The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [128]
“You telepathically deceived them into firing upon one another,” T’Pol said, not asking a question.
Theras sobbed again. “Yes. And the last of them… just took his own life. Moments ago.”
Reed laid a comforting hand on Theras’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry this was necessary, Theras.”
Shran felt his antennae rising in surprise and pleasure. He did it. The coward actually did something. It suddenly occurred to Shran that he might have very badly misjudged Theras; he pushed the thought aside, however, in favor of making it his absolute top priority to complete Jhamel’s rescue, along with that of the other remaining Aenar captives.
After that, the boarding party itself would still have to get off this ship and return safely to Enterprise; he knew that this might prove challenging, since this ship’s bridge crew remained alive, and still could potentially put up a fight should Theras’s telepathy somehow cease concealing the rescue team from their notice.
“Let’s not waste any more time coddling him,” Shran said, addressing both Reed and T’Pol. Then he turned to face the nearest of the two pressure-suited MACOs. Though their faces were shrouded in darkness, Shran knew they must have been as eager as he was to get the group moving again toward the Romulan vessel’s transporter, from which Jhamel and the others could be sent to Enterprise.
“What will become of us now?” Jhamel said inside his brain, her mind still uncharacteristically disordered because of the sedatives she’d been given, her thoughts feeling jumbled and chaotic. “Too, too much dying here.”
“We still have a job to finish here,” Shran added as he tried to ignore the unfathomable sadness that now flowed freely into him from Jhamel’s obviously still drug-muzzled brain.
Theras trudged on with the rest of the group. He felt completely dead inside. And wasn’t he, really, so far as his society was concerned? After all, he had become something that his people regarded as anathema: he was now a killer.
A murderer.
He struggled to keep his concentration focused on the twists and turns of the corridors and passageways that he recalled from the minds of the dead Romulans. The route that led to the ship’s transporter.
Theras was thankful, at least, that the boarding party had not come close enough to any of the slain Romulans who now lay scattered throughout the vessel so that his suit’s night-vision apparatus could reveal them in any amount of detail. But he knew that he would be unable to escape absorbing the horrible visual imagery of what he had done from the thoughts of the other members of the boarding party. Although he recognized that it was cowardly, he nevertheless hoped that the Romulan corpses would never become more than death-sprawled silhouettes in his memory; even that, he suspected, would be nightmare enough to last for the rest of his days.
He was beginning to be distracted, however, by the feelings of grave apprehension he sensed coming from Enterprise- in space, somewhere near the transport ship- as her crew bravely held the line against the weaponry of two Romulan warships, risking death to enable the rescue party to complete its mission. He wished he could further influence the crews of the Romulan warships, inducing them to believe that Enterprise had departed, but he was growing steadily more tired, and even now felt wearier than he had in recent memory. He felt that he had already stretched his telepathic talents to their limits, and perhaps even a good deal past them.
Another thing he found disturbing was the sluggish nature of the thought-auras of the Aenar captives, especially those of his bondmates, Vishri, Shenar, and Jhamel. Had the Romulans drugged them because they feared they might contemplate taking actions such as those he, Theras, had eventually taken?
Defensive actions, such as temporarily “blinding” the Romulans to the presence of the boarding party.
And offensive actions- such as causing the