by David Mack
“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 Khatami. “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 paintings 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.
Standing beside his neighbors and kin on the edge of the great crater, Kerlo felt his heart swell with grief. He had loved Nimur once; and though he had come to fear her after the Change, part of him had hoped she was at least partly still the woman he’d adored, the mother of his child. His most earnest wish now was that she was truly and finally gone, so that the land and the people could be at peace. But even so, he mourned her, and he wept to think that the woman who once had woven such beautiful fabrics with her delicate hands, and had kissed his bruised head with the tenderness of a morning breeze, had driven herself to such a brutal, pointless ending.
• • •
As grateful as Hesh was that the Sagittarius had survived its harrowing brush with annihilation, he was ever so slightly vexed that it had crash-landed on a completely different island from the one on which they had set their exfiltration site. Consequently, returning to the ship had proved to be a rather roundabout affair. It had entailed another submerged journey through pitch-dark seas—a journey made navigable only by Hesh’s own effort to link his tricorder to the rover’s navcomp so that it could detect and plot routes around treacherous kelp forests.
Now, as they surfaced onto a strange new alien shore, Dastin proclaimed, “See! Told you guys I’d get us back to the ship in one piece!”
Hesh left his criticism unspoken: As if he could have piloted around those kelp forests that his Trill eyes lack the acuity to perceive in the dark.
The Arkenite suppressed his urge to set Dastin’s beard aflame and concentrated instead on making tricorder scans of the area for the good of the group and the mission. “I have detected the Sagittarius,” he said. “Relaying coordinates to the navcomp. Be advised, there appears to be a great deal of impassable jungle between us and the ship. We might need to proceed on foot.”
Dastin checked the ship’s position on the navcomp. “On foot? Don’t make me laugh.” He stepped on the accelerator and swung the wheel to the right. “Hang on, this might get bumpy.” The rover fishtailed its way down the beach, charging through the breakers for a few kilometers until Dastin jerked the wheel hard to the left. “There we go.”
Lit by the glow of the planet’s two moons, the straight and level swath cut by the Sagittarius through the jungle was like a smoky canyon with trees and vines for walls. Most of the debris had been knocked aside or driven under the dirt by the small starship’s violent passage, leaving an eerie, wide dirt road stubbled with low stumps. A dust cloud in the middle distance promised an imminent end to their odyssey across this increasingly inhospitable planet.
Theriault opened her communicator. “Theriault to Sagittarius. We have you in sight.”
Captain Terrell answered, “Roger that. The door’s open.”
A couple of minutes later, the rover reached the Sagittarius, which was planted nose-first into the ground. The jungle hugged the dented, torn-up scout ship on three sides; only the aft quarter of the primary hull was clear of obstruction, but the ramp to the cargo bay was several centimeters off the ground because the ship’s forward landing gear had dug itself into the dirt.
Terrell, Cahow, and Ilucci stood on the ramp, watching the rover’s return. The captain lifted his arm and waved in salutation. Dastin flashed the rover’s headlights in response.
The vehicle rolled to a gentle stop a few meters from the ramp. Dastin turned off the engine, and Theriault opened
her door. “Okay, kids. We’re home.” She got out, and the rest of the landing party followed her. As soon as Hesh was free of the rover, he did the first thing that came to mind: He ran another tricorder scan of the area. Just to be safe. It was.
As they walked toward the ship, Hesh got his first good look at the captain, the chief engineer, and Cahow, who were bathed in light from the rover’s headlamps. All three of them were scuffed, sweat-soaked, and covered in a fine layer of grime, but Cahow seemed the worst off of the three. Her face was bloodied, bruised, and reddened, and her flaxen hair looked as if it had been assaulted by an open flame that had left it crisped in several spots.
“Good to have you back, all of you,” the captain said. He shook Theriault’s dusty hand and clapped her shoulder. “Everybody okay?”
“Fine and dandy, sir. How’s everybody else?”
“We’ll manage.”
Dastin surveyed the damage to the ship, glanced back at the rover, and then turned to face Ilucci. “Damn, Master Chief—and you thought I was a menace.”
The gentle jibe lit the chief’s fuse. “I’m the reason this goddamn ship is still here.”
“Whoa!” Dastin lifted his hands in a defensive posture. “Sorry, Master Chief.”
Terrell pressed his open hand lightly against Ilucci’s chest. “Stand down.”
Ilucci took a deep breath as he backed off and unclenched his fists. “Sorry, sir.”
“S’all right. We’ve all had a hell of a day. And it ain’t over yet.”
Theriault stepped onto the ramp and motioned for the others to follow her inside the ship. “Do we have a repair schedule yet, Master Chief?”
Ilucci, Dastin, Tan Bao, and Terrell followed the first officer up the ramp and inside the cargo bay, but Cahow lingered outside and stared into the night, so Hesh stayed behind with her. He wanted to reach out and touch her singed hair, as if that might offer some comfort, but he didn’t know enough about human customs in general, or about Cahow in particular, to be sure such an act might not be misinterpreted, so he kept his hands to himself. “Are you all right?”