The Farther Shore - Christie Golden [1]
She understands that the massacre is a tragedy, that many are suffering from the loss of people they loved. But she cannot feel anything but relief and savage pleasure. That, and rage and hatred, are her limited palette of emotions, and the pictures she can paint with them are dark and clear.
At this moment, celebrating her father’s death while wearing a mask of sorrow, she experiences another emotion: gratitude toward the cybernetic monsters who have finally done what she has longed to do all her life.
Chapter 1
THE WATER WAS hardly inviting. Its surface was coated with some kind of algae and it smelled faintly of decay. Nonetheless, B’Elanna Torres scooped up the water with her hands and drank deeply.
It had been almost a week since she had first stepped out on trembling legs into the wilderness of Boreth. Her first instinct had been to wash off the sticky, foul-smelling combination of ash and blood that coated her body. However, it had taken her some time to find water, and by then, she had changed her mind.
The coating that the priestesses had smeared all over her naked body as part of her ordeal had distinct and important advantages as well as disadvantages. The vile stuff prevented insects from bothering her, and in this tropical climate, they were thick as, well, flies. It also helped protect her skin from the merciless rays of the [4] sun, and even provided a sort of insulation during the chillier night. And when she walked right past a grazing maasklak, an unexpected encounter that had startled them both, she realized that it helped mask her scent as well.
She imagined rolling in feces would produce a similar effect, and frankly, she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t prefer the latter. It had taken nearly two days before her nose had become inured to her own reek. But here in this place, she realized she needed every edge she could find.
B’Elanna hadn’t been overly worried at first. Starfleet was quite thorough in training its cadets to handle emergency situations, and she had certainly had enough experience thinking on her feet in the seven years she’d spent on Voyager. But Starfleet had also tended to assume that when one crash-landed on an inhospitable planet, one would usually have one’s emergency medical kit, phasers, and so on. At the very least, they’d assumed one would have clothes.
B’Elanna had nothing but her own two hands and her wit.
One of the first things she had done was to find water. She dimly remembered something about a few of Boreth’s plants that weren’t deadly, and began to forage berries, fruits, and edible tubers and roots. After about day two, she’d overcome her repugnance sufficiently to add insects to her diet. Making fire was easy—she’d always had a knack for it and teased Chakotay about it mercilessly.
She had two goals that were occasionally in conflict with one another. The first was to simply stay alive and [5] as healthy as was possible given the circumstances. The second was to keep moving in the direction her mother had indicated on the map. Both were challenging, but the latter more so. With no compass and a complete un-familiarity with the terrain and even the stars that speckled the sky that arched over this world, Torres had very little frame of reference.
The map had indicated that Miral would be waiting for her somewhere to the northeast of the temple. Torres had wasted two precious days traveling in the wrong direction before she remembered that Boreth’s sun rose in the south and traveled north during the day. Upon realizing her mistake, B’Elanna Torres raged with a fury that would have impressed Logt, had she been witness to it.
Her redundant organs were serving her well during this time of extreme physical duress. She recalled the conversation she had with the Doctor, when he had argued as persuasively as he was capable of doing in favor of the extra lung