Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [91]
After the guards had dragged him another twenty paces or so, Tuvok felt them let go of his body, which he allowed to collapse limply. One of his handlers kicked him in the ribs, rolling him none too gently onto his side. Focusing past the pain, Tuvok cautiously opened his right eye, the one nearest the smooth white floor, and saw the booted feet of four uniformed prison guards. From this and the position of the voices he heard before him and behind him, he quickly concluded that a total of five other people were in the room with him; one of them was located behind him, out of his line of sight.
He waited patiently, still as a corpse as the guards laughed and bragged about their casual, habitual abuses of the Reman prisoners, and speculated about the indignities the dead Romulan farmer must have suffered while incarcerated with them. One of them wondered aloud about exactly how the farmer had died, and another said that he would run a quick scan to find out.
Knowing his interval of “laying low” had just about reached its end, Tuvok gathered his energies and focused his mind as clearly as he possibly could. A moment after the guard rolled his body over yet again, flopping him onto his back, Tuvok opened his eyes. Out of necessity, the pacifism of Surak gave way to the ancient survival instinct, decades of special tactical training, and no small amount of rage at his captors.
Before the guard could react, Tuvok jammed his right palm sharply upward and into the man’s chest. The Romulan was dead before he could utter a sound, his eyes bulging in mute surprise.
Tuvok heard the others react with shock and horror, but he was already moving, his attention tightly focused on his grim task. He instantly took in the room around him, seeing three men grouped to one side, and another behind him, as he had surmised moments ago. He flung the sharpened rock that he had been clutching in his “dead” left hand at the sole guard behind him, aiming it for his forehead.
One of the trio brought his rifle to bear, but Tuvok had already moved, scissoring his legs out and connecting with the knees of two of the guards. They both screamed and fell backward onto the equipment and computer banks that lined the nearby wall.
The guard with the weapon fired once, and the disruptor blast flashed by harmlessly over Tuvok’s right shoulder. The Vulcan rolled and brought himself upright as the other man fired his rifle again. Gambling that the armed guard wouldn’t expect him to approach, Tuvok launched forward with a savagely purposeful ke-tar-yatar maneuver, crushing the man’s windpipe with a kick to the throat.
Tuvok turned his attention back to the other two guards, both of whom were attempting to reach their rifles and sidearms, despite their fractured knees. He reached the nearer of the two first, put both his hands on the guard’s neck, and executed him swiftly by means of a talshaya, then used the man’s corpse as a shield while the other guard fired at him.
Grabbing the weapon-holding hand of the guard he had just killed, Tuvok pushed the man’s dead fingers, firing a triple burst at his attacker. Two of the shots connected, throwing the guard backward and leaving a smoking hole in his tunic.
His senses keen, Tuvok surveyed the situation. In the last eleven seconds, he had dispatched four of the guards present, while the one he had struck with the rock lay convulsing in a corner, a thick black bruise spreading across his forehead and green blood running freely into his eyes. He was still alive, but posed no threat. The discipline of Surak began to reassert itself, accompanied by an almost overpowering wave of self-disgust. He brutally pushed the latter aside; there would be time for self-recrimination later, assuming he somehow managed to reach safety.
Appraising the computer terminals against the wall, Tuvok realized that he was in a control chamber that ran the prison cell block’s systems. Large wall-mounted monitors displayed infrared images of the prison’s mazelike passageways, perhaps the