Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

41

Prynn heard her father cry out in pain. She watched him writhe on the ground, the gray sky reaching down and wrapping its wisps about his body, torturing him in some incomprehensible way. He thrashed about, his agony plain. Dull brown dirt kicked up and coated his uniform as he struggled to free himself from the violent and mysterious shadows.

She tried to move toward him and could not, tried to scream and found herself mute. Dad,she thought, an appellation she had not used for him in years. Desperation knotted her stomach. He could not leave again. She had to go to him, had to help him, even after all that had come between them. She fought to get to her knees, pushing herself up, pushing against—

–the bedroll.

Prynn opened her eyes on a desolate world, beneath a sky just beginning to pale from black to the distressed color of cinders. Dawn had come to this empty place, as much as it could. Or maybe this is dusk,she thought. Maybe that was all this world knew anymore.

Prynn had risen to her hands and knees on the bedroll, she saw, and she remembered battling to move in her dreams. She sat back on her haunches, the soft, metallic blanket sliding from her shoulders with a sound like sand slipping through her fingers. Whatever images and sounds, whatever thoughts and emotions, had populated her dreams seemed to drain away now as she sought to recall them. Her father…her father…

A moan rose to her left. Prynn looked that way, still feeling bound by the fetters of sleep. But then she saw Shar. His blanket had fallen from him, and his upper body had come partially off his bedroll and onto the ground. His arms moved in small, irregular spasms. He seemed to be asleep, but also in pain.

Another moan escaped Shar’s lips. The familiarity of it brought Prynn to the recognition that this sound had invaded her dreams, had masqueraded as the voice of her father’s agony. Why not Mom’s?she thought suddenly, not knowing why the question had come, but deciding at once that she did not want an answer to it.

As Prynn made her way over to Shar, the charred, skeletal remains of Chaffee’s bow caught her eye. The flames had stopped burning late yesterday, but even now, narrow strands of smoke escaped the wreckage and drifted upward. The calm of the scene contradicted the awful chaos of the crash.

Prynn reached down beside Shar and picked up the tricorder she had set to monitor his condition during the night; she had wanted to be alerted if he required medical attention while she slept. She had also left a second tricorder near the head of her own bedroll, configured to patrol a perimeter around their small camp. Nothing had triggered an alarm on either device.

Standing over Shar, Prynn reset the tricorder to an interactive scanning mode. Shar cried out again as she held the device over him near his head. She slowly moved it down the length of his body, and saw that he had mended some overnight. His vital signs had not improved much, but they had at least remained level. His dislocated shoulder and bruised ribs appeared better, obviously owing to Vaughn’s treatment, but his horribly splintered leg would demand more than the splint and the simple first aid he had been given. Worst of all, the injury to one of his internal organs would continue to threaten his life if he did not see a doctor before long.

Prynn put down the tricorder, then retrieved the medkit from the survival cache and prepared to administer a painkiller. The hiss of the hypospray against Shar’s neck seemed unusually loud against the backdrop of silence. She stood back up and stayed there for a few minutes, the spent hypo in her hand, watching and listening as Shar’s movements calmed and his moaning ceased. Then, very gently, she eased his upper body back onto the bedroll, pulling the blanket over him and up to his chin.

As she returned the hypospray and the medkit to their places, a chill ran through Prynn’s body. The temperature had dipped during the night, though not too much, and her blanket had kept her warm. Already this morning, the temperature had begun to rise back toward yesterday’s level of low double digits—not exactly comfortable, but not terrible either.

Prynn retrieved a ration pack and a water container from the cache, then returned to her bedroll. She slipped on her jacket, then sat down and consumed what would have to pass for her breakfast. As she ate, she thought about the day ahead. She would continue to work on reconstructing the transporter from the salvageable components of the shuttle wreckage, and she would have to consider reviving Shar at some point. He had neither eaten nor drunk since before the crash, and she had no means of providing him sustenance intravenously.

When she finished eating, Prynn put the water container and the spent ration pack back in the cache, then took a combadge out of a jacket pocket. She set the combadge to maintain an open channel with her own, and placed it near Shar’s head. She had done the same thing yesterday, wanting to keep a comlink open to him while she was away from the camp. She also set the tricorder back to an automated scanning mode to monitor his condition.

Then, gathering the few tools she had, she headed out to Chaffee’s aft section, where she would work on the transporter and an escape from this dead planet.

