Forged in Fire

by Michael A. Martin

  “It appears your treatment has worked, Doctor,” Cutler said, nodding toward the ambassador.

  Chapel turned to see that Sarek’s eyes were fluttering open. A moment later he was regarding them with a reserved equanimity that didn’t quite conceal his underlying bewilderment.

  Not for the first time, she wondered about the contents of Vulcan dreams.

  • • •

  Sulu wasn’t quite certain how he had expected Sarek to react after being informed of everything that had transpired since the explosion on Korvat, but the quick briefing seemed to leave the ambassador surprisingly unruffled, even for a Vulcan.

  “Commander, I am eager to contact the Klingon High Council myself,” Sarek said. He was now seated in a chair in Chapel’s office, facing the low sofa on which Sulu sat and beside which Cutler paced like a caged panther. One of the nurses had fetched the diplomat a black robe from his quarters, affording him some additional comfort and dignity during whatever might remain of his rehabilitative period.

  “Do you think you can persuade them to allow us to pursue the bomber into Klingon territory?” Sulu asked, allowing a small spark of hope to kindle in his breast.

  Sarek looked at him as if he had just sprouted a pair of Andorian antennae. “That is where our priorities differ, Commander. My principal concern is to reinforce or reestablish the desire of both sides to continue with these peace talks. I plan to begin by assuring the High Council that although this attack has been a setback, it is only a temporary one, and must not endanger the larger goal of our respective governments.”

  Sulu nodded. “Ambassador Kamarag is still in critical condition.”

  “I do not need Kamarag to speak for me,” Sarek said. “The fact that we and the Klingons were attacked simultaneously — and that both sides have sustained losses — gives me firm ground upon which to stand with the High Council. As deplorable as this attack was, it can be used to promote détente.”

  “When life hands you plomeeks, you make plomeek soup,” Sulu said with a quiet sigh. Cutler stopped pacing near the door and scowled.

  Sarek raised a single interrogative eyebrow. “I beg your pardon, Commander?”

  “I was paraphrasing a human proverb about optimism,” Sulu said, suppressing a smile.

  “Ambassador, we can send your order to Ambassador Dax to return to Excelsior immediately,” Cutler said, shifting her weight from one leg to the other.

  Sarek waved his hand almost dismissively. “First, Commander, I doubt that any of the three Klingon captains would allow anything to dissuade them from their current course of action, short of losing their quarry’s trail entirely. They certainly would not turn one of their vessels around merely to return Dax to us. Secondly, despite his breach of protocol and orders, I am content to defer to Dax’s experience. He possesses wisdom and influence beyond what his years might imply.”

  Sulu was surprised to hear that. According to his diplomatic dossier, Curzon Dax wasn’t exactly green, but he certainly hadn’t yet put in the years required to rack up a level of experience that might impress someone as accomplished as Sarek.

  He wondered fleetingly whether the injuries the Vulcan had sustained during the Korvat attack had impaired his judgment on some subtle, subclinical level that no doctor could quantify.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Early 2290 (the Year of Kahless 915,

  late in the month of Doqath)

  Mempa II

  Moving with care to avoid brushing against the smoldering ruin of the doorjamb, Dr. Nej passed through the blast-charred threshold and entered the laboratory. He shuddered involuntarily when he saw what lay within: the burned bodies of five slight, long-limbed humanoids, scattered across the floor. He gathered from their surroundings — which were replete with antiseptic metal work surfaces that supported an array of small computers, microscopes, scanning devices, and cell-culturing jars — that the dead creatures had been researchers, people engaged in much the same work that took up the targ’s share of Nej’s own time.

  He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the still, disruptor-burned forms sprawled on the floor, even as a trio of Qagh’s burly raiders worked with methodical urgency to pack every tangible trace of the dead men’s labors into antigrav-equipped shipping canisters.

  Nej realized too late that Qagh’s feverish but alert eyes were upon him.

  “It’s only death, Nej,” the albino Klingon said, his words tinged with disdain. “I thought by now the two of you would have become much better acquainted.”

