Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [93]
“Bont na batlem saith,” he commanded, and the group moved among the wounded. As he had instructed, they quickly and cleanly killed any who would otherwise have died a lingering, agonizing death from their injuries. Mekrikuk had learned to practice this judicious compassion during the Dominion War, on Goloroth and other battlefields. He knew well that wars were anything but noble enterprises, and that their corpse-strewn killing fields were among the least glorious places to die. Having looked into perhaps hundreds of haunted, pain-racked eyes, he understood the grateful release of those whose journeys to the next world he had mercifully expedited.
His grim task complete, Mekrikuk led the group down the corridor. They blinked and squinted as they entered the more brightly-illuminated rooms and corridors that lay beyond. “Keisa,” Mekrikuk said, instructing his people to enter the small chamber on the right.
They entered, and Mekrikuk saw five Romulan guards lying dead on the floor. They were the same guards who had taken Tuvok away. He saw that they had been savaged after death by the prisoners who had moved through this room. Stupidly, the rioters had also smashed most of the monitors and computer equipment in the room before they had moved on.
“Tuvok?” he called out. There was no sign of the Vulcan, but his mind told him that his ally was somewhere in the room.
He heard a sound above and behind his group. He whirled to look, as did the others, each of whom possessed hearing no less acute than Mekrikuk’s.
Mekrikuk looked upward. From behind the dark latticework of pipes that ran across the ceiling, Tuvok emerged. The rags he wore were encrusted with dirt and blood. He held several disruptor rifles, tied together with a length of cord.
Tuvok jumped down, his legs coiling beneath him as he landed, like those of a particularly agile arark.
“You are unharmed?” Mekrikuk asked.
“Essentially,” the Vulcan said. “I have not been injured beyond repair. Thank you.” He turned to face the others and began distributing the captured Romulan energy weapons, handing one to Mekrikuk and another to Tesruk.
Despite Tuvok’s assurances, the Vulcan’s dark, sunken eyes were twin pools of pain. Mekrikuk supposed he was unaccustomed to such violence as he had seen today.
“The Romulans will already have locked down Vikr’l’s outer perimeter,” Tuvok continued, speaking in the Romulan common tongue. “We will have to overcome that problem once we reach it. There are other entrances and exits, if we can find them. But our way will be blocked there as well, by other prisoners, by guards, and by whatever security measures they will soon take to quell this riot. It’s likely that they will take lethal measures, and perhaps even try to eliminate the entire population of the prison. We will have to make our escape before that happens.”
“Voi mnaeri mnean ihra corr Rihanha?” asked Fapruk, a portly older Reman male. Mekrikuk had always regarded Fapruk’s so-called revolutionary crimes—the nominal reason for his incarceration at Vikr’l—as the consequence of spontaneous vandalism rather than the result of any coherent plan.
“We should trust him, Fapruk, because he got us this far,” Mekrikuk answered. “And because I said so,” he added in a more menacing tone.
His expression determined, Tuvok motioned toward a side doorway.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter Seventeen
U.S.S. TITAN
“Captain, I believe I’ve isolated Commander Tuvok’s life signs.”
Riker turned his chair, feeling hope surge within him. “Good work, Mr. Jaza. Put what you’ve got up on the screen, please.”
The image on the bridge’s central viewscreen shifted. It had been displaying Romulus in the center, along with images of the Federation relief ships and their Klingon escorts; the scene now displayed a map overlay of the planet, which swiftly zoomed in on a sparsely populated area just outside the capital city of Romulus. As the image zoomed in further, Riker saw a large circular facility in an aerial