The Red King - Michael A. Martin [33]
“How can you tell?” Frane said, squinting into the blackness. Lacking Lofi’s extraordinarily sensitive vision, he thought he’d have to take her word for it.
Then he saw it: a hole among the stars, a slowly moving region of blackness that obscured the tendrils of energy visible within the ragged edges of the Sleeper. A shape that resembled a large vessel of some sort. It evidently lacked the power even for running lights, and had a swooping, tapered shape similar to the profile of the vessel that was apparently towing it.
“They attacked before,” Fasaryl said. “They’ll attack again.”
“We don’t know that,” Frane said, though he had to admit he felt every bit as frightened as the Oghen.
Then Fasaryl vanished in a shimmer of light, followed immediately by Lofi, who shrieked in pain at being teleported away in pieces, since her multipartite body had not been gathered into a single unit when the aliens’ teleportation beam found her. Frane heard g’Ishea lowing in panic, her hooves clattering frantically against the capsule’s floor as she, too, vanished.
Before he could utter a single word of comfort to the terrified Nozomi, the shimmering light returned, claiming them both.
The next several hours were a blur of terror for Frane. He recalled little, except that he had been separated from the other Seekers After Penance, and had been permitted neither to see nor to speak with Nozomi. They had been taken by sallow-skinned men and women who resembled nothing more than the marauding, green-blooded elves from out of the centuries-old legends of the People of Oh-Neyel. His captors had confiscated almost every bodily adornment from him, including his pilgrim’s robe and underclothing, and had struck him when he’d tried to prevent them from snatching away the ancient story bracelet he had removed—had it been only yesterday?—from his father’s corpse. After taking even that, they had drugged him, as best as he could recall through his current state of befuddlement, and had shouted at him repeatedly in a tongue he couldn’t understand.
At some point they had evidently shaved his gray scalp, and a gray-haired, pointed-eared woman with an oddly kind face had attached slender cables to his skull. She spoke several unintelligible commands into a handheld control device.
Red, raging red pain followed, during which he screamed and pleaded and babbled and cried and laughed like a lunatic. He had been a Seeker After Penance, and now he had found a surfeit of it. A black pit of unconsciousness opened next, and he fell gratefully into it, tumbling end over end over end into oblivion.
Then he slept. He dreamed that the Sleeper had at last come fully awake, sweeping away the alien ships, the evacuation capsules.
And every planet his people had ever colonized, exploited, and ruined.
After an eternity, he came awake in a pool of cold sweat, suddenly disappointed that the Sleeper had not risen to relieve his misery once and for all. The kind-faced elf woman he had seen earlier was staring beneficently down at him. She spoke to him in an almost gentle voice.
To his enormous surprise, he understood her words this time.
Standing beside Dr. Venora, Donatra watched the sleeping alien patient through the infirmary’s one-way transparisteel window. The strange semihumanoid creature, now dressed in a short-sleeved, open-necked infirmary smock, lay unconscious on one of the treatment beds, a rumpled white sheet draped over flesh that looked as gray as that of a Cardassian, and nearly as tough as that of a Nasat.
“You’re sure you’ve overcome the language barrier?”
Venora nodded, a rueful expression on her lined face. Donatra knew that she avoided using coercion on her patients whenever possible. But the doctor had bowed to the necessity of expediting the information-gathering process. And the missing fleet had to be found, after all.
“The sessions with the mind-probes greatly accelerated the