The Brave and the Bold Book Two - Keith R. A. DeCandido [52]
The visions of artistic glory that danced in J’lang’s head were suppressed by the site of the various Klingons moving away from the blast site. Just as they did, his intercom beeped.
“J’lang,” said the voice of his assistant, Perrih, “we’re about to start the blasting. Do you want to come down to the observation room?”
“I can see it fine from here, Perrih. Tell Dargh he can blow up the hill whenever he wants.” Dargh was the engineer the local government on Narendra had sent to oversee the mechanical aspects of the memorial. J’lang had found him to be prickly and irritating, with beady little eyes that never looked at the same thing for more than half a second. He seemed to have an endless supply of questions about inconsequential minutae that were not J’lang’s concern as an artist. So he left Perrih to deal with him. That was an assistant’s purpose, after all.
The alternative was to deal with him directly, which would almost certainly lead to J’lang having to kill Dargh, and the project was already behind schedule as it was….
Within a few minutes, a most satisfying explosion erupted from the hill as the triceron ripped through the dirt and grass and rock, pulverizing them to their component atoms and spreading them to the wind.
J’lang had never cared much for explosions—they usually resulted in damaged artwork—but he had to admit to admiring this one. And damn his beady little eyes, but Dargh had done his job superlatively well. When the dust and smoke cleared, J’lang saw a near-perfect L-shaped hole in the hill of just the right size. Oh, the edges would need smoothing, and the surface needed to be flattened and paved, but it was exactly what J’lang needed to start with.
The other thing he noticed as the smoke cleared was the small black box.
Then, suddenly, a sharp pain sliced through J’lang’s skull.
Once, when he was a boy, serving as one of many apprentices to the great sculptor Dolmorr, J’lang had accidentally turned on a welder while it was facing his arm. The white-hot agony that shot through his forearm and wrist was greater than any pain J’lang had thought it was possible to feel. Decades later, he still sometimes felt phantoms of that pain when he closed his eyes.
The agony he felt now was a thousand times worse than that.
I AM FREE! AT LAST, AFTER AN ETERNITY OF TORMENT, I AM FREE!
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It only increased the pain in J’lang’s skull.
Suddenly, the pain vanished. And with it, most of his other senses. He could no longer feel his body around him, no longer hear the hum of the generator that kept power in the prefabricated structure, no longer smell the plate of racht and bowl of grapok sauce that he’d abandoned an hour ago but never disposed of.
He could still see, however. And what he saw was the black box. He could not control his movements, so he could not take his eyes off it.
Then, minutes later, he saw several Klingons moving as one—indeed, moving in more perfect formation than any soldiers J’lang had ever seen—toward that black box.
And all J’lang could think was that the project was about to fall considerably further behind….
Patience. That had always been Malkus’s watchword. He knew that all he needed to do was not rush anything, and it would come to him. Pressure brought sloppiness. When rebels started agitating on Alphramick, he simply waited for them to make a mistake. True, there was a cost in the lives of his soldiers, but they had already pledged their lives to Malkus, and he could always get new ones. But, by waiting, the rebels exposed themselves for the disorganized fools they were, and Malkus was able to crush them far more spectacularly than he would have had he rushed things.
When he had Aidulac supervise the creation of his Instruments, he did not give her any kind of deadline. He knew that in order for her to truly accomplish