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?”