Riker could envision the finger of the sniper, poised over the trigger. He wanted to give the order to cut loose, and he could feel Tang's gaze upon him. But there was no way that he could give the clearance... not when the ninth raider was still unaccounted for.

Then there was more movement, and the final member of the Sindareen raiding party made his appearance.

In his right hand, he was cradling a blaster. His head was turning slowly, clearly trying to spot whatever Federation people might be trying to target him. His left arm was curled around the throat of a woman.

"Deanna," breathed Riker.

He zoomed in on her face. Her jaw was set, her eyes unblinking. If she was afraid, she was making a great show of keeping her feelings to herself.

"That's nine," said Tang. "Lieutenant-?"

"They have a hostage," Riker said tonelessly.

"I know that, sir."

Riker was silent. "Who's your best marksman?"

Tang antic.i.p.ated the request and tapped his comm unit. "Sommers. Shift target to the Sindareen in the rear. Lorie, pick up Gamma's target."

"Acquired," came Lorie's voice from Alpha Point.

This was immediately followed by Sommers saying, "Got him in my sights."

"Clear shot?"

"Negative," replied Sommers, "repeat, that's a negative. Target's moving too much."

Riker saw immediately that Sommers was correct. Maror was too experienced at this. He kept shifting his position, swinging Deanna around so that she was constantly in the way.

Riker pressed the binos so hard against his eyes that he thought they were going to come out the back of his head. He knew what he should do. The vast majority of the hostages were already in the clear. Only one was left... one who might still survive if everything fell fight. But if they made no move, then the raiders would escape, and more people would pay down the line.

Deanna, he thought bleakly.

At that moment, Deanna was swung directly into Riker's sight line...

And she looked straight at him. Straight and proud and unafraid.

Two words rang in his head.

I understand.

"Take them," said Riker.

"Take 'em," Tang ordered. "Take 'em."

Deanna flinched.

From all around, phasers blasted outward, enveloping the surprised Sindareen in coronas of energy. Several staggered and went down. One of them managed to survive the blasts and tumbled into the ship.

Sommers missed Maror. Deanna's instinctive, uncontrollable shiver, antic.i.p.ating the barrage that was about to occur, had been enough to warn the Sindareen leader that something was about to happen. As a result he'd dropped to a crouch, dragging Deanna down with him. Sommers had been aiming high anyway, banking on Maror's exposing his head for the brief moment that Sommers would need. But it didn't happen, and now Maror dashed for the ship, dragging Deanna with him. The marksmen shot around him, steering clear of the trapped Betazoid.

For a split instant, Maror's back was exposed, and Sommers fired. The high-power phaser beam, which would have severely burned and possibly even crushed Deanna Troi, staggered Maror. It caused him to stumble forward, almost failing atop his prisoner, but then he recovered and reached the inside of the ship, shoving Deanna inside ahead of him. The hatch rampway closed, with several crates of Betazoid art treasures-along with five of the Sindareen-left lying on the rooftop.

"Dammit!" shouted Riker. "Dammit!" It was a totally un-Starfleet response. It was also understandable.

With a roar of impulse engines, the Spider swayed into the air. Obviously whoever was piloting the ship was doing so in a G.o.d-awful hurry, not taking time to engage in proper navigational procedures, but instead concentrating only on getting the h.e.l.l out of there.

Riker didn't even have to look behind him to know what Tang was doing. The hard-bitten sergeant had swung the phaser cannon onto his shoulder and activated it. "Can you bring them down?" said Riker without turning.

"I can blow them out of the sky. Quick and fast."

"Can you cripple them?"

"Trickier. Not as sure. And," Tang added quietly, "there's no guarantee she'll survive the crash. You may not be doing her any favors."

"I know."

The Spider had now gained the skies and was heading west, angling upward. In a moment it would pick up even greater speed and hurl itself far, far away from Betazed.

"Cripple them," said Riker.

Tang made an adjustment on the power and fired.

The intensity of the phaser blast was beyond anything Riker had ever experienced directly. The air crackled around him, and he thought he was going to choke.

The blast took out the starboard engine and the navigational instrumentation of the Spider. The ship lurched wildly, tried to regain control, and failed. It spiraled downward, leaving a trail of thick black smoke behind it miles long.

