Serpents Among the Ruins

by David R. George III

  The woman—a tactical officer, according to the pale green coloring of the right side of her uniform shirt—squared off opposite Vaughn, and he wondered how he could defeat the greater strength of a Romulan when he did not have the benefit of a weapon. Surprise no longer seemed the asset he had needed it to be. As though offering proof of that, the woman charged again. Vaughn waited as long as he could to move, then threw himself sideways, hoping to escape the attack. But the woman’s arm reached for him, and she grabbed hold of the black-and-silver mesh of his Romulan uniform before he could get away. She continued forward, carrying him backward and heaving him against the side of Liss Ornahj. Now Vaughn felt the air rushing from his own lungs, and he heard himself begin to wheeze as he tried to breathe.

  Before him, the Romulan’s face looked flush, streaks of bright green crawling up her cheeks. With her eyes wide and her teeth gritted, her rage appeared pure and unstoppable. She brought her fist up, and all Vaughn could do was push himself away from the shuttle so that his head would not pound back against the metal surface when the punch landed. The woman hit him hard, her knuckles darkening his vision as they rammed into the center of his face. He felt his knees weaken, and he chose to let them fold. He dropped onto the deck, the Romulan’s fingers still clutching the chest of his uniform.

  Vaughn tried to fall backward, but the woman would not let him go. Instead, she reached down with her other hand and took hold of his arm, then hauled him upward easily, as though the artificial gravity of Tomed had been suspended for her. She let go of him with one hand and raised her fist again, cocking her arm back. Concerned that if she hit him again, he might pass out—dooming Commander Gravenor and Captain Harriman, as well as the mission—Vaughn swung his arm up and frantically reached for the side of the Romulan’s head. His fingers found her wounded ear, seized it, and pulled. The flesh and cartilage came away with a sickening, carnal sound, and blood spurted from the coarse wound.

  The woman cried out, her voice seeming to carry less pain than anger. She released her grip on him as her hands reached for the side of her head. Vaughn started to sidle away, but the woman stepped forward and dropped her hands, took hold of his upper arms, and heaved him into the air. He soared several meters before crashing onto the deck.

  Searching his mind for anything that he could do to overcome his opponent, Vaughn struggled back to his feet. He anticipated another attack by the Romulan, but he saw that she had not yet moved toward him again. Instead, she bent down, slipped her fingers inside one boot, and pulled out a shape perhaps twenty centimeters long. Vaughn recognized it immediately as a knife.

  The woman held the weapon before her, as though displaying it for Vaughn. Then she reached up and removed its sheath. The blade, half the length of the entire knife, glistened a deep, reflective black. In that moment, Vaughn knew with certainty that, before this battle ended, the Romulan’s dagger would slice into his body.

  Forming a desperate plan and wanting to regain the initiative, Vaughn ran toward the woman. As he came at her, he saw her brace herself, bending her knees and pulling the dagger back, clearly readying to thrust it forward. But Vaughn dived downward, pitching himself at her shins. He knew that she would not have enough time to reverse the haft of the knife in her hand in order to bring it down into his back, but she lowered it enough that he felt it pierce the top of his shoulder as he struck her legs.

  The Romulan flew forward, her legs taken out from under her, and she toppled to the deck as Vaughn passed beneath her. He’d hoped that she would let go of the knife, but her hand stayed wrapped tightly around it, and the blade carved through Vaughn’s shoulder and emerged from his back. Pain shot through him, but he ignored it; he could do nothing else.

  He rolled onto his back, intending to hurry to his feet and continue his attack. But already the Romulan had risen, and as Vaughn began to stand, she pounced on him. He landed on his back again, and she came down on top of him, her legs straddling his midsection, her knees pinning his forearms. She reached down past his face and pulled off the artificial tip of his ear, then repeated the process on the other side. An expression of repulsion decorated her features as she examined the bits of mock flesh. After a few seconds, she cast them aside.

