Gomez sealed the maintenance lab door behind her. All she wanted was to hide in the sanctity of her own quarters, safe behind closed doors, but that was impossible now. Her private quarters had been destroyed during the final series of implosions that had rocked the da Vinci.
All her personal possessions aboard ship had been lost to the atmosphere of Galvan VI: her civilian clothes; an antique, leather-bound twenty-first-century edition of The Complete Works of Richard Brautigan that her father had given to her when she was fifteen; the sonic rifle she had wielded in her battle against a crystalline killing machine on the planet Sarindar.
And the pens, she realized with a pang of regret. Duffy had given her a set of Vulcan calligraphy pens for her birthday three months ago, because six months with an emerald, her birthstone; a music crystal that played Trill lullabies; a bottle of rare Deltan perfume….
Now they’re all gone…everything he ever gave me.…
She palmed the tears from her cheek and wiped her hand across the front of her uniform. Her fingertips paused on the raised edges of the ring that was still tucked safely within her jacket’s inside pocket.
She took out the ring and watched flickers of light dance across its stone’s facets as she turned it in her hand. She let the ring fall into her palm and closed her fist around it.
Her first sob caught in her chest. Her second burst out of her like a hacking cough. Then her grief escaped in full force, a throaty dirge that echoed off the metallic walls of the cramped maintenance lab. She pressed her back to the wall and slid downward as her knees buckled. Her wails of despair became angry screams.
She tightened her fist around the ring until the stone bit into her flesh. No sound she made, no pain she inflicted on her body, could ease the torment seething inside her. She slumped to the deck, then curled into a fetal position. She opened her fist and looked at the ring, which was daubed with her own blood. Although she had no idea why she was doing it, she slipped the ring onto the third finger of her left hand.
She stared through her prism of tears into the cold fire of the diamond, as if it held the secrets of life and death.
Her funereal cries grew steadily more despondent as the truth took root in her mind:
Kieran’s gone.
