ST TOS - 075 - Shadows on the Sun by Michael Jan Friedman

Author:Michael Jan Friedman [Friedman, Michael Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Adventure, General
ISBN: 9780671869106
Publisher: Star Trek
Published: 1993-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

At first McCoy thought the disaster survivors’ ward-his ward-was the one under attack. Then, just before he and his colleagues were beamed to the attack point, he learned the location of the assassins’ true target.

The knowledge made his blood freeze. No being, no matter how cruel, could do what Moboron’s assassins were said to be doing. It just wasn’t possible.

Then McCoy beamed down to the attack point alongside Bando and a couple of his veterans, and he saw how naive he had been. It didn’t matter how much horror one had witnessed, he realized. There was always a worse horror beyond that.

What met his eyes had until minutes ago been a children’s ward. A place for society’s innocents to heal from injuries, from illness, from surgical procedures. But Li Moboron had performed his own brand of surgery on Ssan the place, and now the immature throats of the dying filled the debris-clotted air with thin, high-pitched walls.

Kneeling, the trainee placed his fingertips against the neck of a girl no older than his own daughter, half-buried in the rubble of a collapsed wall. She was beautiful in a fragile sort of way, more slender than she should have been. Perhaps it was an illness that had made her so thin; perhaps that was what had brought her here.

She would no longer have to worry about any illnesses, he told himself. She would no longer have to worry about anything. Closing her eyes, he got up and made his way farther into the heart of the disaster.

The cries grew louder, but all McCoy could see before him were corpses. A boy here, a girl there. Just beyond them, an infant. He could feel a pounding in his temples that seemed to grow fiercer with every step he took. But there were no living Ssana, no one he could help.

Then, suddenly, something came flying at him out of the flames and the billowing smoke. Unprepared for it, he fell over backward trying to absorb its momentum, tumbled while clutching the projectile to him.

It sobbed with its whole body. As McCoy righted himself, he looked down into its Ssani face and saw that it was a boy. The youngster was bleeding from a deep cut in his ridged brow, his indigo eyes wide with fear and shock, his breathing labored and ragged. Just as the human decided there might be internal damage, the Ssana coughed up a gout of blood.

“It’s all right,” McCoy found himself saying. Running his tricorder over the boy as quickly as he could, he pinpointed the trouble a lung had been punctured by a fragment of a broken rib.

Grabbing his communicator, he flipped it open and barked, “McCoy to Fed Med One. Beam this kid up, damn it.”

There was no reply from their facility upstairs. A moment later, however, the child was embraced by the transporter effect, and a moment after that he was gone.

Standing, McCoy forged ahead again, part of a line of doctors and trainees poring through the rubble for survivors, trying to follow the cries of pain to their sources with smoke-stung eyes.

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