Serpents Among the Ruins

by David R. George III

  Several seconds passed, and he grew concerned. He envisioned a scenario where the sixth Romulan had incapacitated—or killed—Vaughn and now utilized the lieutenant’s sensor veil to mask their own position. But then Vaughn’s voice came across the comm channel. “Vaughn here,” he said.

  “Are you all right?” Harriman asked, hearing something—weariness? pain?—in the lieutenant’s tone.

  “I’ve been injured,” Vaughn explained. “One of the Romulans came to the shuttlebay.” He seemed about to say more, but then paused. As the silence drew out, Harriman worried that Vaughn might have passed out, but then the lieutenant continued. “She’s dead.”

  Like Gravenor, Vaughn did not employ the word that would have indicated that he spoke under duress, which meant that all six Romulans had now been neutralized, two dead and four captured. He explained that to Vaughn.

  “Understood,” the lieutenant said.

  “What’s your status?”

  “I’m preparing a shuttle,” Vaughn said, “but I’m having some difficulty. I’ve lost the use of one hand.”

  “All right, Lieutenant,” Harriman said. “I’m on my way to help. I’ve got to deal with the four remaining Romulans, and then I’ll be down to the shuttlebay.”

  “Yes, sir,” Vaughn said. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Harriman out.” He closed the communicator and returned it to the back of his waist. He exhaled loudly, as though he’d been holding his breath. Haven’t I been? he thought. For months, for years even, figuratively holding his breath as he waited for the start of the interstellar war everybody considered inevitable.

  But now, at last, that wait would end. Whether he, Gravenor, and Vaughn would survive the end of the mission was problematic, but it had become clear now that the mission would succeed. After all this time, after all the planning and effort, they were almost home.

  Vokar awoke by degrees, becoming aware of himself first, lying on his side, and then of the hard surface beneath him, and finally of the muted sounds of voices, speaking as though from a distance. He remembered the explosion on the bridge, and the events that had led up to it. Assuming now that he had been captured, he kept his eyes closed, giving no indication to anybody who might be watching that he had regained consciousness.

  With little movement, Vokar tested his muscles, flexing them lightly and feeling for any limitations. He found himself encumbered only at the wrists, held together before his thighs. Finally, needing more information to act, he slit one eye, the one closest to the deck.

  Ahead of him, he saw the back of another Romulan, stretched out parallel to him. The gray sash of the uniform told Vokar that it was Akeev. Beyond the science officer sat a couple of shuttles and several maintenance pods.

  The shuttle compartment, Vokar thought. But why the shuttle compartment?

  Vokar heard a hiss behind him, like that produced by a hypospray, and a few seconds later, he heard another. “Captain,” a man called from nearby, “they’re awake.”

  Realizing the futility of continuing his subterfuge, since he’d apparently been brought back to consciousness by the intruders, Vokar raised his head from the deck. He looked first at his wrists, which he saw had been placed in electromagnetic restraints, evidently appropriated from Tomed’s own armory. Then he peered past his feet, toward the source of the voice. He saw a quartet of antigrav stretchers, and a man walking past them toward the bow of a shuttle. The man had both a disruptor and a hypospray clasped in one hand, and a bandage wrapped around the other, with that arm in a silver mesh sling. He wore a Romulan engineering uniform, though he was clearly not Romulan: his round ears and feathery brown hair provided ample evidence to that effect. “Akeev,” Vokar whispered, looking forward again.

  “Sir,” the science officer said. “Are you all right?”

  “How long have we been unconscious?” Vokar asked, ignoring the question.

  “A long time, I think,” Akeev said. “Ten hours, fifteen…maybe more.”

  “Then we must be close to the Neutral Zone,” Vokar concluded.

  “Yes,” Akeev agreed, “if we haven’t already crossed it into the Federation.”

  But Vokar knew that they hadn’t. If they had, then why would they still be aboard the ship, and in any case, why would the intruders be in the shuttle compartment? He saw now that he had erred in assuming that they’d wanted to commandeer Tomed for their own uses—he had erred not in that deduction, but in stopping at that deduction. He thought that he now saw their purpose in appropriating his vessel.

