Текст книги "Over a Torrent Sea "

Автор книги: Christopher Bennett

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“Report,” Vale tried to say as the emergency lights kicked in, but her own emergency power hadn’t fully engaged yet. She gathered herself and managed to get out something others could hear. “Somebody report!”

“Shields and main power…down,” Panyarachun said between groans. “We’re drifting.”

“Casualties?”

“Internal communications are damaged,” Dennisar reported from the security station. The hulking Orion hardly seemed shaken up at all. “Internal sensors unreliable. Most of us are alive, at least, but I can’t pinpoint exact numbers.”

“Commander!” Fell turned to catch Vale’s eye. The left side of that gorgeous Deltan face had been badly bruised. “Intense radiation from the asteroid. With shields down…”

“Say no more. Evacuate the bridge. Dennisar, please tell me the alert system is working.”

“Initiating radiation alert now,” he called. The computer began intoning the alert, advising all personnel to evacuate the outer sections of the ship.

“Fell, get to sickbay. The rest of us will reconvene in engineering.”

“I’m fine,” the Deltan insisted as the crew began leaving through the emergency ladder. “I can manage the pain.”

“Peya, you could have a concussion. And this ship doesn’t lack for science officers. That’s an order.”

Fell lowered her head. “Aye, Commander.”

By the time the bridge crew reassembled in engineering, with the Syrath astrophysicist Cethente filling in as science officer and with Ranul Keru taking over from Dennisar as security officer, internal power and communications had been restored. Weapons, propulsion, and shields were still down, though, as were inertial dampers—whose failure was why the debris from the asteroid had inflicted such a damaging blow. “The good news,”came Doctor Ree’s reassuring growl from sickbay, “is that we have no fatalities.”Vale was profoundly relieved. They’d lost too many to the Borg—she couldn’t tolerate losing any of her crew to some hunk of rock. “There have been a number of concussions and fractures, all under treatment. Commander Tuvok sustained both, and Counselor Troi suffered a herniation in pulling him to safety. Both should recover in a few hours. The baby suffered minor impact trauma, nothing serious. No radiation sickness reported yet; I’m sending Nurse Kershul around to administer hyronalin shots to key personnel, beginning with you.”

The crew took a moment to absorb the news. The chamber was disturbingly silent with the warp core down; the ship was operating on fusion power. “Can anyone tell me yet what happened?” Vale asked.

Cethente’s wind-chime voice sounded underneath the vocoder-generated translation of its speech. “Further analysis shows that the asteroid contained sizeable pockets of bilitrium and anicium in addition to yurium,”the Syrath said. Its tentacles stretched out from under the wide dome of its saucerlike upper body, atop which an array of sensory bulges glowed a pale green as it studied the readings those tentacles brought up on the consoles. A radially symmetrical being whose body tapered below the dome into a fluted trunk with a diamond-shaped bulge on the underside and four arthropod legs extending from just above the bulge, Cethente was able to “face” its console and its crewmates simultaneously. “All these substances can store large amounts of energy and channel them explosively. Bilitrium in particular is a rare energy amplifier; it cannot create energy, of course, but it can concentrate the energy of a reaction and release it in a tighter, more intense pulse.”

“So it took the energy of our weapons and tractors and threw it back in our faces.”

“Those of you who have faces,”Cethente replied. “Actually I found the energy surge rather appetizing.”

Vale blinked, reflecting on how poorly Federation science understood Syrath anatomy. Cethente looked so fragile in construction that it seemed it should have been shattered by the impact, but the asexual astrophysicist was probably the most durable member of the crew, a semicrystalline life form evolved on a Venus-like world of hellish temperatures and pressures.

“Status of the asteroid?” Vale went on.

“Still on an impact trajectory with Droplet. The explo sion was not sufficiently directional to achieve the desired course change.”

Nurse Kershul arrived, beginning to deliver the hyronalin shots to the crew. Vale thanked the Edosian after receiving her shot and asked, “So what are our options? Can we repair the tractors and weapons in time to try again?”

“Unlikely,” said Mordecai Crandall, the thin-faced human ensign commanding engineering in Ra-Havreii’s absence. “We’ve got, what, five and a half hours to impact? It will probably take most of that to get the warp core and shields back. Unless you want us to shift priorities.”

Vale shook her head. “No, shields have to come first.” The bulk of the ship could protect the crew against the radiation for only so long, and she needed to get them all back to their stations if they were to function at peak efficiency. “Other options, people?”

