But neither the interrogators, the guards, nor the other prisoners had found out that he was notRukath, the lowly farmer from Leinarrh, in the Rarathik District. The minor surgical alterations he had undergone before making land-fall on Romulus had held up. Only the most detailed scan, to which he had apparently not yet been subjected, could have revealed that he was actually Vulcan rather than Romulan.
Between his Starfleet intelligence training, his Vulcan disciplines, and the tricks he had learned while on deep cover assignment with the Maquis, Tuvok was confident in his ability to maintain his assumed identity under repeated questioning and even torture. But fatigue, and perhaps even a recrudescence of the early-stage Tuvan syndrome he thought he’d beaten two years earlier, had taken their toll; he had made several mistakes about Romulan geography and history during his more recent interrogations, evidently arousing enough suspicion among the prison authorities to motivate them to keep him in custody, placing him in solitary confinement in a cold, dismal space all but indistinguishable from a stone casket. Languishing in the darkness, he cursed his faltering memory. He still didn’t know if the guards really thought he was a spy, or if they were merely having fun torturing a simpleminded hveinnwho had wandered too far from his crops.
Today— What dayis it?he wondered yet again—despair was creeping in at the edges of his consciousness, and no amount of meditation seemed to help, even when he could muster sufficient concentration to attempt to enter a state of aelaehih’bili’re,or mind-peace. With his wrist chrono destroyed, Starfleet had no sure way to locate him, and rescue seemed unlikely anyway, given that so much time had passed already since his capture. He thought repeatedly of his wife, his grown children, his grandchildren, but even picturing their faces was already growing difficult.
Defying all logic, he found he was actually beginning to look forward to brief glimpses of, or contacts with, his jailers, no matter how badly they mistreated him. Save for the screams and moans he heard coming from other stone cells in the catacomblike underground prison complex, his captors were now the only intelligent beings with whom he could interact.
Since the initial wildfire-like rise of his fever several days ago, he had begun to lose control of both body and mind. When he wasn’t shivering, he was laughing or crying, the normally suppressed emotions ripping at his being far more than had the physical discomfort of imprisonment. Mostly, he tried to sleep, escaping into a black pool of oblivion. Dreams came to him rarely, and he found their absence a great comfort. When they did come, they were vivid, disturbing, and illogical.
A dark, beetlelike insect scuttled across the moist stone-and-brick floor toward his foot, then up into the rags that shrouded his legs. He watched and waited, his need and desperation overcoming decades of studied discipline. As it came within striking distance, his hands thrust out like le-matyapouncing on a desert ferravat.His shackles clinked as he grabbed the beetle. He felt it attempt to gore his flesh between the pincerlike horns on its head, but he squeezed it until its carapace split. The insect died instantly.
In the dim light, he checked the belly of the beetle, but did not see the distinctive markings of the female. He had started to eat one of them weeks ago, and learned that the females carried a deadly poison in their belly sacs. Twisting this beetle’s head by the horns, he decapitated it, then tossed the head aside. He took a bite of the crunchy body, which immediately suffused his taste buds with a dry, acrid tang. He closed his eyes as he slowly chewed another bite, and felt darkness and despair wash over him again.
“Get that creature out of your mouth,” his mother, T’Meni, said sharply, glaring down at him.
He looked down at his hands, and saw his stubby fingers clutching a half-eatengeshu bug. “Why? Wari was eating it first.”
She bent over and slapped the insect from his hands, into the desert sand. “Wari is asehlat . You are a Vulcan boy. Vulcan boys do not eat insects.”
“That isn’t logical, Mother,” he said. “We feed Wari food that we no longer want. If he can eat what we do, why can’t we eat what he does?”
“Vulcan boys do not eat insects,” she said firmly, then turned to walk away.
Tuvok looked over at the half-eaten bug. It began to squirm, and turned what was left of its head toward him.
“Romulan boys eat insects,” it said, its voice thin and reedy. “Areyou a Romulan?”
“No,” Tuvok said, his voice suddenly deepening into that of an adult. He stood and backed away from the writhing insect, then turned. Standing before him was Captain Spock, who was flanked by Captain James Kirk and Captain Hikaru Sulu.
“I’m not certain I understand your objection, Ensign,” Spock said to him. “We are discussing an alliance between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, not a unification between Romulans and Vulcans.”
Tuvok shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. “The Klingon ideal is conquest and expansion,” he finally said, slowly and deliberately. “This worldview is antithetical to the very foundations of the Federation. Klingon culture is based on violence and brutality; Klingons exist to conquer, destroy, and subsume.”
“Quite a firecracker on your crew, Hikaru,” Kirk said with a smile, gesturing toward Tuvok, but looking at Sulu.
“They want nothing more than to destroy the very fabric of our ideals,” Tuvok said, continuing, though his thoughts seemed jumbled. “They want to blend their chaotic emotional society into ours, and you’re being duped into helping them, Captain Spock. Pardek is using you.”
“Who is Pardek? Are you feeling all right, Ensign?” Sulu asked. A mug of hot tea was in his hand and he threw it at Tuvok.
Instinctively, Tuvok put up his hands to protect his face. The tea splattered against them and clattered to the floor in front of him, suddenly transformed into a pile of randomly scatteredt’an rods.
“Clearly, you aren’t quite into this game ofkal’toh ,” a familiar voice said, and Tuvok looked through his splayed fingers. There, in Tuvok’s wrecked quarters aboard theU.S.S. Voyager , squatted Lon Suder, the starship’s psychosis-addled Betazoid crew member. Suder reached down with bloody hands to grab some of thet’an rods. “What are you afraid of, Tuvok? That your mind will collapse before your society does?”
“I can control my mind,” Tuvok said, backing away. “I have trained to achieveKolinahr .” He stepped back through the door outside his quarters, and stumbled into the searing desert of Vulcan’s Forge, pitiless Nevasa baking him from almost directly overhead.
“But you neverfinished your training,” intoned the Vulcan master who now stood before him. The robed adept then turned his back on Tuvok, who began to follow. Sand swirled around him, propelled by a swift, insistent wind.
“I cancomplete my training,” Tuvok cried out. He saw his wife, T’Pel, and his children and grandchildren. Other masters were escorting them away from him.