Bloodthirst (2 page)

Now his father could only blame himself; now he was losing his only child. Yoshi thought unhappily of the added grief it would bring his father, and slumped over the desk again.

His hand touched the open page of a book he had been reading. Lara was an avid collector of antiques, including the paper books that lined the shelves. He had read himself to sleep the night before, a book chosen because he found the title vaguely familiar, but the choice had been poor and haunted his dreams. His eyes fell upon a line:

I was indeed awake and among the Carpathians. All I could do now was to be patient, and to wait the coming of the morning.

Yoshi closed the book and pushed it away. He had been patient, but morning for him would not come again. He drew a breath deep into his lungs to clear his head, but the air was stale and heavy and yielded little oxygen. He had cut off the circulation system to Lara's quarters. Any of the rooms could be sealed when containment was breached, but the system presumed that decontamination of the rest of the station would take only a few hours. Naturally, there would be no need during that time for food, or water, or fresh air.

No provisions had been made for the insanity that occurred here. He closed his eyes and saw the impossible: he and Lara in the stasis room, standing in front of the closed burial tube and watching aghast, as the lid slowly rose because
it was being pushed open from the inside”

Don't think of it.

He swallowed a sob of fear and calmed himself by listening to his stomach rumble hollowly. Without food it was not so bad—after the first two days, his hunger was replaced by a dull headache. But thirst tormented him unbearably.

It would be quicker, better, to go outside. It was no longer a question of surviving: it was a question of choosing how he was to die.

Yoshi rose from the desk too quickly, and had to clutch it to keep from falling. The worst thing was what the lack of water had done to his mind, making him the victim of his thoughts rather than the master of them. He could face dying, even killing, if his mind were clear.

He pushed himself away from the desk and walked unsteadily through the gloom. The lights had gone out some time ago, and he had groped, childishly frightened of the dark, and found the lamp, candle, and lighter in the old desk. Now he held the lamp in one hand and the scalpel in the other, moving past the bookshelves and the dusty tomes with cracked spines, past the picked-over display of antique medical instruments, to the great thick slab of metal that sealed him off from the outside.

For a time, Yoshi contemplated the door. Small beads of sweat stung his cracked lips and he savored them greedily with his tongue as he thought of what lay beyond: murder, followed by his own suicide.

He tried to swallow and could not, the muscles in his neck pulsing with the effort. He would not lose heart now. He would do it. Dying of thirst was worse letting the evil live was worse. Killing had become an act of mercy. He leaned weakly against the cold metal and pressed the control. The seal slid upward with a whisper. The door opened.

The corridors beyond were draped in blackness. Yoshi held the lamp high and ventured tentatively beyond the threshold. The small stub of candle flickered, capturing at the far edge of its illumination a pale, indistinct shape. Heart fluttering, he followed that shape down the hall to sickbay, where he stopped, sensing a presence within. He leaned forward into the open door and raised the scalpel high, like a dagger at the ready.

“Lara?” His voice was low, scarcely audible, yet in the darkness it carried as if he had shouted.

And in the lampglow, Yoshi glimpsed straight to the bottom of the eyes of death: the clouded eyes of his mother as she lay dead on the floor of the shuttle, the eyes of Reiko that spoke of betrayal, the wide, unseeing eyes of Lara Krovozhadny.

The light of the candle reflected the swift, downward glint of silver.

LEONARD MCCOY ABHORRED technology; in fact, it was his firm conviction that it would someday be the death of him. So when the transporter beam deposited him a half mile underground into total blackness, his heart skipped a beat at the prospect that his belief might suddenly be vindicated.

“God almighty!” McCoy reached out, unable to see anything but the faint glow outlining his hands. He waved them cautiously in front of him without touching anything. “Stanger, you still there?”

“Here, Doctor.” The soft tenor voice came from a short distance away on his right. “We'll be okay in just a second” and before Stanger finished, a focused beam of light cut through the blackness. Behind it, McCoy could just make out the security guard's brown features beneath the fleeting glimmer of his field suit.