“The shuttles,” Panyarachun said after a moment. “What if we jettisoned their warp cores and detonated them against the asteroid?”

“Negative,”Cethente said. “The bilitrium would amplify that even worse than the phasers and quantum torpedoes. It’s particularly effective at concentrating and blue-shifting the gamma-ray energy of an antimatter reaction. No, thank you,”it went on, apparently speaking to Kershul now, though it was hard to tell without a head it could turn. “It would have no more effect on me than the radiation.”

“But Tasanee may be on to something with the shuttles,” Keru said. “What if we use them to push on the asteroid? No energy beams to destabilize it further, just sheer brute force. Could their engines push it far enough to miss Droplet?”

“There’s a problem there,” Crandall said. “The energy surge fried the hangar bay’s force field and power systems. We can’t open the doors, and we’d lose a fair chunk of atmosphere if we did. And we’d need radiation suits to work in the hangar under these conditions—it would slow repairs.”

“What about the captain’s skiff?” Keru said. “Is the La Roccain working order?”

Crandall checked a console. “Some system damage, mostly to sensors, com arrays, transporters. But it was powered down, so its main systems are still intact. It would need a few swapouts, but it could be ready to go in…two hours?”

“I want it sooner, Crandall. Top priority along with shields. That skiff may be all we’ve got.” Vale sighed. “What about communications? Can we use the shuttles’ systems to contact our teams at Droplet, let them know what’s happened?”

“Not through this interference,” Kuu’iut said.

“But they have a shuttle monitoring us optically from orbit,”Cethente chimed. “They should have observed the event by now, and should be able to determine fairly soon that the asteroid’s course has not materially changed.”

“Will they be all right?” Panyarachun asked.

“Probably, as long as they stay far enough from the impact site,” Vale said. “But I can’t say the same for the squales. They may be in for major loss of life if we can’t fix this.”

Keru moved in closer and spoke softly. “Chris…technically the Prime Directive says not to interfere in natural disasters on pre-warp planets. And impacts like this proba bly happen on Droplet more often than on most worlds. We didn’t cause this, and we may even have made it worse.”

“Maybe, Ranul. But we’ve already disrupted their lives enough without meaning to. Besides, we’re already committed. If we stop now, then hundreds, maybe thousands of squales could die because of our choice to stop. That’s as bad as if we’d chucked the asteroid at them ourselves.”

“I can accept that,” Keru said. Then he leaned still closer. “Just between you, me, and the warp core, I think it’s crazy to let people die because we’re afraid of damaging their culture. I’m always happy to find a loophole around that part of the Directive.”

“No comment,” Vale said, though her smile belied it. “But there’s more. Theory says our people should be safe so long as they keep their distance. But theory’s only as good as the data plugged into it. We didn’t know about that bilitrium and anicium. This system keeps throwing surprises at us.” Her gaze turned outward. “Who knows what else we might have overlooked?”

DROPLET

Ensign Lavena had actually managed, after hours of cajoling, to persuade the senior members of the squale pod (for that seemed to be their basic social unit) to approach close enough to the scouter gig that they could meet Riker and converse with him directly, with Aili interpreting between English and Selkie. Normally Riker’s combadge translator could do that; without a translation matrix for squale, it would default to the language of the next nearest indi vidual, Lavena. But Aili had recommended against that, for the squales would be uneasy with a technological mediator. He had the gig’s systems and all their equipment powered down or on standby.

Even so, the squales had approached only reluctantly, the chromatophores in their skin blushing a mottled blue, camouflaging themselves in an instinctive fear reaction. Aili had done a fine job reassuring them, but some deep-rooted anxiety remained. Riker tried to imagine how inanimate matter would seem to beings who had never encountered stone or metal. It was hard to understand why their reaction was so extreme. Even living things had inert components, such as the shells of the floater polyps and the local arthropods. He would have thought that at least a few of the squales might show enough curiosity to want a closer look, but Lavena couldn’t coax them to come closer than a few meters. In the name of diplomacy, Riker finally stripped down to swim briefs and paddled out from the gig a short distance, trailing a length of line behind him so he wouldn’t be separated from it by a powerful swell or other unexpected event. Even on a leash, it was not normally a wise idea to leave a boat untended; he would have preferred it if Huilan or Ra-Havreii could have been along too. But the gig was a catamaran design, able to remain afloat even if capsized. Plus, this was Lavena’s element; if something untoward did occur, he trusted her to get him safely back to the gig.

