The Red King - Michael A. Martin [109]
“I don’t think you’ll want to fire that in here, Suran. Security alarms, remember?” Donatra noticed that his eyes were sunken, the whites filigreed with tiny green blood vessels. Was he so unhinged by the drug residue in his system that he thought he could succeed with such a crude attack?
Keeping her gaze locked with Suran’s, Donatra slowly moved her right hand away from the butt of her disruptor, allowing it to settle instead on the jorreh-handled haft of the short-bladed ihl-sen that she kept right next to it, tucked into a scabbard on her belt. The ready room’s large desk concealed her careful manipulations.
Suran didn’t lower his weapon. “The fleet should already be back in Romulan space by now, Donatra. Instead, you’ve opted to stay here and involve us in matters that are none of our concern. Why?”
She continued to meet his hard, bloodshot stare squarely. “Riker and his crew aided us in staving off a civil war, Suran.”
“Riker and his crew are trying to save a population of refugees. Human refugees. It’s not our problem. We have an empire to defend from the Klingons and the Remans.”
“And the Reman attack against Romulus wasn’t Riker’s problem, either. Yet he acted on our behalf without any reservations. You and I, not to mention the empire we both revere, accrued a large debt to him that day, Suran. And I always pay my debts.”
“Do you owe Riker more loyalty than you owe me?”
She chuckled. “Your notions of loyalty are peculiar, Suran. Right now, Riker isn’t the one who has a weapon pointed at me.” Perhaps I should have followed my instincts and eliminated you long ago, she thought. If not for our mutual loyalty to Braeg, I very well might have already.
Suran’s weapon-hand showed no sign of lowering. “Your plan calls for jettisoning the warp cores of more than half the ships in our fleet, Donatra.”
“Our ships won’t be harmed.”
“As the S’harien wasn’t harmed?”
She ignored the comment. “The fleet will make it back through the anomaly and into Romulan space before their warp-field bubbles collapse. That’s built into the plan, Suran.”
“So you hope. But even if that’s so, some two dozen of our d’Deridex- and Mogai-class warbirds will be hamstrung. We can’t afford to let the Klingons who’ve set up camp inside our borders discover this. Or those savages on Remus and Ehrie’fvil.”
Donatra shook her head. “We’ll have all our vessels repaired and the fleet back to full strength by the time Colonel Xiomek or that idiot Khegh find out anything. I have already seen to it.”
“Cut the human asteroid colony loose and take the fleet to warp now, Donatra,” Suran said, an almost pleading expression crossing his pale features. “The crew need never know how close we came to crossing Honor Blades over this.”
She regarded him in silence for at least a full siure. Though he looked no less depleted than he had when he’d first entered the room, he also appeared no less determined. But Venora’s drugs were obviously still roiling within his blood, along with whatever counteragents Suran’s unknown confederates had used to get him back on his feet only a few dierhu after she had last checked in on him.
This was indeed a formidable and highly dangerous man.
“All right,” Donatra said, rising from behind her desk. Using her left hand, she made a show of preparing to open a comm channel.
With her right she threw the ihl-sen that she had placed inside her tunic cuff. Suran gasped and gurgled and immediately fell to his knees. Donatra rose and strode confidently around the desk, then approached him. She saw that Suran had dropped his weapon. Even if he had managed to hold onto it, she would have been in no real danger; she’d had the Valdore’s security system deactivate it while he’d still been standing on the bridge.
The matter was moot now, however; both of Suran’s hands were presently