Part 17 (1/2)
She pulled him to her and forced him to turn away from the grim vision of his sundered home. He embraced her as he buried his face between her neck and shoulder, but Beverly still felt as if she were standing outside the wall of his despair, making futile efforts to peek inside.
There wasn't a millimeter of s.p.a.ce between them, but it felt to her as if the man she loved were light-years away-and growing more distant by the day. And the Borg were to blame.
”I won't let them take you from us,” she said.
”Neither will I,” he said.
It wasn't what he'd said but how he'd said it that made Beverly tremble and fear that the worst was yet to come.
Worf pressed the door signal outside Jasminder Choudhury's quarters and waited patiently. Seconds later, he heard her invitation, shaken by grief's vibrato: ”Come in.”
He stepped forward, and the door opened. Jasminder stood in front of the sloped windows of her quarters, one arm across her chest, the other hand half hiding her face. Worf took slow, cautious steps toward her. Behind him, the door sighed closed.
Exorcising all edge and aggression from his voice, he asked, ”Are you all right?”
”Yes,” she said. ”Why do you ask?”
”It is unlike you to leave your post, even with permission,” he said. ”I was concerned.”
She brushed a tear from her cheek and looked at him. ”What about you? I thought you had the bridge?”
”I gave the seat to Kadohata,” he said.
Turning back toward the windows and the nebula beyond, she said, ”I just needed a few moments. No telling when we'll get another lull, right?”
”True,” he said. He stepped closer to her as she folded her arms together in front of her and lowered her head. On the coffee table in front of her, a small hologram projector displayed a miniature, ghostly image of a majestic, multilimbed oak tree in front of a quaint rural home. Settling in beside Jasminder, Worf noticed that she was staring at the hologram.
He didn't need to ask where the image had been recorded. It was easy enough to guess. ”It is possible your family escaped Deneva before the attack,” he said.
”Possible,” she said, choking back a hacking sob. ”Not likely.” Her eyes were red from crying. ”But that's not what's killing me.” She nodded at the hologram. ”It's the tree.”
”I do not understand,” he said.
Her jaw trembled, and she covered her mouth with her hand for a moment until she was steady enough to talk. ”Thirty-two years ago, my father and I planted that tree in front of our house. My mother used to have a picture from that day in our family alb.u.m-my dad with his s.h.i.+rt off and a shovel in his hand, me holding up the new tree while he filled in the dirt. Dad used to joke that he couldn't remember which was skinnier that day, me or the sapling.” Her face brightened behind a bittersweet burst of laughter. ”I don't remember, either. It was barely a tree, not even as thick as my arm.” Sorrow overtook her face again. ”See those two figures under the tree in the hologram? That's me and my dad, last year, when I was home on leave. Look how big that tree is: almost sixteen meters tall, nearly two and a half meters around at the base. It's just amazing...or it was. Now it's gone, and I'll never see it again.”
Fresh tears rolled from her eyes, but the emotion flowing behind them was anger. ”I just feel so d.a.m.ned stupid,” she said. ”I should be crying for my mother or my father or my sisters, all my cousins, my nieces and nephews...and what am I crying over? A tree. I'm going to pieces over a tree.”
She was shaking, and Worf saw then that Jasminder's aura of serene detachment and dispa.s.sionate resolve had been shattered. The sudden loss of her home and family and the violent rending of every tangible connection to her past were pains he knew well. The murders of Jadzia and K'Ehleyr were old wounds for him, but the pain they brought him had never diminished.
”You do not mourn the tree,” he said.
She shot a defensive glare at him. ”Then why am I crying?”
”You weep for what it represents.”
Jasminder regarded him with a stunned look for a few seconds, then turned her searching gaze at the hologram. ”Myself?” she wondered aloud, and shook her head. ”My home?”
”I see many trees on your family's property,” Worf said.
”But this is the one I...” Her voice trailed off as she followed his leading question to her own understanding. ”It's my father,” she whispered, her eyes fixed on the spectral image. ”A symbol of our bond, our relations.h.i.+p.”
Worf nodded. ”For a Klingon warrior, there are few things more important than one's father and how one honors him.”
