Death in Winter - Michael Jan Friedman [46]
As the mob thinned out, it began to run. And Kito ran too, knowing the Romulans could skewer him at any moment.
He didn’t notice anything about the streets he ran through, or who was running beside him. He just ran. But the energy beams kept touching down behind him, harrying him, striking some Kevrata and driving the others like a herd of burden beasts.
Kito’s breath rasped harder and harder in his throat. His body grew warm and heavy beneath his clothing, his legs burning with the intensity of his effort.
He didn’t dare stop running, not even for a second. However, he couldn’t keep up such a pace forever. Eventually, he thought, I will simply collapse.
Then his house deities smiled on him.
An alleyway opened to his right, a few meters up ahead. If I slip inside it, he thought, the Romulans may overlook me. Then again they might dig him out like a stubborn parasite, but there was no telling when another such opportunity might present itself.
Veering in the direction of the alley, Kito maneuvered himself inside it. Then he planted his back against one of the walls and hoped against pursuit.
The Romulans’ green energy beams kept on hunting the Kevrata, illuminating the street outside with their fury. But mercifully, none of them came down inside the alley. And after a while, it seemed to Kito none of them would.
I’m safe? he wondered, unable to believe it.
Then some of the other Kevrata began slipping into the alley as well. Kito winced as they joined him, knowing there was a chance they would draw the Romulans’ attention. Of course, they had as much right to the alley as he did.
And as it turned out, they didn’t attract attention. The pulses of green disruptor energy receded into the distance, and Kito’s hiding place gradually fell dark. Dark and quiet. He and the other Kevrata in the alley exchanged glances.
Was it possible that their ordeal was over? That they could go home now? It was starting to appear that way.
Plodding through the snow drifts that had accumulated in the alley, Kito emerged into the broader environs of the street. It was littered with heavily robed bodies, more of them than he could make himself count.
There were flecks and streaks of blood all over the place, hissing as they ate their way down through the snow. It wasn’t Romulan blood. Theirs was a virulent green, the color of their death-beams. This blood was red, as red as ripe snowberries, as warm as the coals at the bottom of a hearthfire.
“Hands of the generous,” Kito breathed.
It was one thing for the Romulans to let his people die of the plague. But to kill them this way… it was intolerable. Kito couldn’t just let it be. He had to do something about it.
And he knew exactly what he would do.
Leaving the human prisoner in her cell, the centurion-who in truth wasn’t a centurion at all-made his way to Commander Sela’s office and waited in front of her desk until she was ready to speak with him.
He didn’t know what Sela was looking at on her computer screen, but he couldn’t interrupt her. The last centurion to do so had been executed on the spot, or so the story went.
And every story, he knew, had at least a kernel of truth.
Finally the commander looked up at him, her strangely human eyes, as blue as the midday sky on Romulus, glinting in the light of the overhead fixtures.
“Report,” she demanded, as if it were she who had been waiting for him.
“The prisoner is secure,” he informed her.
“All that means,” Sela said, “is that she’s still planning her escape. Make certain you are not lulled by her into dropping your guard.”
The centurion nodded. “I will remain vigilant, Commander.”
She eyed him. “See that you do.”
Then, with a gesture, Sela dismissed him. There was something about the way she flipped her wrist, the way she held herself, that he found unspeakably attractive. However, he kept that fact very much to himself.
She must have had lovers over the years, but the centurion hadn’t heard about any of them. That portended badly for anyone who served