by Peter David
Snarling, the two Klingons unsheathed their d’k tahgs and charged—
—for about three steps. Then they stopped in their tracks, grabbed their heads, and howled with agony before collapsing to the floor, blood trickling out of every orifice in their heads.
Just like the Kazon-Ogla, Neelix realized as the nausea threatened to grow worse. He put his hand over his mouth.
“Impressive.” Tuvok’s declaration struck Neelix as the greatest understatement in the galaxy.
Kes, however, stumbled forward. Neelix grabbed her arm. “Are you all right, dearest?”
Nodding quickly, Kes said, “I’m fine. I’m afraid Doctor Zimmerman’s experiments were more … draining than I thought.”
Turning to Tuvok, Neelix asked, “What happened to him?”
“He suffered cranial trauma. If he receives medical treatment, he will recover. Whether he receives that treatment is not within our control.” He started walking forward, stepping over the two Klingons. “We must proceed with all due haste.”
“You should have made sure he was dead,” Neelix muttered as he fell into step behind Tuvok.
“Doctor Zimmerman is the least of our concerns, Mister Neelix.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Neelix said angrily, “you didn’t see what he did!”
“If you are referring to the experimentation he visited upon Kes, I can assure you, I am more aware of that than you.”
Turning to Kes, Neelix asked, “What is he talking about?”
Kes started to say something, then stopped. “It’s difficult to explain.”
“Mister Neelix,” Tuvok said before Neelix could ask another question, “while I understand your emotional need to have everything explained, I suggest that we table our discussion until such a time as we are a safe distance from Ardana.”
Letting out a long breath, Neelix said, “Of course, my apologies.”
They continued through several curving and angled corridors, taking so many turns that Neelix had completely lost his bearings—not that he ever really had them in the first place. Tuvok seemed to know where he was going, though.
Neelix wondered what would happen next. Assuming they were able to escape this wretched place, what would he and Kes do? Would they return to Captain Chakotay’s base? Work with their ragtag group of rebels? Find their own way? How could they do that, if Kes was such a valued commodity in the Alliance?
He put the thought in the back of his mind. Since his family had been killed, Neelix had lived most of his life from day to day, and it didn’t look like he’d have any reason to change that, now that he was halfway across the galaxy.
Perhaps Kes and I can find a ship and try to get home.
That, however, was an issue for later. They turned another corridor and found themselves at a small marble staircase that occupied the right half of that corridor and led up to a massive doorway. It was labeled in a language that Neelix didn’t recognize.
Tuvok said, “That is our destination.” He had also stopped walking.
“What are we waiting for?” Neelix asked as he pushed past the Vulcan. This was no time to be hesitant.
Neelix’s forward motion was arrested by Tuvok’s arm on his shoulder. The Vulcan was deceptively strong. “Ow!”
“To answer your question, Mister Neelix,” Tuvok said, without losing his grip on Neelix’s shoulder, “we are waiting for a proper explanation as to why there are no guards.” With his other hand, he raised an energy weapon and fired it toward the staircase.
The energy beam came to a sharp stop right in front of the staircase, an effect accompanied by a sparkle of lights.
“A force field,” Tuvok said.
“What do we do now?”
“I can bring it down,” Kes said.
One of Tuvok’s eyebrows rose without the other one moving, a trick Neelix rather envied. “Are you sure, Kes?”
Smiling, Kes said, “No—but I’d like to try.”
“Our options are limited,” Tuvok said. “Proceed.”
Kes stared at the staircase, focusing all her attention on it. Neelix stood by, thinking the most encouraging thoughts he could, hoping it would help.
It does.
Neelix smiled at the whispered thought his love sent him as she concentrated.
Suddenly, sparks shot out from the wall to the left of the staircase.
Again, Tuvok’s eyebrow rose. He fired his weapon once again, and this time the beam went straight through to the staircase, which smoked from the beam’s impact.
“Well done, Kes!” Neelix said, once again grabbing her shoulders.
