"In Orbit of Life" (Mature)

[Guest Sar'vek t'Jhiin]

"... Sar'vek t'Jhiin is dead..."

 

A single tear ran from the corner of the Romulan woman's eye, trailing across the side of her temple. Her head hanging, the words echoed in her mind, burning a wide swath in her soul after three years. She'd never be able to forget them, the agonizing truth of them far more painful than any physical blow the Bajoran could have administered.

 

Her slim hand went up to brush the drop away, pushing a loose piece of hair behind her ear before falling back to the hypospray on the tabletop. She touched the cool metal caressingly, considering its contents.

 

Too long had the shell of Sar'vek gone on in its own tortured nightmare, the shards of what was once a proud woman existing without purpose, no more than a living shadow in the Bajoran's pleasured nights. It was to end, through t'Jhiin's own choice.

 

Latrotoxin, concentrated to the highest level. A single cubic centimeter was enough to kill, and the hypo was filled to the brim. One of Tynte's latest bits of deadly research was comparing the toxicity of different arachnid venoms, and how could she pass up such an opportunity?

 

She raised the instrument to her neck, her finger resting on the dispersal control as she looked towards the window, Tomed hanging in the bottom half of the view. An irony of its own, that her birth-world should be her final sight. It was Minshara-class, its rich, verdant colors once dominating its visage from space, now browning from the pollution of Imperial resource retrieval. Such wonderful progress they brought with them to their conquests.

 

Applying slight pressure to the button, she controlled another outpouring of tears, her face in the expression of neutrality she had perfected, decades before she'd ever heard of the accursed Tynte. She wasn't in the mood to make a round of impassioned mental goodbyes to people from her past... from the dead woman's past. She was past that stage of drama. Far past.

 

She sat like that for a time; perhaps minutes, perhaps hours before a coherent thought came to the mind of the Romulan. Lowering the hypo from her throat, a smile pulled her lips for the first time in her captivity, . Her death-state was only tied to one person. Eliminate that person, and Sar'vek would be free. Her eyes flickered back to Tomed. Elements, so close...

 

In honesty, she'd never cared for the backstabbing methods of most Galae personnel. In her opinion, you didn't kill your superior, you just drove them into the ground beneath your feet with superior intellect and cunning. No need to get your hands dirty with someone else's blood when they could do it for you, just as easily. But here... here she could make an exception, an excusable one at that.

 

The Maenak Veruul required no dispensation from her conscience before being deleted from existence, and it wasn't an act she would dwell upon once the deed was done.

 

The smirk having pulled into a full smile, she laced her fingers together, providing a flat resting place for her chin as she propped up her elbows. The old Sar'vek had returned, and all the Romulan officer had to do was to figure out a sure-fire way to deliver a lethal dose of the venom of Terra's own black widow spider.