by David Mack
It therefore came as a surprise to him when, while in the middle of her work, T’Prynn said, “I require a parametric scanner, and I wish to ask you a question.”
He blinked a couple of times, then said, “Go ahead.”
“Why did you join Doctor M’Benga when he brought me home to Vulcan?”
There was nothing accusatory in her voice. She had asked the question in a simple, matter-of-fact way, as if it had been an item of mere curiosity for her.
“You’ve asked me that before,” he said.
“Yes, I have,” she said. “On Vulcan.” She looked up and fixed him with a piercing stare. “I found your first answer less than satisfactory.”
Feeling caught, he bowed his head. “Fair enough.” He took a moment to muster his courage. “The truth is, I came because of a vid I took of you.” She set down her tool as he continued. “It was right after the bombing of the Malacca in Vanguard’s hangar bay. Remember that?”
Her mien hardened. “I remember it.”
“Well, when I heard the blast I came running with my recorder, trying to get a shot of it for the news. And I was panning with this piece of debris tumbling through zero-g in the hangar … and the next thing I knew, I was looking at you.” He looked into her eyes as he added, “And you were crying.”
T’Prynn half turned away, her face neutral but her body language telegraphing shame. “I was not well,” she said.
“I know,” Pennington said. “But the point is, what I saw of you was real—your pain, your sorrow, your rage. And I knew what you were feeling, because I’d been there myself.”
T’Prynn nodded. “When your mistress died on the Bombay.”
“Right,” he said. “When I lost Oriana.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, once I’d shared that moment with you … I don’t know. I guess you became more real to me: a person instead of a villain. On some level, I guess I felt that maybe you were the only person I knew who could really understand the pain I’d felt.” He sighed. “The pain I still feel sometimes.”
Silence fell between them. T’Prynn composed herself and faced him again. “Can you ever forgive me for the wrongs I have committed against you, Mister Pennington?”
He handed her the parametric scanner.
“I already have,” he said. “And you can call me Tim.”
19
June 2, 2267
Quinn dismounted slowly from the back of his mellul, a large but relatively docile animal native to Golmira and domesticated by the Denn. The huge, long-bodied quadrupeds had the gracile bodies of hunting cats, and their vulturelike faces were topped by feline ears and surrounded by enormous feathered manes. Their broad and taloned paws seemed well-adapted to traversing the sands of the desert north of Leuck Shire.
The light of two moons spilled brightly across the dune ahead of Quinn as he dropped to his belly and crawled up the slope behind Bridy Mac. They both had adopted native garb over the past few weeks after finding it well-suited to the rigors of desert travel and survival, but the cool coarse sand still got into the robes’ folds—and into everything else, for that matter.
Bridy stopped at the crest of the dune and retrieved a pair of holographically enhanced binoculars from under her robes. She activated the device and peered through it into the night. “There’s our temple,” she whispered to Quinn. “Finally.”
“You say that like it’s my fault this took three months,” Quinn replied as he inched to the dune’s peak and peered toward the ruins a couple of hundred meters away. “I didn’t ask to get socked in by a six-week sandstorm or sidetracked by monsoon season, and I’m also not the one who gave us food poisoning.”
Adjusting her field glasses, Bridy said, “No, but you did lead us smack into that caravan of desert nomads back in the foothills last week, didn’t you.”
He pulled out his own binoculars. “Ain’t my fault Naya and her little farmer friends got dog shit for intel. They said the ruins’d be clear till high summer.”
“It is high summer.”
“Well, now it is. Besides, if we’d just flown here in ol’ Rosie instead of humpin’ it over land on these beaked cats, the delays wouldn’t have mattered.”
She glared at Quinn. “No, but we’d have brought every nomad for twenty klicks down on top of us when they saw the glow from your thrusters landing on their mound of holy rocks.” Continuing her recon of the nearby ruins, she added, “We’re just lucky we were able to fall back before they saw us.” She looked up from behind her binoculars. “Check out the part of the temple visible through that collapsed section, about a third of the way in from the left. Looks like the Denn built a temple around a Conduit.”
