Seekers: Second Nature

by David Mack

  Stano stared at the Klingon ship as it grew larger on the viewscreen. Khatami put her first officer back to work. “Commander, keep scanning the planet’s surface for any sign of the Sagittarius. Their S.O.S. might have meant they were making a forced landing.”

  “Yes, sir.” Stano turned back to the sensor display and hunched over it, eyes wide and searching for a reason to hold on to hope.

  Watching the younger woman, Khatami at last found a small degree of grudging respect for Stano’s choice of a neatly tucked beehive hairstyle. It didn’t need to be pushed away from her face when she leaned forward or bent down, so it spared her what had once been a frequent distraction. As utilitarian as the hairdo was, however, Khatami still preferred her own neatly coiffed bob cut—just as she preferred her uniform with trousers, while Stano had elected to adopt Starfleet’s miniskirt uniform, for reasons that still eluded Khatami’s understanding.

  Lieutenant Hector Estrada, the oldest of the ship’s senior officers, swiveled away from the communications panel. “Captain, we’re being warned by the Voh’tahk not to enter orbit.”

  “Return the favor, Lieutenant. Warn the Voh’tahk’s commander not to get in our way.”

  The mostly bald, mustached Estrada arched his thick eyebrows with momentary alarm before slowly rotating his chair back toward his console. “Aye, sir.”

  Khatami had no desire to start a shooting war with the Klingons, but she refused to be pushed around by them, either. The Organians said we’d be friends one day. She stifled a soft, cynical laugh. You can’t be friends with someone you don’t respect. And you can’t respect someone who lets you bully them. So we’ll just call this my overture to friendship.

  Her ruminations were interrupted by Lieutenant Stephen Klisiewicz, the ship’s third-in-command and senior science officer. “Captain? I think you should see this.” He handed her a data slate with a report he had just extracted from the ship’s library computer.

  It was an update from Starfleet Intelligence regarding the I.K.S. Voh’tahk. Specifically, an alert concerning who had just been placed in command of the D-7 heavy cruiser. Khatami handed it back to Klisiewicz and lowered her voice. “How recent is that?”

  He whispered back, “Confirmed nine days ago by first-hand sources on Somraw.”

  She regarded the Klingon vessel with a new measure of caution and respect. Not many Klingon commanders had reputations that preceded them, and even fewer had become infamous to the point that their presence would give Khatami pause. Captain Kang fit both descriptions.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Return to your post.” Klisiewicz nodded, and then he climbed the short stairs out of the command well and returned to his regular station on the upper level.

  Stano snapped upright and turned toward the captain. “Sir, I’ve found the Sagittarius!”

  “Is she intact?”

  “Looks like it.” Stano keyed commands into her console. “Estrada, I’m sending you their coordinates. Hail them on a coded frequency, see if you can raise them.”

  Estrada was already at work on the task. “Aye, sir. Transmitting now.”

  Khatami used the panel on her command chair’s armrest to open an internal comm channel to sickbay. “Bridge to Doctor Leone.”

  The ship’s nasal-voiced chief surgeon answered at once. “Go ahead, Captain.”

  “Tony, it looks like the Sagittarius went down hard on the planet’s surface. We don’t know yet how bad they’re hurt, but they might need medical help.”

  “Understood. I’ll have Nurse Sikal put together a ­triage team while I prep sickbay.”

  “Very good. Commander Stano will let Sikal know when to meet the landing party. Bridge out.” She thumbed off the channel to sickbay and opened another to main engineering. “Bridge to Commander Yataro.”

  The ship’s recently assigned new chief engineer, an ambitious Lirin officer, responded after a brief delay. “Yataro here.”

  “Commander, prep a damage control team to beam down to the Sagittarius.”

  “Understood. Anything else, sir?”

