Taking Wing

by Michael A. Martin

  She found she had to grab the pinhead-size, hard-shelled object quickly between her own thumb and forefinger. The thing was made of metal, and its dozen or so legs were trying frantically to carry it away, no doubt back to its secretive masters. She handed the squirming “bug” to Will and silently mouthed the words “Tal Shiar.” Then she shuddered, unnerved by this new violation of her person. Their eyes and ears really are everywhere.

  A few minutes later, after some careful scanning and grooming, the away team materialized back in Titan’s transporter room four, where the group underwent a second series of scans, which turned up negative.

  “Interesting that we were left unguarded just long enough to find and disable those Tal Shiar ‘bugs,’ “ Will said after they had all been certified “bug-free.”

  “Did Tal’Aura know they were there?” Keru wondered aloud as he tucked his tricorder away. He placed it beside the shielded sample vial in which he had stored the captured listening device in the hope that Titan’s science and engineering staff could use it to develop enhanced tactical countermeasures.

  “Perhaps this little discovery makes the Tal Shiar a likelier culprit in Pardek’s murder than Tal’Aura or Tomalak,” Will said.

  Troi nodded in agreement. “Or Donatra.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Will said.

  The group left the transporter room and entered the adjoining corridor, whereupon Akaar and Keru went one way—presumably intent on getting the captured Tal Shiar bug to Jaza and Ledrah—while Troi followed Will the other way into a turbolift she knew would take them straight to the bridge. Despite the reassuring arm he placed around her shoulders after the doors closed and the lift began to move, a wave of sadness swept over her. “Vibe” or no “vibe,” building trust among such hardened, suspicious, and cynical people as these Romulan leaders could very well prove to be the single biggest challenge of her Starfleet career.

  She prayed silently that it was a challenge she could meet.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  VIKR’L PRISON, KI BARATAN, ROMULUS

  “Mnean partrai hra’ yy’a hwi hvei h’rau na gaehl!”

  Mekrikuk’s deep voice echoed down the corridor. Generally, the Romulan klhus ignored the yelling and screaming from the Remans, but when someone yelled that there was another dead body back in the cells—as Mekrikuk had just done—they paid slightly more attention. Whether the corpses ended up in the food or in a mass grave somewhere outside the prison was a matter of constant debate. Mekrikuk had always suspected that the Romulan corpses were treated with slightly more dignity than the Reman dead were afforded, and he hoped this would be the case now.

  The Romulan known by others as Rukath, but to Mekrikuk and his protected ones as Tuvok, lay motionless on the ground. Tesruk and Kachrek were guarding his body to prevent any postmortem molestation by the other prisoners, but Mekrikuk knew that it was not his protected ones that really kept the others at bay. His own menacing presence accomplished that.

  By the seventh time that Mekrikuk thundered the notice to the guards, he finally heard movement coming from the far end of the dimly illuminated cell block. It wasn’t so much the sound of the guards that had alerted everyone to their arrival; none of the Reman prisoners in his tier needed their extra-sensitive hearing to divine the guards’ presence, since the cacophonous noise from the prisoners in the first tiers nearest the entrance had effectively alerted everyone in Vikr’l Prison.

  Moments later, the handtorches of the approaching guards blinded those foolish enough not to avert their eyes.

  “Ihnna uaenn na itaeru!” the lead guard roared, but the crowd had barely begun complying by moving backward when the quartet of guards flanking him let loose with sprays of xecin. Those caught in the vapors immediately began gasping for air, retching and convulsing. The faster-moving prisoners had already fled deeper into the relative safety of the cellmaze.

  Two of the guards came into the cell cautiously, while a pair of their fellows watched their backs, plasma rifles at the ready. The guard closest to Rukath/Tuvok kicked him in the ribs, causing his lifeless body to roll partially to one side. The other sprayed xecin full-force directly into Rukath/Tuvok’s face. Seeing that it had no effect on the body, the two men grabbed the corpse’s ankles and began pulling it from the cell.