The bent metal panel seemed to pull free, but then it snapped back into place. A sharp edge caught the index finger of Prynn’s left hand, slicing it open. Pain flared, and she sat back amid the debris of the downed shuttle and kicked out in frustration. Her boot impacted the panel, drawing a loud clang, and then one side of the panel slipped down a few centimeters. A second later, the entire metal piece fell away from the bulkhead.

Prynn looked at the newly revealed circuitry that she had been trying to access, then laughed. The sound was a lonely one in the empty wastes, made more so because she knew that it contained no humor. She peered up through where the roof of the shuttle should have been and regarded the forbidding sky. The clouds, despite their constant movement, stared back like the unchanging and impenetrable walls of a prison.

Her finger throbbed, and she lifted her hand and examined it. Blood flowed from a cut running lengthwise up the tip. She raised her finger to her lips and sucked at the wound, clearing it, then looked at it again. The cut reached deep into her flesh, she saw, and it filled quickly again with blood.

Prynn put her fingertip back in her mouth, applying pressure to the cut. She got to her feet and walked from the rear compartment of the shuttle, out through the path she had cleared through the wreckage. The soles of her boots scraped along the ground as she strode back toward the burned-out shell of Chaffee’s forward section and, beyond it, the camp.

As she walked, she thought of Vaughn, walking himself, trying to reach the source of the pulse. He was out there somewhere, alone, and she wondered what he was feeling right now. And she wondered what she herself was feeling. After he had departed yesterday, she had gone to work on the transporter and, even given the circumstances and the surroundings, that had somehow provided her a sense of normality. Prynn had been able to focus on the work, narrowing her vision and thoughts to the task at hand.

Today, though…

Today had been different. While she had continued to make progress with the transporter, her mind had begun to wander. She had found herself recalling the days after her mother had died, and the terrible sense of loss that, though experienced less often as the years had passed, had never really left her—and never would, she knew. Prynn supposed that such morose remembrances stemmed from facing her own mortality. With rescue from Defiantrealistically impossible during the next day and a half, and Vaughn’s ability to stop the pulse uncertain at best, she understood that the remainder of her life might now be measured in hours. She did not want to die, and she would do everything she could to prevent that from happening, but for all of that, her thoughts dwelled not on her own death, but on that of her mother. The days of despair Prynn had experienced after her mother’s death continued to recur to her, no matter how much she attempted to concentrate on recovering the transporter.

The days after Mom’s death,she thought, are still going on.Seven years later or seventy, each day Prynn lived would be a day lived after that dreadful event. And no matter what happened in the next day and a half, that would always be the case.

Prynn passed the blackened bow of the shuttle, the camp coming into view beyond it. Shar, she saw, had not moved from atop his bedroll. She headed directly for the survival cache, where she took a dermal regenerator out of the medkit. She cleared her wound once more, then raised the device and switched it on. A narrow blue beam emerged from the tip, accompanied by a high-pitched whine. As she ran the healing light across her fingertip, her flesh began to knit together, a pinpoint of heat sparking her nerve endings. Within a minute or so, she finished, and deactivated the regenerator.

Something moved at the periphery of her sight. Prynn turned quickly, and saw nothing. She gazed out at the open land beyond the camp and saw only a barren vista. She peered at the metallic blanket pooled on her bedroll, and then over at Shar—

Shar’s eyes were open and looking at her. He resembled a corpse, with empty eyes staring without seeing from a face that had lost any trace of vibrancy, his blue skin ashen. Prynn’s breath caught for an instant, but then Shar lifted a hand that had come out from beneath the blanket…slowly, tentatively, as though motioning to her with a great effort.

Prynn sprinted the few steps over to Shar. She kneeled down beside him, dropping the dermal regenerator and scooping up the tricorder beside his bedroll. She reset the device, then took Shar’s hand as she scanned him. His condition, she saw, had not changed much from earlier, although she did detect a shift toward dehydration.

Shar squeezed her hand, and she set the tricorder aside. He tried to speak with her, but his mouth made only small, smacking sounds. Prynn got him some water, then helped him lift his head so that he could drink it. He coughed with the first sip, but then managed to get the water down. When he finished drinking, Prynn eased his head back down onto the bedroll.

“Your eye,” Shar said, and she remembered the injury to her sclera.

