Forged in Fire

by Michael A. Martin

  Sulu led the others out of the turbolift, stepped past the rear duty consoles, and finally approached the raised command chair located almost in the precise center of the bridge.

  “Captain on the bridge,” Cutler announced in a loud, no-nonsense tone that made everyone present snap instantly to attention. Both Lieutenant Lojur, the Halkan navigator, and Ensign Akaar, the towering Capellan relief helmsman and security officer, had risen respectfully beside their centrally located consoles.

  They looked at Sulu expectantly, as did the half-dozen or so other bridge personnel who had briefly paused in their various tasks before their blinking, humming duty stations.

  “As you were, everybody,” Sulu said, and the bridge staff turned its collective attention back to work.

  They’re a good crew, he thought. Here’s hoping I’m worthy of them.

  He heard the portside turbolift hiss open, and turned to see a beaming Christine Chapel step onto the bridge.

  “Chris!” he said, delighted to see another Enterprise alumnus on such an auspicious occasion. “I’m glad to see you’re still aboard.” If Dr. Klass decided to retire soon — and she’d been making noises about doing just that, particularly lately — he hoped very much that Chapel would consider signing on to replace her as Excelsior’s CMO.

  “I wanted to make sure that Doctor Klass was completely back on her feet before I went back to the Diplomatic Corps,” she said as she gathered him up in a to-hell-with-bridge-decorum bear hug. “And I got up here as soon as Chief Renyck called me with the good news. Congratulations on your promotion . . .Captain Sulu.”

  Captain, Sulu thought as Christine released him from the embrace. He looked down at the command chair beside him and ran his hand along one of its arms. I think I like the sound of that.

  Then he sat in the chair, just as he had done many times before in Captain Styles’s absence. But this simple action now took on much greater significance. At long last, after so many years of hard work, he actually held the rank of captain while in command of Starfleet’s most advanced ship of the line. And he wasn’t simply keeping the chair warm for someone else.

  The combined sense of triumph and vindication tasted sweet indeed. Excelsior was his ship now. And his responsibility.

  He felt at once overawed and exhilarated, as well as unexpectedly humbled; it was impossible for him to forget, after all, that he owed his captaincy to the chaotic vicissitudes of violence and death as much as he owed it to the lifetime’s worth of effort he had expended ever since that horrible day on Ganjitsu.

  He realized now that in some terrible, twisted way, he also owed a debt to the albino, though certainly not in the way that Kang, Koloth, or Kor would understand such things. The pirate had forever altered the trajectory of Sulu’s life forty years ago.

  Then, only three weeks ago, Qagh had rather cataclysmically emptied Excelsior’s center seat, giving Sulu no choice other than to take it.

  “He’s still out there somewhere,” Sulu said, frowning into the image of the infinitude of stars that lay beyond the blue, half-shadowed Earth that Excelsior orbited.

  “Excuse me, Captain?” Cutler said.

  “The albino, Commander. He’s not the kind of loose thread I like to leave hanging.”

  A knowing look crossed Cutler’s face as she folded her arms before her. “Something tells me the Klingons will pick up the stitch on that particular loose thread, sooner or later. If there’s one thing they excel at, it’s the art of the karmic follow-through.”

  “Good point,” Sulu said, nodding as he recalled the renowned Klingon preference for serving up revenge as a cold entrée. “So what’s next on our agenda, Commander?”

  “Captain’s discretion,” Cutler said with a shrug. “There was no telling in advance how long Excelsior would have to stay in Earth orbit, so I cleared our schedule. And our three-year exploration mission in the Reydovan sector isn’t due to begin until stardate 9090.1.”

  “So we have nearly two whole weeks to get Excelsior shipshape,” Rand said in amusement. “Chief Henry and the rest of the engineering crew are liable to get soft with so much extra time on their hands.”

  “Trust me,” Cutler said around a perfectly evil grin. “I’ll find stuff for them to do.”

  Two weeks, Sulu thought as he stroked his chin thoughtfully. Two whole weeks to take Excelsior wherever I want.

  There wouldn’t be a lot of time to pursue vendettas. And that realization came to Sulu with an unexpected sense of relief, since quests for revenge weren’t exactly enshrined in Starfleet’s charter.

  “Mister Lojur, lay in a course for the drydock and shore leave facilities at Xarantine,” Sulu said, facing forward. “Warp eight, Mister Lojur.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Lojur, releasing one of his rare smiles, since Xarantine was without doubt a world on which even a troubled member of an ascetic, pacifistic race could find no end of peaceful entertainments.

  “Ready to engage helm, sir,” Leonard James Akaar said in a voice about half an octave deeper than Sulu’s, his demeanor all business; Sulu wasn’t sure the giant Capellan even knew how to smile.

  “Very good,” he said, turning his chair back toward starboard so that he faced Cutler again. “Chief Henry can evaluate and fine-tune our repair and maintenance needs along the way.”

  Cutler nodded, her enthusiasm almost palpable as she immediately began moving toward the nearest turbolift. “I’ll see to it, Captain.”

  His eyes once again riveted to the main viewer, Sulu said, “Gentlemen . . . let’s hit the road.”

  After a brief exchange of quizzical looks in response to their captain’s peculiar human idiom, the navigator and helmsman both set about their tasks with enviable efficiency. Within moments, the sapphire globe of Sulu’s birthworld had fallen away into the interstellar darkness.

  The faint vibrations beneath his boots told him more eloquently than any console readout that Excelsior had just gone to warp.