  “That’s all for now. Bridge out.” Khatami closed the channel. She had adjusted quickly to the new chief engineer’s habit of curt conversations. He seemed to have a keen dislike of small talk, and he preferred his duty-­related conversations to be short, direct, and unambiguous. Strangely, he was an excellent problem-solver and unraveler of riddles—byproducts, Khatami suspected, of his deep-seated aversions to uncertainty, chaos, and obfuscation.

  Estrada touched his hand to the transceiver nestled in his ear, listened intently for a moment, then shot a hopeful look at the captain. “Sir, I have the Sagittarius.”

  “On speakers.” Khatami waited until Estrada signaled her that the channel was open, and then she continued. “Sagittarius, this is Captain Khatami on the Endeavour. Do you copy?”

  Terrell’s voice was blanketed in static. “We read you, Captain.”

  “What’s your status?”

  “Heavy damage across the board, and I think we scuffed the paint something awful. Nothing a week at Starbase Pacifica won’t fix.”

  “Do we have our neighbors to thank for that?”

  “Naturally.”

  “How’s your crew holding up?”

  “Still counting fingers and toes, but we’re all here. Just heard from my landing party, and they’re on their way back now.”

  “All right, Clark. Hang loose and we’ll beam down some help—just as soon as we have a little talk with the neighbors.”

  “Tell them I said hello.”

  “Oh, I plan to tell them a lot more than that. Endeavour out.” Khatami narrowed her stare at the image of the Voh’tahk, which had grown large on the viewscreen. “Hail Captain Kang.”

  She knew it would take a few moments for Estrada to establish a real-time vid link to the Klingon commander, so she used the interval to stand from her chair and smooth the front of her green captain’s tunic. By the time Kang’s visage filled the viewscreen, Khatami had fixed her own countenance into a stern mien that Stano affectionately referred to as a game face.

  “Captain Kang. Would you care to explain why you fired on a Starfleet vessel?”

  The goateed, smooth-foreheaded Klingon mirrored Khatami’s dour glare. “We acted in self-defense. Your scout ship launched an unprovoked attack on our escort vessel.”

  “I doubt that, Captain. If the Sagittarius fired on a Klingon ship—”

  “If? You dare call me a liar? You would mind your tongue if you knew my reputation.”

  “If you knew mine, your ship would be on the far side of this planet by now. Go ahead, Captain. Have one of your officers look me up. I’m sure the High Command has some kind of file on me and my ship. Pay close attention to our service at the Battle of Vanguard.”

  A smirk pulled at the corner of Kang’s mouth. “Is that a threat, Captain?”

  “Call it a warning.” She stepped forward and stole a fast look at the tactical display on McCormack’s console, which confirmed her suspicions. “I see you’ve locked weapons on us.”

  He cocked his head at a rakish angle. “Call it a warning.”

  “I know you don’t play games, Captain. Neither do I. So I’m giving you a choice. Release your weapons lock without firing in the next ten seconds—or I’ll blast your ship into dust within the next thirty. Your call. What’ll it be?”

  “Do you really think you and your ship are a match for me and mine?”

  “I guarantee it.”

  The standoff stretched on for long, painfully quiet seconds. As one moment after another slipped away, Khatami dreaded having to make good on her threat. What could possibly be so valuable that the Klingons would risk starting a war for it?

  Kang turned his head and snapped at his female first officer, “Stand down.”

  McCormack looked over her shoulder at Khat
ami. “The Voh’tahk has released its targeting lock and powered down its weapons.”

  “Tactical systems to standby, but keep our shields up.”

  The Klingon commander simmered with resentment. “What now, Captain?”

  “We need to tend to our people on the planet, and I’d rather not have you breathing down our necks while we do it. Move your ship into an antipodal orbit from here. As long as we keep the planet between us, we can both go about our business. Agreed?”

  Disgust twisted Kang’s frown. “For now.” He signaled someone off-screen, and the transmission ended. The main viewscreen reverted to a view of the Voh’tahk banking away and making a swift orbit of Nereus II, until it disappeared beyond the planet’s equatorial curve.