  The doctor’s impulse was to point out that he, Nej, had probably forgotten more about death than Qagh had ever learned; his stint as a battlefield medic for the Klingon Defense Force alone had put him on a first-name basis with death. Of course, he couldn’t deny that his direct participation in the dealing of death was a rather more recent development; it followed the time of his discommendation from legitimate Imperial service two decades earlier, which had been a consequence of his lamentable failure to duplicate a one-off artificially designed pest-eating predator known as a glo’meH before the prototype organism’s untimely death. His discommendation had forced him into an underground existence, giving him little choice other than to place his scientific expertise in the service of the highest bidder.

  The fact that the current highest bidder had turned out to be the weakling whelp of the late dishonored warrior Ngoj stood as vivid proof that the universe was a far smaller place than Nej had previously imagined.

  Rather than verbalize any of this, he decided to remain focused on matters of a more practical nature.

  “Killing them all may have been a mistake, Qagh,” he said, keenly aware of the irony behind his last utterance even as it left his lips; “mistake,” after all, came from the very same Klingon word root that underlay the albino’s name, an oddity that long ago led Nej to the conclusion that Qagh’s earliest caretakers must have possessed considerable gifts of perspicacity.

  Except, as Nej surmised from many years of underworld rumor, they had evidently lacked sufficient perceptivity to prevent their albino foundling from engineering their deaths and commandeering their various criminal enterprises.

  “They left us little choice,” said Qagh, who was watching his men as they continued gathering and packing up data-pads and beakers for later scrutiny aboard the Hegh’TlhoS. “They were trying to destroy their work rather than surrender it to us.”

  Nej nodded. “I suppose jeghpu’wI’ such as these have few options available to them other than surrender or self-destruction.” Like many sentient races native to this sector and those immediately adjacent to it, the Mempans were essentially weaklings; they had been conquered subjects of the Klingon Empire for as long as anyone could remember. The sight of an incoming raiding party consisting mostly of Klingons, HemQuch or otherwise, must have set them into a fight-or-flight panic.

  Balancing out the Mempans’ obvious deficits as warriors, however, was a well-earned reputation for expertise in genetic engineering, endeavors with which the Empire had never seen fit to interfere unduly so long as the Mempan Elders deployed no bioweapons and delivered tribute to the Empire in sufficient quantity and frequency to satisfy the local military governor.

  Today’s raid was far from the first time that Qagh and his men had availed themselves of the Mempans’ bioscience knowledge, which occupied a broad pallet ranging from enhancing various humanoid traits to increasing crop yields. During recent years, Mempan genetic research had advanced with sufficient rapidity that repeated visits were warranted — so long as Qagh’s raids did not come regularly enough to attract the unwelcome attention of the Klingon military, which arguably loved piracy even less than did the peace-obsessed weaklings of the Federation.

  “Let us hope, then, that these dead jeghpu’wI’ left sufficiently clear notes to allow us to reconstruct their work,” Nej added as he studied the pale, perspiration-slicked latitudinal striations on Qagh’s forehead; Qagh had not sufficiently exerted himself during the raidin
g party’s brief orgy of killing, nor was the room warm enough, to have caused him to break into a sweat. And then there was the none-too-subtle tremor in the albino’s hand, which Nej was certain he would have spotted even had he not been a trained physician.

  He couldn’t help but wonder just how close to Gre’thor’s black gates Qagh’s perpetually wandering and unwinding DNA had brought him this time. His health was doubtless as close to the edge as it had ever been, or perhaps closer; otherwise, he never would have undertaken a raid such as this one so soon after the attack on Korvat, which had surely placed the Klingon military, and possibly Starfleet, on high alert.

  “I fail to see how your standing there staring at me will help us discover any such information,” the albino said, clearly annoyed, his eyes aglow with unnatural inner fires that gave off no warmth that Nej could perceive.

