It delighted Korgh how many points of that story were actually true; he had been the intended heir, and he had hidden his identity in order to work for the House of Kruge. But just as amusing was the expression on his son’s face. Lorath looked as if he’d just seen a targ swallow a saber bear whole.
“Well, my son,” he said as he approached, “I did tell you to be prepared.”
Seeing how many others were gawking at their reunion, Lorath put his hands on Korgh and guided his father clear of the crowd. The general’s escorts formed a wall of muscle, allowing the two to avoid further questioners.
The pair didn’t stop moving until they passed through a side exit into an alley. Lorath stepped back from Korgh and spoke. “I don’t understand any of this, Father.” The general, honored many times for bravery, sounded truly shaken. “The story you told—it’s incredible.”
“The truth is sometimes incredible.” Korgh looked left and right. Night was falling on Qo’noS; apart from a worker lighting a street brazier far away, they were alone. He touched his son’s shoulder. “You are Lorath, son of Korgh. And Korgh is son of Torav—but also Kruge. You are, after me, heir to the House of Kruge—and your son, after you. And so it will remain, as long as we can protect the title with blood and blade.”
Lorath considered Korgh’s words. His stunned expression gave way to a frown. “Did my mother know?”
“The knowledge would not have done her any good. I didn’t want to burden her.” Korgh did not add that there were quite a lot of things he had never told her. His late wife’s social connections had gotten him his entre to the House of Kruge fifty years ago. While lovely and a good mother, Kaas had no mind for intrigue. One couldn’t have everything.
“Why did you never tell us?”
“The same reason. The information would have been worthless. You and your brothers would only have known the shame of an old man who sat by while others lived off what was rightfully his. You would never have respected me, Lorath. And rightfully so.”
“We would have helped you reclaim what was taken—if you had asked us!”
“There were too many heirs with claims,” Korgh said. Lorath at his side, he started strolling toward the flickering light at the end of the alley. “Thirteen claimants and their kin—all those who attended the ceremony on Gamaral. The number was even larger years ago. Nothing we could have tried would have worked.” He shook his head. “No, my son, you would have gone to an early death—and your brothers with you. What would that have accomplished?”
Lorath shook his fist. “I would have died with my real name—your real name.”
“Nonsense. They would have made us all disappear from history, just as they did Kruge’s officers a century ago. Instead, you are a general—and your son is soon to be a starship captain.”
“Bredak? He does not yet have a command.”
“He will, as soon as I can arrange for it. I have the chance to accomplish many things now that should have been done long before.”
“My son will surely appreciate it.” Lorath laughed. “Father, I hope I’m as busy as you when I’m a hundred twenty.”
“One simply needs goals.”
With Lorath in better spirits, they continued walking. Soon they found themselves before the door of the secluded and anonymous-looking suite Korgh kept near the Great Hall. Owned by the House of Kruge, it was the place he stayed when, as Gin’tak Galdor, he had business in the capital. His face lit by the torch burning in the lane, Lorath looked at his father and grinned. “Amazing, that hologram of you and Kruge. I’ve never seen you at that age. You were younger than my son is now.”
Korgh returned the smile. “I’m sorry he wasn’t here to see this.” He turned and unlocked the door. “But I will see him when he takes command. We have a bird-of-prey, Jarin, that is almost ready to launch; it will be his. You should come to see him off.”
“I would, Father. But with all the madness going on—”
Lorath went silent. Still on his doorstep, Korgh looked back at him. “What?”
Standing in the street, the younger Klingon appeared worried anew. “This thing that happened on Gamaral—the attacks by the assassins. If the High Council accepts your claim to control the house, some . . .”
“Some what?”
Lorath spit it out. “Some will ask questions. But for Kersh—”
“Who has no chance.”
“—every rival of yours died. You may be accused.”
“Let them try. It’s possible you may even be removed from the investigation. I don’t care. Anyone who looks into the matter will find as you have found. The Federation was incompetent, and someone took advantage. Someone with a grudge.”
“But who?”
“I have a theory,” Korgh said. “But I will save that for later.” As soon as the High Council returns to session, he thought. “What’s important is that I was in that battle, doing my job. Trying to protect two of my charges, at risk to my own life.”
“It was brave,” Lorath said. “But to come forward now, when all is in disarray. It could seem opportunistic.”
“Or heroic. I am doing what I have the right to do—at a time when honor calls me to do it.” He looked back at the Great Hall, its exterior lights now all lit. “You know, I once studied human literature, to get a better sense of why Kruge so feared the Federation. There is a human play—a kind of opera without music—where a claimant walks in on a scene where all the royals have killed one another. Power simply lands at his feet—and he picks it up. There is no dishonor in that.”
“Agreed,” Lorath said, seemingly relieved. He backed up into the street. “I must check on the investigation. No one will bother you here. You should be able to rest.”
“You must get some too,” Korgh said from the doorway.
“What, is there another surprise coming?” Lorath laughed. “I can’t see how you would top the last one.”
“Just watch—and be ready. Today I have taken but the first step.”