Quinn followed the lines of the temple’s decaying stone façade until he found the area Bridy was talking about. He switched to a higher magnification. A second later, the image came back into focus, and he saw the structure inside the stony shell: bizarre fluid whorls cast from what looked like superbly polished obsidian. The same kind of design and material he had seen in the Shedai city on Jinoteur.
“Jackpot,” he said. “Desert kooks, meet your planet’s ticking time bomb.” He looked at Bridy. “What’s our play?”
Bridy squinted as she eyed the temple. “The nomads are all around it, but none of them seems to be going inside it. That’s good.” She put away her binoculars and took out her tricorder. “First we document the find, take detailed readings to send back to Vanguard, and gather samples for analysis on the Rocinante.”
“How you gonna do all that from way over here?”
She scowled at him. They both knew the mission called for her to go inside the temple and scan it from within, but he couldn’t resist poking fun at her.
“We’ll need a distraction,” she said. Pointing to the left, she added, “Maybe a small explosion past that big dune to draw them away. While they’re poking around in the sand, I’ll slip through their camp and into the temple.”
“Okay, sure,” Quinn said. “I could set that up, no problem. But they ain’t gonna fall for the same trick twice. Hell, they might not fall for it once. Say you get inside—what’s your exit strategy? You think they’ll just let you stroll on out?”
Bridy began crawling backward down the dune. “I just figured you’d do something gallant, like let them chase you.”
Shimmying down the slope beside her, he replied, “What in tarnation makes you think I’d do that?”
“Call it a hunch,” Bridy said. Once they were safely out of sight they stood up. Bridy walked to her mellul and retrieved a small backpack from her saddle. “How long to set up the explosion?”
“Not long,” Quinn said. “Fifteen minutes, tops. I …” He let his voice trail off as a glint of light from overhead caught his eye. He craned his head back and gazed skyward.
A single star swiftly grew larger, and the air shuddered with the low-frequency roar of fusion engines.
Watching the point of light grow and reveal itself to be a bulky ship on a rapid vertical descent, Quinn remarked, “That don’t look good.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Bridy, who hurried back up the dune.
Quinn crawled as quickly as he was able. By the time he caught up to Bridy and nosed over the sandy peak, a Klingon heavy transport was touching down fewer than fifty yards from the temple—in the midst of the nomads’ camp.
He expected the desert-dwellers to flee. Instead they swarmed around the Klingon ship and brandished their swords, spears, and primitive bows.
A massive bulkhead on the ship’s ventral hull detached and lowered into a broad ramp. Seconds later a battalion of Klingon soldiers marched down the incline in a V formation. Those in the front rank had their disruptors leveled.
Loudspeakers on the outer hull of the transport blared commands at the natives, who hooted and whooped as they charged up the ramp.
The Klingons held their ground and opened fire.
Quinn winced at the blinding crimson flashes of disruptor fire. When he opened his eyes a moment
later, he saw the Klingons continuing to advance—stepping on the charred, smoking corpses of the slain Denn in their path.
A second wave of nomads stood paralyzed with indecision. Another barrage of disruptor fire cut down roughly fifty more of them. The surviving Denn nomads fled in a panic, running in all directions as they abandoned their tents and mounts.
Even from more than a hundred meters away, Quinn could smell the sickly perfume of scorched flesh.
Next came the rumble of motors and the clank of rolling treads. Heavy excavation vehicles started to roll slowly down the ramp from the transport ship. A fresh platoon of Klingons carried large containers stenciled with markings in their native script. Flood lamps mounted on the starboard side of the transport snapped on and lit up the entire temple at once.
“So much for Plan A,” Quinn said. “Unless you still think a little puff-boom over that dune’ll do the trick.”
Bridy frowned. “Not a chance. We’re lucky their sensors haven’t picked us up yet. We should get moving before they do.”
