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his hands. In an attempt to keep himself from bleeding to death he
jammed his wrists under his armpits. He looked up at me, his face
getting distinctly green. "Please..." he implored.
"Please?!" I said. "I don't think "Please' is the magic word today;
you'll have to try again. How about Swordfish?" He looked at me as if
I had lost my mind. I looked at him as if he had lost his wrists and
was making a big mess all over the place. "Go on," I said, "give it a
try. It's not 'please' and it's
not 'pretty please," but I'll give you a hint.." it's got "My liege'
in the sentence." He had no idea what I was talking about so, rather
than continue the ordeal, he gave up the ghost. These guys are simply
not party animals.
As I watched his soul slither down the street, I heard the sound of
feet scuttling behind me and turned to see to whom they belonged. I
was assuming that one of them would be the individual who had thrown
the knife. Indeed it was. And she was a woman! She was accompanied
by several more Klingons. "Dax, isn't it?" I asked. "Jadzia Dax?"
She stared at me blankly for a moment, and then she recognized me. I
could see it in her eyes. But she said nothing at first. Instead she
knelt next to the fallen Klingon, and gently stroked his face. "Kor..."
she whispered. "We should have been faster .... I'm sorry."
"Have I taught you nothing, Jadzia?" growled the old warrior. "No
apologies..."
"... no fear.." no tomorrow," she finished the sentence, intoning it
in a way that indicated she had heard it any number of times.
"No... tomorrow ..." agreed the one called Kor... and then his eyes
rolled up into the top of his head, and he was gone.
Dax and the others clustered around him for a moment.." and then Dax
suddenly pitched her head back and unleashed the most ear-splitting
howl I'd ever heard. To make matters worse, the others took up the
cry. There is nothing more embarrassing than standing on a street
corner with a bunch of Klingons braying. It's so embarrassing! I
looked at my feet, I looked up in the sky, and finally I just joined
them. What the hell, a good cry is therapeutic and the way they were
doing it was tantamount to a sonic colonic.
Don't get me wrong; it's not the most hideous sound in the universe.
The most hideous sound in the universe is the mating call of the
six-legged male giz'nt, one of the most shortlived species ever. The
giz'nt's call was so atrocious, so bloodcurdling, no one could stand to
be within fifty feet of it, and that included female giz'nts. But male
giz'nts, being notoriously chauvinistic, were unaware of this.
Consequently their calls never managed to attract any females. They
survived for a brief time by mating with females who happened to be
sleeping, thus enabling the males to sneak up on them. In those
instances, the mating call served more as a sort of paralyzing bellow
that froze the female in her place so that-even once she was awake--she
couldn't get away fast enough. Unfortunately, it was too little, too
late, and the giz'nt died off within a few generations. Every so
often, evolution simply makes mistakes.
I finally clapped my hands over my ears and shouted, "Must you ?!"
They mercifully stopped, and Dax approached me slowly. Her hair was
down, long, and somewhat ratty. She was not wearing a Starfleet
uniform as she had been when I last saw her. Instead she was clad in
Klingon battle garb. Upon closer inspection, I realized that one of
her eyes was missing. How careless, I thought; it's one thing to lose
your purse, quite another to lose your eye.
"Q," she said in a voice dripping with contempt. "I should have known
you'd be behind all this."
"Then you would have known wrong," I told her. "I'm as much in the
dark about all this as you. Maybe more."
"You expect me to believe you?"
"I don't have any expectations one way or the other. But let's say,
for your sake, that I'm lying. Very well." I folded my arms. "Why
would I be lying?"
She opened her mouth to reply, but clearly nothing readily occurred to
her. She looked to the others, but they shrugged mutely. She looked
back at me. "All right," she said, with a low growl that seemed to be
a permanent part of her voice. "Let's say you're not. Tell me what
you do know."
"The universe is coming to an End." Every time I said it I felt like
Chicken Little, but it was the truth!
She considered for a moment, and then sighed heavily. "Figures."
"Makes everything else seem rather moot, doesn't it?"
"It does indeed. What about this place?" She took in the entirety of
it with a nod. "Do you have any idea where this is?" One of the
Klingons rumbled, "We are in StoVoKor." "Ah. Well, that certainly
clears that up," I said.
Still, for all my sarcasm, it seemed as much an explanation as any
other. "Sto-Vo-Kor" was the Klingon equivalent of warrior heaven and
purgatory, all mixed into one. The charming part of the notion was
that they were not acting under the watchful eye of any Klingon god,
for as they were fond of saying, Klingons had killed their gods many
centuries before.
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