The door sealed shut behind him, and Korgh stepped into the darkened room. A sense of nIb’poH struck—what the humans called “déjà vu”—and he knew in an instant he was not alone.
“Come on out, Odrok,” he said. “I can smell the drink on your breath from here.”
Forty
Odrok had always seemed so much older to Korgh. When he had encountered her following the Battle of Gamaral, she had been thirty to his twenty. Now, a century later, that decade was almost meaningless: both were in their golden years. And yet he had taken care of himself. She . . . had not.
“You should not have come here,” he said, watching her stagger from his pantry. “It’s too public.”
“Who will recognize me?” The white-haired woman held a half-full bottle of bloodwine in one withered hand—and an empty one in the other. “Who remembers who Odrok even was?”
“What are you babbling about?”
“I mean I have spent my whole life in one guise or another—and much of it running your errands.” Hunched over, Odrok staggered past him and deposited herself in one of his chairs.
“How long have you been drinking?”
“Only while you were before the High Council. We’ve waited so long for this moment, Korgh—I was afraid something would go wrong.”
Korgh highly doubted she had limited her drinking. He had given Odrok her first taste of bloodwine, a century earlier when they had sealed their pact in another darkened room; it had been one of his few mistakes. At a hundred thirty, Odrok remained an almost preternaturally talented engineer, but she had been forced to wait too many years between her secret assignments for him. Idleness had mixed with despair to give her a monstrous thirst.
But her work had helped him achieve this moment. Her work—and that of another. “There was never anything to worry about. The holorecording of my ‘adoption’ provi
ded the perfect moment.”
“Our partner did an amazing job,” Odrok said, slurring her words. “I thought I knew holography—but I’ve never seen work like that. A perfect emulation of a century-old recording—and such amazing modeling work on you and Commander Kruge!” She began to choke up. “Just as he was in those days. I still miss him.”
“I’m sure.” He’d always sensed there was something more to her Kruge obsession, but he had never bothered to plumb it. He walked up to her and plucked both bottles from her hands.
“Martok’s people will have no option but to accept it as real,” she said.
“Politicians do what they want. I have made it hard for them to reject it.” He returned to his pantry and sealed the door.
“I overheard you talking to her son,” she called out.
“My son. And my wife’s.”
“Your dead wife.” Odrok had always thought of Kaas as little more than a spare part: essential to Korgh’s plans, but of no sentimental value. “You still have not trusted Lorath with the truth about what you have done.”
Korgh looked into the shadows of the room. Lorath was so damned earnest, he wondered if he would ever be able to tell him everything. Now was not the time. “Get sober. I need you to use the communication link with our partner on Thane.”
Odrok wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “The channel to the Klach D’Kel Brakt should work. I retested the satellite repeaters we deployed weeks ago—back when I was there to set the demolition charges.” She shook her head. “I am so sick of that damned nebula.”
“We’re about to be done with it.” Odrok had logged an almost unimaginable number of light-years in his service. Where he needed her now was a few kilometers away—in her Qo’noS apartment, where she’d hidden the uplink device. She had assured him there was no way the calls it made could be intercepted, but he still didn’t feel comfortable having the thing in his possession.
Unsteadily, she rose. “What did you want me to call about? I got a status report earlier. Everyone’s still returning from Gamaral. They all departed in different directions—and some had to take extreme roundabout routes to evade detection. But Valandris’s team has returned with Kahless.”
“Excellent. Once all the vessels have returned, we can start the countdown.” He stepped to the window, where he peeked outside to make sure no one would see her leave. “And while you’re at it, find out why Worf is there. That was never the plan.”
Odrok staggered toward the door, which she then used to support herself. Straightening, she looked back at him. “This is really it, isn’t it? All these years, all our work. Is it truly about to happen?”
“It will—as long as everyone does what they’re told. That includes you,” he said, opening the door. He did not see her out.
U.S.S. ENTERPRISE-E
HYRALAN SECTOR
“ ‘I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,’ ” Picard recited, “ ‘which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.’ ”
Speaking from the Federation Consulate on Qo’noS, Riker laughed. “I had a feeling the Galdor news would jar loose some Shakespeare.” He and Ambassador Rozhenko had hailed the Enterprise not long after the end of one of the more unusual Klingon High Council meetings ever. “Maybe you can tell us if the Bard ever wrote anything about salvaging interstellar treaty conferences.”
“Perhaps he would have,” Picard said, forcing a wan smile from behind his ready room desk. It was hard to find too much levity, now that he’d heard what Galdor—or rather, Korgh—had told the council. “There was a difference, you know. Fortinbras may have taken control after all the heirs had died, but he never pretended to be someone he wasn’t to his own people. Or his people’s loyal allies.” He shook his head.
On-screen, Riker saw Alexander’s puzzled expression and apparently decided they’d better move on from Hamlet. He held up a padd. “The ambassador’s been looking into the Defense Force records. There was a Korgh who served under Kruge.”
“The right age?”
“Seems so. His father sacrificed himself to save Kruge. That part of the story seems credible.”