Riker did his best to try to participate in the language lesson that followed. The squales needed to hear from him directly, at least enough to establish his authority, so he needed to use what Selkie he remembered, plus what Lavena helped him brush up on, to get his ideas across. But airborne Selkie was a different dialect than aquatic Selkie. “Umm, that’s not the problem,” Lavena said when it seemed he wasn’t getting through. “The squales have a keen grasp of sound patterns and linguistic structure—the dialect difference doesn’t bother them. And they can hear fine out of the water,” she finished, seeming reluctant to say it.

“My accent’s that bad, huh?”

Her crests flushed. “I don’t know if accent is the word. More a matter of pitch and rhythm…”

He sighed. “I wish I had my trombone. I’m not much of a singer.”

Once past the usual “We come in peace” material, Riker tried to get across the idea of Titan’s exploratory purpose and their intense curiosity about this world and the squales’ remarkable technology. He had observed, both in first contacts and dating, that it usually helped break the ice to show interest in the other party and get them talking about themselves. And since the squales had been monitoring the away teams from afar with their living probes, Riker assumed they were an inquisitive people as well, despite their oddly inflexible fear of inanimate technology. He hoped to connect with their species through that common interest in discovery.

Besides which, he hadn’t thrown the Prime Directive completely out the window. Getting the squales talking about themselves was a good way to avoid revealing too much about the galaxy beyond.

But at this stage, there was little that he or Lavena could ask coherently about the really intriguing questions: how the squales bred their living tools, how the planet’s life got enough minerals to survive. They were only able to establish the basics. The squales lived in pods of flexible size and composition, not unlike Earth cetaceans. Some pods consisted of mothers and their young offspring, others of adolescents banding together under the tutelage of unrelated adult males. Although it was more complicated than that. For one thing, like many Dropletian chordates, the squales had four sexes, two that were roughly male (in that they only donated gametes) and two that were hermaphroditic, exchanging gametes with each other and both bearing and raising young. (Pazlar’s people theorized this was a hedge against mutation; with four copies of each chromosome, defective genes would be overridden by the majority. Given the frequent infall of asteroids rich in heavy, potentially toxic elements, it was a valuable adaptation.) The squales seemed amused when Riker and Lavena explained that the two of them represented the whole range of biological sexes their respective species possessed. (He didn’t tell them about the Andorians for fear of looking deficient in comparison.)

For another thing, the pods seemed to be organized around more than just age and sex. Riker got the impression that different pods specialized in different tasks or fields of study. Indeed, Lavena seemed to think that the pod interacting with them was actually an aggregate of two or three pods, given its size and the factionalism she occasionally sensed among them. At the very least, some of the older “males” seemed to take a more wary, defensive stance than the others, reminding Lavena of a security detail shepherding a team of science officers.

The squales lived all over Droplet, though primarily in certain zones, presumably those where the most nutrients were concentrated by the currents. They had ways of cultivating food, mainly breeding livestock like the so-called flaming idiot fish, but also farming some sort of seaweed, or so Lavena interpreted it. They were actually able to create the stable economic surplus necessary for building a civilization, to have the resources and leisure for large-scale activities beyond survival. But how did that civilization manifest? They had no cities; where were their breeding farms, their schools, their galleries? Was it even meaningful to think in those terms when dealing with a civilization whose environment was perpetually fluid, in more than one sense of the word? What seemingly natural formations on, or below, the surface of Droplet were actually organized and managed in ways that Titan’s crew had not been able to discern?

Sadly, the conversation was interrupted when Riker’s combadge activated and Melora Pazlar’s voice sounded from the gig. The squales reacted badly, retreating several meters down. As Lavena followed to calm them, Riker swam back to the boat, clambered aboard, and hit the badge, which was still attached to his uniform. “Riker here.”

“Captain, we…trying to reach you,”came the staticky reply. “Bad news.”

Once he’d been briefed, he swam down far enough to get Lavena’s attention and signal her to come over. “What is it, sir?”

“Our observation shuttle reports that Titanfailed to deflect the asteroid. There was an explosion of some sort, and we lost contact with the ship.”

“Oh, no.”