McCoy felt for his communicator and opened it with an indignant flourish. “McCoy to
Enterprise
.” He had to speak up to be sure he was heard. The suit muffled the sound of his own voice, rather as if he had a head cold. “Jim, how the hell do you expect us to operate in the dark down here?”

There was a pause at the other end, and he could picture the corner of the captain's mouth crooking up a half inch or so, but the reply showed no trace of it. “Don't tell me neither of you thought to take a flashlight.”

“I did, sir,” Stanger volunteered from a distance—a little too eagerly, McCoy thought. He frowned at the transmitter grid before speaking into it.

“That's not the point, Captain. The point is that”

“The point is inferred and noted,” Kirk said, and now the smile was in his voice, too. “Next time, we'll warn you.”

“Thanks,” McCoy answered sarcastically.

“Everything else okay, so far?”

“How should I know? I just got here,” McCoy said. “I'll yell if we need anything.”

“You do that, Doctor. Kirk out.”

Stanger had already made his way to the nearest wall and had located the control panel for the lights, but he was frowning. “Power source cut off. That's odd. Other systems seem to be working.”

McCoy nodded. “What kind of place are we in, anyway?”

Stanger swept around with the flashlight at waist level.

“Looks like some sort of lab”

The beam swept over gleaming onyx counter tops and an elaborate assortment of Petrie dishes and vials—all encased in a pentagon of crystal. The entrance to the pentagon shimmered with the same type of field as Stanger and McCoy's suits. As they moved closer, the crystal threw the light back in their faces. “Looks like a medical lab,” Stanger said.

“A hot lab,” McCoy murmured, mostly to himself.

Stanger frowned. “A what?”

“A pathology lab, from the looks of their containment setup. An isolated disease control center. Reminds me of the one in Atlanta. Wonder why they'd have such a small setup in the middle of nowhere like this.”

“Seems to me you'd want to keep something like this out in the boondocks,” Stanger said.

“Maybe. But you'd think they'd have given some sort of warning. If we'd beamed down here without the precaution of the suits”

Stanger's expression grew sickly. “You mean they didn't
tell
us anything?”

“Just a class-one medical emergency. But there's nothing to worry about. These suits are standard procedure. They'll keep us safe.”

The guard grunted dubiously and started moving the light around the corners of the room. “Anyone in here?”

His voice echoed in the shadows of the empty chamber; no answer came.

“Guess we'd better take a look around,” McCoy said, though quite frankly it was the last thing he wanted to do. He'd never been afraid of the dark, not even as a kid—well, not
really
“but the lab was giving him a distinctly uncomfortable feeling. He wanted to find whomever he was supposed to find and get out of there. “That was a class-one medical emergency signal. We can't afford to take our time.”

In response, Stanger led the way to the door and glanced down at the tricorder. Its dials glowed feebly in the dark. “I'm getting a faint life-form reading coming from that direction.” He pointed and started moving for the door. McCoy followed—perhaps too closely. At one point in the corridor, he stepped on the back of Stanger's heel.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly, feeling embarrassed.

“That's okay.” Stanger swung around to look at him, politely lowering the flashlight so it didn't shine in the doctor's eyes. McCoy could tell from the sound of his voice that Stanger smiled slightly. “Place getting to you?”

“No—well, actually, yes. Don't you think there's something creepy about this place?”

“I find it all very appropriate.” Sounding bemused, Stanger turned away from him and started following the tricorder again. McCoy tried this time to maintain a respectable distance. “You
do
know what day it is, don't you, Doctor?”

McCoy frowned. “Stardate”

“No, I mean Old Earth calendar.”

“Oh. Uh, October something I think it's the last day. Is it the thirtieth or the thirty-first? I can never remember that damn poem”

“The thirty-first,” Stanger said helpfully.

McCoy grinned in spite of himself. “Well, I'll be It's Halloween. I'd forgotten. Not many people celebrate it these days.”

“A shame, too,” Stanger said. “My folks did. It was my favorite holiday when I was a kid.”

“Well, that explains it, then. These people are having a Halloween party, and they've invited us.”

Stanger chuckled. “Thank God we remembered to wear our costumes.”