  Stano slipped away from the sensor console to stand beside Khatami. “That was close.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be the last time. Get a landing party together, medics and engineers. We need to get the Sagittarius off this rock as fast as we can.”

  “And if it’s irreparable?”

  “Evac the crew and phaser the wreck into slag to keep it away from the Klingons. But whatever we do, we’d better do it fast. If I know Kang, he’s already looking for some way to seize the advantage and come back at us—and I want to be long gone before that happens.”

  • • •

  Kang paced his quarters like a wild animal fresh to a cage and waiting to avenge itself on its keeper. “I will make her pay for this. I will make her pay in blood.”

  Mara watched him with sullen disapproval. “You will do no such thing.” When he shot a lethal stare at her, she was unmoved. “If you had wanted to sacrifice all our lives in a pointless battle, you’d have done so. The matter is decided.”

  “She should have withdrawn.”

  “Why? Because you rattled your bat’leth? Would Kirk have run from you?”

  His wife was right, and that infuriated Kang. “She reminded me of him. Her stare.”

  “Yes. She has the same intensity.”

  Kang stopped and opened a low cabinet in which he kept a few choice libations. He chose a bottle of good warnog, opened it, and half-filled a pair of metal goblets atop the cabinet. He picked them up and handed one to Mara. “We need to complete our mission without revealing our purposes to the Starfleet crew.”

  Mara swallowed a long draught of the potent alcohol. She savored its long finish with her eyes closed. When she opened them, they shone with a new clarity. “To satisfy the High Command and the High Council, we’ll need to leave here with viable test subjects. I see now the recon team waited too long to select one for removal. We should select natives who show no signs of transformation, and put them into stasis before they start to change.”

  “I agree. We’ll be in orbit above the natives’ island within the hour. We can select two at random, beam them up—”

  “No, not at random. We can’t tell from orbit which ones are within months of the Change and which are years shy of it. We need to send down another team to identify the right subjects.”

  Kang finished his drink and sleeved the moisture from his lips. “Very well. Make their jobs easier—tell them to find that petaQ of a scientist, Tormog. Perhaps it’s not yet a good day for him to die.”

  24

  It was next to impossible to move quietly through the dense jungle that covered most of the island, not that Tormog had ever possessed a knack for stealth. Though he’d been born into a culture that glorified its relatively small population of warriors out of all proportion to their achievements, and to the grave detriment of the rest of Klingon society, he had dared to become a scientist rather than a soldier, a man of letters rather than a man-at-arms.

  No regrets. I’ve been true to my nature, and used my gifts for the glory of the Empire. They can question my prowess with a blade, but I won’t let them tell me I have no honor.

  Bitterness and resentment stewed inside him. It had rankled him not just to have his advice ignored, but to have been mocked for trying to save the lives of his fellow Klingons. Why should he have to suffer such indignities for trying to help them avoid a disaster? He had served beside the warrior caste for years, but he doubted he would ever understand them.

  He pushed through a tangle of vines and vaulted over the broad trunk of a fallen tree, all while keeping track of the large crowd of Tomol he was following. They were on the trail, moving in small groups. Their conversation was limited to frightened murmurs as they drifted toward whatever had crashed on the island’s east side. None of them seemed to notice Tormog following them. What would they do if they did? They didn’t seem prone to ­violence—at least, not before they transformed. And if Nimur’s reaction to the recon team had been any indication, they appeared to be receptive to contact with other intelligent beings, even those that looked significantly different from them. He knew his caution might be unnecessary, but until he had the advantage of backup he could count on, he planned to stay in the shadows.

  His communicator buzzed softly against his hip. He flipped it open and lifted it close enough to whisper into it and be heard on the other end of the channel. “What?”

  Kang’s voice was deep, dry, and droll. “Making yourself at home, Doctor?”

  “I’m following the natives to the crash site.” He swatted his way through a cluster of thorny vines, then caught the faint, far-off scent of smoke. “Dare I ask whose wreck it is?”