“They’re picking up reflections from Titan—it’s still in one piece. But judging from the way the ship’s moving under the asteroid’s gravity, it’s nearly twice as massive as we thought, and it’s still on course for Droplet, impact in under five hours. We have to assume the ship won’t be able to prevent the impact. I’ve sent two of the shuttles to assist Titan, but we need to get back to base camp, batten everything down.”

“Sir, we can’t go now! We have to warn the squales! Tell them to evacuate the impact site!”

“I’d like to, Aili, but can you suggest how? We can only estimate the impact zone, and how do we even describe it without any fixed geography?”

“Please, sir, let me try. Can you get me a projection of the impact zone?”

“I’ll ask Pazlar.”

The impact zone would be some forty degrees east of the dawn terminator and a similar amount south of the equator. Riker suggested that Lavena describe it as the near edge of the equatorial storm belt in the region that would be halfway between sunrise and noon when the impact came in roughly a third of a local day. It was inexact, but she would urge them to evacuate as broad an area as possible.

Riker gave her a good hour to try before calling her back. “I fear we’ve lost their trust, sir,” she said. “First we break our promise to avoid using technology, then I come back making dire warnings and telling them where they’re forbidden to swim. The ‘security’ squales didn’t react well. I think they interpreted it as a threat. They took charge of the conversation, took up intimidating postures, and questioned me pretty harshly. The ‘science’ squales raised some protests, but they were argued into silence. I think most of them are younger than the others. I just couldn’t get through, sir.”

“Ra-Havreii’s proposed an alternative,” he told her. “We drop a probe at the impact site, one that emits a loud, continuous klaxon—loud enough to be painful to any squale staying in the danger zone. It should force them to evacuate.”

“That seems cruel, sir.”

“I know, I don’t like it. I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary, but we don’t have time to try to get through to them now. Hopefully after it’s over, they’ll recognize that we acted to help them.”

“At least let me go back down to tell them what we’re going to do. Otherwise they’ll take it as an attack.”

And the security pod might just retaliate against two small bipeds out in a lonely boat in the middle of nowhere.“Try your best, Aili. But be careful. You should take a phaser—”

“No, sir,” she said emphatically. “They’d never listen then.”

“They won’t even—” Know what it is,he had been about to say. But if the security pod was already on the defensive, she could bring a bicycle horn and they’d fear it was a weapon. “Just be careful. We need you more than anybody on this mission.”

“Right, sir. No pressure.” She vanished into the murk.

He gave her until the three-hour mark. When he ducked his head underwater, he could still distantly hear her voice, faint but distinctive against the counterpoint of squalesong, so he knew she was alive and well. But he couldn’t call her back, and he couldn’t wait for her any longer. He ordered Ra-Havreii to deploy the underwater klaxon.

With the speed of sound in seawater around a kilometer and a half per second, give or take, Riker estimated it would take under fifteen minutes for the sound to reach his location. Maybe sixteen minutes later, Aili shot to the surface. “Help me into the boat, quick!” He pulled her in, and she sank weakly onto the deck. Riker realized she was exhausted; she would have been out of breath if she still breathed. He began helping her into her hydration suit. “Never mind that, get the motor running. As soon as I heard the clamor of squale calls from the deep sound channel, I knew the beacon must’ve been deployed…. I lit out of there just before the security goons tried to grab me again. We’ve got moments, and I don’t know if fear of tech will stop them this time.”

Riker moved back to activate the engine, but then he looked around him. “I think it’s too late, Aili. We’re surrounded.”

“And by two pods’ worth. I think they called in another security team.”

Luckily, the squales that ringed the gig seemed content with a blockade for the moment. “They’re wary, sir, but I don’t think they want to hurt us. They’re just protecting themselves.”

Lavena spent a futile half-hour singing to them in Selkie, trying to reason with them. Meanwhile, Riker contacted the Gillespieand requested backup, figuring a shuttlecraft would be sufficient to frighten the squales away. But before the shuttle arrived, Pazlar contacted him. “The klaxon’s gone down, sir. The squales sent some kind of large, armored creature to intercept and wreck it. They’re returning to the area.”

Riker sighed. “Go back and try again. Stay as long as necessary to get the message across.”

“But sir, what about you and Aili?”

“We should be able to ride out the shock waves safely at this distance. Those squales can’t.”

“Aye, sir.Gillespie out.”

Lavena, floating in the water again, looked up at Riker. “I just hope they appreciate what we’re doing for them when this is over.”

