Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [51]
A dark, beetlelike insect scuttled across the moist stone-and-brick floor toward his foot, then up into the rags that shrouded his legs. He watched and waited, his need and desperation overcoming decades of studied discipline. As it came within striking distance, his hands thrust out like le-matya pouncing on a desert ferravat. His shackles clinked as he grabbed the beetle. He felt it attempt to gore his flesh between the pincerlike horns on its head, but he squeezed it until its carapace split. The insect died instantly.
In the dim light, he checked the belly of the beetle, but did not see the distinctive markings of the female. He had started to eat one of them weeks ago, and learned that the females carried a deadly poison in their belly sacs. Twisting this beetle’s head by the horns, he decapitated it, then tossed the head aside. He took a bite of the crunchy body, which immediately suffused his taste buds with a dry, acrid tang. He closed his eyes as he slowly chewed another bite, and felt darkness and despair wash over him again.
“Get that creature out of your mouth,” his mother, T’Meni, said sharply, glaring down at him.
He looked down at his hands, and saw his stubby fingers clutching a half-eaten geshu bug. “Why? Wari was eating it first.”
She bent over and slapped the insect from his hands, into the desert sand. “Wari is a sehlat . You are a Vulcan boy. Vulcan boys do not eat insects.”
“That isn’t logical, Mother,” he said. “We feed Wari food that we no longer want. If he can eat what we do, why can’t we eat what he does?”
“Vulcan boys do not eat insects,” she said firmly, then turned to walk away.
Tuvok looked over at the half-eaten bug. It began to squirm, and turned what was left of its head toward him.
“Romulan boys eat insects,” it said, its voice thin and reedy. “Are you a Romulan?”
“No,” Tuvok said, his voice suddenly deepening into that of an adult. He stood and backed away from the writhing insect, then turned. Standing before him was Captain Spock, who was flanked by Captain James Kirk and Captain Hikaru Sulu.
“I’m not certain I understand your objection, Ensign,” Spock said to him. “We are discussing an alliance between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, not a unification between Romulans and Vulcans.”
Tuvok shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. “The Klingon ideal is conquest and expansion,” he finally said, slowly and deliberately. “This worldview is antithetical to the very foundations of the Federation. Klingon culture is based on violence and brutality; Klingons exist to conquer, destroy, and subsume.”
“Quite a firecracker on your crew, Hikaru,” Kirk said with a smile, gesturing toward Tuvok, but looking at Sulu.
“They want nothing more than to destroy the very fabric of our ideals,” Tuvok said, continuing, though his thoughts seemed jumbled. “They want to blend their chaotic emotional society into ours, and you’re being duped into helping them, Captain Spock. Pardek is using you.”
“Who is Pardek? Are you feeling all right, Ensign?” Sulu asked. A mug of hot tea was in his hand and he threw it at Tuvok.
Instinctively, Tuvok put up his hands to protect his face. The tea splattered against them and clattered to the floor in front of him, suddenly transformed into a pile of randomly scattered t’an rods.
“Clearly, you aren’t quite into this game of kal’toh,” a familiar voice said, and Tuvok looked through his splayed fingers. There, in Tuvok’s wrecked quarters aboard the U.S.S. Voyager , squatted Lon Suder, the starship’s psychosis-addled Betazoid crew member. Suder reached down with bloody hands to grab some of the t’an rods. “What are you afraid of, Tuvok? That your mind will collapse before your society does?”
“I can control my mind,” Tuvok said, backing away. “I have trained to achieve Kolinahr .” He stepped back through the door outside his quarters, and stumbled into the searing desert of Vulcan’s Forge, pitiless Nevasa baking him from almost directly overhead.
“But you never finished your training,