Kobayashi Maru - Michael A. Martin [182]
Finally allowing himself a moment to relax, Trip looked down at the man, trying to ascertain which part, if any, of Sopeks story might be true. Was he a Romulan who had infiltrated the Vulcan military structure? Or a Vulcan who led a Romulan paramilitary insurgency group? Or was he a free agent who was playing both ends against the middle for some other not-yet-revealed purpose?
Of course, the fact that Trip had brought Sopek along with him didnt guarantee that hed receive any forthright answers from the man. And he had more immediate problems, such as not knowing enough about what was happening in fairly close proximity to the escape pods thin skin. For all he knew, the Klingon ships Sopek had known were coming were still embroiled in a pitched battle against Enterprise . Or, Enterprise had won. Or, he thought, a wave of dread slowly cresting within him, she might have lost. He had never gained any degree of control over the psychic link that sometimes seemed to enable him to communicate with TPol, but he knew he couldnt feel her now.
Dont you go thinking that way, Charles Anthony Tucker the Third, he thought. After all, “Gracie Tucker hadnt raised him to be a defeatist. Or a nihilist. But she also didnt raise you to shoot unarmed Romulans in the back, something deep in his mind said, something that felt like guilt. He pushed the thought aside, but something else his mother had told him as a child took its place.
She had read to him regularly at night before bedtime, often from books of fairy tales and fables. One particular fable came to him now, about a frog that carried a scorpion across a river. When theyd gotten halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog, poisoning him. As they slipped beneath the water, the frog asked the scorpion why he had stung him, knowing that they would both drown.
“Because its my nature, the scorpion said. “You knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up.
Was Sopek the scorpion and he the frog?
He cursed whatever had possessed him to agree to come to Romulus in the first place, the pride that had let him believe that he could stop these people. The Romulans were scorpions and vipers, and living beside them, hiding among them, he was becoming like them. He had not died from the poisonous stingat least not yetbut knew that he had been poisoned all the same.
But instead of experiencing death, he had undergone a metamorphosis. And whatever he was developing into was not something he thought his mother would recognize, even if the master surgeons of Adigeon Prime were to bob his pointy ears and restore his original human appearance in every detail.
A light on the escape pods small, simple instrument panel began flashing green, the Romulan color of danger, and this was followed instantly by a shrill beeping. Trip turned away from Sopek and read the instruments, then peered out the narrow viewport to try to get a better sense of what was causing the proximity alarms to go off.
Dead ahead, far too close now for the maneuvering thrusters to miss, was a dark shape illuminated only by the escape pods external running lights. Despite the devices slow tumble relative to the pod, and the fact that it was visible only as a silhouette, Trip recognized it immediately from his studies of Ehrehins files.
It was one of the many gravitic mines that the Romulan military had deployed throughout this region over the past several decades in their never-ending effort to discourage the Klingons.
And the escape pod was about to smack straight into the damned thing.
How do I keep getting myself into these situations? Trip asked himself, perhaps for the final time.
Then he closed his eyes and thought about TPol.
EPILOGUE TWO
Day Forty, Month of KriBrax The Hall of State, Dartha, Romulus
T HE DECURION FINISHED his report,