Moving on knees and elbows, she backed down the dune until they were out of sight again. Quinn followed her, and they pulled themselves up into the saddles of their melluls. As they began the loping, swaying gallop back toward Leuck Shire, Quinn quipped, “It’s just as well they showed up now. I always hate when these things are too easy.”
The sun was up but still low on the horizon as McLellan and Quinn reached the outskirts of Tegoresko, the nominal capital of Leuck Shire. “We should go the rest of the way on foot,” McLellan said. “In case the Klingons are here, too.”
“Makes sense,” Quinn said.
They guided their melluls inside a low, three-walled ruin. McLellan dismounted first, but Quinn was right behind her. He grabbed a pipe that rose up from the concrete foundation and tried to shake it, but it held fast. “This’ll do,” Quinn said. He tied his mount’s reins around the pipe, then did the same for those of McLellan’s steed. “Need anything from the packs?”
“No,” McLellan said. “Let’s travel light. We’ll take turns on point every couple of blocks.”
Quinn nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll go first.” He peeked through the doorway and scouted the street. “Clear.”
He slipped through the door, and she stayed close behind him. They crossed the boulevard of broken asphalt, whose prominent fissures were choked with weeds.
Darting from one building’s corner to the next, McLellan remained alert for any sign the Klingons might be near. Her fifth turn on point, she heard the sound of disruptors echoing in the distance ahead of them. “Great,” she muttered.
“Ain’t nothin’ to panic about,” Quinn said as they ducked for cover inside a deep doorway. “Figured this might happen. The ship’s camouflaged, it’ll be fine.”
McLellan regarded her partner with a scornful stare. “You think I’m worried about the ship?”
“I sure as hell would be,” Quinn said.
Frustration made her jaw clench. “I’m worried about Naya and her people. If they make the same mistake the nomads did—”
“They won’t,” Quinn said. “I showed ’em what Klingons look like and told ’em not to piss the lobster-heads off.”
The tension in her jaw melted away as her face went slack with disbelief. “You told them about the Klingons?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Quinn said. “And seein’ as they’re here, I think I made the right call.”
“You realize that’s potentially a Prime Directive violation,” McLellan said.
He rolled his eyes. “I call it bein’ a Good Samaritan. Ain’t like the Denn don’t know about other worlds, or warp flight. I didn’t pollute some precious paradise. And if my bit of friendly advice keeps these folks from gettin’ their faces shot off, I’ll just call that a win, thank you very much.”
Much as it pained McLellan to admit it, he was probably right. “Okay, fine,” she said, motioning him to move on. “You’re up on point.”
Quinn checked the street and moved out. He blazed a trail through the rubble beside the streets, using it for cover as they passed near the village’s central square.
Minutes later he and McLellan ducked under a slab of shattered cement and waited while a Klingon squad marched past. When the crisp echoes of stomping jackboots receded, McLellan peeked out from under the slab toward the town square.
Naya and her daughter, Ilka, stood at the front of a phalanx of Denn, flanked by the landgraves who had come to dinner with McLellan and Quinn on their first night as Naya’s guests.
A goateed Klingon commander stood facing Naya and read aloud from a scroll-like document. McLellan didn’t speak much tlhIngan Hol, but she understood enough to know he was explaining the new laws under which the Denn would henceforth live as subjects of the Klingon Empire. As was typical for any such proclamation, the penalty for nearly every offense against the Empire, no matter how trivial, was summary execution.
Quinn looked at the Klingon commander and whispered, “Meet the new boss.”
“Pretty much.” She stole glances in either direction along the street. “Looks clear. If we can make it behind that row of building façades over there, we should have solid cover all the way back to the ship.”
He patted her shoulder to let her know he was moving ahead of her on point, then he broke cover and skulked across the road. She stayed with him, moving quickly but also quietly. For several seconds she felt precariously exposed, but then they were off the street and concealed once more in the embrace of Tegoresko’s crumbling urban landscape.
