Unification - Jeri Taylor [56]
And so he was sure that this second violation of his tortured shoulder was within his control.
Sitting in the small, dark cubicle assigned to the ship’s physician, K’Vada listened to Klarg, the doctor. Klarg was a heavy, blowsy man of indeterminate age who wheezed as he talked. The physician had convinced K’Vada that the incessant pain he felt was due to an incorrect alignment of the shoulder in its socket. The only remedy was to pull the ball of the shoulder from its joint and then reinseft it properly.
K’Vada knew that scar tissue would have developed around the injury. He knew that this tissue would have to be ripped in order to reposition the bone.
What he hadn’t realized was how excruciating that process would be.
Klarg was to blame for it, he was sure. Had the Klingon doctor not been inept and doddering, the pain would have been manageable. But the idiot, instead of quickly snapping the shoulder loose, pried and twisted as though he were trying to torture K’Vada. It went on interminably, and though he dug his nails into his palms until they bled, and finally bit into his tongue in a desperate effort to create pain somewhere else besides his shoulder, the cry escaped his lips.
He had thought it was just a strangled moan, but from the startled look on Klarg’s face, it must have been far more—a shriek, a humiliating admission of weakness. With his newly dislocated arm dangling at his side, he kicked the doctor across the room.
That had perhaps been a bad decision.
Klarg was dazed and injured. K’Vada could see that he was stumbling as he made his way back across the room. He was not a young man, and unaccustomed to physicality.
“Replace my arm!” K’Vada yelled at him. He had not undergone this much suffering to be left with a useless appendage.
Klarg looked up at him, his bony brow distended, his eyes bugged in a strange and disturbing way. He was gasping for breath and his face was seeping fluids. K’Vada stared at him. Was the patahk going to die? Without having relocated his shoulder socket?
K’Vada had a moment of panic, and tried to lift the doctor from his kneeling position. “Get up,” he commanded. “Do your duty to me!”
But Klarg slumped against him, driving a new shot of pain into his arm. To his horror, the ship’s physician passed out and his breathing became reedy and shallow. He was going to die.
K’Vada glared at him. For a moment he hoped Klarg would die, as punishment for putting him in this dreadful predicament. Then he had a moment of panic as he realized that, with Klarg dead, no one on board could properly reposition his arm, and he would more than likely be permanently disfigured.
He considered trying to reinsert the arm himself. A warrior, on the field of battle, might be faced with such a challenge. Would Kahless have qualied at the thought of pain? Would he have despaired of preserv-ing consciousness while twisting his bones through ripped tendons and into their proper resting place? Never.
Klarg turned gray at his feet, gasping noisily, as K’Vada stood, trying to convince himself to take hold of his useless arm and force it into its resting place.
Finally, it occurred to K’Vada that he really should see to Klarg before he took any drastic action with his arm, and he bellowed for help. Scurrying minions arrived and he ordered attention to Klarg, all the while concealing from them his damaged arm.
He made his way to the bridge, still uncertain as to what his next action should be. He searched his memory for anyone on board who possessed rudi-mentary medical skills, and could think of no one. He fought pan’,c. On a Klingon ship, the weak were expendable. It was a mark of honor to assassinate one’s superior; if someone were weak and careless enough to be taken in such a fashion, he did not deserve either to lead or to live.
K’Vada would be dead within days if it were learned that he was defenseless. And it wouldn’t take long before someone would notice that he couldn’t even lift his