  “Farewell, and good fortune on the Other Side,” Mekrikuk said, loud enough for the guards to hear. One of them immediately trained his rifle and handtorch on Mekrikuk. Kachrek stepped into the path of the rifle, but the guard didn’t fire.

  The heavy doors clanged shut, and the guards moved away in a group, pulling Rukath/Tuvok by his ankles toward the cell block’s outer doors.

  Mekrikuk took a deep breath and began to prepare himself. Though his psionic abilities had always been fairly limited, he pushed out with them aggressively, reaching toward the one particular mind that offered any prospect of freedom and salvation.

  The gray stillness was infinite. It held neither memories nor ghosts from his former life. Though Tuvok was aware that his body was being kicked, the sensation didn’t register as pain so much as a lighter shade of gray.

  He had not gone so deeply into a healing trance in more than half a century. To any who might examine him, he was functionally lifeless. Only a deep-tissue tricorder scan would reveal the persistent vestiges of life within him, a state not very far removed from suspended animation. He was well aware that such a low level of metabolic activity couldn’t be maintained for long; were his heart rate to decline any further, or the balance of gases in his bloodstream to alter in the slightest, his mimicry of death would become far more perfect than he had intended.

  Tuvok found the trance more difficult to maintain than usual for several reasons. Although the Reman Mekrikuk had helped to restore him somewhat from his earlier malnourished condition—thus aiding him in regaining a degree of control over his mental disciplines—Tuvok knew that his current condition was far from ideal. More important, those in a healing trance often found it difficult to return to full consciousness unaided.

  For this reason, Tuvok had worked with Mekrikuk on a specialized form of hypnotic command, to be delivered telepathically. The Reman’s esper abilities were untrained and limited, but Tuvok had mind-melded with Mekrikuk—a terrible mutual lowering of personal barriers, but a deed thought necessary by both men under the current dire circumstances—and had given the Reman clear, unambiguous instructions.

  Time passed, all but unreckonable in the gray infinite, before Tuvok saw the silent flash of color that represented Mekrikuk’s mental burst, far away, coruscating and crackling as it moved inexorably toward him. Eventually, with an almost agonizing slowness, it engulfed Tuvok, and he saw in it the path that would lead his mind toward a fully conscious state. Tuvok wondered idly whether the characters in the ancient stories of fal-tor-pan—the re-fusion of a Vulcan’s immortal katra with its still-living body—had experienced something similar. Though Ambassador Spock was rumored to have undergone just such a refusion once, Tuvok had never quite been able to bring himself to believe it.

  As he gradually drifted back to himself, Tuvok began to regain some rudimentary awareness of his physical body. He realized with some discomfort that he was being dragged by his feet, the rough-hewn stone floor tearing away at his bloodied back through the rags that draped his emaciated body. He felt a burning sensation in his nostrils, mouth, and eyes, and realized that his captors had sprayed him with something caustic, probably to make certain that he truly was as dead as he appeared. He was careful not to react to the smell or the pain, keeping his breaths shallow, willing his countenance to remain just as lifeless as it had looked while he had been in the healing trance.

  “Dii Pangaere tohr ve reh nubereae,” he heard one Romulan guard say to another, and he felt a twinge of pride that he had outlasted their expectations.

  His captors suddenly stopped dragging him, and Tuvok heard one of them bark a sharp command. “Aihr Arrain Vextan. Abrai
na iaaeru!”

  As if the grinding mechanical sounds of the prison doors weren’t clue enough that they had reached the outer gates, Tuvok felt the floor vibrating beneath him as the great metal barriers rolled open. Seconds later, he was dragged into the area beyond the doors, where the floor was smoother, and the air cooler and less fetid. Though his eyes remained closed, he could sense a considerable increase in the ambient illumination.

  After the guards had dragged him another twenty paces or so, Tuvok felt them let go of his body, which he allowed to collapse limply. One of his handlers kicked him in the ribs, rolling him none too gently onto his side. Focusing past the pain, Tuvok cautiously opened his right eye, the one nearest the smooth white floor, and saw the booted feet of four uniformed prison guards. From this and the position of the voices he heard before him and behind him, he quickly concluded that a total of five other people were in the room with him; one of them was located behind him, out of his line of sight.

