Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [50]
In spite of his own dark thoughts, Riker found himself chuckling again. “Nice shooting, pardner,” he said to Vale. Anticipating a difficult series of negotiations between several exceedingly contentious and cantankerous parties, he felt a surge of gratitude at having two senior officers with such finely honed diplomatic instincts.
“We are now leaving the Neutral Zone, Captain,” Axel Bolaji reported from behind the conn. “Entering the periphery of Romulan space.”
Riker stared straight ahead into a firmament ruled by the dangerously splintered Romulans. Despite his confidence in both Deanna and Christine, he found himself wishing that Ambassador Spock could also be at his side when all the shouting finally began down on Romulus.
Chapter Nine
VIKR’L PRISON, KI BARATAN, ROMULUS
Throughout the past week, Tuvok had been completely unable to focus his attention, as his fever rose ever higher. As closely as he could tell, he had been imprisoned for fifty days, though in the dark, windowless dampness, it was difficult to reckon time accurately. He couldn’t even keep track of the cycles by counting mealtimes, since food arrived irregularly, with entire days sometimes elapsing between meals.
But neither the interrogators, the guards, nor the other prisoners had found out that he was not Rukath, the lowly farmer from Leinarrh, in the Rarathik District. The minor surgical alterations he had undergone before making land-fall on Romulus had held up. Only the most detailed scan, to which he had apparently not yet been subjected, could have revealed that he was actually Vulcan rather than Romulan.
Between his Starfleet intelligence training, his Vulcan disciplines, and the tricks he had learned while on deep cover assignment with the Maquis, Tuvok was confident in his ability to maintain his assumed identity under repeated questioning and even torture. But fatigue, and perhaps even a recrudescence of the early-stage Tuvan syndrome he thought he’d beaten two years earlier, had taken their toll; he had made several mistakes about Romulan geography and history during his more recent interrogations, evidently arousing enough suspicion among the prison authorities to motivate them to keep him in custody, placing him in solitary confinement in a cold, dismal space all but indistinguishable from a stone casket. Languishing in the darkness, he cursed his faltering memory. He still didn’t know if the guards really thought he was a spy, or if they were merely having fun torturing a simpleminded hveinn who had wandered too far from his crops.
Today—What day is it? he wondered yet again—despair was creeping in at the edges of his consciousness, and no amount of meditation seemed to help, even when he could muster sufficient concentration to attempt to enter a state of aelaehih’bili’re, or mind-peace. With his wrist chrono destroyed, Starfleet had no sure way to locate him, and rescue seemed unlikely anyway, given that so much time had passed already since his capture. He thought repeatedly of his wife, his grown children, his grandchildren, but even picturing their faces was already growing difficult.
Defying all logic, he found he was actually beginning to look forward to brief glimpses of, or contacts with, his jailers, no matter how badly they mistreated him. Save for the screams and moans he heard coming from other stone cells in the catacomblike underground prison complex, his captors were now the only intelligent beings with whom he could interact.
Since the initial wildfire-like rise of his fever several days ago, he had begun to lose control of both body and mind. When he wasn’t shivering, he was laughing or crying, the normally suppressed emotions ripping at his being far more than had the physical discomfort of imprisonment. Mostly, he tried to sleep, escaping into a black pool of oblivion. Dreams came to him rarely, and he found their absence a great