Rekan Vrag had threaded her hands into her sleeves, a gesture that must have dated from a time when she wore the more elegantly draped robes of the Klingon military aristocracy. Somehow, even dressed in drab utilitarian brown, the gesture did not demean or humble her. "Enter," she said simply, pausing at the threshold of one small overhang. Kira's warning instincts rose to full clamor when she saw the featureless, dim interior. But when Dax snapped on a belt-lamp and used it to pick out the single slim figure huddled against the far wall, Kira was the next one in after Bashir. At least these Klingons had spared him the luxury of a blanket.
The survivor stirred when Bashir started his examination, his hands rising in a move Kira recognized as a standard defense technique taught at Starfleet Academy. She caught his hands back easily from Bashir's oblivious throat, feeling them shake with frustrated weakness between her own.
"It's all right," she said, hearing her voice drop to the crooning hush she'd used to soothe younger children in the camps during attacks. "You're safe."
"Safe., The young man licked dry lips, barely able to say the words past them. He peered up at her puzzledly, then his gaze moved to Bashir's familiar uniform and eased. "Starfleet...?"
"That's right." It didn't seem worth pointing out that Kira was with the Bajoran military, not Starfleet. She suspected that just not being Klingon would have been enough to reassure him. "I'm Major Kira. This is Lieutenant Commander Dax and Dr. Bashir."
"I'm... my name's Alex, Alex Boughamer. How did you know I was here?"
Kira tossed a warning glance at Dax, inclining her head toward the tall and rail-thin shadow that still slanted across the mouth of this deep overhang. Dax nodded back at her soundlessly, then answered. "We picked up the Victoria Adams's distress call at Deep Space Nine yesterday." She paused, carefully eying the pale face below them. "Alex, did anyone else survive?"
Boughamer startled Kira with a breathless chuckle. "Hell, all of us survived, Lieutenant. In fact, I'm the worst off. Captain Marsters packed us three deep in the sampling shuttle -- you should have heard the geologists bitch about that -- and one of the..." His drifting words sliced off abruptly, as if he'd just recollected that he was still among Klingons. "... um, an older guy among the passengers who used to be a pilot or something -- he piloted us down. He was amazing. We took some bumps in the comet field -- that's when the spectrometer fell on me -- but otherwise we made it down pretty much in one piece. I couldn't believe it." His blue eyes sharpened to a more crystalline alertness as Bashir's bone regenerator skated across his ribs. "What about the Vicky A. Major? You said you got a distress call. Did she make it out okay?"
"We don't know," Dax said, in the gentle voice she usually reserved for hopeless causes and untimely deaths. "So far, there's no word."
Boughamer's face seemed to crumple in on itself for a moment, then firmed up again. "That's okay. We knew -- Captain Marsters knew she might not make it. He just wanted to make sure we got away, and we did. He'd be glad about that."
They were silent for a moment, listening to the hum of the deep-tissue regenerator that Bashir scanned across Boughamer's abdomen. The daylight slanting in from outside seemed too bright, now that Kira's eyes had adjusted to the darkness. She restrained an urge to ask Rekan to step closer to the mouth of the overhang to provide more shade.
Dax touched Boughamer's shoulder to get back his drifting attention. "You said all the other survivors were alive. Where are they?"
"With the Klingons," he said simply.
Kira glanced out at Rekan's silhouetted figure and frowned. "Which Klingons? There's no one here but you."
Boughamer shook his head, then groaned and dropped his head back to the ground. "Not here. They caught us at the crash site and took us someplace far away. It was dark... we were in a cave, I think. Deeper and colder than this--more wind blowing through. But I don't know --." He started to shake his head again, but desisted when Bashir laid a gently restraining hand across his forehead. "They had me blindfolded part of the time, and I was passed out the other half. All I remember is waking up and being in some kind of vehicle -- something that lurched a lot, like a big landhopper or all-terrain crawler. I was there for what seemed like forever, then I was here. That's all I know."
Kira fell silent again, this time in sizzling frustration over the lack of clues she could follow to the missing survivors. She lifted an eyebrow at Dax to see if the Trill had any other questions.
"Alex," Dax said, "the Klingons who found you after you crashed--what did they look like?"
"Was one of them a heavy guy, long black beard and hair?" Kira put in.
"No." Boughamer's eyes closed, but his voice sounded so much clearer now that Kira guessed he was doing it to better remember. "They were too young to be a ship's crew, no armor, nobody in charge. And they've lived there, wherever we were, for a while. I could smell that rather smoky smell and the food smells and the Klingon smells."
"Why did they take the rest of the crew and passengers back to the caves with them? Why didn't they bring them all here?" Bashir asked.
Boughamer's eyes flashed open, looking startled and oddly angry. "Didn't I tell you already?" He cursed when he saw their heads shake. "I'm sorry, I thought I had -- I've been repeating it over and over in my head until I wasn't sure what I'd said and what I'd just thought. It's what they sent me here to tell you, it's why they sent me. They knew someone would come to look for us, and this is what they want you to do."