  He waited patiently, still as a corpse as the guards laughed and bragged about their casual, habitual abuses of the Reman prisoners, and speculated about the indignities the dead Romulan farmer must have suffered while incarcerated with them. One of them wondered aloud about exactly how the farmer had died, and another said that he would run a quick scan to find out.

  Knowing his interval of “laying low” had just about reached its end, Tuvok gathered his energies and focused his mind as clearly as he possibly could. A moment after the guard rolled his body over yet again, flopping him onto his back, Tuvok opened his eyes. Out of necessity, the pacifism of Surak gave way to the ancient survival instinct, decades of special tactical training, and no small amount of rage at his captors.

  Before the guard could react, Tuvok jammed his right palm sharply upward and into the man’s chest. The Romulan was dead before he could utter a sound, his eyes bulging in mute surprise.

  Tuvok heard the others react with shock and horror, but he was already moving, his attention tightly focused on his grim task. He instantly took in the room around him, seeing three men grouped to one side, and another behind him, as he had surmised moments ago. He flung the sharpened rock that he had been clutching in his “dead” left hand at the sole guard behind him, aiming it for his forehead.

  One of the trio brought his rifle to bear, but Tuvok had already moved, scissoring his legs out and connecting with the knees of two of the guards. They both screamed and fell backward onto the equipment and computer banks that lined the nearby wall.

  The guard with the weapon fired once, and the disruptor blast flashed by harmlessly over Tuvok’s right shoulder. The Vulcan rolled and brought himself upright as the other man fired his rifle again. Gambling that the armed guard wouldn’t expect him to approach, Tuvok launched forward with a savagely purposeful ke-tar-yatar maneuver, crushing the man’s windpipe with a kick to the throat.

  Tuvok turned his attention back to the other two guards, both of whom were attempting to reach their rifles and sidearms, despite their fractured knees. He reached the nearer of the two first, put both his hands on the guard’s neck, and executed him swiftly by means of a talshaya, then used the man’s corpse as a shield while the other guard fired at him.

  Grabbing the weapon-holding hand of the guard he had just killed, Tuvok pushed the man’s dead fingers, firing a triple burst at his attacker. Two of the shots connected, throwing the guard backward and leaving a smoking hole in his tunic.

  His senses keen, Tuvok surveyed the situation. In the last eleven seconds, he had dispatched four of the guards present, while the one he had struck with the rock lay convulsing in a corner, a thick black bruise spreading across his forehead and green blood running freely into his eyes. He was still alive, but posed no threat. The discipline of Surak began to reassert itself, accompanied by an almost overpowering wave of self-disgust. He brutally pushed the latter aside; there would be time for self-recrimination later, assuming he somehow managed to reach safety.

  Appraising the computer terminals against the wall, Tuvok realized that he was in a control chamber that ran the prison cell block’s systems. Large wall-mounted monitors displayed infrared images of the prison’s mazelike passageways, perhaps the very ones through which he had just been dragged.

  Though he hadn’t yet heard an alarm, he knew he couldn’t afford to take the time to figure out the layout of the prison, and probably lacked the time even to map out his most efficient escape route. The guards’ disruptor rifle blasts had undoubtedly been detected by other Romulan troops, so it was likely that he had only minutes of freedom left, if that. But he knew of someone who almost certainly did know the best way out, though accessing that information would be almost as dangerous as facing the rest of the prison’s armed personnel.

  Tuvok approached the bleeding guard and pulled his crumpled form into a sitting position. The man’s dark eyes were open but unfocused, and his body still twitched. He was dying, but not yet dead. At least not completely. Tuvok forced aside another wave of self-loathing as he contemplated what he was about to do. What I have to do.

  Placing his left index finger beside the dying man’s nose, his thumb under his chin, and splaying his other fingers against his bloodied cheek, Tuvok stared deeply into his erstwhile captor’s rapidly glazing eyes.

  My mind to your mind, he thought, placing every iota of his will into the mind-meld. If he could extract the information he needed before the final dissolution of the guard’s mind, then everyone confined in this horrific labyrinth might stand a fighting chance of escaping.

