Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [52]
“I can complete my training,” Tuvok cried out. He saw his wife, T’Pel, and his children and grandchildren. Other masters were escorting them away from him.
T’Pel turned and called to him. “You left your Kolinahr training incomplete. You left your family incomplete. And you do not support the progress of our people.”
He saw that the masters were leading his family toward a phalanx of Romulan warbirds that had settled in the desert, looking as though they had always been there.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to see Admiral Kathryn Janeway. She smiled at him sweetly. “Even if you didn’t complete your training, I thought you had learned your lesson, Tuvok.”
“Which lesson?” he asked her. His head felt as if it were splitting open, and sweat ran down his face.
“You engineered the melding of the Maquis with the Starfleet crew aboard Voyager ,” Janeway said. “Despite all logic, despite the conflicts between two groups that had every reason never to work together, you managed to bring them into accord. Just like Ambassador Spock is doing on Romulus.”
Tuvok wiped the sweat away with the tattered sleeve of a robe he hadn’t recalled ever having worn before. “I no longer oppose Spock’s Unification movement,” he said. “That is why I volunteered for the mission to Romulus.” Now, he knew where the robe had come from.
“You don’t oppose Unification?” Janeway asked, looking peevish. “Then why aren’t you helping Spock now?”
Tuvok was about to answer, when he felt his stomach buckle with immense pain. He cried out and fell, sprawling onto a hard surface. Janeway was gone. The blowing sand was gone. Only the random pattern of rough-hewn stones and bricks of his cell floor remained.
The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was the severed head of a beetle as it was crushed under the toe of a heavy boot. Then hot darkness came, mercifully enfolding him.
Mekrikuk heard the guards before they even entered the hallway. He knew that many of his Reman brethren had allowed imprisonment and deprivation to dull their senses, but he had worked hard to keep his sharp and honed. He was thankful for the prison’s lack of light. Remans, after all, were creatures of the darkness.
Exercising at Vikr’l Prison wasn’t an easy option. The prisoners were kept underfed and overaggravated, and any Reman who showed open contempt for the Romulan jailers was taken away and never heard from again. Rumors were that troublemakers were processed into food after their executions, effectively getting rid of any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the guards while demeaning the captive Remans even further by forcing them into cannibalism. Mekrikuk chose not to eat on the days after someone had been taken away, no matter how tempting he found the intense food-smells.
Mekrikuk was used to hardship. His earliest memories were of being beaten in the dilithium mines, when he was barely four years old. Several of his siblings had died in the mines, either from exhaustion or disease, although Bekrinok had been killed for daring to stand up to a Romulan taskmaster who was sexually assaulting his teenage mate.
Of the rest of his family, Mekrikuk was the only one to have survived the Dominion War. Like many Remans, he had served as cannon fodder, but somehow, he had survived and emerged victorious in engagement after engagement. Mekrikuk had even saved the life of Delnek, the favored son and aide-de-camp of Senator Varyet.
That act had secured Mekrikuk a favored place in the senator’s household. Varyet was a progressive politician who championed the rights of downtrodden provincial races; Mekrikuk was technically a slave in her household, but had been given unprecedented freedom, as long as he remembered “his place” while in public.
Not long ago that freedom had been cut short. A human named Shinzon, allied with the Remans, had assassinated the Romulan Senate, including