Crossover - Michael Jan Friedman [86]
The doctor frowned at the prospect, but she knew her duty. If anyone was good at making the tough decisions, she was.
“Aye, sir,” she assured him.
A moment later she was gone as well. That left Picard alone with the admiral, who was still staring at him incredulously.
“Well,” said McCoy, his voice little more than a whisper. “I guess you’ve got something in common with that friend of mine after all.”
Picard grunted, apparently cognizant of the reference. “I’ll take that as a compliment, Admiral.”
McCoy shook his head. “Just when you think you know someone …” he murmured.
“They surprise you?” the captain finished for him.
The older man nodded. “They do at that.”
Picard allowed himself a smile. “Tell me, Admiral, will you be staying on the saucer section?”
McCoy’s expression was still full of surprise, but he harrumphed softly. “Not on your life. Spock would never let me hear the end of it.”
As Tharrus emerged from the blockish command center, surrounded by a full dozen of his guards, he glanced at the sky. It was a particularly bloody looking shade of green, thickening to blue at the horizon.
It wouldn’t rain after all, he noted with some satisfaction—or at least not until the following day. That was good. Rain would have spoiled the spectacle he had planned.
Taking in the courtyard, he glanced at the stone wall that ringed it—and especially at the gate that sat in the center of it like some big, ornately shelled amphibian. Beyond the gate there were plenty of witnesses—a sampling of Constantharines from every walk of life. His men had seen to that.
Still, they were only a minute portion of the audience that would witness the day’s events. Tharrus had gone to the trouble of setting up his cameras at intervals along the wall—cameras that would broadcast over subspace channels to points as far away as Romulus.
But then, what was the point of a spectacle if there was no one to see it? Or to learn from it the determination and efficiency of Constanthus’s great Governor Tharrus—and the futility of opposing such a Romulan?
Of course, Tharrus reflected, he’d had a wide variety of choices in terms of how to proceed. There were several methods of execution the Romulans had embraced over the years.
A favorite was the poisoned cup, which generally carried some measure of dignity with it. This was the option granted to those who’d chosen the wrong side m an attempted coup d’etat, or military officers who had disgraced themselves. Even in the matter of dying, rank had its privileges.
On occasion, however, even the poisoned cup offered little in the way of dignity. The right blend of toxins could cause a man to spit out the bulk of his stomach lining over the course of several days before he finally and mercifully expired. That fate, however, was reserved for outright traitors to the imperial cause. It was one of the reasons Romulans were so very slow to consider treason.
More expedient was the simple disruptor ray. It was quick, it was clean, and it left nothing to clean up. It was far from painless, but there were few things in life that didn’t have their little drawbacks.
Hanging was a method that hadn’t been used very much in the last hundred years. Even the sternest of administrators shunned it—not for its barbarism, but for the fact that so many primitive peoples embraced it. Romulans did not like to be compared to savages.
However, thought Tharrus, as he came to stand in the shadow of the gallows his men had constructed, he would run the risk of being called a savage if it got him what he wanted. After all, hanging had the advantage of being most humiliating to the one being hanged—and a Romulan was more likely to fear humiliation than even the greatest agony.
In short, this was part of his plan. To humiliate Spock and the other prisoners, to terrify them slowly and thoroughly, until one of them finally lost his composure and gave up the Vulcan.
What’s more, he was absolutely certain