“So do I, Aili.”

“Well, maybe Titanwill come through and deflect it after all.”

Riker looked skyward. He could feel Deanna’s presence through their empathic link, even at this distance, but she seemed distressed, maybe even hurt. He prayed their baby was all right. “Let’s hope so.”

CHAPTER N

INE

TITAN

When the two shuttles from Droplet arrived at Titan, which was still coasting along with the asteroid, Vale immediately assigned them to help the captain’s skiff in its attempt to thrust the asteroid off course. The big rock’s trajectory was changing, but with aching slowness. The La Roccawas built for diplomatic functions and recreation, not for power, and the engines and shields of Ellington IIand Marsalishad been rigged for aquashuttle mode. All told, it finally became evident that the asteroid’s course could not be changed enough; at most, they had made its angle of entry shallower. That might ameliorate the impact to some degree, but not enough to spare the Dropletian lives down there.

So with less than an hour to go, Vale proposed a last-ditch plan. “We didn’t want to blow it up for fear that might do more harm than good,” she told the staff, back on the bridge now that the shielding was restored. “But we can’t prevent the harm anyway, so maybe blowing it up is the only option we have left. We’ve seen how well those bilitrium deposits can amplify an explosion—maybe we should be using that to our advantage.”

She proposed a variation of Panyarachun’s earlier suggestion: instead of trying to detonate shuttle warp cores against the surface of the asteroid, they would position the antimatter canisters from two shuttles as close as possible to the largest and deepest bilitrium deposits they could reach. “With luck, it’ll amplify the blast enough to turn that thing to rubble, and most of it will burn off in the atmosphere.”

“The problem there,”said Cethente, “is that the intense radiation still emanating from the asteroid would render our sensors useless.”

“Not all of them,” said Chief Bralik, who’d been called in to consult on the geology. “I can rig a good old-fashioned gravity sensor. It can find the parts that match the density of bilitrium. Just like everything else in this system, it’s just a case of going back to the way they did it in the old days.”

Vale nodded. “All right. Do it.”

SHUTTLECRAFT MARSALIS

Within twenty minutes, Bralik had beamed over to the Marsaliswith her gravity sensor. As soon as that had been accomplished, Titanbegan thrusting away on impulse, falling behind the asteroid, both to gain distance from the explosion and to decelerate for orbital insertion. Under Bralik’s supervision, Ensign Waen piloted the shuttle into the fissure blown by the previous explosion. The Ferengi cast her eyes about at the rock formations that glittered in the shuttle’s spotlights. “A fortune in transuranics, and we’re about to blow it up,” she lamented.

“Plenty more where that came from,” the Bolian pilot said, tilting her smooth blue head to glance at Bralik. “Literally.” She furrowed her faintly striped brow. “Do you think this will protect the squales?”

“I think, young one, that sometimes you have to do somethingeven when the odds are that it won’t bring you any profit. Because then you can at least say you tried.”

Waen did not look comforted. “Is that a Rule of Acquisition?”

“No, dear. It’s a rule of getting by.”

Bralik’s console beeped, and she checked the readout. “Density readings consistent with a large bilitrium deposit at three forty-eight mark twenty,” she announced. “A second deposit beyond the opposite wall, maybe sixty meters deep. Close enough.” She tapped in a few calculations, sent the result to Waen. “Place the canisters at these coordinates.”

“Got it, Chief.”

A moment later, Bralik felt the shudder of canister ejection, then a low hum as the tractor beam engaged and moved the canister into position. “Careful!” she called as she noticed the beam spreading a bit beyond the canister. “We’ve seen what can happen when this rock drinks up tractor energies.”

But before she even finished, an energy discharge arced between the walls of the fissure, conducted through the residual rock vapor from the earlier explosions. Some mineral deposit must have had a residual charge still stored, just on the threshold of eruption. The discharge triggered a new explosion, and debris pelted the shuttle. “Shields holding,” Waen called. “Canister’s still intact.”

“Don’t count your latinum yet, honey! Look!”

The walls were moving. The fissure was collapsing in around them.

TITAN

Vale watched in alarm through the viewscreen static as the asteroid began crumbling apart in slow motion, the fissure closing to trap the Marsalis. “Get them out of there!” she called, not caring how.

“No transporter lock,” Kuu’iut called. “The radiation.”