  The movement caused a globule of the Romulan’s blood to drip from her face onto Vaughn’s uniform. She looked down to where it had fallen, and then glared at him with raw hatred. She dropped her empty hand onto his wounded shoulder and pressed down. Pain seared that side of his body, and for the second time, he feared that he would pass out. Whorls of white light spun across his vision, and he opened his mouth and screamed. Above him, the woman’s eyes gleamed with the enjoyment of her cruelty.

  “Do it!” Vaughn yelled at her. “Kill me!”

  With sudden speed, the Romulan raised the knife above her head. Vaughn moved with equal swiftness, recognizing his opportunity. He yanked one arm free from beneath her knee, then flung his hand upward. As she brought the knife down, it punctured his palm, the blade passing out the other side. He could not ignore the agony, but he refused to give in to it; the stakes were too high. Instead, he wrenched his arm sideways and down, knowing the damage the ebon blade would do to his hand, and not caring.

  The knife came free of the Romulan’s grasp, and Vaughn tugged his other arm from beneath her knee. As she scrambled to reclaim her weapon, he grabbed its handle with his uninjured hand. The woman reacted, but not quickly enough: Vaughn pulled the blade out of his palm and then drove it forward, into her rib cage. She threw her head back and howled in obvious distress, reaching automatically to where her own weapon had injured her. But Vaughn wasn’t done; he slid the knife back out, and then sent it slicing back into her body, up on the right side, where her black heart still beat within her. She tried to take hold of Vaughn’s hand, but her strength had gone now. He pushed at her upper body, and she fell backward and to the side with a dull thud, one of her legs coming to rest draped across his knees.

  All at once, Vaughn felt numb. The pains in his hand and shoulder had not abated, but had somehow transformed; they had mutated into dull and pulsing sensations, horribly unpleasant, but survivable. He identified it not as anything that he had managed to do, but as simple instinct, the natural reaction of his body and mind to protect themselves.

  He lifted his mangled hand up to look at it. Blood flowed freely from the wound, actually hiding the worst of it, but he could move only his thumb and none of his fingers. He knew that he would have to tend to his injury—injuri es, he amended, thinking of his shoulder—or he would die from blood loss. Unable to help himself in any other way at the moment, he forced himself up into a sitting position, then placed his damaged hand beneath his opposite arm. He squeezed as gently as he could, but forcefully enough to stem the flow of blood. It hurt him no more than what he had already been through.

  Extracting himself from beneath the Romulan woman’s leg, Vaughn leaned over and reached awkwardly to her wrist with his healthy hand. He felt for a pulse and found none. Good, Vaughn thought, and then felt immediately uncomfortable for his satisfaction at the death of another. He had always believed in the sanctity of life—all life. If he could have incapacitated the woman somehow, he would have, but…

  I killed her, he thought, the foreign notion terribly troubling to him. Worse, though, was his certainty that, given another opportunity, he would have taken the same actions. He did not regret what he had done, but he regretted having had to do it. Until now, his duties with special operations had avoided matters of life and death, at least in such a direct and personal manner. He also realized that, in other times and other places, circumstances such as these would recur, and he would again do what needed to be done. Unquestionably, he had crossed the Rubicon.

  Vaughn removed his fingertips from the wrist of the dead woman. As he withdrew his uninjured hand, he saw it stained in blood, both the green of the Romulan and the red of his own. No, he thought. There will be no going back.

  He fought to get
to his feet, then staggered back to Liss Riehn. When he had earlier searched for weapons aboard the shuttle, he’d come across a medical kit. He would use it now to tend to his wounds and mask his pain. However he would need to deal with what had just happened, with what he had done—with what he had lost—it would have to wait.

  Right now, he still had a job to do.

  Harriman ascended the ladder, climbing into the limited, dimly lighted space between a turbolift and the wall of the vertical shaft. At the top of the ladder, he dismounted onto anarrow walkway, careful to make sure of his footing. He circled around the lift—which sat parked at the starboard entrance to Tomed’s bridge—and entered the horizontal shaft that ran in an arc to the port-side doors.

  Taking the beacon from his belt and switching it on, he walked to the other side of the ship and began searching along the bulkhead. It did not take long for him to locate a knockout panel that allowed emergency access to and from the bridge. And this, he joked to himself, qualifies as an emergency.

