Текст книги "Taking Wing "

Автор книги: Andy Mangels

Соавторы: Michael Martin
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

She prayed silently that it was a challenge she could meet.

Chapter Sixteen

VIKR’L PRISON, KI BARATAN, ROMULUS

“M nean partrai hra’ yy’a hwi hvei h’rau na gaehl!”

Mekrikuk’s deep voice echoed down the corridor. Generally, the Romulan klhusignored the yelling and screaming from the Remans, but when someone yelled that there was another dead body back in the cells—as Mekrikuk had just done—they paid slightly more attention. Whether the corpses ended up in the food or in a mass grave somewhere outside the prison was a matter of constant debate. Mekrikuk had always suspected that the Romulan corpses were treated with slightly more dignity than the Reman dead were afforded, and he hoped this would be the case now.

The Romulan known by others as Rukath, but to Mekrikuk and his protected ones as Tuvok, lay motionless on the ground. Tesruk and Kachrek were guarding his body to prevent any postmortem molestation by the other prisoners, but Mekrikuk knew that it was not his protected ones that really kept the others at bay. His own menacing presence accomplished that.

By the seventh time that Mekrikuk thundered the notice to the guards, he finally heard movement coming from the far end of the dimly illuminated cell block. It wasn’t so much the sound of the guards that had alerted everyone to their arrival; none of the Reman prisoners in his tier needed their extra-sensitive hearing to divine the guards’ presence, since the cacophonous noise from the prisoners in the first tiers nearest the entrance had effectively alerted everyone in Vikr’l Prison.

Moments later, the handtorches of the approaching guards blinded those foolish enough not to avert their eyes.

“Ihnna uaenn na itaeru!”the lead guard roared, but the crowd had barely begun complying by moving backward when the quartet of guards flanking him let loose with sprays of xecin.Those caught in the vapors immediately began gasping for air, retching and convulsing. The faster-moving prisoners had already fled deeper into the relative safety of the cellmaze.

Two of the guards came into the cell cautiously, while a pair of their fellows watched their backs, plasma rifles at the ready. The guard closest to Rukath/Tuvok kicked him in the ribs, causing his lifeless body to roll partially to one side. The other sprayed xecinfull-force directly into Rukath/Tuvok’s face. Seeing that it had no effect on the body, the two men grabbed the corpse’s ankles and began pulling it from the cell.

“Farewell, and good fortune on the Other Side,” Mekrikuk said, loud enough for the guards to hear. One of them immediately trained his rifle and handtorch on Mekrikuk. Kachrek stepped into the path of the rifle, but the guard didn’t fire.

The heavy doors clanged shut, and the guards moved away in a group, pulling Rukath/Tuvok by his ankles toward the cell block’s outer doors.

Mekrikuk took a deep breath and began to prepare himself. Though his psionic abilities had always been fairly limited, he pushed out with them aggressively, reaching toward the one particular mind that offered any prospect of freedom and salvation.

The gray stillness was infinite. It held neither memories nor ghosts from his former life. Though Tuvok was aware that his body was being kicked, the sensation didn’t register as pain so much as a lighter shade of gray.

He had not gone so deeply into a healing trance in more than half a century. To any who might examine him, he was functionally lifeless. Only a deep-tissue tricorder scan would reveal the persistent vestiges of life within him, a state not very far removed from suspended animation. He was well aware that such a low level of metabolic activity couldn’t be maintained for long; were his heart rate to decline any further, or the balance of gases in his bloodstream to alter in the slightest, his mimicry of death would become far more perfect than he had intended.

Tuvok found the trance more difficult to maintain than usual for several reasons. Although the Reman Mekrikuk had helped to restore him somewhat from his earlier malnourished condition—thus aiding him in regaining a degree of control over his mental disciplines—Tuvok knew that his current condition was far from ideal. More important, those in a healing trance often found it difficult to return to full consciousness unaided.

For this reason, Tuvok had worked with Mekrikuk on a specialized form of hypnotic command, to be delivered telepathically. The Reman’s esper abilities were untrained and limited, but Tuvok had mind-melded with Mekrikuk—a terrible mutual lowering of personal barriers, but a deed thought necessary by both men under the current dire circumstances—and had given the Reman clear, unambiguous instructions.