“I’m fine,” she said. “It looks worse than it is.”

“What happened to you?” Shar wanted to know. “And to me?” Prynn told him about the crash, pointing out the demolished bow section twenty meters away. Shar looked in that direction, and then back at her. “What about Commander Vaughn?” he asked, his voice rising with concern.

“He’s fine,” she said flatly, anger welling within her. The emotion surprised her—not her negative feeling for Vaughn, but the suddenness and the unexpectedness with which it had come upon her at this moment. Why?she asked herself. Why did that happen?Because somebody had been worried about her father? Why should that make her angry?

Because he doesn’t deserve anybody’s concern,she concluded. Except that even she hoped for his continued well-being right now, since he was attempting to save four billion people. And even though she despised him, she did not wish him dead.

To Shar, Prynn conveyed Vaughn’s intention to travel on foot to the source of the pulse. She also mentioned how communication with him had failed once he had traveled too far from the camp.

“Will he have time?” Shar wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Prynn said. “And if he makes it there, will he be able to do anything? I don’t know that either. But Vaughn…” She hesitated, wanting to reassure Shar, but hating the words she was about to use. “Vaughn is good at his job.” So good,she could not prevent herself from thinking, that he sent my mother to her death.Prynn knew that the bitterness she felt would show on her face, and so she picked up the dermal regenerator and paced back over to the survival cache. She made a bit of a show of replacing the device in the locker, hoping she had successfully covered her emotions.

“If Commander Vaughn can’t stop the pulse,” Shar said behind her, “then we’re going to die.” His voice, it seemed to Prynn, carried fear and pain, but not the fear of death, and not the pain of his physical injuries. Something else occupied him, she thought.

“Shar,” she said, turning back to face him, “I’m working on repairing the shuttle’s transporter. Some of the primary circuits were destroyed in the crash, but both backups are relatively intact.” She explained Vaughn’s orders, that she should first try to fulfill the mission of stopping the pulse, and then one way or the other get Shar and herself as far away from the pulse as possible. “In a few days, Saganwill be repaired and Lieutenant Dax will send it down to rescue us.”

“If we live through the pulse,” Shar said.

“We’ll make it,” Prynn said with a sense of surety she did not feel. She noticed Shar’s face tensing. His jaw set, his eyes narrowed, and his antennae moved in a manner she could not interpret. “Shar?” she asked, taking a step toward him. He said nothing, but his gaze had left her, and now he stared up at the sky. “Are you all right? Are you in pain? Can I get—”

Shar rolled his upper body onto his left elbow, and looked over at her in a way that stopped her in mid-sentence. Color rushed into his face, patches of deep blue blooming on his cheeks and forehead, a dramatic contrast to the stark whiteness of his hair. Prynn could not tell whether he was hurt or angry. He stared at her for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Zhavey.”

“What?” She did not understand.

“My mother,” he said, and she realized that he had interpreted the word for her. Prynn had heard about the complications of Andorian biology, that they wed in groups of four, and that they even reared their children in such family units. She knew that Councillor zh’Thane was one of Shar’s parents, and she wondered if that was to whom he was now referring.

“Your mother?” Prynn asked.

“Some part of her…” he said, and trailed off. “She made this worse.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Prynn said. “Shar, I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Just before we left Deep Space 9,” he said, “she brought my bondmates to the station.”

“Oh,” Prynn said, startled by the revelation. She did not know what else to say.

“She was trying to manipulate me into returning to Andor.” His right hand balled into a fist. “And she succeeded. I agreed to visit my bondmates on Andor when we get back from the Gamma Quadrant.” Shar lifted his fist a few centimeters and then brought the meaty part of it down onto the ground.

“Shar, you don’t have to think about that now,” she told him. “Listen, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Your mother—”

“I promisedto go back,” he said, yelling the word. “And when I don’t…” He looked away from her, his gaze drifting toward the ground in front of him, but the vacant look in his eyes told Prynn that he was seeing something else, some image in his mind. “It will kill Thriss to lose me.” Shar raised his right fist again, higher this time, and then he thrust it against the ground, knuckles first. Rage hardened his normally soft features.