  Footsteps approached from the direction of the shuttle. Vokar looked up to see a Starfleet officer, a disruptor in his hand. He stopped a couple of meters short of Vokar’s feet.

  “Admiral Vokar,” Harriman said.

  “My serpent,” Vokar intoned, “returned to me.” He chose not to hide his hostility.

  “You can think that,” Harriman told him, “but I’d suggest that the serpent lives in your own house, sits in your own chair.”

  “Perhaps,” Vokar said, “but I’m not about to kill hundreds—or is it thousands—of my own people.” Harriman’s eyebrows went up, and Vokar knew that he had unmasked the human’s plan. “All to coerce the Klingons to ally with the Federation against the Empire. And what do you imagine the Klingons would do if they learned of your cowardly act?”

  Harriman lifted a hand to his face and wiped it across his mouth. “Two of your officers have been killed,” Harriman said then, apparently unwilling to respond to Vokar’s accusation. “There are four of you left—”

  “Also to be killed shortly,” Vokar interrupted, a comment intended only to bait Harriman. If the Starfleet captain had truly wanted to take the lives of Vokar and his other three officers, he would have done so already.

  “Actually, you have a choice, Admiral,” Harriman said. “I’m aware of the prerogative of Romulan commanders to destroy their own vessels, and to kill themselves and their crews, when faced with capture, and I remember your own personal desire to go down with your ship.” Vokar used his hands to push himself up to a sitting position, and he saw T’Sil and Valin also beside him, their faces turned up to listen to the conversation. Linavil and Elvia, then, had been killed. “But in this instance, you can stay here,” Harriman finished, “or you can come with us.”

  “And where would ‘we’ be going?” Vokar asked, already having a good idea of the answer, and knowing that he would never consent to being a prisoner of the Federation.

  “You and your crew will be taken to a planet far from Romulan space,” Harriman said.

  “Where we’ll be kept as prisoners,” Vokar said.

  “Yes,” Harriman said. “But you won’t know it. We’ve developed an experimental technique to erase memory.”

  “You’re going to experiment on us?” Akeev asked, obviously fearful of such a prospect.

  “Your memories will be erased,” Harriman said, “but otherwise, you’ll be unaffected. You’ll be permitted to live out your lives in a comfortable setting.”

  Even if Vokar believed Harriman—which he didn’t—the notion of Federation doctors performing experimental techniques on his brain repulsed him, as did the idea of living the rest of his life in captivity. As he had been trained to do, Vokar would die with his vessel. But he also knew Starfleet, and he understood that Harriman offered this choice to Vokar not for all four of them, but only for himself; Harriman would allow the others to make their own choices.

  “Captain,” the man with the bandaged hand called. “Thirty minutes.”

  “That’s it,” Harriman said, looking at each of the four Romulans. “You need to make your decisions now, all of you. Are you coming with us, or are you staying here?”

  Vokar waited. Valin spoke up first. “I…I’ll go with you,” he said quietly.

  “I will too,” T’Sil said. Vokar felt nothing but disgust for the young officers.

  “I’m staying,” Akeev declared, defiance apparently overcoming his fear. Vokar nodded his head
in approval.

  “Admiral?” Harriman asked.

  “We’ll all go,” Vokar said. “Including Akeev.”

  “Sir?” Akeev asked, his voice rising in obvious surprise.

  “We’ll all go,” Vokar repeated.

  “All right,” Harriman said, then called back over his shoulder, “Lieutenant.” The man in the ersatz Romulan uniform appeared again from around the bow of the shuttle and approached the group. Vokar saw that he now held only a disruptor in his unbandaged band. “We’re going to have four more passengers,” Harriman told him.

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said. He circled the group at a wide remove until he’d gotten behind them.

  “Everybody up,” Harriman said, gesturing with his own disruptor. “Slowly.” Vokar and the others all rose to their feet. “Now, one at a time, I want you to walk toward the shuttle.”