Time passed, all but unreckonable in the gray infinite, before Tuvok saw the silent flash of color that represented Mekrikuk’s mental burst, far away, coruscating and crackling as it moved inexorably toward him. Eventually, with an almost agonizing slowness, it engulfed Tuvok, and he saw in it the path that would lead his mind toward a fully conscious state. Tuvok wondered idly whether the characters in the ancient stories of fal-tor-pan—the re-fusion of a Vulcan’s immortal katrawith its still-living body—had experienced something similar. Though Ambassador Spock was rumored to have undergone just such a refusion once, Tuvok had never quite been able to bring himself to believe it.

As he gradually drifted back to himself, Tuvok began to regain some rudimentary awareness of his physical body. He realized with some discomfort that he was being dragged by his feet, the rough-hewn stone floor tearing away at his bloodied back through the rags that draped his emaciated body. He felt a burning sensation in his nostrils, mouth, and eyes, and realized that his captors had sprayed him with something caustic, probably to make certain that he truly was as dead as he appeared. He was careful not to react to the smell or the pain, keeping his breaths shallow, willing his countenance to remain just as lifeless as it had looked while he had been in the healing trance.

“Dii Pangaere tohr ve reh nubereae,”he heard one Romulan guard say to another, and he felt a twinge of pride that he had outlasted their expectations.

His captors suddenly stopped dragging him, and Tuvok heard one of them bark a sharp command. “Aihr Arrain Vextan. Abrai na iaaeru!”

As if the grinding mechanical sounds of the prison doors weren’t clue enough that they had reached the outer gates, Tuvok felt the floor vibrating beneath him as the great metal barriers rolled open. Seconds later, he was dragged into the area beyond the doors, where the floor was smoother, and the air cooler and less fetid. Though his eyes remained closed, he could sense a considerable increase in the ambient illumination.

After the guards had dragged him another twenty paces or so, Tuvok felt them let go of his body, which he allowed to collapse limply. One of his handlers kicked him in the ribs, rolling him none too gently onto his side. Focusing past the pain, Tuvok cautiously opened his right eye, the one nearest the smooth white floor, and saw the booted feet of four uniformed prison guards. From this and the position of the voices he heard before him and behind him, he quickly concluded that a total of five other people were in the room with him; one of them was located behind him, out of his line of sight.

He waited patiently, still as a corpse as the guards laughed and bragged about their casual, habitual abuses of the Reman prisoners, and speculated about the indignities the dead Romulan farmer must have suffered while incarcerated with them. One of them wondered aloud about exactly how the farmer had died, and another said that he would run a quick scan to find out.

Knowing his interval of “laying low” had just about reached its end, Tuvok gathered his energies and focused his mind as clearly as he possibly could. A moment after the guard rolled his body over yet again, flopping him onto his back, Tuvok opened his eyes. Out of necessity, the pacifism of Surak gave way to the ancient survival instinct, decades of special tactical training, and no small amount of rage at his captors.

Before the guard could react, Tuvok jammed his right palm sharply upward and into the man’s chest. The Romulan was dead before he could utter a sound, his eyes bulging in mute surprise.

Tuvok heard the others react with shock and horror, but he was already moving, his attention tightly focused on his grim task. He instantly took in the room around him, seeing three men grouped to one side, and another behind him, as he had surmised moments ago. He flung the sharpened rock that he had been clutching in his “dead” left hand at the sole guard behind him, aiming it for his forehead.

One of the trio brought his rifle to bear, but Tuvok had already moved, scissoring his legs out and connecting with the knees of two of the guards. They both screamed and fell backward onto the equipment and computer banks that lined the nearby wall.

The guard with the weapon fired once, and the disruptor blast flashed by harmlessly over Tuvok’s right shoulder. The Vulcan rolled and brought himself upright as the other man fired his rifle again. Gambling that the armed guard wouldn’t expect him to approach, Tuvok launched forward with a savagely purposeful ke-tar-yatarmaneuver, crushing the man’s windpipe with a kick to the throat.

Tuvok turned his attention back to the other two guards, both of whom were attempting to reach their rifles and sidearms, despite their fractured knees. He reached the nearer of the two first, put both his hands on the guard’s neck, and executed him swiftly by means of a talshaya,then used the man’s corpse as a shield while the other guard fired at him.

Grabbing the weapon-holding hand of the guard he had just killed, Tuvok pushed the man’s dead fingers, firing a triple burst at his attacker. Two of the shots connected, throwing the guard backward and leaving a smoking hole in his tunic.