"Where's it going to come down?" said Riker tonelessly.

"Judging from the speed and trajectory," Tang replied, "somewhere in the region known as the Jalara Jungle."

There was silence for a moment, and then Gart Xerx said, "If she makes it through the crash, she has a good chance. The jungle has its dangers... mud pits and such... but there are few really dangerous animals to contend with."

Riker turned and stared at him. "You're forgetting the most dangerous animals. They're the ones steering the ship."

CHAPTER 25.

Maror didn't know what he was running from, or what he was running to.

No. That wasn't precisely right. He knew what he was running to. He was running straight to h.e.l.l. But if there was one thing of which he was resolved, it was that he was going to take the d.a.m.ned Betazoid woman with him.

She sat on a rock nearby, and to his frustration she looked exactly as she had the day before, and the day before that. Even though her clothes were ripped and dirty, her face filthy, her hair hanging in stringy ringlets that had lost all their bounce in the moisture of the jungle. Even with her shoes gone, her prospects slim.

Still, she had composure.

He couldn't take it anymore. He wanted her to be like other women he had captured. He wanted her to beg or plead. He wanted her to whimper or moan. He wanted her to... to something.

He swung his gun up and aimed at her. "Ask for your life."

With a small shrug of her slim shoulders, she said evenly, "Please do not kill me."

He stared at her in disbelief. "You call that begging?"

"No. I call that asking. To be honest, it's pointless. You'll kill me or not. I can't stop you. Begging will demean me and accomplish nothing. I see no advantage to it, and I won't do it."

With a roar of unbridled fury, he stalked over to her and grabbed her by the back of her head. He yanked down hard, and the angle in which he pulled her skull made her mouth open involuntarily. He shoved the barrel of the gun into her mouth, angling it so that the ray blast would be certain to blow her brain up through the top of her skull.

"I said beg," he repeated.

Her eyes rolled up to regard him for the briefest of moments, and then up into the top of her head. Her breathing slowed, and her entire body went limp.

For an instant he thought she'd pa.s.sed out, but then he realized what she had done. She'd put herself into a trance, or into some sort of deep meditative state. When she was like that, nothing he could say or do would bring her out of it until she was ready to be brought out. He could blow her brains out and she would never know or feel it.

So there he was, feeling like something of a fool. You couldn't threaten someone who wasn't aware of you. Which meant either he should kill her or not. If he killed her, he had a corpse and nothing to hold over any of the Fed men should they catch up with him. There was no point to it. h.e.l.l, there was no point to any of it.

With a curse he released her and took some small measure of satisfaction in watching her thud to the ground like a bag of stones. Then he perched himself on the rock that she had occupied moments before and stared down at her, waiting for her to come out of it.

Slowly, after some minutes, she did. She lay there. staring up at him.

"You wonder why I haven't killed you yet?"

She tilted her head slightly and said, "You hope that I will serve some purpose in the near future."

The membranes on his neck fluttered a bit faster as he asked, "And have you wondered why I haven't raped you?"

"You're not a rapist. A thief, yes. A killer as needed. But not a rapist."

Maror studied her. "You're that certain?"

"I wasn't at first." She drew her knees up under her chin. "At first I was terrified that you might do that. When the two of us were the only survivors of the crash, I was certain you might take that course. But as time has pa.s.sed, I have begun to have a sense of you. Prolonged exposure to you has enabled me to get an empathic feel for you that I didn't have before."

"Keep your empathic feelings to yourself." He walked toward her and yanked her rudely to her feet, as if to try to make up for the fact that he wasn't the type to a.s.sault a woman s.e.xually. "I still can't believe," he grumbled, "that you survived the crash when others of my men didn't."

"I was not tense," she said simply. "I had relaxed myself. Your men were tense. The stiffness resulted in the internal injuries that killed them."

"Thank you for that diagnosis," he snarled.

He led her through the jungle, watching carefully all about him for any sign of pursuit.

Deanna, for her part, took the opportunity to expand her senses and get a feel for the life that throbbed all about her in the jungle. It was rare that anyone really ventured any real distance into the Jalara, and rarer still for anyone to be out this far. In a way she found it exciting. She just wished that that excitement wasn't coming at the expense of those who loved her.

