Death in Winter - Michael Jan Friedman [17]
“Have you been waiting long?” asked the male in the black coat, uttering the words that confirmed his identity for her.
“Not long at all,” Beverly responded, her voice roughened to the level of a Kevrata’s by another device, implanted in her throat. Now for the countersign. “How is your mother?”
The male shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Fearful, like everyone these days. She sees those around her falling victim to the plague and wonders which of us will be next.”
His voice was steady, unaffected. But neither he nor his companion could entirely conceal their desperation. Beverly had seen their expressions on a hundred different worlds. It said they would do anything, risk anything, sacrifice anything if it might translate into a cure.
There were times in her career when she had felt bad bringing hope to such people, because hope was all she could bring. But this time she was confident she could do more than that.
“So,” said the Kevrata in the blue-and-silver coat, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “do you think you can help us?”
“I do,” Beverly said in the same barely audible tone. “But I’ll need a place to work. And blood samples. And a little time.”
“We can provide a place and blood samples,” said Blue Coat. “Those will be easy. But time…” He tilted his head to one side. “That may be in short supply.”
“I understand,” she said. Indeed, she understood that as well as anyone in existence, after what she had seen on Arvada III.
“When can you start?” asked the Kevrata in the black coat.
“I was about to ask you the same thing. If you’ve got a place in mind, I can move in tonight. Otherwise- “
Beverly stopped in midsentence, seeing a crinkling in the black skin around her companions’ eyes. It was a sign of apprehension. And they were looking at something directly behind the doctor.
Beverly very much wanted to know what was going on back there. But she also didn’t want to attract attention, so she refrained from turning around.
“Problem?” she asked softly.
“Possibly,” the Kevrata in the black coat told her. “Sit still and perhaps it will go away.”
Beverly did that. But as the seconds wore on, she could see by the lift of her companions’ chins that the problem wasn’t going away. It was getting closer.
By then, everyone in the doctor’s part of the tavern was turning around. It would have seemed strange for her not to do so as well, so she swiveled about in her wooden chair-and saw that there was indeed a problem.
A squad of armed Romulans had entered the tavern. There were six of them in all, the goggle-equipped hoods of their white thermal suits tossed back to reveal their brow ridges, the severe cut of their hair, and their tapered ears. It was impossible to mistake them for any other species-even the Vulcans, with whom they shared a long-ago common ancestry.
“No one move,” said a hard but decidedly feminine voice.
At first, Beverly couldn’t see where it had come from. Then the Romulans opened a path, and the doctor realized that there was a seventh figure in their group.
She had expected to see the severe, dark features characteristic of most every Romulan she had ever encountered. The features she saw were neither severe nor dark.
But they were hauntingly familiar.
The piercing gaze, the strong but feminine features, the close-cropped blond hair, and the determined jut of her chin… if Beverly hadn’t known better, she would have said she was looking at her old comrade Tasha Yar, who was killed shortly after she became security chief on the EnterpriseD.
But this was the Romulan Empire. That considered, it made much more sense that the woman giving orders in the tavern was Sela, the half-Romulan daughter of a Tasha Yar who had survived in a rogue timeline. Sela bore an uncanny resemblance to her mother and, with the exception of her pointed ears, almost none to her Romulan father-an ironic twist, considering the fact that she was entirely her father’s daughter under the surface.
Sela had first reared her head more than a decade earlier as a