  Nej gestured toward one of the microcomputers that had yet to be packed up by Qagh’s musclemen. “I will sort through all the data in detail as soon as these devices are linked to my biocomp back aboard the Hegh’TlhoS— giving priority, of course, to stabilizing locus Q56 of your fourteenth chromosome.”

  Qagh nodded, his feverish eyes flashing like twin pulsars as he moved. The albino suddenly froze as his gaze locked onto something located in the space somewhere beyond Nej’s shoulder.

  “Isomiotic hypodermics,” Nej thought he heard the albino say.

  “Excuse me?” Nej said, put off by Qagh’s apparent non sequitur.

  The albino brushed past him, nearly knocking him over as he passed toward one of the metal work surfaces, from whose gleaming top a pair of the raiders were dumping a box of what appeared to be medical supplies into one of their antigrav containers.

  The raiders stood aside to allow Qagh to reach into the container, from which he retrieved a slender metallic cylinder about as long as a man’s index finger.

  “Isomiotic hypos,” he said again, confirming that Nej had indeed heard him right the first time.

  Nej approached the albino so he could get a better look at the object in his hand, as well as the rest of the contents of the open antigrav container.

  “These are isomiotic hypos, all right,” Nej said. He understood that isomiotic hypos could be useful in treating certain cancers and neural disorders, and could cause death if applied in large doses. “But I fail to see how such things will be of any use in stabilizing your genome.”

  Qagh looked at him as though his forehead ridges had just sprouted a face of their own.

  “Of course they can’t help me repair my DNA,” he said. “But they can be weaponized, with the appropriate modifications. There’s no need to fight only defensively against those who must be pursuing me even now, after the Korvat affair. After all, they’ll surely be ready for our plasma flares and disruptors at our next encounter.”

  Putting aside the issue of Qagh’s deteriorating condition, Nej gave the matter of the isomiotic hypos some thought. The albino, whom he had to admit was a rather accomplished biochemist in his own right, was indeed onto something here; the hypos actually could be used as the basis of a significantly destructive bioweapon, one that had farther-reaching implications than fending off those who would avenge Korvat.

  How fitting it would be to unleash such a thing against the High Council itself, he thought. After all, Nej was bitterly aware that he owed his discommendation to the inflexibility of both future chancellor Sturka and a majority on the Council. These were the same individuals, in fact, who had brought the House of Ngoj down decades earlier, treating him like a lowly, smooth-headed QuchHa’ in the process.

  Nej allowed a predatory smile to spread slowly across his face. It will be easier to help you save your life yet again, Qagh, if we both have something compelling to live for.

  And what could be more compelling than the prospect of serving an ice-cold helping of revenge onto the plates of one’s enemies?

  • • •

  Once he felt satisfied that repairs to the freebooter Hegh’TlhoS were well under way — a process that would be greatly accelerated by some of the matériel his raiding party was still carrying out of the Mempa II lab complex and into the holds of the temporarily grounded freighter — Qagh entered his vessel’s cramped infirmary to take a gene alteration treatment that he and Nej had developed in haste from some of the Mempan lab’s biomaterials. As he lay supine on the narrow examination table after injecting himself, feeling weightless and afloat on a chemical and radiological cloud despite the table’s unyielding hardness, Qagh dozed —

  —and dreamed he was on another raid, one not unlike the mission of plunder he had just completed on Mempa II. But unlike that world, which was dominated by deserts, grasslands, and glacial terrain, vast swaths of this planet consisted of wild, untrammeled jungle, and yielded a profusion of more shades of green than he had ever imagined possible. The Klingons called this untamed border-region planet Veqlargh, after one of the evil spirits from the myths of ancient Qo’noS. But the Earthers, who had effectively laid claim to this remote world along with its incalculably vast array of biological wealth, had their own name for the place:

  Ganjitsu.

  It was an uncontrolled and chaotic planet, overgrown and all but ungovernable, a cosmic analog to his own mutated, constantly drifting DNA. Perhaps that was why the verdant border world terrified him still, having served as the setting for more nightmares than he could count over the past four decades.

