Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 01:34:27 -0500 Reply-To: JillMari@AOL.COM Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Jill Spetoskey Subject: Shades of Red and Black (part 10 of 10) Comments are always welcomed and encouraged at jillmari@aol.com or jilkey@grfn.org Shades of Red and Black(A Highlander/V story) part 10 of 10 c. 1995 by Jill Spetoskey *** "Folks, we've got a problem here," Julie spoke as Sara shifted uncomfortably in the folding chair. "According to Sara, we left something important behind during the raid on Meridian." "Thanks, Julie." She rose and took Julie's place at the table that served as impromptu podium. "First, I need to give you a little more background on myself than I gave you before. No offense, but I just couldn't trust you with everything. I'm older than I look by far, around two thousand, not twenty-nine. I was raised in the hills of Rome at its prime." She paused, and pulled her pocket knife out, wishing there was a less painful was to do things. She felt Ghost chose that moment to twine himself around her legs. "Watch." She drove the knife deeply into her bare forearm, careful to not drip blood on the rest of her clothes. Mike charged at her, face filled with concern. "Sara. Are you crazy? You've severed a vein there." A few of the others approached her as well. "Trust the doctor over there. If she thought anything was wrong, she'd have her kit out and be fussing over me as I speak." Sara nodded at Julie, who was the only person still seated. She wiped the blood off her arm, revealing the almost-healed wound. "Look. It's almost healed already." After a few minutes of questioning, the buzzing among the Resistance leaders died down. Sara answered the questions carefully, telling the truth for the most part, but, once more, keeping the Game out of the picture. She rapped the table to the the group's attention. "This is something I very rarely tell to mortals, and never withour cause. This time, the cause is that the Visitors have probably captured one of my kind. No one really knows why, but you can tell no difference between us and normal humans as we grow up and move through a seemingly normal life. Although it is possible for the immortals to know that a specific person will become immortal on their first death, we never tell a person that they will become immortal beforehand, although some of these people do know of the existence of immortals beforehand. The reasons for this is hidden so heavily in tradition and myth that I'm not precisely sure why it is so. Kate was one of these future immortals, and according to eyewitnesses, the blaster shot she took was lethal. We haven't heard from her since the raid, so I assume that she's in Visitor hands. If they treat her as they usually treat their prisoners, then they are going to find out her differences. My people have always been careful to stay away from the human scientists or those who would pry too deeply into our secrets. Because of Kate's capture, we could be giving the Visitors the secret of immortality." "Something like that could be a disaster to both my people and yours." Martin softly said. "Agreed." Mike added. "But is it feasable to try to get her back. For all we know, they've already frozen he in the mothership, and we'd never find her." "Actually," Ham spoke for the first time, "they haven't moved anybody back to the mothership as far as we know. We did enough damage to the processing plant that the only thing the lizards are trying to do right now is start repairs on things. If the Visitors did get any prisoners, my sources should be reporting it to me in the next three hours." "Okay. In the mean time, we can guess where prisoners would likely be taken. Let's give some thought to things, and then we'll meet back here in, say, two hours." Julie adjourned the meeting, and a few people headed out to grab a cup of coffee. When the meeting reconvened, it was likely to be a long one. "Sara, when this is over, I need to have a talk with you." Ham spoke. "Yeah. I've been meaning to discuss some things with you, but the timing just hasn't been right. After we get Kate back, we'll all sit down together." She noticed Ham looked a little relieved as he left the room. "Sara?" Another question sailed at her. "Yeah, Mike." "It's different for you now. Isn't it? Before you were fighting for us and you were doing your job well, but you didn't have your soul in it. Now, you're ready to go to hell and back." "Yeah, Mike. It is different now." **** She'd swallowed the cyanide, but it hadn't semed to do anything other than make her sleepy. Now, Kate waited in the darkness for the Visitors to return. She heard blurry voices first, and then footprints down the hallway. The door clanged open, and her eyes scrunched shut in the light for a second. Two guards grabbed for her. Making a fist, she threw her entire hundred and twenty pounds behind her hand, and took a swing at the first guard's face. She hit him squarely in the nose, and was rewarded with his yelp of pain. The second guard brought his rifle across her face, but she still gave a half-smile, hoarding her small victory carefully as she felt the blood ooze down her face. They roughly hauled her to her feet, and started to move her down the corridor. "Since we can't take her up to the mothership just yet, our orders are to soften her up a little so that we can get any information from her in a timely manner." She knew the words were meant to scare her rather than pass along any information to the other guard. With a smudge of satisfaction, she noticed the other guard was still bleeding