His senses keen, Tuvok surveyed the situation. In the last eleven seconds, he had dispatched four of the guards present, while the one he had struck with the rock lay convulsing in a corner, a thick black bruise spreading across his forehead and green blood running freely into his eyes. He was still alive, but posed no threat. The discipline of Surak began to reassert itself, accompanied by an almost overpowering wave of self-disgust. He brutally pushed the latter aside; there would be time for self-recrimination later, assuming he somehow managed to reach safety.

Appraising the computer terminals against the wall, Tuvok realized that he was in a control chamber that ran the prison cell block’s systems. Large wall-mounted monitors displayed infrared images of the prison’s mazelike passageways, perhaps the very ones through which he had just been dragged.

Though he hadn’t yet heard an alarm, he knew he couldn’t afford to take the time to figure out the layout of the prison, and probably lacked the time even to map out his most efficient escape route. The guards’ disruptor rifle blasts had undoubtedly been detected by other Romulan troops, so it was likely that he had only minutes of freedom left, if that. But he knew of someone who almost certainly didknow the best way out, though accessing that information would be almost as dangerous as facing the rest of the prison’s armed personnel.

Tuvok approached the bleeding guard and pulled his crumpled form into a sitting position. The man’s dark eyes were open but unfocused, and his body still twitched. He was dying, but not yet dead. At least not completely. Tuvok forced aside another wave of self-loathing as he contemplated what he was about to do. What Ihave to do.

Placing his left index finger beside the dying man’s nose, his thumb under his chin, and splaying his other fingers against his bloodied cheek, Tuvok stared deeply into his erstwhile captor’s rapidly glazing eyes.

My mind to your mind,he thought, placing every iota of his will into the mind-meld. If he could extract the information he needed before the final dissolution of the guard’s mind, then everyone confined in this horrific labyrinth might stand a fighting chance of escaping.

Mekrikuk felt the gentle touch of Tuvok’s mind before he even heard the Vulcan’s thoughts. The brief contact allowed him time to warn Tesruk and Kachrek and several other Reman prisoners—though they were not exactly friends, Mekrikuk regarded them almost as equals—of what was about to transpire.

Then the cell doors opened, and Mekrikuk knew that the Trayatik dice had finally been cast.

At first, no one seemed to react. But within seconds, the Reman prisoners began a mad en masse rush to the corridors. Finding themselves suddenly outside the cellmaze doors for the first time since their arrival at Vikr’l, many of the Remans pushed forward toward the prison’s outer perimeter, which some of them had not even seen in years. Some stayed behind, scrapping and brawling with prisoners from other tiers, their anger over real or perceived slights now exploding with furious intensity.

Mekrikuk and a handful of Reman prisoners from his immediate circle of intimates stayed back in the cell, biding their time as the noise of the rapidly escalating riot grew almost deafening. The shouts and screams reached an earsplitting volume as the doors to the chambers beyond their tier also opened. Approaching the duranium bars, Mekrikuk squinted, watching as hordes of Remans surged forward into the well-lit areas that lay beyond the outer doors.

He grinned in satisfaction, imagining that this scene was being repeated in every confinement wing in Vikr’l Prison, thanks to the machinations of Tuvok. Until the Vulcan’s newly scrambled security codes could be deciphered, this entire maximum security facility had been effectively turned into an open courtyard. Mekrikuk had no pity for the guards he was certain were now attempting to flee the prison as the angry masses surged toward them, their minds brimming over with thoughts of revenge.

And of freedom, which was Mekrikuk’s foremost desire. Assuming he survived the events of this day, there would be time and opportunity later to exact vengeance against his captors. For now, he knew he would have his hands full just keeping himself alive and in one piece.

Mekrikuk noted that the outer corridors were mostly empty now that the rioting crowd had moved toward the prison’s periphery. The storm is always calmest in its center,Mekrikuk thought, echoing the sentiment that Tuvok had instilled in him during their brief psionic contact. All that remained in the cell block’s deeper recesses were the broken bodies of the dead and those too badly injured to take advantage of the opportunity to escape.

“Denae!”Mekrikuk said, and his small retinue of Reman compatriots followed him cautiously out into the corridor. The rough stone floor was slick with emerald blood as they exited the cellmaze.

