The door was large enough for him, made of thin metal and bracings. It was windowless and tall, suggesting an inner confusion and a possibility of darkness in which to conceal himself. Klaang angled away from that building and went for the silver tower to the side. Shock broke across its expression, and it disappeared back into the swinging port. He was about to try when a port opened in the nearest building and an alien emerged, bright in the face and round in the body, with hairless chin and narrow shoulders and cloth on its head. His conscience and his duty were in conflict.īut to die with Suliban disruption in the back - who would tell how it really had been for him? Why he died with wounds in his back? He was running to save the mission, after all, not himself. Ridiculously, he tilted toward each shot escape would be preferred, but if there was no escape, he wanted to die boldly. The alien countryside lit up in great expanses. The Suliban weapons spat bitter fire at Klaang as he ran. A good death in battle for a good old craft, to go ferociously into the dust and flame with scars of Suliban attack. "Hah!" A burst of new energy, driven by the stink of burning plants, drove him faster toward the square buildings he had seen as his craft rushed overhead to its death. He saw their mottled faces, heard their weapons, and sensed their insult. A glance over his shoulder told him they were after him even through the smoke and weeds. The stalks beside him burst into flame and withered, blackened. Then the blasts began, and he knew he was wrong. Suliban animals would lose him in this weed field. He knew he was big, even for a Klingon, but here he sensed an advantage. His bulky body served better here and seemed young again. The gravity here - he could run faster than on Qo'noS.
Klaang ran, ran like a fear-driven child, but with anger also, which kept him leaping harder with each step. Who was on this planet? Who had made the stalks into rows as tidy as a mOghklyk's spine plait? What beasts were here who built the land into squares, the buildings into squares, and the fences into squares? Were they also square? It was Klingon to its core and it would serve till the end, spewing a curtain of smoke to hide him in the stalks.
Thus he ran from the smelling wreck of a noble craft that had carried him so far, whose flawed intakes he had not been able to mend in time. Failed! I have smashed my craft, and now I flee to live!ĭie here? In rows of weeds and seeds? This is no way to die! Suliban! The savage pawns must not have what I know.
0 kommentar(er)
