Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [24]
Riker replaced the bat’leth and strapped one of the knives snugly into place along the outside of his calf. What, he wondered, did the Tsorans have in the way of weapons? He hoped, suddenly and fervently, that they had broken the strictures placed upon them by the Fandreans, and had more than a few short-range projectile dart weapons.
If not, they’d deal with it. It was folly to leave this shuttle for anything but burial detail anyway. Well, and… he glanced at the shuttle head. With nothing but individually powered emergency lights functioning on
board, he didn’t expect the head to be usable, so maybe there were two reasons to leave the shuttle.
“Once my men are attended,” Akarr said, standing just behind the pilot’s seat and contemplating Riker as Riker contemplated the head, “I’ll begin the kaphoora.”
“What?” Riker forgot to be diplomatic. He forgot to be anything but astonished. “You’re going ahead with the hunt?”
Akarr pouched his lower lip in disapproval. “We cannot put this shuttle back together; we cannot fly out of here. Therefore we’ll do what we came for.”
“We can concentrate on survival.” Riker braced his arm against a canted wall; that the movement made him loom over Akarr only meant it served him twice. “We can assess our supplies, our position, and decide on the best course of action.”
Akarr seemed to turn thoughtful—it was still hard to tell, but his lip relaxed and he idly rubbed the end of his nose. “We will hunt, as well,” he said after a moment. The Universal Translator offered a garbled word, then shifted into perfect operation. “—Pavar is honored, we will gather what we need to walk out of here, and we will hunt along the way.”
Not a chance. But he didn’t say it. If nothing else he knew better than to throw a challenge like that at an adolescent Tsoran bent on earning daleura. So instead he said, “We’ll talk about it then. Right now, your men are bleeding.” He gave the med kit meaningful heft, and Akarr, smiling—his teeth fully covered—moved out of his way.
“What if you’re right?” Yenan said, his normally smooth under-purr now harsh with tension as he reacted to La Forge’s short presentation about the signal burst. They—several highly placed Fandreans, Worf, La Forge,
and a Tsoran representative—had gathered around a table in a brightly lit museum meeting room of clashing decor and random preserve ho los … almost like a classroom with the teaching aids left scattered around. La Forge certainly felt like he was sitting in a child’s classroom, given the Fandrean scale of the furniture. Beside him, Worf must feel even more out of place; his knees hit the underside of the table. And these chairs … definitely not designed with the human posterior in mind. Yenan looked directly at him. “If you’re right, what do we do next?”
“Find them,” Worf said, simply and immutably.
Yenan waved his arms in a complicated gesture; the three Fandreans with him—the museum head, the city leader, and the preserve ranger commander—hummed in agreement. “Find them? That is not so easily done! And even if we do? Then what?”
The single Tsoran, a permanently stationed liaison named Kugen, clamped his mobile lower lip firmly over his mouth and left it that way, stiff and disagreeable.
“Look,” La Forge said. “Let’s start with this: the signal was from Commander Riker, and it means they’re in trouble—there’s no other reason he’d send what amounts to a broad-spectrum burst of noise in conditions under which he couldn’t really expect it to get through. And it stands to reason that whatever else may have happened, the shuttle is inoperable—or they’d have returned, waited by the portal, and blasted those same signals at us until we let them out.”
“You know your people so well to say all of that?” the ranger commander—Zefan was his name—said.
“Yes, I do,” La Forge said.
“As do I,” Worf rumbled. “We must go in after them.”
“Oh, no, it’s not as