He took a deep breath, then launched himself into a message so singsong and practiced that its original Klingon cadences could scarcely be heard anymore. "You are from Starfleet who listen to this, and you have come to rescue your people from the comets. But there are people on this planet that you haven't come to rescue, and to us their lives are more valuable than these are to you. So we say to you, we who live on this planet and for this planet and with this planet, that we will not release these people of yours from the threat of the comets until you have released our people from it, too, forever. If you do not, then the comets will release us all." Boughamer's breath whistled out of him in near-exhaustion, but his eyes were already anxiously turning from Kira to Dax to Bashir. "I really said it that time, didn't I? I didn't just imagine that I did?"
"You really said it." It was a good thing at least one of the Trill's brains could still form words, because judging from the arrested expression on his face, Bashir had been thumped as speechless as Kira. "The rest of the survivors from the Victoria Adams are being held hostage by a group of Klingons. They'll be released only when we've managed to protect the entire planet from the comets. Otherwise --"
"-- otherwise they hang on to the hostages until sylshessa," Kira said grimly. "Until Armageddon, when everybody dies."
It was the mark of a mission going bad, Sisko thought ruefully, when your first instinct upon being hailed by your sector commander was to have your communications officer tell her you'd beamed down with your away team. Had it only been a few hours ago that he'd felt utterly confident that he could swoop into the Armageddon system, elude the Klingon blockade, beam up the survivors from the Victoria Adams, and be back at the station before Admiral Nechayev had finished conferring with her Vorta equivalents? Now that he was orbiting high above this comet-scorched planet, his sensors blinded by impact debris, his ship in imminent danger of detection by a returning Klingon blockade, and his away team stymied by Klingon ecological activists -- of all the unlikely antagonists! -- he wasn't sure Nechayev was even going to believe his progress report, much less endorse his continuing mission. And he could tell from the surreptitiously sympathetic glances he was getting from O'Brien and Worf that they shared all of his doubts.
With a resigned sigh, Sisko nodded at the young ensign who'd taken Dax's place on the bridge. "Put the admiral through."
"Captain Sisko." Interference from the comet field fuzzed the high-security channel, making Nechayev's image waver. As usual, though, the admiral's polished steel voice cut through the bac
kground hum with ease. "Do you know what's going on right now?"
"We're still trying to locate the survivors from the Victoria Adams," he said. "We've gotten proof that most of them are alive, but --"
Nechayev waved his explanation to an unexpected stop, her carved face tightening with an emotion too cold to be anger and too tense to be irritation. "Let me update you on the larger situation. Twenty minutes ago, the Victoria Adams -- and the Klingon ship she appeared to be traveling with -- were destroyed by a Cardassian military outpost at KDZ-A17J. The Cardassians claim it was an act of self-defense."
"What?" The shout resounded so loudly around the Defiant's bridge that Sisko knew it hadn't just been his voice raised in unconscious protest. "How could Captain Marsters attack a Cardassian outpost? The Victoria Adams wasn't armed!"
Nechayev frowned. "According to the Cardassians, Marsters came into the system at high speed and made a suicide run straight at their outpost. When they destroyed the Victoria Adams to prevent the impact, a cloaked Klingon vessel that was shadowing her -- or pursuing her -- returned their fire. The ensuing battle took down two Cardassian warships and half the station's defense system before the Klingons were destroyed."
Sisko whistled softly. He'd only met Marsters once, and although he'd been impressed with the research captain's intelligence and good judgement, he would never have expected a Vulcan Science Academy graduate to display such reckless courage in defense of his passengers and crew. "He deliberately incited that battle to keep the Klingons from returning here," he told Necheyev without hesitation. "He must have known it was the only way he could stop them."
Worf let out a rumble of Klingon respect. "That was the act of a great warrior."
"You know that, and I know that," Nechayev snapped back. "But all the Cardassians know is that they've been attacked by what looked like a joint Federation-Klingon force. It's taking all the diplomatic pressure we can muster to keep open war from breaking out all along the border."
"Look at the bright side," O'Brien offered. "At least we won't have to worry about the Klingon blockade for a while. They'll be so busy shoring up their border patrols --"
"I disagree," Worf interrupted. "If the Klingons blockading this system were willing to fire on an unarmed Starfleet vessel and pursue her into the teeth of a Cardassian outpost, there is something of immense importance to them in this system. I do not believe they will abandon it."
Nechayev's image fractured into hissing rainbow prisms as a chunk of cometary ice rebounded against the Defiant's angled shields, then reformed into an ironic frown. "For once, our diplomatic corps agrees with you, Commander Worf. They tried to make some subtle inquiries about this KDZ-E25From planet of yours, but couldn't get their usual Klingon informants to spill so much as a word. The best guess our tactical analysts can make is that it was the site of some heroic Klingon military action in the Cardassian invasion."
"Unlikely," said Worf. "The only battlefields sacred to Klingons are those where a single warrior or ship held off an overwhelmingly superior force. The Cardassians were never that."