  Vokar peered over at Valin, ordering him without a word to go first. The sublieutenant stepped forward and started toward Harriman. Vokar waited for only a moment, and then he moved. He brought his hands up in their restraints as he rushed over to T’Sil, bringing them down around her head. “Akeev,” he yelled, hoping the science officer would understand his duty. Vokar twisted with all of his might, and heard with satisfaction the fracturing of T’Sil’s neck. He turned then, toward Valin, and saw the sublieutenant falling to the deck from Akeev’s grasp. A flash of intense blue light streaked across the shuttle compartment, and Akeev crumpled where he stood. Beyond him, Harriman stood with his disruptor aimed. Vokar took a step toward him, and Harriman fired.

  His last thought consisted of a single word directed at the Starfleet captain: Die!

  In the aft portion of the shuttle cabin, Gravenor executed the test sequence for the third time. Before her, the cloaking device she had removed from Tomed sat on the deck between the two equipment columns. Fiber-optic lines ran in jumbles from numerous junction nodes on the device over to the exposed circuitry of the shuttle. She confirmed the operation of the cloak, its connections to the deflector interface, and the rate of the power drain.

  Finished with her testing, Gravenor turned toward the front of the cabin, to where Lieutenant Vaughn sat at one of the forward stations. She saw the sling he wore and wondered again just what he had been through here. He had reported killing a Romulan officer whom he’d believed had come to the shuttlebay to transmit a message about the commandeering of Tomed. But the spatters and smears of red and green blood on the deck, the lifeless body of a subcommander, and Vaughn’s own injuries had all testified to the ferocity of the battle that had taken place, something the lieutenant had not mentioned. That omission, as well as his reluctance to provide details of the encounter, troubled Gravenor. Of more concern to her, though, was Vaughn’s manner in the hours since the incident. He continued to behave and act professionally, but where he had always been open and communicative, he now seemed reserved, almost closed off. Gravenor had initially suspected the lieutenant to be suffering a post-traumatic reaction to his experience, but she now suspected that there might be larger matters at issue.

  With a few minutes before they needed to launch, Gravenor stood up and walked to the front of the shuttle. “How are you doing, Elias?” she asked as she took a seat beside him. She rarely used his first name, and she did so now as an indication of her concern for him.

  “I’m fine, Commander,” Vaughn said, looking up from the console for just a moment. “Thank you.” Although polite, the response promised no elucidation.

  “Are you in much pain?” she persisted. Vaughn had initially treated himself with a Romulan medkit he’d found in the shuttle, but Harriman had later tended more carefully to his injuries. The captain had also provided him with medication for his pain, but the analgesic hadn’t been able to mask it completely.

  “There’s some pain,” Vaughn admitted, now keeping his focus on the panel, “but I’m getting through it.”

  “Good,” Gravenor replied. She wanted to say more, wanted to help her colleague deal with the issues affecting him right now, but she also knew that there would be a better time than this to do so. Instead, she glanced down at the chronometer on the console. In just thirteen minutes, she saw, the shuttle would have to launch. “What’s Captain Harriman’s location?” she asked Vaughn.

  The lieutenant worked his controls, and then said, “He just arrived at the brig.”

  After Harriman had stunned Admiral Vokar and the other Romulan—Akeev?—he’d wanted to load them back onto the antigrav stretchers so that he could take them to the brig. Gravenor had considered the decision an overly cautious one, since the two Romulans would not regain consciousness prior to Tomed’s destruction. But the captain had insisted, and Gravenor had realized that he’d had a reason other than caution: justice. The two Romulan officers had murdered their own crewmates, and Harriman had wanted to see them spend the last moments of their lives paying for those crimes—and in Vokar’s case, she was sure, for other crimes as well. It might have been only a gesture, but she believed it to be an important one, and she respected Captain Harriman for making it.

  She thought about trying to discuss the matter with Lieutenant Vaughn, but decided instead to allow him the solitude he seemed to need right now. “I’m going to run one more test sequence,” she said as she stood from her chair.