This was fortuitous, as she started to collapse. Gripping her more tightly, he said again, “Kes?”
She managed to stabilize herself. “I’m fine.” Her pale, sweaty face and whispered voice belied her words.
“I think it would be best,” Neelix said slowly, “if you let Mister Tuvok and myself handle things from here on out.”
“Agreed,” Tuvok said. “You are new to these abilities, and the strain may prove more than you can bear.”
“I’ll bear the strain if it means getting out of this place,” Kes said with more fervor than she’d spoken with a moment ago.
Neelix smiled. “We’ll get out of here, my love, of that you can rest assured.” He turned to Tuvok. “Shall we?”
“Indeed we shall,” Tuvok said.
Still smiling, Neelix walked forward and stepped on the first of the stairs—
—which was when the beam sliced through his stomach.
Clutching his belly, Neelix fell onto the stairs headfirst. He tried to keep his eyes open, and only partially succeeded. Tears welled up, forcing him to blink.
He heard someone scream. It was Kes, but he wasn’t sure if he heard her voice in his mind or in his ears. Perhaps it was both….
Then the pain hit his mind, worse even than the pain in his body. But behind it wasn’t simply the agony of a wound, but the bright light of Kes. Neelix felt her presence in his mind even more than he had when she communicated with him on his now-destroyed ship or in Zimmerman’s lab. Then, she had been a voice in his head; now she was a beacon that was inside his very soul.
He had always found her beautiful, but now he truly appreciated her magnificence. She was an incandescence that he felt in every part of his body—and that burned at her touch if she so desired, a fact the Klingons who had shot Neelix learned to their regret.
Through her thoughts, Neelix was able to feel the moment when the Klingons’ brains exploded, and hear their final thoughts before expiring. He was able to feel Tuvok’s shock at Kes’s latest demonstration of her psionic abilities, and the pain he felt as a piece of sculpture sliced through his arm.
When that happened, Neelix realized that Kes was moving many objects in the area with her mind. The large door shattered into millions of shards of metal; the sculptures were ripped from the walls and sent flying across the room, the furniture likewise; the bodies of the four Klingons who had been approaching from the other direction exploded into a pulpy mess of blood and muscle and bones.
Kes’s light shone even brighter, then.
It was the last thing Neelix saw before he gave in to the pain at last….
Harry had killed seven Klingons by the time he and Seska reached the turbolift. Four he had killed with continuous disruptor fire that had started as soon as they came within Harry’s sight and didn’t end until fifteen seconds after they were quite dead, their bodies a sizzling mess of burnt flesh and destroyed nerves. One he had killed by sneaking up behind her, slicing her throat with a mek’leth, then cutting open her crest. The remaining two were the ones on duty in the security office. He had killed them by throwing two d’k tahgs, the first of which lodged in one Klingon’s throat, the second in the side of the other guard’s head; he had then used the mek’leth to cut off their heads and toss them into two separate corners of the office.
The turbolift that was taking them down to the Monor Base’
s sub-basement responded to Harry’s voice commands, which surprised Seska. Harry shrugged and said that he had reprogrammed them. “I’m surprised the Klingons haven’t gotten control back.”
Seska wasn’t at all surprised.
As soon as the turbolift doors opened, Harry and Seska both fired repeatedly, he high, she low. When the resultant screams finally stopped, they stopped firing. She looked down the corridor to see two Klingons on the floor, in front of a secure doorway painted with the emblem of the Alliance. Seska realized that it was the first instance of the emblem she’d seen on Monor Base. B’Elanna isn’t just scum, she’s disloyal scum.
Then again, she thought with a wry smile, so am I.
They walked toward the large door. “Here’s why I needed your help. I was hoping to reprogram the computer so that it would accept my DNA signature to open the door.”
“You couldn’t do it?” That shocked Seska, as such a feat was within the expected range of Harry’s capabilities.