  “Ours. The Homghor went down with all hands.”

  “I warned them not to beam up the novpu’. They should have listened.”

  The captain let out a disgusted huff. “But they didn’t. What matters now is what comes next. A Starfleet vessel crash-landed on an island near yours, and there is another in orbit, a battle cruiser. We need to act fast if we want to salvage our mission from this blunder.”

  Tormog stopped and turned his full attention to the conversation. “Meaning what?”

  “We need to replace the subjects we lost in the crash of the Homghor. Can you select two from the crowd near you? A male and a female?”

  The scientist resumed walking and straining to catch glimpses of the Tomol through the close-packed foliage and the rows of gnarled tree trunks. “Yes. But how do we transport them without sharing the Homghor’s fate?”

  “We take them before they start to transform.”

  That made sense to Tormog. “Yes, of course. As long as we sedate them before they begin the Change, that should work.”

  “But they can’t be too young. You’ll have to choose subjects who are close to turning.”

  “I understand.” Ahead of him, past the crest of a low hill, the trees thinned, and a distant reddish glow dominated the sky. “How much time do we have?”

  “None. Every moment we spend now is one we have to steal.”

  “Understood. I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve chosen my subjects.”

  “Good. A landing party will be standing by. Voh’tahk out.” The channel closed with a barely audible click. Tormog tucked his communicator back into its pocket on his belt.

  The cover of the forest gave way within a few strides to an apocalyptic hellscape of smoking ground, scorched trees, and thick drifting curtains of impenetrable black smoke. All at once Tormog realized he was standing in the open, plainly visible to anyone who might chance to turn in his direction. Because of the spectacle that filled the plain beyond the hilltop, however, no one was looking at him. They all faced the nightmarish aftermath of the crash site.

  Thousands of small fires burned on the denuded landscape. Huge chunks of starship wreckage littered the blackened-glass slopes of the impact crater. The nadir of the crash site was a pool of what looked like molten obsidian. Scablike patches of crust had formed on the black pool’s surface as the slagged rock cooled. Great pillars of smoke climbed skyward from the sprawl of smoldering devastation. It reminded Tormog of the ancient pain
tings of the mythical horrors of Gre’thor, the underworld realm of Fek’lhr, who condemned dishonored Klingons to an eternity of torments as sadistic entertainment for their betters, who could look down from Sto-Vo-Kor and laugh forever at the well-deserved fates of the damned.

  The Tomol spread out along the periphery of the blast area, forming a ring of bodies. Tormog could only wonder what the natives thought they were looking at. Had they ever seen a meteor strike this planet before? Or observed a starship crash? Did they have any sense of what had just happened here? Or had they simply come like insects drawn to a flame?

  All questions to be answered some other time. Tormog kneeled behind a large, charred stump and assessed the nearest Tomol, sorting them mentally by age to determine which ones would be best suited for a protracted stasis voyage to the Klingon homeworld.

  If it’s test subjects Kang wants, then test subjects he shall have.

  • • •

  Everyone in the village had seen the falling star—just as they all had heard Nimur’s voice inside their heads. Her inchoate roar of pain and rage had been impossible to block out or ignore. To Kerlo, who had been closer to Nimur than anyone else, it had been unbearable, cleaving his thoughts like a burning blade, forcing him to his knees until all he could do was hold his head and cry out for mercy that refused to come.

  Then had come the eruption in the east, the white dome of light that had turned red as it diminished and shrank behind the distant hilltops. Other voices called out, then, in concert with Nimur’s. The Wardens she had ­corrupted—they were with her. But what had happened to them? How had they risen so high? And what had cast them down? Was this the legendary justice of the Shepherds, the retribution the priestesses had long warned would be delivered on those who dared to flee from the Cleansing?

  Kerlo needed to know. They all did. And so together they walked toward the new sunset, the one that lingered in the east, a red glow beckoning them to come bear witness.