The Children of Hamlin - Carmen Carter [53]
“Tomas!” cried his mother. “You go too far.”
Her son flushed. “I’m very sorry, Mother. It must have been the blow to my head.” He edged his way out of the barn as he apologized.
Taking advantage of the diversion, Wesley and Dnnys scampered up a tall ladder to the hayloft. From that dizzying height the concerns of the adults below seemed just as puzzling, but far less important.
“So what was that all about?” asked Wesley. “What was he apologizing for?”
Dnnys mumbled an unintelligible reply as they climbed over tightly corded bales of hay and waded through loose straw. Dust raised by their boots tickled their noses and set them to sneezing. They reached the hay doors and pushed them open, taking in great gulps of the clear air outside.
“So tell me,” Wesley asked again, after they had taken a seat, dangling their legs over the edge of the loft. A late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the barnyard below.
“We don’t talk about those things.”
“What things?”
To Wesley’s surprise, his friend turned bright red.
Dnnys took a deep breath, then whispered the answer. “You know, religious things.”
“Oh.” Wesley was careful not to show any sign of amusement. His exposure to a wide variety of cultures had taught him to respect an equally wide variety of taboos, and this prohibition was certainly no stranger than others. He changed the conversation to spare his friend any further embarrassment. “When does the decanting start?”
Dnnys stuck a straw between his teeth and leaned back onto his elbows. “Tomorrow morning,” he said glumly, as if uttering a death sentence.
Wesley understood. Once the animals were released into the holodeck, Dnnys would lose his excuse for working in the cargo deck. Which also meant losing his cover for roaming freely about the Enterprise. “Listen, if there’s anything I can do … “
“There is,” said Dnnys. “I have a favor to ask. A big favor.”
Wesley waited for an explanation, but Dnnys seemed reluctant to continue. “What is it, Dnnys? You know I’ll help.”
“I have this plan.” The Farmer boy wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “But it’s got to be a secret.”
Wesley listened carefully to his friend’s explanation. And as he listened, he began to frown.
The medical isolation chamber had been cleverly designed for a wide variety of purposes. If a patient was contagious, the airflow seals locked the infectious agent within. For anyone with a depressed immune system, the same seals kept viruses and bacteria from entering. The low-intensity red lights were soothing to eyes weakened by fever and fatigue, while the soft cushions and lowered gravity were especially suited for burn patients in the last stages of healing.
It was also the closest approximation to the environment of a Choraii ship that Dr. Crusher could prepare on such short notice.
A diagnostic scanner monitored the patient lying inside, displaying a constant assessment of his physical condition and the effect of the last sedative injection, but the panel couldn’t tell her what she really wanted to know. She studied the sleeping figure of the man known as Jason, searching for the answers to the disturbing questions raised by the deaths of the other adult captives. The skin over his knees and elbows was still raw. He had collapsed as soon as the transporter beam faded and his body lost the support of the buoyant liquid interior of the Choraii atmosphere. Here, his face was slack in repose, but her own mind superimposed an image from the transporter chamber when she had looked into his eyes and seen only a wild terror.
Jason had plunged without warning into a vastly different world, and his cries had been strangled by the unexpected rush of thin air into his lungs. If he was one of the original Hamlin children, memories of that long-ago childhood had not eased the transition. Even Tasha, gone for only a few minutes, had been disoriented on her return