“Bont na batlem saith,”he commanded, and the group moved among the wounded. As he had instructed, they quickly and cleanly killed any who would otherwise have died a lingering, agonizing death from their injuries. Mekrikuk had learned to practice this judicious compassion during the Dominion War, on Goloroth and other battlefields. He knew well that wars were anything but noble enterprises, and that their corpse-strewn killing fields were among the least glorious places to die. Having looked into perhaps hundreds of haunted, pain-racked eyes, he understood the grateful release of those whose journeys to the next world he had mercifully expedited.

His grim task complete, Mekrikuk led the group down the corridor. They blinked and squinted as they entered the more brightly-illuminated rooms and corridors that lay beyond. “Keisa,”Mekrikuk said, instructing his people to enter the small chamber on the right.

They entered, and Mekrikuk saw five Romulan guards lying dead on the floor. They were the same guards who had taken Tuvok away. He saw that they had been savaged after death by the prisoners who had moved through this room. Stupidly, the rioters had also smashed most of the monitors and computer equipment in the room before they had moved on.

“Tuvok?” he called out. There was no sign of the Vulcan, but his mind told him that his ally was somewhere in the room.

He heard a sound above and behind his group. He whirled to look, as did the others, each of whom possessed hearing no less acute than Mekrikuk’s.

Mekrikuk looked upward. From behind the dark latticework of pipes that ran across the ceiling, Tuvok emerged. The rags he wore were encrusted with dirt and blood. He held several disruptor rifles, tied together with a length of cord.

Tuvok jumped down, his legs coiling beneath him as he landed, like those of a particularly agile arark.

“You are unharmed?” Mekrikuk asked.

“Essentially,” the Vulcan said. “I have not been injured beyond repair. Thank you.” He turned to face the others and began distributing the captured Romulan energy weapons, handing one to Mekrikuk and another to Tesruk.

Despite Tuvok’s assurances, the Vulcan’s dark, sunken eyes were twin pools of pain. Mekrikuk supposed he was unaccustomed to such violence as he had seen today.

“The Romulans will already have locked down Vikr’l’s outer perimeter,” Tuvok continued, speaking in the Romulan common tongue. “We will have to overcome that problem once we reach it. There are other entrances and exits, if we can find them. But our way will be blocked there as well, by other prisoners, by guards, and by whatever security measures they will soon take to quell this riot. It’s likely that they will take lethal measures, and perhaps even try to eliminate the entire population of the prison. We will have to make our escape before that happens.”

“Voi mnaeri mnean ihra corr Rihanha?”asked Fapruk, a portly older Reman male. Mekrikuk had always regarded Fapruk’s so-called revolutionary crimes—the nominal reason for his incarceration at Vikr’l—as the consequence of spontaneous vandalism rather than the result of any coherent plan.

“We should trust him, Fapruk, because he got us this far,” Mekrikuk answered. “And because I said so,” he added in a more menacing tone.

His expression determined, Tuvok motioned toward a side doorway.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter Seventeen

U.S.S. TITAN

“Captain, I believe I’ve isolated Commander Tuvok’s life signs.”

Riker turned his chair, feeling hope surge within him. “Good work, Mr. Jaza. Put what you’ve got up on the screen, please.”

The image on the bridge’s central viewscreen shifted. It had been displaying Romulus in the center, along with images of the Federation relief ships and their Klingon escorts; the scene now displayed a map overlay of the planet, which swiftly zoomed in on a sparsely populated area just outside the capital city of Romulus. As the image zoomed in further, Riker saw a large circular facility in an aerial view, and recognized it as a highly secured, bunkerlike facility.

“Tuvok appears to be inside Vikr’l Prison, which is located within one of the outlying districts of Ki Baratan,” Jaza said. “The readings are pretty thready, though. I’m picking up indications of kelbonite and fistrium inside the prison walls. Not a lot, but enough to cause some interference with our scans, even with the new high-res sensor nets. We might have better luck if we could get our sensors closer to the prison.”

“Seems like quite a stroke of luck that you happened to find him,” Vale said as she rose from her chair and approached Jaza’s science station.

“He may have been located in a deeper section of the prison before now,” the Bajoran said, frowning as his fingers moved deftly across the console in front of him. “If he’s just been moved toward the perimeter, that might explain why the scanners couldn’t find him until now.”

“Can we get a transporter lock on him?” Riker asked.

Ranul Keru spoke up from the tactical station, aft of the captain’s chair. “I’m afraid not, sir. The prison appears to be equipped with wide-dispersal transporter scramblers. All we’d get back would be a pile of protoplasmic sludge.”