She turned toward him, and he saw the dawning of a terrible understanding in her eyes. ”My father's gone, Worf.”
The outpouring of her grief was incremental for a few seconds, and then it cascaded out of her, like an avalanche exploding without warning from a fractured mountainside.
He pulled her toward him as she howled with rage and sorrow. Her guttural wails made him think of the Klingon warriors who were storming the fields of Sto-Vo-Kor that day.
Her cries subsided, but still she lingered in his embrace, as deathly still as someone in deep shock. In a voice hoa.r.s.e and raw, she said, ”I just can't believe it, Worf. Everything I ever called home is gone.” She looked up at him with tearstained eyes. ”Do you have any idea what that's like? To have your whole world blown away? Your whole family taken from you?”
His early childhood came back to him in bitter flashes. Memories of fire and fear on Khitomer. Bodies and blood.
”Yes,” he said in a sympathetic whisper. ”I do.”
19.
Dr. Simon Ta.r.s.es felt his feet slip-slide for the third time in a minute while he struggled to close Lieutenant sh'Aqabaa's shredded torso. He shouted over his shoulder, ”Somebody mop up this blood before I break my neck over here!”
Turning back toward Nurse Maria Takagi, who was a.s.sisting him, he snapped, ”Clamp the aorta, dammit!”
His temper was flaring, but he couldn't afford to waste precious seconds reining it in. There were five different colors of blood pooling on the deck between the biobeds, and the air was filled with pained cries, delirious groans, and panicked screams. Then the main doors gasped open, and a troop of medics carried in four more security personnel who were broken and saturated with their own blood.
A triage team led by the Aventine's a.s.sistant chief medical officer, Dr. Lena Glau, descended on the new arrivals. They worked in rapid whispers and grim, meaningful glances. At the end of several seconds' review, Glau pushed a lock of her sweat-stringy dark hair from her face and called out directions to her gathering flock of nurses and medical technicians. ”Move the chest wound to the O.R., stage the bleeders in pre-op, and call the time on the head wound.”
Sealing off a major tear in sh'Aqabaa's vena cava while dark blue ichor oozed over his gloved fingers, Ta.r.s.es called over to Glau, ”Lena, what've you got?”
”More friendly-fire victims,” she said, following her patient with the chest wound as he was moved on his antigrav stretcher toward the O.R. ”I have two minutes to save this guy.”
”Let me know if you need a hand,” Ta.r.s.es said, and then he gritted his teeth while he struggled to work around the tattered remains of his Andorian patient's traumatized pericardium.
Glau replied, ”Looks like you've already got your hands full, but thanks, anyway.” She, her patient, and her surgical-support team vanished inside the O.R.
He grimaced at the critically wounded Andorian shen on the biobed between himself and Takagi. Ideally, he'd have performed her operation in the Aventine's main surgical suite, but sh'Aqabaa's vitals had crashed too quickly. There hadn't been time to move her to O.R. before the need to operate had become imperative. He didn't know who was to blame for the shortage of surgical arches, but as Ta.r.s.es rebuilt sh'Aqabaa's chest cavity by hand, he promised himself that someone at Starfleet Medical would get an earful about this.
a.s.suming Starfleet Medical still exists tomorrow, he reminded himself. Or, for that matter, a.s.suming we still exist tomorrow.
The other three members of sh'Aqabaa's squad were in the hands of the Aventine's chief resident physician, Dr. Ilar Prem, and its surgical fellow, Dr. Nexa Ko Tor. Dr. Ilar was a Bajoran man with a slight build, finely molded features, and dark eyes capable of snaring one with a sudden, shockingly direct stare. Dr. Nexa was a female Triexian with ruddy skin and deep-set eyes that seemed custom-made for keeping secrets. Her most impressive quality as a surgeon was the ability to use her three arms to operate on two patients with equal efficacy at once.
Prem's patient was a human woman, and Nexa was working on two men, a Zaldan and a Bolian. Even from across the room, Ta.r.s.es could tell that none of the three surgeries was going well. The vital-signs displays above the biobeds fluctuated wildly, and then they began to go flat.