The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [105]
Without exchanging any words with him- or so much as looking at him- the guards shoved Trip down into one of the chairs. He wasn’t sure whether the manacles that secured his wrists behind his back were making him more uncomfortable than the disruptor pistols that were now trained on him.
Scant moments after Trip’s entrance, the conference room door slid open to admit Ch’uihv and another pair of guards. The men, who were half carrying and half dragging Ehrehin between them, deposited their charge somewhat more gently into the seat beside the one Trip occupied.
Ch’uihv took the seat directly across the table from Trip and Ehrehin as the guards looked on vigilantly. The Ejhoi Ormiin leader turned one of the computer terminals so that it faced him. He quickly entered several commands, apparently activating both his own terminal and the one closest to Trip and Ehrehin.
“There is an electronic stylus attached to the terminal in front of you, Doctor,” Ch’uihv said, his intense gaze locked upon the elderly scientist. “You will use it to enter whatever formulae or diagrams my people will need to master in order to replicate your latest work on avaihh lli vastam.”
The elderly scientist sighed in resignation, though he didn’t seem quite able to pick up the stylus before him.
“Doctor. I thought I had made myself clear back in the hangar. Please do not force me to do to your assistant what I was forced to do to his associate, Terha.” To illustrate his point, he unholstered his weapon and set it down on the table before him, tantalizingly out of Trip’s reach.
He’s going to kill me anyway, Trip thought. Hell, he’ll probably give Ehrehin the very same treatment once he thinks he’s got what he needs from him. There’s just no trusting this bastard.
“Don’t do it,” Trip whispered, leaning toward the scientist. A large, rough hand shoved him hard against the back of his chair.
“I will be watching your every entry most attentively, Doctor,” Ch’uihv said.
You’re not the only one, pal, Trip thought, his engineering reflexes kicking in nearly as strongly as his instinct for self-preservation.
Ehrehin looked at Trip, a deep sadness in his rheumy eyes. With obvious reluctance and a trembling hand, the old man took up the stylus, then began slowly sketching directly on the monitor screen on the tabletop in front of him.
Trip watched in growing fascination as a detailed technical diagram began to take shape on the screen- an image that Ch’uihv seemed to be studying intently on his own terminal. Trip hoped that before Ch’uihv finally killed him, he’d develop at least a partial understanding of this new technology that purportedly allowed star-ships to reach warp seven.
Unfortunately, it was a technology that would soon be in the hands of a breakaway Romulan faction that was probably at least as dangerous to Earth and her allies as all the military power of the Romulan Star Empire itself.
Thirty-One
Friday, February 21, 2155
Enterprise Nx-01
ARCHER LEANED FORWARD in his command chair, staring straight ahead at the screen. The long-range scanners were showing him exactly what he wanted to see.
“You’re certain they haven’t detected us?” he asked.
“They’ve shown no sign of it so far,” Reed said from his station to the captain’s right. “They apparently aren’t making any active proximity scans, and they’ve neither sent nor received any outside messages since we found them.”
Ten minutes earlier they had finally almost caught up with the transport ship- thanks to Shran’s continued use of the telepresence unit- only to discover that what they were chasing was not an Orion ship, as they had assumed, but rather a completely unfamiliar class of transport vessel, presumably one of Romulan design. The prevailing theory among the bridge crew was that the Romulans had picked up their Aenar cargo from the Orions somewhere outside of Romulan territory, and had then headed back toward their homeworld.