McCoy smiled, feeling a little more relaxed. He liked Stanger. Personable, good sense of humor, and seemed to know what he was doing. But awfully old for an ensign. There was some sort of rumor going round the ship about him, something bad he'd supposedly done that Tjieng had been repeating to Chris Chapel, but McCoy had been too busy to stop and listen. Besides, he disapproved of gossip in theory, anyway. “No wonder I was feeling a little skittish.”

They inched their way along the corridor until Stanger planted himself in front of a closed door and gestured at it with the tricorder. “In there.”

“What do you think we'll find?”

“Bats hanging from the ceiling,” the ensign retorted, but his eyes were faintly anxious.

“Well, then, after you.” McCoy gestured gallantly; Stanger turned to face him. “You
are
the security guard, after all.”

Stanger's lip curled beneath the field suit, and he shot the doctor a sour look. “You know, that's the trouble with this job.” But he went in first—not without resting his free hand lightly on his phaser. McCoy followed close behind.

The flashlight swept the room at eye level.

“Looks like their sickbay,” McCoy said. And a small one at that, barely big enough to accommodate three or so people. “See if there's anyone on the diagnostic bed.”

Stanger lowered the flashlight. “Funny, I'm not reading anything now, but I could have sworn the tricorder said in here”

McCoy's communicator beeped, and he flipped it open. “McCoy here.”

The ray of light shot straight up, painted an insane zigzag on the ceiling, then disappeared as the flashlight rolled into a far corner. “GEEzus!” Stanger gave a muffled cry. The faint outline of his suit showed him sprawled across the floor.

“Stanger! Are you all right?” McCoy dropped the open communicator.

“What the hell is going on down there?” An angry voice emanated from the communicator on the floor.

Stanger emitted a small bleat of disgust and pushed himself away and up into a standing position. He was on his feet by the time McCoy recovered the flashlight and shone it on him.

“My God, Stanger”

Deep red fluid beaded up and dribbled down the front of Stanger's suit, repelled by the energy field. McCoy grabbed his arm, but Stanger shook his head and pulled his arm away.

“I'm all right. Fell over something—someone. Feels like a body—still warm.” He pointed at the floor.

The beam shone down into the dull eyes of a woman, beautiful, bronze-haired, dead. On top of her, face down in a gruesome embrace, lay the still, white form of a darkhaired man.

McCoy gave the flashlight to Stanger to hold while he bent over the man. The woman was cold, dead for a few hours at least, but the man's body was still warm to the touch. McCoy shook his head bitterly. If they had only gotten there a few minutes earlier He gently rolled the body over, and started. “Will you look at that?” His voice was soft with awe.

The light shone on the man's neck, which had been slit from ear to ear in a hideous, gaping grin. An old-fashioned scalpel dropped from his limp fingers.

“I'm trying not to, thanks.” Stanger averted his eyes quickly. “What about the woman?”

“She's been dead for some time. Both bled to death. You can see how pale they are. You probably were picking up a reading on him a half minute ago—if we hadn't spent so much time stumbling in the dark, I might have been able to do something”

“Must have gone crazy.” Stanger shook his head. “There's nothing we can do?”

McCoy sighed. At times like this, his medical knowledge seemed a useless burden. “I can beam him up to the ship, and by the time I get him pumped full of enough blood to make a difference, the damage to the brain”

Frowning, Stanger interrupted. “Do you hear something, Doctor?”

McCoy listened carefully. The sound of someone talking, very far away “For God's sake, my communicator”

Stanger took the flashlight and retrieved it for him.

“Anybody there?” McCoy said apologetically into the grid.

“What the devil is going on?” The captain's voice had no trace of amusement in it now.

“We just stumbled over two corpses, Jim. Quite literally. They've been cut very neatly.”

McCoy could hear the slow intake of breath at the other end of the channel. Kirk was silent for a beat, and then he said, “Doctor, I just got a message from Starfleet Command in response to my report that we were answering the distress call. It says that under no circumstances are we to respond. Unfortunately, we were too far out to get the message before we beamed the two of you down.”