Harry knelt down at the door control and pried off the panel cover. “The problem is the system’s hardwired to only accept the DNA of a Cardassian or a Klingon. Presumably, it’ll accept the supervisor’s patterns, so halfbreeds can get in, but a full-blooded Terran won’t work.”
Seska nodded. “But I will.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m missing something, Harry—what’s on the other side of this door? It’s not part of the base, is it?”
“No, it’s the control room for the entire city. On the other side of this door are the antigravity generators that keep Stratos afloat. They’ve got to be very finely honed and carefully tuned. I’m willing to bet the reason why the electronic security here is so strict is because it wouldn’t take a lot to sabotage those generators.” For the second time, Harry smiled. “This base is full of Klingons and the finest scientific minds in the Alliance.”
Seska’s eyes widened. “You want to crash Stratos?”
“It’ll be a great victory for the rebellion, and hundreds of Klingons, a few Cardassians, and that halfbreed bitch will all die horribly.” Harry said the words with a frightening calm.
Finding herself unable to muster up a good argument against the notion—since she knew Harry wasn’t suicidal, and therefore knew that their being off Ardana before the crash happened was part of the plan—Seska said, “Let’s do it.”
14
The first thing B’Elanna did when she woke up was look around Laboratory 3. As she feared, the prisoners were gone. However, she was surprised to see that Zimmerman was lying on the floor near her, blood pooling from a head wound, and that the lab looked as if it had been hit by a cyclone.
The first thing she did was walk over to her former favorite’s corpse and yank her d’k tahg out of his eye. Wiping the blood and ocular fluid off the blade with her sleeve, she then walked over to Zimmerman and thrust the weapon into the back of his neck. Ripping it out, she then jammed it into the side of his head, near the wound, then yanked it out again and stabbed him in the back. Then she just stabbed him randomly over and over again, his blood spurting everywhere, his body convulsing in its death throes, a scream forming in the back of her throat, eventually becoming a death-yell that echoed in the wide-open spaces of this thrice-damned base. Over and over again she plunged her family dagger into the body of this mewling, irritating, obnoxious, foul, contemptible Terran.
She hated them. Every single one of them, from whichever smooth-faced petaQ caught Miral’s eye and Miral’s eggs to impregnate her with B’Elanna, all the way to this bald, smirking irritant of a scientist who conspired with Thomas to betray her …
Thomas …
She stopped in mid-thrust and turned to look at Thomas’s corpse, his beautiful, smooth, loving face forever marred by the wound made by her d’k tahg.
The sad part was, she had enjoyed him. Perhaps she hadn’t actually loved him—B’Elanna wasn’t even sure what that emotion was—but she had loved being with him, loved feeling him, loved everything they did together. Ultimately, the time she spent with him was the only occasion in her miserable halfbreed existence that she was ever truly happy.
Raising her gore-covered d’k tahg again, she made as if to thrust it into Thomas’s scarred body, but hesitated before she could bring her arm down.
Damn you, Thomas. She couldn’t do it. Killing him in the first place, that was an act of self-defense, but in the cool light of premeditation, she found she couldn’t even bring herself to defile his corpse.
Damn you, Miral.
She needed to be away from this place. If nothing else, Kes, the alien woman, was gone, and B’Elanna needed her found. She activated an intercom. “Kohlar, this is the supervisor, what’s happening?”
There was no response.
“Transporter room, beam me directly to the security office.”
“Yes, Supervisor.”
At least someone’s answering, she thought angrily as the transporter beam took her from the devastated lab to the more pristine security office.
Mildly more pristine, in any case—there was blood all over the place, and two corpses on the floor, both Klingons. She could not immediately identify them, due to their being decapitated. Looking around the room, she saw Kohlar’s head in one corner. In the opposite corner was another head, but the face was turned away from her, and B’Elanna found herself unwilling to walk over and turn it so she could see who else had been killed.
The important thing wasn’t who was dead, but who had killed them. “Harry,” she said with a growl.