Riker studied the image on the viewscreen, his eyes narrowing. If I send a rescue team down there, I put the Romulan-Reman power-sharing negotiations in jeopardy. I’d risk giving Durjik and his followers areal reason to reject the Federation.And it didn’t help matters that the prison was so close to the capital city of the Romulan Star Empire.

“Sir, I’m also detecting what appear to be weapons discharges within the prison perimeter,” Keru said. “The Romulan and Reman life signs we’re reading are all moving around quite a bit.”

“A prison riot?” Vale said, looking up from the data she was reading at Jaza’s station.

Which means this may be our only opportunity to get Tuvok out of there alive,Riker thought. As wary as he was, he knew he couldn’t afford to delay taking action any longer.

“Commander Vale, Commander Keru, assemble an extraction team,” Riker said, an edge in his voice. “I want your bestpeople on this. Go in, get Tuvok out, and don’tget caught. I do notwant anyone to know that Starfleet was ever there. Use the Handy.She’s already been outfitted for this sort of thing.”

Vale’s eyes widened, but she nodded crisply. “Yes, sir.” A moment later she and Keru were sprinting to the turbolift. Keru was already calling into his combadge for his security team.

Riker felt a twinge of regret; had this been the Enterprise, hewould have been the one leading this rescue mission. But now, he had larger responsibilities. Despite his half-joking promise to Captain Picard that he intended to ignore the advice of his new first officer, he understood the wisdom of keeping a ship’s captain on the bridge.

“Mr. Jaza, patch everything over to my ready room, and then take the bridge,” Riker said, rising from his chair. “Inform Dr. Ree that we may have injured coming within the hour. Lieutenant Rager, I want you to monitor the Romulan communications channels. Find out everything you can about this riot, and get the information directly to the away team, encrypted and scrambled.”

Riker moved toward his ready room, tapping his combadge as he walked. “Admiral Akaar, Commander Troi, to my ready room, please.”

Dusk was deepening into night over the Romulan capital city. The shuttlecraft Handydipped through the low-rolling clouds toward Vikr’l Prison. The sleek type-11 craft was the only one of the ship’s complement of eight that Admiral Akaar had authorized—illegally—to be equipped with a cloaking device.

Vale and Keru both agreed with the unorthodox decision, especially given the potentially volatile nature of their interaction with the Romulans. Vale thought it made little sense that both the Romulans and the Klingons were permitted cloaking technology, while the Starfleet convoy was hampered by decades-old agreements with a Romulan government that no longer even existed.

Vale looked around the shuttle at the assault team that Keru had assembled. It included the Caitian lieutenant j.g. Rriarr; the Vulcan lieutenant j.g. T’Lirin; the Martian human lieutenant Gian Sortollo; and the Matalinian lieutenant Feren Denken. With the exception of their shuttle pilot, Ensign Olivia Bolaji, everyone aboard was outfitted in stealth suits and helmets. These garments, based on the isolation suits worn by Federation social scientists while covertly observing prewarp species, were utterly black on the surface. But when their internal systems were activated, they holographically duplicated the background behind the wearer, thus providing highly effective personal camouflage.

Even with their stealth systems turned off, the suits’ helmets not only helped disguise the identities of the away team members, but were also equipped with electronic auditory enhancers and heads-up in-helmet displays whose optical sensors provided what amounted to 360-degree vision. The suits also afforded their wearers a degree of resistance to directed-energy weapons, though field tests suggested that it wasn’t wise to allow oneself to take more than a single direct hit.

Vale listened as Keru went over the team’s mission profile and contingency plans yet again. He seemed extremely concerned about leaving any member of the team behind, no matter the reason, and assigned them to work in pairs. Keru was to go with Rriarr, T’Lirin and Sortollo were a pair, and Denken and Vale were to be the third duo.

Looking out the Handy’s forward viewport, Vale saw that columns of black smoke were wafting into the sky. As the cloaked craft drew nearer to the prison’s squat, gray structures, she caught sight of dozens of figures moving with frantic speed. Armed Romulan security personnel were scrambling throughout the outer levels of the structure, whose walls were arranged in three concentric circles. At the center of it all lay a massive complex that the shuttle’s scans—hampered as they were by seemingly random subterranean veins of refractory metals—revealed extended six or more stories underground; Tuvok’s biosignature was emanating from deep within that central structure. Vale looked toward the sprawling surface prison yard near the innermost circle; here a swarm of armed Remans was massed, firing at the walls of the surrounding structures—and at the guards who dared to peer over those walls or shoot back.