  Lowering himself from the walkway to the floor of the horizontal shaft, Harriman moved back to the starboard turbolift. He found the knockout panel in its shell, once more using the beacon. Then, with great care, he set his shoulder against the bottom of the panel and applied gradual pressure; he did not want the square of metal falling into the lift and either making noise or activating the automatic opening of the doors.

  When he had pushed the panel inward a few centimeters, Harriman pried its top edge downward with his fingers, eventually allowing him to pull it completely free. He set it on the walkway, then reached to his belt and traded the beacon for his phaser. Selecting its stealth mode and an appropriate power level, he set the weapon to overload, with a trigger of sixty seconds. He began counting down in his head as he gently deposited the phaser inside the lift.

  As Harriman made his way back over to port, he drew the disruptor he had picked up from beside the dead body of the Romulan engineer. He verified its setting, then climbed back up onto the walkway and readied himself in front of the emergency access panel. As he waited to take action, though, his thoughts returned again to Amina, just as they had down in the transporter room. And as he had done then, he pushed those thoughts away, knowing that they would not serve him right now.

  He counted down to twenty, and then to ten, and then to five. He tensed his muscles as he awaited the explosion, not wanting to move before his diversion manifested itself. He counted to three, two, one, and as though he had willed the detonation himself, the phaser overloaded.

  Harriman surged forward at the sound of the blast, driving his shoulder against the knockout panel and pushing forward onto the bridge. The explosion seemed to occur in two places at once, both behind him, in the turboshaft, and to his right, in the lift. He hit the deck and rolled, coming up onto one knee with the disruptor held out before him. Ignoring the effects of the phaser blowing up, he assessed the situation as quickly as he could. He saw a figure pulling itself up from beneath a console at the center of the bridge. Harriman immediately put the officer in his sights, but he’d expected to find two Romulans here and—

  Something shifted position on the far side of the bridge. Harriman dropped at once to the deck and crawled behind the nearest console, not waiting to find out what had moved. Above him, the air suddenly sizzled as disruptor fire roared past and hammered into a station behind him. He brought his own weapon up and fired it around the corner of the console, aiming not in the direction from which the disruptor shots had come, but toward the Romulan he had seen in the center of the bridge. He heard the body fall to the deck just before more disruptor shots screamed out, this time striking the front of the console providing him cover.

  Something flickered off to Harriman’s right, and he glanced that way to see a series of small flames dancing in the starboard turbolift. One of the two doors had been blown completely off and now lay on the deck, he saw, while the other still stood, but had been badly bent and scarred. When the disruptor fire stopped a moment later, it left the crackle of the fire as the only sound on the bridge.

  Harriman peered around at his immediate environs, looking for anything he could use to his advantage. Cautiously, he rose onto his knees and peeked over the edge of the console. Keeping his head low enough that it would not become visible from the other side, he read the Romulan markings on the panel to see which ship’s system it operated: environmental control. He considered several options, then reached up and worked some touchpads.

  The lighting went out. The fire in the turbolift sent an eerie, orange glow flickering across the bridge. The numerous consoles threw long, wavering shadows along the deck and against the bulkheads.

  Harriman waited, listening fixedly for the slightest sound of movement. He let a full minute pass before he pulled the beacon from his belt. Covering the beam, he activated it, then tossed it spinning away from him with a flick of the wrist. The disruptor fire began almost at once, blasting in the direction of the beacon. Staying low, Harriman emerged from behind the console on the other side. In the semidarkness, the point from which the disruptor was being fired made itself plain. Harriman raised his own weapon and pressed the trigger. Blue light streamed across the bridge, briefly illuminating the face of the Romulan as it struck him.

  Both disruptors quieted. Not taking any unnecessary risks, Harriman jumped back behind the console and consulted his tricorder. In seconds, he had confirmed that neither of the two Romulans on the bridge any longer posed a threat.