“Shar,” Prynn called, but already, he had brought his fist back up. He pounded the ground again, and then a third time, and he did not stop. His knuckles hammered the ground, faster and harder, and Prynn heard the awful sound of his bones breaking. “Shar,” she called again, then turned and moved back to the survival cache. She quickly dug inside for what she needed, then raced around Shar, to his back. She dropped down behind him and pushed the hypospray against the side of his neck. Her fingers brushed his flesh, and she felt the tautness of the muscles beneath.

Shar punched once more, then stopped, his arm pausing as he raised it. Prynn put a hand against his back and lowered him down onto the bedroll. She reached across his unconscious form and grabbed the tricorder there, then scanned him. When she had determined that his condition remained stable, she examined his hand. Several layers of skin had been torn away from his knuckles, and blood seeped from the wound. Bones in all of his fingers had fractured.

“So this is what they mean by ‘Andorian fury,’” she said, glad that the soporific she had given Shar would keep him asleep for at least several hours. She stood up and went once more to the medkit, to retrieve what she would need to treat Shar’s new injury. It seemed almost impossible to credit the transformation she had just witnessed. Shar, normally quiet and reserved even in social situations, had changed in an instant into somebody she barely recognized. She had not felt threatened herself in any way, but the incident had still affected her.

This is Vaughn’s fault,she thought. He had left them here. Had left herhere. Again.

Again?she asked herself. Now I don’t even know what I’m thinking.She attempted to clear her thoughts as she returned to Shar’s side.

For twenty minutes, Prynn tried to concentrate on administering first aid, tried to focus on Shar’s hand and on nothing more. When she finished doing what she could, she headed out to resume her work on the transporter. But even as she started for the aft section of Chaffee,she peered back over her shoulder—not at Shar, not at the camp, but off toward the horizon. She did not know why, but she could not shake the image of her father walking away from her.

42

Treir slid the plate onto the bar. “Here you go,” she said, referring to the small, lightly browned cakes, covered in a thick, fruit-filled glaze. “Skorrian fritters in a Kaferian apple compote.” Morn looked at his breakfast approvingly. Treir reached below the bar and pulled out a set of dining utensils wrapped in a linen napkin. She set the package beside Morn’s plate, then reached down and patted his hand. “Now, don’t eat too fast,” she teased him. “I know one of your stomachs must still be filled with all that Maraltian seev-ale you had last night.” Morn rolled his eyes, nodding his head in agreement.

Treir smiled and moved down the bar, away from Morn. She poured herself a glass of water, then peered over toward the dabo table. The late morning tended to be the slowest time of day in the bar, between breakfast and lunch for most of DS9’s denizens, but that had changed today. Word of Hetik’s presence in the bar must have spread through the station like the Symbalene blood burn. A dozen people—mostly women, but a few men, too—surrounded the dabo table now, a situation remarkable not only because of the time of day, but because in recent weeks, Quark’s had not seen so many gamblers at one time even at night. And she felt certain that business would only continue to increase in the days ahead.

“Thirteen through, thirteen through,” she heard Hetik say, announcing the outcome of the latest spin and play.

“Bastion?” somebody called raucously. When it was busy, the dabo table was by far the loudest spot in the bar—and maybe anywhere on the station.

“Sorry,” Hetik said. “No bastion.” A collective groan went up among the gamblers, but a groan that nevertheless held a note of enjoyment. Win or lose, these dabo players were having fun, another detail that boded well for future business. The thick clink of gold-pressed latinum rang through the room as Hetik collected the winnings of the house.

A distinctive-looking woman at the far end of the bar signaled to Treir with a wave. Treir walked over to the woman—tall, with a rough, grayish skin, a long, narrow neck, and strikingly luminous eyes—and took her order for a refill of her drink. She picked up the Melkotian woman’s empty glass and moved back down the bar to find the bottle she needed. To her surprise, she saw Quark standing in the doorway, and to her delight, she saw him looking over at the dabo table with an expression of satisfaction on his face. Then he looked around, saw her, and smiled.

Treir quickly replenished the Melkotian woman’s drink, went back to the end of the bar, and set it down before her. When Treir turned back around, Quark had come around the bar. “Is this all Hetik?” he said as he approached, inclining his head in the direction of the dabo table.

Treir smiled and shrugged. “What do you think?” she said. Quark glanced back over at the pack of gamblers, his astonishment seemingly surpassed only by his conspicuous glee. “So,” she said, reaching out and playfully brushing a fingertip across the top of his bald head, “do you have the contract for our agreement about Hetik?”