“I can get us over the prison,” Bolaji said. “But there’s no clear place to land that probably won’t be swarming with Romulan skimmers any minute. Jaza tells me seventeen of them are already en route.”

“And with the transporter scramblers operating, we still can’t beam Tuvok out, or beam ourselves in,” Keru said, looking at the forward window. “We’re going to have to get in there the hard way.” He turned back toward the others on his team. “Remember those swift descent air assault exercises we’ve been doing, folks?”

“How could we forget, O Fearless Leader?” Denken said with a lilt in his voice that didn’t quite conceal his nervousness. Vale nodded as the rest of the strike team made positive noises and double-checked their equipment.

Keru grinned through his helmet’s open faceplate. “Then it looks like it’s about time to put theory into practice.”

Vale couldn’t fault Keru’s plan. Though it was old-fashioned, she didn’t doubt it was the best way to enter the prison undetected—or at least as stealthily as possible under the circumstances. She pointed toward the top of one of the low buildings, where a handful of Remans had overpowered the guards near what appeared to be a landing bay for hover vehicles.

“Get us as close as you can to that rooftop down there, without crossing into the prison’s antitransporter fields,” Vale said. “We’ll beam directly to the dorsal hull, come down firing. Once we reach the roof we’ll have a high, defensible position. With a little luck, the Romulans on the outer perimeter will never even know we were here.” She turned back toward the others. “Phasers on heavy stun. Keep your beams narrow, and keep an eye on the proximity sensors in your helmets so we don’t hit each other. Watch your backs—it’s pandemonium down there.”

She pointed to one of the side viewscreens, then raised her wrist-mounted tricorder. “Tuvok’s biosignature is still coming in strongly, and I read two clear paths to reach him.” She was grateful that the fistrium and kelbonite Titan’s sensors had detected from orbit didn’t seem to be interfering significantly with the Handy’s sensors, or the away team’s tricorders, at close range. “Whoever reaches Tuvok first will signal the rest of the team. Then we’ll all get the hell out of there.”

Vale turned back toward Bolaji and caught her wincing and rubbing her protruding stomach. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Bolaji shot back tersely. “Just a kick.”

Let’s hope that’s all it is,Vale thought, then turned back to face the others. “Let’s move, people.”

As Bolaji held the cloaked shuttle in position hovering over the rooftop, Keru began keying commands into the transporter console. T’Lirin and Sortollo activated their stealth systems and silenced gravity boots, turned invisible, then vanished in the shimmer of a transporter beam. Vale looked through the front window, though she could see no sign of either of them as they glided invisibly downward toward the rooftop.

As Keru and Rriarr repeated this maneuver and began their gentle descent, Vale saw two of the escaped Reman prisoners cast squinting glances toward the essentially invisible shuttlecraft. Damn,she thought, they must have heard the transporter or the gravity boots. Their ears are a lot more sensitive than we thought.Their weapons at the ready, Vale and Denken were next to materialize on top of the shuttlecraft Handy,toward which the Remans had already raised their rifles. Luckily, Vale and Denken managed to squeeze off the first shots.

Even as the stunned Remans toppled, the phaser blasts caught the attention of a dozen or so other prisoners who were already beginning to swarm onto the roof. But moments later, Vale’s proximity sensors revealed that Keru and Rriarr were down on the rooftop, crouching behind what appeared to be a large air-conditioning unit as they began spraying the angry Remans with phaser fire. Sortollo and T’Lirin had taken cover nearby, firing into the melee as well.

Moments later, Vale’s and Denken’s gravity boots touched the roof’s hard surface, where the rooftop rioters were all sprawled unconscious.

“Thanks for leaving some for us,” Vale said, grinning behind her face shield. The acrid smell of ozone hung in the air.

“You’ll get your chance to shoot at something soon enough,” Commander Keru responded, his deep voice sounding slightly tinny in her helmet.

As the team members forced open a door and cautiously lowered themselves into the prison facility, Vale had little doubt that Titan’s security chief was right.

“So much for stealth,” Keru muttered. He realized belatedly that he had badly underestimated the efficacy of the Remans’ nonvisual senses.