  Harriman stood up and reached to the environmental controls, bringing the light back up. He walked the perimeter of the bridge, over to the Romulan he had just fired upon. The man lay on his side, one arm stretching out above his head, the gray sash of his uniform distinguishing him as a technical specialist. His disruptor sat on the deck a few centimeters from his open hand. Harriman reached down and picked it up.

  Walking to the center of the bridge, he regarded the first Romulan he had shot. The man lay prone on the deck, but Harriman did not need to see his face to recognize him. Small in stature, and with the royal purple of his uniform indicating his high position within the Imperial Fleet, Admiral Aventeer Vokar seemed to exude an aura of authority even now.

  Starfleet Command deemed Vokar one of the most dangerous people in the Romulan Star Empire, a prime architect of the present lust for war with the Federation. Harriman did not entirely agree with that assessment: he considered the admiral to be the most dangerous Romulan. In addition to Vokar’s staunch conviction in the preeminence of his people, he constantly sought the defeat of all those he considered inferior—the Federation, the Klingons, and others—and he had allies in the Senate, the ear of the praetor, and command of all Romulan space forces.

  Harriman peered down at Vokar, stunned into unconsciousness. The admiral had a spanner in his hand, and had obviously been working to restore helm control to the bridge. Harriman peered at the flight-control readouts and verified that Tomed remained at speed and on course. He saw a disruptor sitting atop the helm panel.

  He contemplated his own disruptor, and visualized pressing its energy emitter against Vokar’s temple. He recalled his first encounter with the admiral, when Vokar had launched unprovoked attacks on Dakota and Hunley. He had killed Captain Linneus and dozens of others, and would have captured and tortured the rest of the crews had he not been stopped. Surely those actions alone justified Vokar’s death, even all these years later—perhaps especially after all these years; the admiral had lived free for three decades after committing multiple murders. There hadn’t even been any ongoing hostilities between the Federation and the Empire to qualify him as a war criminal; Vokar was simply a criminal.

  Anger grew within Harriman as he remembered that terrible time aboard Hunley. Vokar’s death right now would not only avenge all of those he had killed and maimed, both back then and in other incidents, but it would also limit the risk of not killing him. If Harriman permitted Vokar to live, there would always be the threat that he
would reveal the mission. Starfleet special ops would take measures against that, of course, but the threat would exist as long as Vokar remained alive.

  He adjusted the setting on his disruptor, then squatted beside the admiral and pushed the weapon against the back of his head. Beads of sweat formed on Harriman’s skin. The weight of the disruptor felt right in his hand.

  He did not press the trigger.

  For all of the evil Vokar had perpetrated, Harriman could not kill him in cold blood. He had not done so all those years ago aboard Daami, and he would not do so now. But he would do everything he could to see the admiral imprisoned for the rest of his life.

  Harriman stood up and found the tactical console, intending to scan the interior of the ship. On the readout, though, he saw that an attempt had been made to engage Tomed’s self-destruct. Vokar had evidently made some progress with it, as some of the power couplings Harriman had himself rerouted to the containment field had now been isolated and cut off. As a result, containment would now fail sooner, but fortunately not before the mission had been completed.

  He operated the ship’s internal sensors, and read four life signs, all Romulan: two here on the bridge, and the two Commander Gravenor had stunned down near the maintenance junction. Including the engineer Harriman had killed, that left one unaccounted for. He pulled out his communicator and flipped it open. “Harriman to Gravenor,” he said, choosing not to use the Romulan names they’d assigned themselves.

  “Gravenor,” the commander responded.

  “I’ve taken the bridge and captured two Romulans,” Harriman said. “That means there’s one more aboard, but I haven’t been able to locate them with the ship’s sensors.”

  “Understood,” Gravenor said.

  “What’s your status?” Harriman asked.

  “I’m preparing for our departure,” Gravenor said.

  “Very good,” Harriman said, understanding that the commander meant that she was working on the cloaking device. She also had not utilized the prearranged word that would have functioned as a distress signal, something she would have done if, for example, the sixth Romulan had been holding her prisoner. “Harriman out.” He reached up and reset the channel on his communicator, then said, “Harriman to Vaughn.”