“Contract?” Quark said, turning back to her. “Forget it.” He waved a hand between them, as though physically dismissing the notion.

“Are you sure?” Treir asked, deciding that, at this point, she wanted more than simply Quark’s easy acceptance of her new hire. “I mean, I already told Hetik that he would only be here for another six days.” She had not really done that, but she wanted Quark to acknowledge her worth.

“You what?” Quark said, the sharp, toothy smile disappearing from his face.

Treir slid a hand languorously along the edge of the bar, dipping her body down until the entire length of her arm rested flatly on the smooth surface. She leaned her head against her biceps and peered innocently up at Quark. “Is that a problem?” she asked. “I realized after you left last night that you really didn’t want Hetik here, so I told him this morning that we would be letting him go.”

Quark stared at her for a moment, his mouth dropping open. He was obviously aghast. “Let’s not be…” He paused, and then smiled. “Treir,” he said, his voice dripping with as much charm as he could muster.

“Quark,” she said in a low, throaty tone, flirting along with him. She lifted her head from her arm, and eased off the bar toward Quark. She glided a hand around his back, and brought her lips near his ear. “Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked in a whisper.

“Yes, of course,” he said, his arm coming up around her waist. “Hetik can stay.”

Treir purred in Quark’s ear, and then said, “And what else?”

“Your idea to hire him was a good one,” he admitted, with only the slightest hint of reluctance. Then he turned his head and looked up into her eyes. “You’re an asset to the bar,” he said seriously.

“Well, that’s almost a declaration of love,” somebody said. Treir looked over and saw the station’s chief of security standing a short distance down the bar. Treir got the impression that she had been there for a few moments.

“Laren,” Quark said anxiously, dropping his hand from around Treir’s waist, though Treir left her arm around his back. “I mean, Lieutenant Ro.”

“Good morning, Quark,” Ro said, the corners of her mouth threatening a smile. She seemed entertained by the scene Treir and Quark had been playing out.

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Treir said. “What can I get for you?”

“Oh, don’t let me interrupt,” Ro said. “Finish your business first.”

“Uh, we were done,” Quark said.

“Actually, Iwasn’t done,” Treir told him, running a finger slowly along the top of his ear.

“Oh no?” Quark said, gazing back up at her, his hand returning to her waist. His attention seemed far away, his euphoric moment an obvious by-product of her touch.

“If I’m such an asset to the bar,” Treir suggested, “then perhaps I’m underpaid.”

Quark grinned, and Treir suspected that he actually appreciated her audacity. “I don’t think so.”

She raised her free hand to the base of Quark’s neck and straightened the silver bauble strung between his lapels. “Well, then,” she said, “perhaps a position change.”

Quark reached up and toyed with her necklace—a bold move, Treir thought at first, considering that Ro was still here. But then she realized that her initial assumption about Quark’s interest in the lieutenant—that it had only to do with Ro being DS9’s chief of security—must have been correct after all. “What sort of a…position…did you have in mind?” he asked, continuing his flirtation.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she told him. “Junior partner sounds interesting to me.” She skimmed a finger down the edge of one of his lobes.

“I don’t know about junior partner,” Quark said, “but maybe we can discuss a merger.” Treir winked, but before she could say anything more, Ro interjected.

“Quark,” she said, her voice harder now, evidently no longer amused at the byplay. Treir looked over at the lieutenant and saw only seriousness on her face. “Colonel Kira wants to see you in her office as soon as possible.”

“Colonel Kira?” Quark said, and all at once, his focus changed. He took his hand from Treir’s waist and moved away from her. He took a few steps down the bar until he stood directly across from Ro. “What does she want?”

“You’ll have to ask her,” Ro said sternly.

“But I didn’t do anything,” Quark protested.

“No,” Ro said. “Of course you didn’t.” She looked and sounded angry, but as she turned and marched out of the bar, something in the way Ro carried herself made Treir think that she was also hurt.

Treir peered down at Quark, who now looked worried after the news that the colonel wanted to see him. She smiled, realizing that she had not quite understood the situation between Quark and Ro after all. Quark’s interest in the lieutenant might or might not have been genuine, might or might not have been motivated only by expediency, but Ro…wonder of wonders, Ro actually liked Quark.

Treir shook her head, thinking that the universe really was an amazing place.