  Just as on Mempa II, Qagh’s dream-self once again stood in a spotless, well-equipped bioscience laboratory. But unlike the Mempan facility, this place was illuminated only dimly, populated by shadows behind which hid malevolent ghosts, jatyIn intent on thwarting him, determined to force him and his men to withdraw in frightened haste to the relative safety of their landing craft.

  Just as he had done four decades earlier, he returned to his shuttle, hurriedly piloting it back into orbit about the green world. His heart pounding nearly loudly enough to cause the hull to vibrate in sympathy, he rained death onto the lab from two hundred qelI’qams skyward in order to regain some small measure of calm.

  He watched through the forward window as his disruptor fire reduced the entire compound to atoms — along with the bioscience secrets it had so stubbornly refused to disgorge.

  He awakened still feeling the residue of the rage and satisfaction he’d originally experienced on that long-ago day, comforted at least a little by the knowledge that no one else could use whatever cure had eluded him then.

  He sat up on the biobed, feeling stronger than he had in weeks, secure in the knowledge that he would continue to survive, just as he always had, no matter what cruel setbacks fate might deal him along the way.

  Nej, who must have entered the room while he had been dozing, stepped toward him and raised an interrogative eyebrow along with the marked second hypo that Qagh had already prepared in advance. In response to Qagh’s affirmative nod, the doctor injected the hypo’s contents into the albino’s neck. The shot stung slightly, but made him feel even stronger still.

  “How long do you think the results of this round of treatments will last?” Qagh said, rubbing his neck.

  Nej shrugged as he set the hypospray down on a nearby table. “Perhaps weeks. Or months. Or perhaps only days. But we’ve bought you enough time, I think, to acquire still other new treatments. Again.”

  Qagh nodded. “And time enough, I trust, to acquire a few other things as well.”

  “What do you mean?” Nej asked.

  Qagh considered the House that had abandoned him all those long decades ago, and whose kinsmen were even now doubtless trying to follow his trail because of the Korvat affair.

  He considered how satisfying it would be to do more than simply elude the members of that House.

  He pondered how the isomiotic hypos he had found in the Mempan lab might help him attain that satisfaction, once he’d assembled a few other critically necessary components to complement them. It made sense. After all, why should he be forc
ed to confine his offensive capabilities to the ability to kill only a few people at a time — especially at a time when he might need to gain serious leverage over one of the oldest Houses on Qo’noS?

  “I mean,” he said at length, “that you are going to do more than simply help me scrounge yet another few additional weeks or months of life, Nej.

  “You are also going to help me engineer and assemble a rather formidable weapon.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Early 2290 (the Year of Kahless 915,

  late in the month of Doqath)

  I.K.S. Klothos

  “What do you mean you cannot follow the trail?”

  Kor’s voice rose to a roar nearly loud enough to be heard in the vacuum of space, making Dax glad he was seated at a station in the aft portion of the Klothos’s bridge.

  “Our sensors no longer reveal any trace of the target vessel’s warp trail,” said the Klingon helmsman, his tone surly but not mutinous.

  “Then recalibrate them!” Kor ordered. He glowered as he turned, momentarily catching Dax and several assorted Klingon bridge officers in his withering glare before seating himself in the center-mounted command chair.

  “Incoming hail, Captain,” the communications officer shouted.

  A moment later, the equally perturbed visage of Kang filled the forward viewscreen. “Tell me that your ship hasn’t lost the trail as well,” Kang growled.

  “Ghuy’cha’ qI’yaH qovpatlh!” Kor said, rendering what Dax could only interpret as an artfully wrought stream of Klingon profanity. “I was hoping at least that your luck would prove better than mine.”

  “No. And Koloth has just informed me that he is faring no better.”

  Dax moved over to one of the tactical stations that served double duty as a science station, even though it bore little resemblance to any Starfleet console he had ever seen. The buxom Klingon woman who sat there — he thought her name was Ma’kella — stared up at him as though he had just pulled his symbiont out of his abdomen.