“Vale to Ellington. Can you tractor them out before the fissure finishes collapsing?”

“We’re working on it,”came Olivia Bolaji’s voice. “Waen’s heading for the exit. We’re trying to shore it up with our tractors.”

Vale watched tensely as the shuttle’s beams strained to hold apart the massive chunks that were slowly crashing together. Energy discharges flashed inside the closing fissure, clouds of rock vapor bursting out and splashing over the shuttle’s shields. Finally, the Marsalisscraped its way past the rock walls and out into space, nearly sideswiping its sister shuttle. “Both shuttles, back to the ship, now! Kuu’iut, what’s happening?”

“The asteroid is breaking into three large pieces. They’re still in contact, but no longer physically joined—just resting against each other. But they’re shifting.”

“As soon as the shuttles reach a safe distance, blow the antimatter.”

“The canisters might not stay in range of the bilitrium.”

“All the more reason not to hesitate!”

“Aye, ma’am. Shuttles are at minimum safe distance—detonating.”

At least the detonator signal was strong enough to pierce the radiation; the explosion that erupted from inside the asteroid was satisfyingly brilliant and violent-looking through the static. The asteroid blew out into an expanding cloud of dust, and Vale gave a tentative sigh of relief.

But then Kuu’iut gave his somber report. “Not enough contact with the bilitrium. The explosion was unconcentrated, much of the energy lost to space.” As the dust began to clear, Vale saw that the asteroid was still in only three very large chunks, huddled fairly close together though drifting slowly apart and tumbling separately.

“Any way to blow those into smaller pieces?”

“Weapons are still down—and we need what power and maneuvering we have just to make orbit. And the shuttles don’t have the power.” It clearly galled the competitive Betelgeusian to admit defeat, but that didn’t stop him. “I’m sorry, Commander Vale. There’s nothing more we can do.”

SHUTTLECRAFT GILLESPIE

Melora Pazlar gazed at the sensor readings on the shuttle console in horror. Not only had Titanfailed to prevent the impact, but…“Pazlar to Riker,” she called. “The angle of impact has changed. The rock’s not coming down where we put the klaxon!”

“Not that they were willing to evacuate the area anyway,” Ra-Havreii said. The squales’ big bruisers had destroyed their second klaxon as well. Pazlar wasn’t surprised that trying to scare them out of a particular place had just made them more determined to stay there. It was downright humanoid of them.

“And it’s worse, sir—the impact zone’s a lot closer to you now. You’ve got to get out of there! Head west as fast as you can! We’re coming to get you, but we may not get there in time.”

“Make best speed, Commander. The squales aren’t letting us go anywhere, and I’m reluctant to use force on them.”

“Captain, you may have to. A stun beam won’t kill them.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Riker out.”

Melora turned to Xin. “Is there anything else we can do?”

He sighed. “Not unless you have a containment field big enough to hold sixty billion cubic meters of water, a tractor beam strong enough to lift it all, and a transporter powerful enough to beam out any squales it contains before flying it into the asteroid’s path to vaporize it before it hits the ocean. Oh, and a death wish.”

“Sorry,” she said without humor. “Fresh out.”

“Good,” Xin said. “Because spending the rest of my life with you was noton my agenda.”

Melora glared, hurt and angry that he would hurl such a barb at a time like this. But then she turned back to her instruments, pushing it aside. Maybe he was petty enough to dwell on their personal issues when a disaster was going on, but she was going to focus on what was important.

Damn him.

Ra-Havreii was rather relieved that his suicidal plan had not been technically viable; that way he didn’t have to feel guilty about not wanting to sacrifice his life for a few hundred dexterous calamari. To be sure, he appreciated the intricacies of their language and was impressed with their technical achievements, but it wasn’t as if their civilization was about to be destroyed. Ra-Havreii had seen that happen multiple times in the past year and a half, had just recently had it nearly happen to his civilization; so however insensitive it may have seemed, he couldn’t entirely build up as much horror about this as he saw on Melora’s face.

What troubled him more, though, was the pain on her face at his unthinking words, the tears she blinked away as she forced herself back to work. He’d assumed she felt the same way he did, that she would take the comment in stride as playful banter. Or had he? Either way, he was sorry if he’d caused her genuine pain, but in the long run it was for the best that she cast aside any fantasies of commitment. His words had been inappropriate, but only in the sense that they both had far more important things to concentrate on.