  “Understood, Commander,” Vaughn said simply.

  Gravenor returned to the rear of the cabin and attempted to pinpoint once more just what the chances were of the special ops team ever seeing the Federation again.

  Harriman watched as the stimulant he’d administered took effect. Vokar’s eyes blinked open, and he lifted his head from the antigrav stretcher and peered around the small cell. When he spotted Harriman standing outside the doorway, he froze, and then said, “So, are we to die together?”

  Harriman said nothing. On his way here with his two prisoners, he’d thought of many things to say, but he realized now the pointlessness of whatever words he might utter. Vokar had lived a life devoted to beliefs and actions impossible for Harriman to justify rationally, and nothing he or Vokar might say now could change that.

  Vokar rose from the stretcher and paced toward the doorway. “No, I guess we’re not going to die together,” he said, “because you’re going to run away before that, aren’t you?” Harriman maintained his silence. “You’ve set your plan in motion, and you’re going to slink away before it’s done. And no doubt you’ll cast the blame my way for all the deaths you’ll cause, all in the name of the survival of the glorious Federation.” Vokar stopped about a half-meter from the forcefield that sealed the cell.

  “Actually,” Harriman said, “you are the cause of these events.”

  “I am?” Vokar asked. “By spying on Starfleet’s testing of a first-strike weapon? By conquering a weak, inferior race like the Koltaari? Or perhaps you mean that I drove you to do this by my attempt to protect my people from a Federation starship and freighter trespassing in our space thirty years ago?”

  Harriman smiled without humor. “You don’t even believe any of that yourself,” he said. “You caused this by trying to find any excuse to go to war with the Federation—by trying to provide any excuse.”

  “The superior will survive,” Vokar said, as though quoting personal doctrine. “Tell me,” he said, turning away and pacing back across the cell, “where is Lieutenant Akeev? Or have you left him in the middle of the shuttle compartment?”

  “He’s in another section,” Harriman said, “in another cell, paying for his crime while he’s still alive.”

  “Crime?” Vokar said, whirling around to face Harriman again. “Is that why you’ve brought me here, to exact some form of retribution for crimes you imagine me to have committed?”

  “I just watched you murder one of your own crew,” Harriman said.

  Vokar walked back to the doorway, until he stood only centimeters from the forcefield, his cold gray eyes glaring at Harriman. “What you call murder, I call discipline. Unlike S
tarfleet, members of the Romulan Imperial Fleet are trained to give up their lives when duty requires that they do so.” Vokar reached up and tapped at the forcefield. Harriman did not move as a flash of blue-green buzzed through the doorway. “Is that why you’re here now?” Vokar asked. “To see me pay for my so-called crimes?”

  “No,” Harriman said simply.

  Vokar said nothing, apparently waiting for an explanation. When he received none, he said, “Then why are you here?”

  “Just to tell you that I’ve relieved you of your command.” Harriman held up his hand before Vokar’s face. In his fingers, he clutched the long patch of stylized starbursts that identified the Romulan Imperial Fleet rank of commanding admiral. Harriman had removed it from the neck of Vokar’s uniform.

  Vokar stepped back, reeling as though he’d been struck across the face. He reached for the collar of his uniform, and found his rank missing. He said nothing for a moment, and then seemed to force an expression of nonchalance onto his face. “You have no authority to relieve me.”

  Harriman shrugged. “Nevertheless,” he said, and he dropped the rank patch onto the deck. Then he turned and walked away.

  It required all of Sulu’s concentration not to display the anxiety mounting within her as Enterprise approached Foxtrot XIII. She resisted the urge to tap the arm of the command chair, or to stand up and pace the bridge. Still in shock at the audacity of Captain Harriman’s plan, she wanted to take action as quickly as possible, see it completed, and put it in her past.

  “Captain,” Linojj said from the helm, “sensors just detected a vessel in the Neutral Zone.”

  “Heading in which direction?” Sulu said, careful to ask the questions she should be asking, as though she knew nothing beyond what had just been reported to her.