Worf related the story as he had heard it. “He had been speaking of doing so before, in grief over learning that Kruge had not returned from the dead. By plunging into the flames, he said he followed the true Kruge into death.”
Kahless put down his bowl and shook his head. “These are the remains of a world turned upside down, Worf.”
“These people have been ill used,” Worf replied. “Do not misunderstand. What they have done is unconscionable, unforgivable. I have told you what I learned about the massacre of the sentries at Spirits’ Forge, done at this Cross person’s command. Valandris told me the story. It matches the massacre at Gamaral in dishonor.” He shook his head. “And yet I see these people as they have lived, I see their children, and I think that if things had been different, it might not have come to this. They might have resisted the false Kruge.”
“Admit it, Worf. They were poorly led.”
“I am not sure how much to blame Potok. I saw the report Ambassador Spock made a hundred years ago. The general was trying to keep his people together, hoping to shepherd them through discommendation. A sentence,” Worf added with distaste, “that may have been undeserved, from what I understand. I know what it is like to be dishonored due to political machinations—but I suffered alone. Potok took responsibility for hundreds.” He took a deep breath. “How might any Klingon have responded in such a place?”
“You would have done better,” Kahless said, looking kindly on him. “I may be the clone of Kahless, but you, my friend, have been an even better example of his teachings at times.”
Worf shook his head, unwilling to accept the praise. “You are the rightful heir, Emperor.”
“I was grown in a lab. I have no more claim to moral authority than does any Klingon,” Kahless said, his eyes distant. “You have the greater deeds.” He looked at his bowl, unfinished. “Certainly in these last years, as I grew fat in my solitude, my thinking grew flabby too. I was wrong to live alone. I see that now.”
“Emperor, belief is like a blade. It grows dull when it is not used.”
“Cross used our beliefs as a blade against our people—but so did Potok. Whatever he intended, Potok appears to have destroyed any hope his people might—”
Worf saw Kahless look up. The commander turned to see Valandris approaching along with three others. One he recognized as Hemtara, the mathematical thinker from Chu’charq’s bridge crew. Another was Dublak, who had been so shaken earlier on seeing Kahless’s return from the dead.
The fourth was little Sarken, lingering behind Valandris.
Worf and Kahless stood. “What do you want?” the emperor asked.
“We would like to know more,” Valandris said.
“More?”
“I read a book at Spirits’ Forge,” she said. “In it, you—the real Kahless, I mean—said to leave nothing until tomorrow.”
Kahless paused, clearly thinking on how to respond. “That is correct. It is wrong to sit and wait, to quarrel and wish—as your people have been doing. A true Klingon sees the right path and takes it, whatever comes.”
“What if we do not know the right path?” Hemtara asked.
“There are times when it will be impossible to tell,” Kahless said. “You must accept this. You already know that any path taken halfheartedly is bound to be the wrong one.”
Valandris let out a sigh. “Kahless, when we committed to Kruge’s way, he said a similar thing to us to get us to work his will. We devoted ourselves to it, fully and with our lives. Yet you and Worf have said that was the wrong path.” She looked at him searchingly. “What would have guided us?”
“The other tenets,” Kahless said, “and your true Klingon heart. Worf told me that you regretted your ambush at Gamaral. Is this so?”
“I do,” Valandris said, straightening.
“If you had never known the teachings of Kahless the Unforgettable, how did you come to that feeling?”
Valandris considered for a moment. “I . . . do not know. I just felt it.” Her brow furrowed. “It wasn’t like in hunting, where we pounce on a mindless thing. It just feels—”
“Like your opponent deserves better,” Dublak said. He looked down.
Kahless studied them and nodded. He focused on Sarken. “How would you put it, child?”
She chewed her lip as she thought for a moment. “It is not good to do a bad thing.”
Kahless laughed, loudly and heartily—and this time, somehow, the sound did echo, drawing the attention of others. “You put it well,” the clone said. “But our people would say batlhHa’ vangIu’taHvIS quv chavbe’lu’.”