  Mekrikuk felt the gentle touch of Tuvok’s mind before he even heard the Vulcan’s thoughts. The brief contact allowed him time to warn Tesruk and Kachrek and several other Reman prisoners—though they were not exactly friends, Mekrikuk regarded them almost as equals—of what was about to transpire.

  Then the cell doors opened, and Mekrikuk knew that the Trayatik dice had finally been cast.

  At first, no one seemed to react. But within seconds, the Reman prisoners began a mad en masse rush to the corridors. Finding themselves suddenly outside the cellmaze doors for the first time since their arrival at Vikr’l, many of the Remans pushed forward toward the prison’s outer perimeter, which some of them had not even seen in years. Some stayed behind, scrapping and brawling with prisoners from other tiers, their anger over real or perceived slights now exploding with furious intensity.

  Mekrikuk and a handful of Reman prisoners from his immediate circle of intimates stayed back in the cell, biding their time as the noise of the rapidly escalating riot grew almost deafening. The shouts and screams reached an earsplitting volume as the doors to the chambers beyond their tier also opened. Approaching the duranium bars, Mekrikuk squinted, watching as hordes of Remans surged forward into the well-lit areas that lay beyond the outer doors.

  He grinned in satisfaction, imagining that this scene was being repeated in every confinement wing in Vikr’l Prison, thanks to the machinations of Tuvok. Until the Vulcan’s newly scrambled security codes could be deciphered, this entire maximum security facility had been effectively turned into an open courtyard. Mekrikuk had no pity for the guards he was certain were now attempting to flee the prison as the angry masses surged toward them, their minds brimming over with thoughts of revenge.

  And of freedom, which was Mekrikuk’s foremost desire. Assuming he survived the events of this day, there would be time and opportunity later to exact vengeance against his captors. For now, he knew he would have his hands full just keeping himself alive and in one piece.

  Mekrikuk noted that the outer corridors were mostly empty now that the rioting crowd had moved toward the prison’s periphery. The storm is always calmest in its center, Mekrikuk thought, echoing the sentiment that Tuvok had instilled in him during their brief psionic contact. All that remained in the cell block’s deeper recesses were the broken bodies of the dead and those too badly injured to take advantage of the opportunity to escape.

  “Denae!” Mekrikuk said, and
his small retinue of Reman compatriots followed him cautiously out into the corridor. The rough stone floor was slick with emerald blood as they exited the cellmaze.

  “Bont na batlem saith,” he commanded, and the group moved among the wounded. As he had instructed, they quickly and cleanly killed any who would otherwise have died a lingering, agonizing death from their injuries. Mekrikuk had learned to practice this judicious compassion during the Dominion War, on Goloroth and other battlefields. He knew well that wars were anything but noble enterprises, and that their corpse-strewn killing fields were among the least glorious places to die. Having looked into perhaps hundreds of haunted, pain-racked eyes, he understood the grateful release of those whose journeys to the next world he had mercifully expedited.

  His grim task complete, Mekrikuk led the group down the corridor. They blinked and squinted as they entered the more brightly-illuminated rooms and corridors that lay beyond. “Keisa,” Mekrikuk said, instructing his people to enter the small chamber on the right.

  They entered, and Mekrikuk saw five Romulan guards lying dead on the floor. They were the same guards who had taken Tuvok away. He saw that they had been savaged after death by the prisoners who had moved through this room. Stupidly, the rioters had also smashed most of the monitors and computer equipment in the room before they had moved on.

  “Tuvok?” he called out. There was no sign of the Vulcan, but his mind told him that his ally was somewhere in the room.

  He heard a sound above and behind his group. He whirled to look, as did the others, each of whom possessed hearing no less acute than Mekrikuk’s.

  Mekrikuk looked upward. From behind the dark latticework of pipes that ran across the ceiling, Tuvok emerged. The rags he wore were encrusted with dirt and blood. He held several disruptor rifles, tied together with a length of cord.

  Tuvok jumped down, his legs coiling beneath him as he landed, like those of a particularly agile arark.