T’Pel turned and called to him. “You left yourKolinahr training incomplete. You left yourfamily incomplete. And you do not support the progress of our people.”
He saw that the masters were leading his family toward a phalanx of Romulan warbirds that had settled in the desert, looking as though they had always been there.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to see Admiral Kathryn Janeway. She smiled at him sweetly. “Even if you didn’t complete your training, I thought you had learned your lesson, Tuvok.”
“Which lesson?” he asked her. His head felt as if it were splitting open, and sweat ran down his face.
“You engineered the melding of the Maquis with the Starfleet crew aboardVoyager ,” Janeway said. “Despite all logic, despite the conflicts between two groups that had every reason never to work together,you managed to bring them into accord. Just like Ambassador Spock is doing on Romulus.”
Tuvok wiped the sweat away with the tattered sleeve of a robe he hadn’t recalled ever having worn before. “I no longer oppose Spock’s Unification movement,” he said. “That is why I volunteered for the mission to Romulus.” Now, he knew where the robe had come from.
“Youdon’t oppose Unification?” Janeway asked, looking peevish. “Then why aren’t you helping Spock now?”
Tuvok was about to answer, when he felt his stomach buckle with immense pain. He cried out and fell, sprawling onto a hard surface. Janeway was gone. The blowing sand was gone. Only the random pattern of rough-hewn stones and bricks of his cell floor remained.
The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was the severed head of a beetle as it was crushed under the toe of a heavy boot. Then hot darkness came, mercifully enfolding him.
Mekrikuk heard the guards before they even entered the hallway. He knew that many of his Reman brethren had allowed imprisonment and deprivation to dull their senses, but he had worked hard to keep his sharp and honed. He was thankful for the prison’s lack of light. Remans, after all, were creatures of the darkness.
Exercising at Vikr’l Prison wasn’t an easy option. The prisoners were kept underfed and overaggravated, and any Reman who showed open contempt for the Romulan jailers was taken away and never heard from again. Rumors were that troublemakers were processed into food after their executions, effectively getting rid of any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the guards while demeaning the captive Remans even further by forcing them into cannibalism. Mekrikuk chose not to eat on the days after someone had been taken away, no matter how tempting he found the intense food-smells.
Mekrikuk was used to hardship. His earliest memories were of being beaten in the dilithium mines, when he was barely four years old. Several of his siblings had died in the mines, either from exhaustion or disease, although Bekrinok had been killed for daring to stand up to a Romulan taskmaster who was sexually assaulting his teenage mate.
Of the rest of his family, Mekrikuk was the only one to have survived the Dominion War. Like many Remans, he had served as cannon fodder, but somehow, he had survived and emerged victorious in engagement after engagement. Mekrikuk had even saved the life of Delnek, the favored son and aide-de-camp of Senator Varyet.
That act had secured Mekrikuk a favored place in the senator’s household. Varyet was a progressive politician who championed the rights of downtrodden provincial races; Mekrikuk was technically a slave in her household, but had been given unprecedented freedom, as long as he remembered “his place” while in public.
Not long ago that freedom had been cut short. A human named Shinzon, allied with the Remans, had assassinated the Romulan Senate, including both Varyet and Delnek. In the days that followed, the military forces rounded up every Reman they could find in and around Ki Baratan, as well as more than a few Romulan civilians, for “questioning.”
Given his closeness to such a well-known political figure, Mekrikuk had received greater scrutiny than most. He had survived brutal torture, but told his interrogators nothing of value, largely because he didn’t knowanything of value, other than the location of some of the late senator’s hidden valuables. By the time they were done with him, he would have sacrificed anything—or anyone—to get them to stop, or put him out of his agony.
Finished with him after only a few days, the military dumped him in Vikr’l, where he appeared to have been forgotten. He often wondered why they hadn’t killed him, and sometimes wished he had the courage to end his own life. But he had learned many things in the prison, not the least of which was the burning desire to pull his life back from the brink yet again, as he had done so many times before during so many harrowing battles against the Jem’Hadar.
Reman legend was replete with tales of Tenakruvek, a great warrior who had returned from the brink of death five times, only to grow stronger each time. He eventually ascended to the Reman afterlife, to become a part of the pantheon worshipped by those few Remans who still prayed to the harsh deities responsible for placing them on their barren world of ever-day and ever-night.
Although he knew that many would see it as blasphemous, Mekrikuk now sometimes fancied himself a modern successor to Tenakruvek. After all, he had survived the mines, the war against the Dominion, and now torture and imprisonment. “Only two more deaths left,” he often said to himself whenever he felt his spirits sinking too far.
Whether because of his large size or his heavily scarred body, the others in the cellmaze mostly left Mekrikuk alone. Some newcomers had offered themselves to him in exchange for protection; twice he had taken the offer, less from any carnal desire than because it was an expected trade, merely the way of the world. The two under his protection hadn’t been abused by any other inmates, and they worked to keep themselves as fit as Mekrikuk did. They also kept their ears open for interesting news or opportunities.
Especially opportunities to escape.
They were away now, as the guards brought another new prisoner down the hall, using their dazzling handtorches to light their way and blind any Remans who got too close. Many of the others pressed forward to the bars of their cells, but the smarter ones stayed back. The chance to see the newcomer would come soon enough, and those nearest the bars were often sprayed with caustic xecinin addition to having their light-sensitive eyes dazzled by the handtorches; Mekrikuk found it odd, but he knew that some of them had actually come to enjoy the burning and stinging sensation of the xecin,if not the blinding lights.
As expected, the guards ordered everyone back from the bars, then sprayed the chemical at any who were slow to comply. They dumped a slight, rag-clad body in the center of the cell block, then turned to leave. After the outer cell-block doors had clanged shut behind the retreating guards, the individual cell doors opened automatically, allowing the other prisoners to inspect the new arrival.
Mekrikuk looked over at the body as the others began to move in closer. He saw immediately that this was not another Reman. It was a dark-skinned Romulan. Despite the kindness Varyet and Delnek had shown him, the sight of the bedraggled Romulan stirred something very close to hatred within Mekrikuk, as he was sure it did with all the other Remans in the cell block.
He remembered gentle Varyet, and felt shame.
What has this man done to deserve this?Mekrikuk reached out with his mind, concentrating hard to read the man. His telepathic talents were limited, but he knew that the mind of a sickly or infirm person was often easier to “touch” than that of someone in full health.
Moving into the Romulan’s mind, he saw a Romulan woman and a family arrayed around her, but they were trapped behind a smoky wall. On the wall was a swooping symbol that Mekrikuk recognized as that of the Federation’s Starfleet Command.