“Did this Korgh vanish when Galdor appeared?”
Alexander spoke up. “The empire doesn’t track people’s movements. It was so long ago—and he wasn’t anyone important.”
Picard thought back on Galdor’s story, now rivaling the Gamaral Massacre and Kahless’s abduction as the biggest news in the Klingon Empire. “In a strange way, it makes sense. Galdor appeared to me to be a classic caretaker. I just didn’t imagine he was preserving the house for himself.”
“Maybe he wasn’t,” Alexander said. “His son General Lorath was across the aisle from me in the council chamber. He seemed as stunned as we were. And the gin’tak seemed earnest about never having expected a day like today.”
“The man I met made it his business to expect everything. I don’t know that he knew this was coming, but he certainly had a plan in case it did.” Picard contemplated for a moment. “Lieutenant Chen worked up a profile on him before we visited Ketorix. I’ll have her revise it, to see if anything unusual sticks out.”
“We’re on it here too,” Riker said. “And thanks for the update on the Orions. I think we know how the assassins got through the cordon. Maybe if we can figure out who they are, that’ll tell us where they went. Riker out.”
The admiral was surely correct, Picard thought—but looking at the array of new messages, it seemed well-nigh impossible to fit the pieces together. He had reports on everything, but nothing definite. The origin of the disruptor one of the assassins had dropped on Gamaral was a complicated path that could have led to any of a dozen gunrunners. The materials study of the gear the assassins wore—based on Enterprise’s sensors and forensic evidence from the planet—pointed again to multiple sources. The obscuring properties of the assassins’ armor seemed to have been inspired by similar Breen technology, although it was harder to say more than that.
Analyses of Typhon Pact member reactions to the massacre had provided even less light. The Kinshaya were celebratory, no surprise. The other parties were concerned about the H’atorian Conference, and how it would affect their potential ability to traverse the House of Kruge’s territory.
Perhaps the strangest avenue in the whole investigation was being explored by his chief engineer—and reading a just-arrived report, Picard’s eyes narrowed. La Forge had found something. But what could it possibly mean?
Picard stepped out onto the bridge. “Set a new heading, Lieutenant Faur. We’re going back to Gamaral.”
Forty-one
UNSUNG COMPOUND
THANE
The highest point in the camp, the hill had served for decades as the community’s burial mound. Klingons elsewhere thought little about how they disposed of bodies; once the spirits departed, there was no need to treat empty shells with any reverence. The practice on Thane was different. Corpses invited disease, and life on Thane was dangerous enough already. Further, the early settlers suspected that a dishonored soul bound for Gre’thor might leave behind remains more odious than most.
The mound had been built with the dead shoved into unmarked holes and quickly forgotten. Valandris had never known anyone to willingly visit the Hill of the Dead—until the Fallen Lord’s spacecraft had simply appeared there one day, a little over a year before.
There was no magic to it, she was certain; Potok had insisted that the later-generation exiles remain educated about science and technology. They knew what cloaking devices and transporters were, even if they had never encountered any. But once he’d convinced the residents of Omegoq of his identity, the Fallen Lord took the Hill of the Dead as his home, erecting a simple three-room hut there. Since then, it had been their temple. Many times she and her fellow residents had gathered on its slopes, hearing him tell of the greatness that could be theirs. He had turned them from
the galaxy’s flotsam into the Unsung. And he would do more for them yet.
Even being one of the Fallen Lord’s favorites, Valandris had to admit it was unnerving to be called there alone. She walked the worn path up to the front steps of the hut and prepared to strike the small gong hanging next to the door.
The door opened before she could act, and the smell of burning incense wafted out. A tiny Klingon woman appeared, holding a small burner. Wearing an ocean blue gown with a hood that completely covered her hair, the willowy female only came up to Valandris’s shoulders. But when her deep golden eyes looked out from beneath the cowl and locked on the warrior, the intensity of her gaze nearly caused Valandris to take a step back.
“The mighty Valandris,” the woman said, her voice somewhere between a whisper and a chant. “Soarer of the skies, death in the night. You have returned to us.”
“Yes, honored N’Keera.” Valandris bowed her head. “All praise to your lord.”
“He is your lord too. He will be lord of all.” As she spoke the words over the burner, her breath caused the escaping smoke to balloon and billow.
“And we will rise with him.”
Since Valandris had known her, N’Keera had always spoken in mantras and riddles. She was thought by many to be the Fallen Lord’s spouse; she never seemed to leave the door to his home. But the more superstitious said she was something else: a shaman of some kind, whose powers kept their lord young. It was hard to tell how old N’Keera was. Some days, she looked twenty; others, she appeared closer to her lord’s age—or older, if that was possible.
It didn’t matter: it was all part of her mystique. N’Keera had simply appeared one day, stepping out from the wooden hut; other minions of the Fallen Lord had come and gone the same way. Valandris and her companions were sophisticated enough to figure they were probably transporting in and out of the hut from vessels in orbit, although she had never noticed any ships during her recent trips offworld. However, there was no denying the net effect on the locals.
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