One does not achieve honor while acting dishonorably. But that, Worf thought, was not the important thing that Kahless had said. No, the words that had put a spark in the faces of the emperor’s listeners were spoken earlier.
Our people.
Kahless scaled the flattened boulder that had been his makeshift worktable and stood, facing the rest. Glancing to his left, Worf saw that beyond the dormant birds-of-prey, night had fallen outside the cave opening. But the dinner was done and the fires were burning. There were songs to sing and stories to tell.
Eighteen
SECRET BREEN SHIPYARD
JOLVA REE
The armored workers filing past Shift looked alike. She appeared no different, of course, in her Breen armor. They paid her no mind as they marched toward the prep center, where they would augment their suits with propulsion units allowing them to work in the zero gravity of the shipyards.
Their gait was so uniform, their manner so controlled, that an unindoctrinated observer might consider them automata. To Shift’s eyes they were anything but mindless robots. They were heroic, driven, unified. Breen, pledged together to the advancement of the Confederacy and the spread of its values. She rejoiced to hear again the sound she had long missed: the low buzz of many Breen vocoders in use at once. Normally, they spoke only when necessary and always in advancement of their common cause.
Yet this day was different, one long anticipated by the workers who had labored for years in secret inside the asteroid orbiting Jolva Ree. Today the Breen were arming the secret attack fleet they had been building for the Holy Order of Kinshaya. Finished months earlier, the spherical Fervent-class warships had sat waiting to be deployed. Their completion, and the chance that they might now be used, was owed entirely to Shift.
Back during her first visit to the Breen facility hidden deep in Kinshaya territory nearly four years earlier, Thot Roje had been facing the demise of his greatest project and with it, his career. The backlash following the Niamlar Circle Massacre on Janalwa had made the battlespheres Roje was building for the Kinshaya useless; the new ecumenical administration under the reformist Yeffir had shown little interest in continuing hostilities with the Klingons—or with anyone else. And while the Kinshaya did not abandon their alliance with the Breen through the Typhon Pact, the new Episcopate had made it clear it was going to keep the Confederacy at arm’s length.
But Jolva Ree had not been shut down. Shift had convinced Roje to keep the project going while he launched a parallel effort to undermine the new Kinshaya authorities. Having joined the Breen and completed her training, Shift had assisted. Unlike many Breen, she felt comfortable operating without armor, and did so on numerous missions to Janalwa. Orion traders were not uncommon sights on Kinshaya worlds; Shift had visited under several different names and guises, offering secret material assistance to Ykredna, the former Pontifex Maxima. She had also opened back channels to Kinshaya military personnel.
Those efforts had borne fruit. After just a year—including bribes, blackmail, and the odd assassination—Shift and her comrades in the intelligence service had brought the two powers closer together than they had been when the Breen troops were openly operating in the capital. A subtler form of domination had begun.
Yet one thing had eluded the Breen. The expansionist policies of the Holy Order had been a relatively recent development, coinciding with the race’s co
nquest of the Kreel and its subsequent alliance with the Pact. Pontifex Maxima Yeffir, while weakened, would never wage war just on the Breen’s say-so. The Kinshaya might do something less risky on their own stupid impulses, but they would not become sacrificial pawns in a Breen power game. They required a shove of a particular kind—an idea that had struck Shift during her conference with Roje and Domo Pran during their exit from Klingon space.
The worker processional finally past, she crossed the hall to a docking tube. Within moments, Shift was aboard her sometime home for the past year, Blackstone. The difference, however, was startling. Gone were the operators, huddled over their command interfaces in the illusion control center; in their place were several Breen laborers carting immense data processing units. Thot Roje was here, as was the underling who had of late become his nemesis.
“Welcome, Chot Shift,” Roje said. “You have not met Chot Dayn?”
“Everyone knows of Chot Dayn,” she replied. “You have done much to make our people more efficient.”