It took them more than half an hour to reach the Rocinante, but to their mutual relief the scanner-blocking modifications Starfleet Intelligence had installed on the vessel had kept it hidden from the Klingons. As an added precaution, Quinn had moved the ship from its original landing site to one in the heart of the city, inside a roofless building whose windows and street-level access points had been boarded up or bricked in.
After the ship had been secured, the Denn had added a flimsy faux roof to the building. Though the roof wasn’t strong enough to support even one man’s weight, it looked more than solid enough to thwart a visual scan, either from orbit or from a recon flyover. As long as the Klingons didn’t make a hard-target inspection of every abandoned structure in the city, the Rocinante would likely be safe for some time.
Quinn slipped through a gap in one boarded-over window arch, stopped, and listened. “Okay,” he said. “No one here.” He led McLellan inside the building and over a series of rickety plank walkways and ramps that hugged the walls and sloped down to the bottom of its foundation. He jogged to the ship and entered the code to unlock its rear hatch.
The gangway lowered with a dull hiss and a cloud of vapor. “Home, sweet home,” Quinn said as the ramp touched the ground.
He and McLellan hurried inside. She went straight to the cockpit and fired up the communications system.
“Can you do me a favor?” she asked. “Check the sensors and see what kind of ship the Klingons have in orbit?”
“On it,” Quinn said, powering up the sensor package. He called up the results and grimaced. “It’s a D-7 battle cruiser.”
“Lovely.”
McLellan typed quickly and composed a brief, code-worded report: Saw sights. Neighbors are here with a big dog. Staying with friends. Would rather see family. Waiting for next song. She encrypted the message with SI’s latest ciphers and sent it in a low-frequency subspace burst transmission to Vanguard.
“There,” she said. “Message is away. Now we wait.”
Quinn smiled. “I know a few ways to pass the time.” Before she could scold him for his shameless flirtations, he held up a deck of cards. “Texas Hold ’Em, no wild cards, no jokers.”
She sighed. At least it’ll keep us busy until we get a response from Starfleet. “Okay,” she said, “but no strip bets. We both keep our clothes on this time. Especially you.”
He frowned but started dealing out cards. “
You’re no fun.”
20
One minute the view outside the Skylla’s cockpit was nothing but stars surrounding a dull orange rock of a planet; the next it was dominated by a Klingon bird-of-prey dropping out of warp all but on top of Pennington and T’Prynn’s stolen vessel.
“Bloody hell,” Pennington said as he scrambled to shut down all of Skylla’s nonessential systems. “Where’d they come from?”
T’Prynn was the picture of calm as she stepped into the cockpit and took her seat beside Pennington. She looked at her console. “They appear to be generating a field that returns false sensor data. Their stealth technologies are improving.”
As the hum of the ship’s onboard systems faded to silence and the console lights dimmed and went out, Pennington eyed the warship cruising away toward the planet and replied, “The Klingons are developing stealth systems?”
“Indeed,” T’Prynn said. “They have been working on them for several years. The fact that this ship eluded our long- and short-range sensors suggests it possesses advanced silent-running protocols.” The bird-of-prey became a silhouetted speck against the distant planet. “Fortunately, they do not seem to have detected us, which might indicate their new technology restricts their own sensors’ range and precision.”
Pennington said, “Lucky us.”
The only console still active aboard the Skylla was T’Prynn’s piloting station. She keyed the ship’s thrusters and initiated a slow roll and turn. “We will need to take cover behind the nearby moon to ensure we aren’t detected by the Klingons when they return from their initial orbit of the planet,” she said as the star-scape spun outside their canopy.
I guess I should be used to this by now, Pennington mused as T’Prynn guided the Skylla toward safety. During the past few weeks, in between rebuilding the ship from the inside out, they had been forced to “go dark” several times to evade various Klingon vessels and, in one case, a Tholian cruiser.