The Battle of Betazed - Charlotte Douglas [39]
“Let’s head for the road,” Vaughn ordered quietly. “We’ll seem less suspicious if we show ourselves to the patrol. Deanna, if they stop us, you do the talking. You’re more familiar with the planet than the rest of us. But everyone remain alert. If they give us trouble, we’ll have to take them out.”
Take them out?
The idea of hand-to-hand combat with the Jem’Hadar wiped Deanna’s mind suddenly blank, and she could recall nothing Vaughn had taught her. She could only hope that he’d drilled her so thoroughly, she would react immediately and instinctively if the time came.
The group made their way along one of the furrows, their boots gouging the earth and filling the air with the pungent scent of rich loam. In the peaceful natural setting, Deanna would have found the interstellar war raging in the heavens around them hard to believe if she hadn’t been a veteran of so many conflicts.
Searching the skies, she prayed she’d been wrong in suspecting the Defiant had come under attack. The Daronan atmosphere had revealed no evidence of a conflict—no massive explosions, no trails of smoking debris, but that meant nothing.
With Deanna in the lead, the away team stepped from the field onto the hard-surfaced road. None of them glanced toward the Jem’Hadar patrol fast approaching from the east. With luck, Deanna thought, her team could continue west toward Jarkana without drawing attention. A group of farmers, clustered around a wagon drawn by sturdy Daronan oxen, trudged ahead of her. If she and the rest of the team hurried, they could blend in with the crowd.
“Halt!” a harsh voice behind them ordered.
Deanna stopped and turned. Beverly paused on one side of her, Data and Vaughn on the other. Deanna caught sight of the commander and blinked in surprise. If she hadn’t known better, she would have sworn Vaughn was a changeling. The tall officer had shrunk inside his coat, seemingly losing inches in height, his posture suddenly projecting only feeble harmlessness.
She had little time to appreciate Vaughn’s metamorphosis before she found herself almost toe-to-toe with the Jem’Hadar leader. The members of his patrol, weapons drawn and aimed at the away team, waited a few feet away.
“What are you doing here?” the patrol leader demanded.
“Picking cavat.” At Deanna’s first up-close confrontation with a Jem’Hadar, she was struck foremost by the immensity of the soldier, and next by the fierceness of his appearance. His cobbled skin, pierced with protruding bones like rows of teeth, reminded her of pebbles on a rocky beach. With his ashen complexion, gray uniform, and huge size, she figured fighting a real Jem’Hadar would seem the equivalent of attacking a small mountain.
His emotions and those of his group bombarded her, and the soldiers made no attempt to hide them. She sensed dedication to the Founders, contempt for their foes, and an eagerness for combat. She hoped she could defuse the last.
“The cavat in this field is harvested by machines,” the Jem’Hadar leader said with suspicion. “You don’t belong here. Present your ID chips.”
Deanna’s mind whirled. If she couldn’t come up with a convincing explanation, her team would have to fight its way out. Vaughn might be able take down one of the soldiers, if he could reach one before being shot, and Data with his superhuman strength could probably handle two, but she wasn’t convinced she and Beverly together could disable the fourth without their weapons.
Estimating how long she would need to retrieve the phaser concealed under her coat, Deanna pointed to Vaughn, who was staring at his feet. “See my senile father there?” She shifted her attention to Data. “And my brainless brother? If we had brought our IDs with us, they would have lost theirs. My sister,” she nodded to Beverly, “and I do well just to keep up with these two simpletons, much less keep track of bureaucratic red tape. If you wish to follow us into the city, however, I’ll retrieve our credentials