green a little. They took her to a dimly-lit room larger than her previous cell, and tied her to a chair in the middle of it. The guards took positions near the door, and together they waited for something or someone. Kate assumed that it was another mind game for them, and that they were trying to move her that much closer to a breakdown. So, she tried to place her mind on another task, and found that mentally reciting old shipping invoices required enough concentration that she could forget the store room a little. She started with Nash, New York City, July 13, 1985, the first shipment she could remember sending when she'd started working for Lucian, and had gotten to MacLeod, Seacouver, August 23, 1988 when the door opened and another Visitor entered carrying a case under his arm. After a few low words with the guards, he turned to her. "Hello. I'm Leo, and I'm sure we're going to have a nice little discussion here." The pale Visitor sounded almost cheerful. "It looks like you've already caused us some trouble, and I trust that that won't happen again. Your name is.." "Sara Smith." A nice plain name she would easily remember, and she saw a wrong name as one more layer she could put between herself and the too happy lizard, who had taken a startled breath as he looked at her. "Now what do we have here?" His cool hand firmly grabbed the side of her face that the rifle had hit. "George said that he hit you square in the face, but other than a little blood, it looks like nothing happened." "I don't know. He just hit me with that thing." The Visitor's fingernails dug into her face, and she winced as she felt a little more blood trickle down her face. The Visitor leaned backward and paused, looking at his handiwork. "And the scratches just close right up in a way a human does not heal." There was something a little different in his voice. "Who are you and what are you, Sara Smith?" "I'm nothing special, a nobody." She said softly as he grabbed her shoulder and gave a twist that nearly popped it out of its socket. "If you want proof, I tore a ligament in my left ankle a few years ago, and still have the scars from it. Look. They'll still be there." "If I were ambitous, I would figure things out down here."He said as he grabbed her leg and examined her scars. She felt like she should, but she didn't have the energy to fight him. "But, I am happy with my job, and would rather keep it than gamble with Diana's disfavor. George, would you keep an eye on out guest while I make arrangements for her?" He slipped out the door, leaving her alone with the silent guard she'd tried to attack. They had remained together in the room, her sitting, and him standing for about an hour when the guard's comm unit urgently beeped him. He spoke lowly and intensely into the device, and then looked down at her. "Okay, time to move you. Do exactly as I say, or I'll blow your head off." As he untied her bonds, he carefully kept her in his gun sights. "We are going to go from this room, and get on a shuttle. Walk very carefully, or you'll regret it." A blaster pushed into her back, Kate walked down the hallways where she was directed. There was something going on in the warehouse that they weren't mentioning to her; new noises were starting to lisp on her ears. George told her to walk faster, and she tried to increase her speed in the dim lighting. She rounded a blind corner, and her foot caught hard on some object, sending her sprawling on her back against a wall. She heard George near screaming at her to get back up now, and she could feel the hair on her body rise as he waved the blaster at her. She tried to rise but was hit by a wave of nausea, forcing her back down for a moment. "Drop it now, lizard!" There were non-uniform boots at her eye level now, and they seemed to be attached to the voice of Ham Tyler. "It's a standoff." George calmly replied. "If you shoot me, I'll shoot her. Whoever she is, I don't think she'll survive a full power blaster shot to the chest." "Fire, Ham. It'll be okay." Sara's voice came from the darkness. She partially saw Ham fire at George. The Visitor started to fall backward, and reflex reaction caused him to fire his own blaster. As she felt the weapon's energy crash into her chest, she found herself thinking that this time hurt just as much as last time. "He was wrong, Ham. She can survive getting shot like that. Now kelp me get her back to safety, and we'll have that talk I promised." Kate felt the two pull her off the ground, and then the world went black again. *** She came to conciousness in the back of an aging Suburban. Somewhat surprisingly, the vehicle seemed nearly empty by Resistance standards. Julie, who was sitting next to her lying form was carrying on some sort of conversation with Ham the driver on highway routes. Kate carefully opened her eyes, and the world didn't spin too badly. "Julie, she's coming out of it now. You can stop worrying." "Sara?" Kate groaned. "You told Ham to let him shoot me." "I'm sorry about that, Kate, but there wasn't time to do anything else." "I could have died at the warehouse." She complained, but there was something that wasn't quite right about the argument. "Actually, you could say that you did die in there, but you are the kind of person who won't stay dead. You're immortal like I am." "Immortal like in can't die?" "It's not as simple as that...." And as they travelled down the road, Sara explained about immortality, and then they let themselves pause to enjoy their victory over the Visitors for a moment. Finish =========================================================================