Nechayev's frown deepened. "Then what's your explanation, Commander? Do you really believe the Klingons are shooting down Federation science vessels just to keep the cometary fireworks show to themselves?"
"No." If he felt discomforted at having drawn the needling attention of their sector commander, Worf didn't show it in either voice or expression. "What we are seeing is most likely an internal Klingon dispute of some kind, with the Victoria Adams inadvertently caught in the middle. The presence of only a single house among the Klingons stranded on the planet --"
"What Klingons stranded on the planet?" Nechayev blinked in surprise.
Sisko cleared his throat to draw the transmitter's autofocus back to him. "I started to tell you that our crash survivors are being held hostage by one of three groups of Klingons who say they have been stranded on this planet."
Nechayev's eyes narrowed. "And the fact that all these stranded Klingons come from a single house makes you think they might be political exiles? Imprisoned in the neutral zone because of some power struggle in the Klingon High Command?"
"Yes." The glint of Worf's dark eyes now held surprise and discomfiture in equal quantities. Sisko could have told him not to underestimate Nechayev's intelligence. He might not always like her strategic decisions, but he had to admit that the admiral had a raptor-swift grasp of salient facts. "However, since we do not yet know why or how these Klingons came to be marooned here, I cannot speculate as to the exact nature of the dispute."
Nechayev's thin, pale brows arched. "It could be anything. With all the recent unrest and turmoil he just quelled in the Klingon High Council, Chancellor Gowron could be unwilling to let any hint of internal dissension get out."
"Agreed," said Worf. "It will thus be a point of great honor to the Klingons to keep the blockade manned, to prevent the dishonored ones from escaping their sentence of exile."
"Which is now," Sisko pointed out, "a sentence of death."
"Because of the comet disintegration." Nechayev followed his logic as easily as she had followed Worf's. "Are the Klingons demanding evacuation to safe haven in return for releasing the crash survivors?"
"No." Sisko tried to mask the exasperation in his voice, but suspected he didn't do a very good job. "Most want us to just leave them alone to die. A few want us to give them enough technology to let them survive the bombardment. But the ones who actually have custody of the survivors from the Victoria Adams want us to save the entire planetary ecosystem by sweeping the comet debris out of the system."
Sisko had rarely seen Admiral Nechayev taken by surprise, and never seen her speechless. Until now. The arctic blue of her eyes glittered at him for a long moment, but only the background sizzle and thrum of small ice particles vaporizing off their shields filled the stunned silence.
"The Klingons want you to protect the planet they were stranded on against their will?" Her words were so filled with disbelief that they sizzled almost as much as the melting ice. "Why?"
Sisko took a deep breath. "We don't know. We haven't even made direct contact with them yet. So far, my away team has gotten all of its information from the Victoria Adams's communications officer. He was sent to the main exile camp to deliver the ultimatum, but he was wounded too badly to identify where he was brought from. Major Kira and Commander Dax are interrogating the other Klingon exiles now in an attempt to locate where this splinter group might be hiding."
"Do they really think the other Klingons will betray them?"
"They might, if Dax can convince them it's the honorable thing to do. Even if she can't, we can always divert a few of the oncoming fragments, to convince them of our good intentions for long enough to evacuate the crash survivors. After that --"
"After that, it's not our problem," Nechayev said bluntly. "Are we absolutely sure the rest of the Victoria Adams crew and passengers are still alive?"
"Yes." He wasn't, but had a feeling it wouldn't be wise to admit that to Nechayev.
"Then your orders, Captain, are to negotiate their release as soon as possible. If you don't succeed before the Klingons reestablish their blockade, I suggest you clear the area at that time."
"You suggest?" Sisko cocked a startled look at his commander. "You're not making that an order?"
Nechayev grimaced. "God knows, I'd like to. I'd rather not lose the best ship in my sector -- not to mention the entire staff of a space station that isn't exactly the most requested post in Starfleet -- over a few damned chunks of comet." She fell silent and her lips tightened, as if it was difficult for her to decide how to phrase the next part of her transmission. "There is a retired officer among the tourist party who under no circumstances must fall into the hands of the Klingon High Council. Under no circumstances. "She repeated it with enough emphasis to make Sisko's eyebrows lift.
"Can you tell me –"
"No," said Nechayev flatly. "Even the knowledge of his whereabouts is classified
information. If the Federation Diplomatic Service ever found out that he risked his life just to see some comets crash into KDZ-E26 -- I mean E25 --"
"We've been calling it Armageddon," Odo informed her.
"Appropriate," said Nechayev dryly. "Considering the hell there's going to be to pay if we lose the Defiant as well as the Victoria Adams there. Not to mention starting a three-way war between the Federation, the Cardassian Empire, and the Klingons."
"But if we manage to evade the Klingon blockade long enough to rescue our crash survivors --" Sisko let the sentence trail off, eying his commander closely for signs of disapproval.
The admiral regarded him with cold eyes, but allowed an ironic slice of smile to appear. "In that case, Captain, I might just be willing to overlook your blatant disregard for my opinion."
Sisko nodded. "Understood."
Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02 Page 6