Read Online Venus Rising by Flora Speer - Free Book Online Page B

drooping trees, flowed before her, just as she
remembered it. The sun was warm, the breeze soft, and she could
hear her parents talking. Her little sister was laughing, playing
at some childish game. She could not see any of them. There was
only the river and the trees and the sound of their beloved
voices.
    The silver-gold Beltan sun disappeared behind
a cloud, and suddenly there were other voices, loud Cetan words
destroying the peaceful day. Then came the screams, over and over
again. The very air grew darker, and thunder rumbled across the
sky. Narisa knew she had to find her parents and her sister, had to
help them. She could not, could not, let the Cetans kill
them again. Not again. She almost found them this time. She was so
close. She heard a last loud shriek.
    “Mother! Father! Laria! No! Wait for me.
Wait!” She was on her knees, struggling with some tall creature.
“Let me go, you Cetan pig. I must find them. Let me go, I say!”
    “Narisa, it’s me, it’s Tarik.” Strong hands
held her, pinning her flailing arms to her sides, shaking her hard.
“Wake up. You’ve been dreaming. Narisa!”
    She fell against him, breathing hard as
though she had been running for a long time, clutching at him to
reassure herself he was real and not part of her nightmare. They
knelt together in close embrace while she tried to compose herself.
Tarik pulled her head onto his shoulder and stroked her hair until
her tearless cries had quieted and her breathing was normal again.
After a while he eased her gently down onto the sand and lay beside
her, still holding her.
    “If you tell me about it,” he said softly,
“you will chase the dream away faster and be able to sleep again
sooner.”
    She would never have breathed a word of her
family tragedy to the cold and arrogantly superior Commander Tarik
she had so despised aboard the Reliance, the man who had
harshly criticized the most minor details of her work. But this was
a different Tarik from the one she had known then; or rather, she
had not known him at all until they had been forced together during
the last three days. His peculiar ideas constantly threw her off
balance, but he had been genuinely afraid for her when the snake
might have killed her. He had kissed her, not once, but twice. And
just that morning he had put his hand on her bare breast and held
it there. She grew warm again at the memory, and snuggled against
him. She felt his lips brush across her brow. They were lying so
close, almost like lovers, their legs entangled. She thought if he
kissed her brow again, she would raise her face and his lips might
touch her mouth. What would he do then? Would he put his hands on
her as he had before? What was it like to be loved by Tarik?
    “Tell me the dream, Narisa,” he urged,
recalling her from her foolish imaginings. She began to talk, and
before she was done she had told him not only the dream, but the
terrible story of the Cetan raid on Belta, and the extermination of
her family along with so many others, the unbelievably cruel deed
that caused the planet to remain devastated and nearly unpopulated
for long years afterward.
    “I was at the Capital at the time of the
attack,” she continued. “I was in the second year of training for
the Service, and my superior officer would not let me return to
Belta. As you know, recruits are never allowed to leave the
Capital, not for any reason, until the training is over and they
are assigned to a spaceship. When I insisted I had to go, they told
me Belta was too far away, which was true enough, and they gave me
extra duty to punish me for my insubordination. I have never been
back to Belta since then. I’ve never seen the ruins of my old
home.”
    “So, not having seen the material evidence,
you find it hard to believe your loved ones are really dead, and
you keep searching for them in your dreams, as though you could
change what has happened.”
    “Yes, I suppose so, though I know full well
in my mind that they are