Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [54]
Startlement. These aren’t Romulans. They’re Vulcans .
He saw a dark-skinned Vulcan man sitting on the floor, his legs crossed, his crisp black-and-gray uniform clean and pressed. A small construct of sticks sat in front of him, intricate and fragile.
Mekrikuk looked at the pastel-hued walls that surrounded the dreamscape Vulcan, and saw images there of starships, of a group of officers in red tunics, another ragtag group of men and women led by a man whose face was tattooed, and a third group, dressed in uniforms identical to the one worn by the Vulcan who was seated on the floor.
The Vulcan looked up at him, and held up one of the sticks he had stacked before him. “You can help me complete my mission,” he said.
“Your mission is to complete this device?” Mekrikuk asked.
“No,” the man said simply. “My mission is to help those who wish to reconnect the Romulan Empire with its progenitors. It is not unlike the construction of the kal-toh.”
Suddenly, the walls seemed to come alive, the images and people displayed there disappearing. Mekrikuk saw that the walls were now covered with beetles, their chitinous mandibles and carapaces beating in an insistent rhythm. As the carpet of insects moved inexorably toward the Vulcan, he looked at Mekrikuk and said, “To help me would be logical, Tenakruvek.”
Mekrikuk shook himself out of his telepathic trance, the insect-covered walls dissolving into the harsher reality of the cellmaze. He saw the crowd leaning in toward the new Romulan, grasping and pulling, stealing from and bruising the unconscious man further. He was sure to be dead within moments.
“H’ta fvau, riud ihir taortuu u’ irrhae alhu kuhaos’ellaer tivh temarr!” Mekrikuk’s voice thundered through the cellspace, and his outburst had the desired effect. The prisoners, having just been duly warned that the next person to touch the new prisoner would be eaten for dinner that night, backed away, some fearfully, some sullenly, some respectfully.
Mekrikuk approached and knelt beside the far-too-warm man who lay on the stone before him. He turned the man’s bruised, battered head and felt his weak, thready pulse. Even though the man looked like a Romulan, he could see that this was the very same Vulcan he had seen in his mind-link.
The man whom he knew was not named Rukath, but Tuvok.
“I will help you,” Mekrikuk said, hoping that Varyet was watching him from the Halls of Erebus.
Chapter Ten
U.S.S. TITAN
“This isn’t exactly what I signed up for,” Kent Norellis said, watching the streams of green bubbles that rose like inverted meteor showers inside his glass.
Cadet Zurin Dakal looked up from his tray of sushi—an obsession he had acquired during his freshman year at Starfleet Academy—and was relieved to see that Norellis, seated at right angles to Dakal on the left, had apparently addressed the comment to no one at the table in particular. Dakal had feared that he personally would be expected to respond to the ensign’s newest complaint, and that was one challenge he was not yet ready to undertake.
All things considered, Dakal knew he should have felt honored to be here. Not only did he have the distinction of being the first Cardassian in Starfleet, not only was his Academy class the first to begin in the aftermath of the Dominion War, not only was he one of only four fourth-year Starfleet cadets privileged to fulfill his required field studies on a new starship at the start of its mission, but now he also seemed to have been unofficially adopted by what was quickly emerging as a tightly-knit and bewilderingly eclectic group of science officers and non-commissioned specialists.
But while he had accepted the group’s invitation to join them for dinner at the Blue Table—the crew’s nickname for the informal weekly gathering of members from the science department in the mess hall, a custom which had started a