“Not nearly enough,” Dayn said. “Waste is rampant across the Confederacy. And it festers far from our borders too.”
She did not have to guess what Dayn was referring to. It was an open secret that the logistical specialist had been sent by the domo to shut down work at the asteroid and break everything down for scrap. She also assumed he was Amoniri.
“The face of the Breen” was supposed to be a great equalizer, and in general it had been for her. Regardless, newer members could not help speculating what sort of being was inside their neighbor’s armor. True, they weren’t supposed to; that defeated the whole idea. But Shift had discovered a number of behavioral tells. Fenrisal, like Roje, tended to be sly. Silwaan, cautious. The Amoniri, bossy. No, she was not supposed to notice things like that—but to the Breen way of thinking, this was also a deficiency of others. They were failing to project Breen-ness, for want of a better term.
Chot Dayn was as insufferable as they came. He looked around at Blackstone’s command center—eerily empty without the truthcrafters. “At the domo’s command, I directed the workers in your absence to commence final preparations for the fleet,” he said, “and many of our Spetzkar special operations forces are on their way here. But I fail to see how this vessel will make a difference, Thot Roje. It hardly seems worth all the trouble.”
“You have only seen part of it,” Roje said. He turned to face a rounded bulkhead. “Behind this wall lies the heart of the ship’s functions, the key to its operation—once we access it.”
Chot Dayn raised his hands in frustration. “Why do you wait? Bring torches and open it, then.”
“That would destroy its workings,” Shift said. “The imaging chamber is the heart of Blackstone’s illusion-generation system, the critical link between the vessel’s computer processors and the emitter atop the hull. There is a key to activate it.”
“A key! Do you have it?” Dayn asked.
“I have never seen it used. But I know who has it.” She looked back. “Perfect timing,” she said, watching Gaw slouch in, flanked by Breen guards.
“Is that you in there, Shifty?” Gaw asked, looking her over. “You know I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
She turned to Roje. “I must speak to him in Federation Standard.”
“Go ahead,” the spymaster said.
“By all means,” Dayn piped in, crossing his arms in boredom. “We have already waited years.”
With a spoken command, Shift made an adjustment to her vocoder. “You understand me now?”
Gaw nodded. He looked over at the Breen bringing in the new equipment. Two more entered carrying sizable loops of ODN cable. “I guess you guys are serious.”
“We need to activate the imaging chamber, like we discussed.”
Gaw nodded. “Yeah, I guess you usually saw the imaging chamber open because you were with Cross. We’d shut it down by the time you found us in the comet tail.”
“We need to get inside, Gaw.”
The Ferengi sighed. “I need my pince-nez,” he said, pointing to the bridge of his nose. “My little glasses.”
“You can see well enough without them,” Shift said. “Stop wasting time.”
“You don’t understand. They’re the key.” He pointed to a knickknack atop his workstation—a little orb that threw off multicolored light when spun on its magnetic base. “And I’ll need that.”
Huh, Shift thought. She had played with the widget herself over the past year. She took it from its stand while Roje ordered that Gaw’s personal effects be delivered to the command center. After a few minutes, while Chot Dayn stood around grousing about his time being wasted, a Breen arrived carrying the glasses.
Gaw gestured for them, and then asked Shift to come near. “Set the orb on top of that,” he said, indicating the console nearest the curved wall. While she did as asked, he rubbed the lenses of the pince-nez on his sleeve. “All truthcrafter ships have their own ways to unlock the imaging chamber. Sometimes it’s a magic word. Sometimes it’s sound. Sometimes it’s light.” He blew on the glasses. “Give that a spin, dearie.”
With a whisk of her gloved fingers, Shift put the orb into whirling motion, sending random rays of rainbow light into the air near it. Gaw approached with his glasses between his thumb and forefinger and moved them back and forth before the orb. The lenses caught the light, redirecting it to the curved bulkhead—which immediately began rotating, revealing the brightly lit chamber inside. At the same time, the darkened screens in the command center surrounding the Breen came to life.