She was certain that her mother must be frantic by now, and not for the first time she silently cursed the fate that had made her half-human. Had she been full Betazoid, there was a great likelihood that she would be able to send free-ranging thought broadcasts as far back as the city. Summon help right to the spot where she presently was. It wouldn't matter that geographically she didn't have a clue as to her whereabouts. They would simply be able to sense her.

But her ability to send and receive was diluted by her human heritage. She needed greater proximity to be at all reliable. And out here, in the middle of nowhere, proximity was not exactly easy to come by.

Birds fluttered past her, and she had to step carefully to avoid treading on a small serpent that slid past her. It was not poisonous, but she had no desire to injure something innocent. The thing she found most heartening was that she had sensed the creature's presence rather than seen it.

The vegetation around them was thinning out, and ahead of them was a cleared area that prompted Maror to let out a sigh of relief. It was a watering hole.

He turned to Troi. "Even you have to be thirsty. You're made of ice, but ice requires water."

"I'm hardly made of ice," she said, brushing strands out of her face and trying not to let the fatigue she felt be betrayed in her voice. "That water will taste as good to me as it does to you."

"That's very comforting." He gestured with the gun. "You first."

"Thank you."

She went to the water and knelt down before it. The rips in her dress exposed more skin than she would have liked, but at this point there was no use getting overly concerned about such things. She cupped her hands, scooped up water and brought it to her lips, sipping gingerly and being careful not to take the big gulps that her impulses urged.

He frowned as he watched her. "You drink like a bird."

"There's no point in overdoing it," she replied evenly. "if I overindulge, the result will simply be stomach cramps. I see no advantage to that."

"Fine. Fine. Do what you want."

She looked at her reflection in the water and moaned softly. Then she shoved her hands in once more, wetting them thoroughly, and brought them up to her face, making an effort to wash away as much of the dirt as possible. After a few moments she studied the result and decided that, while it wasn't perfect, at least it was an improvement.

"You realize," she said, "that you're not heading anywhere in particular. You're just marking time. You have no one waiting to pick you up. No rendezvous. No secret hideout."

"I've never been caught. I take tremendous pride in that. I'm not about to get caught now, no matter what. Besides, I'm betting that they stop looking for us. They've probably found the ship by now. They found the bodies of the others. Maybe they'll even continue the search for a couple of days. But sooner or later, they'll conclude that we couldn't have survived-that we probably fell into a... what did you call it?"

"Mud pit," she said evenly.

"Right. Mud pit. Or maybe a ravine. Or maybe even got eaten by some huge animal they didn't even know hung about in these woods. They won't search for us forever."

"Oh, yes, they will," she replied with quiet confidence. "I don't believe they'll ever stop. And neither, in all honesty, do you."

"Really? Then why am I going to all this trouble if it's so certain that I'll be caught?"

She turned and looked at him with her ebony eyes. "You are afraid. You are afraid of whatever actions might be taken against you by Starfleet. Afraid of giving up some measure of your freedom. So afraid, in fact, that you would much rather live a handful of days fighting for survival, but free... than you would live many days, or months or even years, in captivity or under the supervision of the Federation."

His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

After one more brief pa.s.s of the water over her face, she rose and pointed to the water. "All yours."

He nodded and gestured for her to step away from the water. "You know, I was just tired of you before. But now I'm really, really sick of you. All you're doing is slowing me down." He crouched in front of the water and scooped some up. He was able to bring it to his mouth and continue to converse at the same time. "You yammer at me. You a.n.a.lyze me. You try to make me feel like some sort of coward. I'm starting to think that whatever minimal use you might have had as a hostage would pale next to the sheer, selfish pleasure I'd feel at blasting the top right off of your pretty little-"

She kicked him in the small of the back.

With a yell, Maror stumbled forward, wet soil slipping beneath him, and he fell headfirst into the water. He floundered around and was about to pull his upper body out when some inquisitive water snakes, which Deanna had sensed were in the area, came to investigate and did so by wrapping themselves around Maror's throat.

Deanna, for her part, bolted.