruise, but you don’t hear me complaining. “
“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”
Yar’s captor laughed, and shifted her. “She’s heavy fer such a little thing.”
“Want me t’take her?” The other man didn’t sound very eager.
“Nah-we’re here.”
In a few more steps, Yar felt a sharp turn, and the sense of entering a room. “We got ‘er!” her captor said brightly, and dumped her unceremoniously to the floor.
“Get that thing off her head!” a new voice exploded in fury.
Only it wasn’t a new voice-
“Okay, okay-didn’t want her t’see the way, did we?” protested the one who had carried her, pulling off the hood covering Yar’s head.
In disbelieving déjŕ vu she found herself nose to toes with shining black boots, then managed to turn onto her back, her eyes following long legs up, farther up, past a torso clad in black and gray, to a cruel and angry face staring down at her. The expression was the same one seared into her memory from the last time she had seen …
… the face of Darryl Adin.
Chapter Five
ENSIGN TASHA YAR could not imagine anybody in the universe being happier than she was. She had graduated from Starfleet Academy with honors, and her first training cruise was such a success that the Starbound had been given a genuine, responsible assignment on its way back to Earth: carrying a consignment of dilithium crystals from the cracking station on Tarba to Starfleet’s shipyard on Mars. But it was not just the success of her new career that had Yar wondering if the artificial gravity had ceased to function.
After the utter misery of the first fifteen years of her life, she had barely adjusted to the idea of a hopeful future when Federation Immigration threatened to send her back to the hell-hole she had escaped from. Historians discovered in records no one on the planet remembered that the turning point on New Paris had come when it seceded in absentia from the Federation it blamed for abandoning the colony. Not knowing about the wars and technological breakdowns going on back on Earth, the government of New Paris seceded in order not to be bound by the very laws whose abandonment led to Earth’s worst war and the Post-Atomic Horrors. Ironically, New Paris took longer than its founding planet to sink into degradation … but the eventual result was similar, and unlike Earth, New Paris never recovered.
But Dare found Starfleet legal counsel to present Yar’s case. In the end, though, it was neither the legal counsel’s skills nor Dare’s eloquent descriptions of the life he had rescued “the child” from that won her the right to stay on Earth: the most powerful druglord on New Paris, whom the Federation perforce had to recognize as spokesman for his planet, simply didn’t want her! “What’s another starving girl-child? You want her, you keep her-in fact, take any of the rest of the strays that want to go with you!”
Only after she was at last secure in her new life could Yar begin to mold herself into something civilized, to achieve her dream of attending Starfleet Academy. The struggle merely to survive was over. Whole new vistas opened to her.
At last, it seemed, fate had turned a kindly face toward the young woman it had previously scorned. When Darryl Adin returned to Starfleet Academy for a refresher course in the latest security techniques, just as her final training placed Yar in the same courses, they had rediscovered one another. The difference in their ages, so important when he was a Starfleet officer and she a terrified adolescent, was insignificant now that Yar was almost twenty-three. Inevitably, they had fallen in love.
Nor could they have chosen a better time for it. In the past, Starfleet marriages were risky endeavors, often doomed in the attempt to balance two careers, forcing choices between refused promotions or long separations. Either way, domestic pressures added to an already stressful lifestyle resulted in an unconscionably high rate of broken marriages.