“I didn’t even see a sensor,” Shift said.
“Yeah, we’re good. The real Harry Blackstone did a lot of tricks with lights and colors, so that’s what we went with,” Gaw said, looking down at his glasses in his palm. He shook his head sadly. “I never thought I would show that to outsiders.”
Thot Roje stepped over and quickly seized the pince-nez from the surprised Ferengi’s hand. He took the orb and handed it to a technician. “Analyze this and duplicate our own method.”
“Now this,” Shift said, holding out her hand to show the bookmark from the Annals volume.
Gaw’s head hung low. “You know I can get in trouble with the Circle for this.”
“You’re already in trouble,” she said. “And so is Cross.”
He shrugged. “I get it, I get it.” He took the ribbon from her, stepped inside the chamber, and fed it into a slot. Then he stepped back outside and gestured to the new data cores. “I told you we’d need more processing power. Those won’t be enough.”
“There’s a dozen more just like them upstairs in Cross’s penthouse. I got rid of the bed,” she said with some satisfaction. “All connected to the trunk ODN line.”
“Take a walk to the bridge, then,” Gaw said, settling in at his control station. “If this works, you’re about to see a show.”
The Breen did as he instructed, and they saw what he promised. Even Chot Dayn was convinced. “Contact Domo Pran,” Roje said. “Operation Proxy Warlord is a go.”
Nineteen
U.S.S. ENTERPRISE
ATOGRA SYSTEM, KLINGON SPACE
“The better question, Captain, is what I can do for you.”
That, Chen thought in the turbolift, was what she could’ve said back on the bridge when Picard asked her if there was anything he could do for her. All manner of responses had popped into her head since she’d left the bridge, ranging from the simple—“I’d like an assignment, sir”—to the inappropriate: “Why, yes, Captain. You can deal me back into the game, so I’m not wasting my time.”
Holding her tongue wasn’t in Chen’s nature. For a half-Vulcan she was frank and vocal. But there was a time and place to campaign for assignments, and it wasn’t on the bridge. Especially not when half the crew likewise felt left on the shelf.
Yet Chen believed she had a particular beef. Over the course of the Unsung crisis the contact specialist had gone from being a critical player to an extra. At
Gamaral, she had been at the center of the action, repelling the Unsung who had boarded Enterprise. She had taken an important role in the investigation, drawing on her knowledge of the House of Kruge and the members who had been killed during the may’qochvan commemoration. That had led the captain to keep her on the bridge during the desperate race to Thane in the previous month. She had faced down the Unsung in person and lived. That experience was important.
After Worf returned from Thane, however, Chen’s profiling work on the Unsung lost much of its value. There was no longer any doubt who they were, and what they were about; the commander had learned the exiles’ story in detail during his imprisonment. It fit with what Starfleet knew about the fate of Commander Kruge’s staff and with Ambassador Spock’s hundred-year-old report on his meeting with General Potok. That mystery had been solved.
The remaining unknown—locating the Unsung—was a question more amenable to La Forge’s technological skills. The rudimentary behavioral model Chen had built based on the Unsung’s previous actions was invalid with the death of their puppet master. Now the rump remains of the squadron could go anywhere or nowhere—if it even stuck together. Predicting their movements had become more a matter of projecting where they could go, rather than where they would go.
The lieutenant emerged on an upper deck and made for an observation lounge that seldom saw use: one of her favorite spots for unwinding while off duty. Seated in a high-backed chair, she glanced out at whatever comet Enterprise was trailing and took out her padd.
Catching up on news was of little comfort. There was the fruitless search since Ghora Janto and the worrisome reports of Klingon-on-Klingon violence inspired by fear of the Unsung. Reports of numerous incidents of hostility by Klingons toward Starfleet, including several outright lapses in peaceful cooperation involving people who supposedly answered to the Empire. Martok’s control, one of her favorite analysts suggested, lessened every time Lord Korgh spoke.
The Hall of Heroes Page 10