She walked over to the computer console, which was almost as stained with blood as B’Elanna herself, and called up the surveillance camera in Katie’s quarters. There was still one Terran she didn’t despise, and that was dear Katie Janeway, who’d been so unswervingly loyal to B’Elanna throughout everything. As long as Katie’s okay, everything will be—
Her face fell. Katie wasn’t remotely okay. Katie’s body was on the floor of her quarters, her face marred by the telltale scarring of a disruptor blast. The culprit was probably the naked Terran on her couch, whose eyes were closed and who wasn’t moving. The tattoo over his eye identified him as Chakotay, their leader.
She checked the sensors and saw that there was a minimal life sign. It must have been Chakotay, clinging to life despite the gaping wound in his side.
Her lips curling into something that was half snarl, half smile, B’Elanna instructed the computer to flood Katie’s quarters with nerve gas. It wouldn’t hurt Katie at this point, and it would guarantee that her murderer paid the price for ruining B’Elanna’s plans.
As she fed the instructions, she noticed that her hands were covered in blood. Putting one hand to her face, she felt the blood and gore that was caking on her cheeks and realized that she probably looked a mess.
No, she thought, I look like a Klingon who has gone into battle. And I will not rest until all my enemies are dead.
She started examining other parts of the base. First, she checked on Seska; true to the way this day had been going for B’Elanna, the traitor had been freed. The security feeds to the entire hangar bay were nonfunctional for some reason—B’Elanna assumed that Harry was responsible—so B’Elanna checked the other part of Monor Base where she least wanted Terran rebels to be wandering around free: the hallway that provided access to the city’s control room.
Sure enough, she saw two dead guards and Harry Kim and Seska kneeling in front of a control panel.
Just as B’Elanna was debating whether or not it was worth flooding the hallway with nerve gas—her hesitation arising mainly from the loss of Seska’s trial, which was an important part of her plan to regain status with Alliance Command—Harry and Seska managed to get the door open.
Damn them! The security measures weren’t active in the control room itself, as both the anesthezine and the nerve gas were too risky to let loose around the sensitive antigravity equipment that kept Stratos in the air.
Not nearly as risky a
s letting two rebels in there, though. “Transporter room, beam me to the corridor outside the control room, now!”
“Yes, Supervisor.”
She wished she could have beamed directly in, but transporters didn’t operate within the room, either, for the same reason the gases didn’t.
It wasn’t until she materialized that she realized that she had forgotten to retrieve her disruptor from Thomas’s corpse. Well, it’s not like I would’ve used an energy weapon in there anyhow.
It still put her at a disadvantage, however. Harry and Seska would have no qualms about firing their weapons, as their likely goal was to sabotage the antigrav generators that kept Stratos aloft.
The phrase control room didn’t do the space justice, since the word room implied a relatively small, enclosed area, even on Ardana where spaciousness was the order of the day. The control room took up the entire length and breadth of the city, save for that one corridor that led to the turbolift into which B’Elanna had materialized. The four corners of the space were taken up with huge cylindrical generators, protected by duranium sheaths, and each half a qelI’qam in diameter. Throughout the massive space were various control consoles. B’Elanna moved toward the nearest of the generators.
Sure enough, she saw Harry and Seska operating one of the consoles—B’Elanna didn’t know which one, as the minutiae of engineering bored her to tears. Besides, unlike the equipment in the security office and operations, these generators hadn’t been replaced with Alliance models, as it was deemed too risky to take the existing Ardanan equipment offline in order to replace it.
To B’Elanna’s relief, that very feature was vexing Harry and Seska right now, as they appeared to be having difficulties with the interfaces.
Quickly, she reviewed her options. She doubted she could sneak up on them—certainly not on Harry. Only the room’s sheer size had allowed her to remain unnoticed so far. She had no energy weapons, and couldn’t risk firing them in any case. As for Harry and Seska, they’d be more than happy to risk it and, she could see now, they were both quite well armed (though not well dressed; Harry was as covered in gore as B’Elanna, and was wearing only some stolen Klingon uniform pants, and Seska had yet to put on any clothes).