  Don’t worry, Lawrence, he thought, silently looking around the mighty starship’s comfortingly busy bridge. As long as I’m in charge here, I promise to take very, very good care of her.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Stardate 9592.2 (2293)

  San Francisco

  With her new deep-space assignment officially starting at 0600 the next morning, Ensign Demora Sulu knew she should have been happy. Literally over-the-moon happy, in fact, and filled to overflowing with anticipation for the adventure to come.

  Instead, she felt the weight of the cosmos itself settling onto her shoulders as she contemplated the depths of her glass of chardonnay.

  “To new frontiers,” Commander Pavel Chekov said over his raised glass of Stolichnaya. “And new ships named Enterprise.”

  “May there always be a Sulu at the helm,” added Captain Montgomery Scott, who held aloft a clear, sloshing tankard that contained something that was green, toxic-looking, and mercifully unidentified.

  “Speech!” said fair-haired Ensign Michael Thomas Paris, who grinned over a frothy stein of blue Andorian ale, one of the signature specialties of the Quantum Café, and a favorite of many of the establishment’s Starfleet habitués.

  Commander Chekov was the first to show any sign of noticing that something wasn’t quite right. “What’s wrong, Demora?” he said as he set his drink down on the table and leaned forward, an expression of concern etched across his friendly, open face.

  She sighed and shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said, barely succeeding in stopping herself from adding “Uncle Pavel.” Because both Chekov and Scott numbered among her father’s dearest and oldest friends, she really did consider both of them family. But she didn’t want to precipitate the barrage of needling that her fellow recent Starfleet Academy graduate, Ensign Paris, would surely unleash later if she were to be too familiar with a pair of Starfleet’s most distinguished officers.

  “Could have fooled me,” Chekov said, his head tipped in curiosity.

  Scott, however, wasn�
�t going to allow her a graceful retreat. “Come now, Lassie. I may have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night,” he said, grinning conspiratorially under his gray “cookie duster” mustache. “Something’s troublin’ you. Now what could be weighing down your soul the night before you’re to ship out on Starfleet’s new Excelsior-class flagship?”

  Demora raised her glass and downed the remainder of its contents as if to make a show of honoring the toasts her two “uncles” had just made. Then she motioned with the empty glass toward one of the waiters to signal that she needed a refill, preferably at transwarp speed.

  She turned her gaze wryly on her old “Uncle Monty,” Captain Scott. “I thought you didn’t much care for the Excelsior-class design, sir.”

  He chuckled. “Aye, I’ll admit to a bias toward the tried and true, but that’s only because I’m an old-timer. But a star-hopping whippersnapper like you ought to be thrilled to be going out to explore the galaxy — even if you’re forced to do it in that oversized, overengineered bucket o’ bolts.”

  The waiter approached Demora, bottle in hand, and filled her glass before withdrawing gracefully to an adjacent table where a trio of young Starfleet officers was already enthusiastically sharing a meal. For an evening immediately before a major starship departure, the Café seemed surprisingly empty, currently serving a mixed Starfleet and civilian clientele of only a dozen or so people.

  “It’ll be an honor and a privilege to be part of the new Enterprise’s crew,” Demora said, staring into the depths of her newly filled glass. Then she fixed her gaze back upon Chekov before turning slightly to face Scott. “And I hope you’ll both be aboard tomorrow for our big sendoff. I mean, we still have some settling in to do for a few days until we actually leave the system next Tuesday, but the official christening and all the other big media events are all scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there,” the engineer said with a broad smile. “With bells on.”

  “And I wouldn’t miss it for the world either,” Chekov added. “Captain Kirk promises he’ll be there as well.”

  “If he doesn’t break his neck with that orbital skydiving vice of his in the meantime,” Scott said.

  Chekov chuckled. “You know the captain. He’s indestructible.”

  “What about the rest of the old crew?” Scott asked, still addressing Chekov.

  “Doctor McCoy says he’s too busy growing back his beard, taking crash courses in Klingon physiology, and starting up his new civilian practice to attend the ceremonies. But he did tell me he’d try to catch the next one.”

  “That certainly sounds like how Doctor McCoy would handle retirement. I wonder if it’ll take this time,” Scott said with a chuckle. That elicited a smile from Demora, who felt certain that the engineer would spend at least as many of his own retirement years building and tinkering as McCoy would practicing medicine and doing research.

  “I got a message from Captain Spock this morning, too,” Chekov said. “He won’t be able to attend either. He’s on Earth, though, for a meeting with the new diplomatic representative from Triskelion.”

  “Aye, I heard about that as well,” said Scott. “The Triske-lions sent Shahna herself. I saw her picture in the Federation News Service feed this morning, and she looks every inch the diplomat now. I almost didn’t recognize her without the steel swimsuit and all the cutlery.”

  Although Demora had read extensively about the exploits of the Enterprise crew, she could only wonder about that one.

  “Any word from Excelsior?” asked Ensign Paris.

  Though Demora answered quietly, she was unable to keep the acid entirely out of her voice. “Do you mean before or after she brought the Triskelion envoy to Earth for that meeting with Captain Spock?”

  Paris, who had acquired the ironic nickname “Iron Mike” during his Academy years because of his slight, willowy frame, winced noticeably at her rejoinder. Demora could see that the twenty-two-year-old ensign realized an instant too late that he was treading upon sensitive ground, and she instantly regretted not exercising more restraint. In vino veritas, she thought, regarding her wineglass as though it were a blood-smeared dagger.

  When she noticed the inquisitive expressions that had spread across both Scott’s and Chekov’s faces, she said, “My father has already sent his regrets.”

  “Excelsior was called away?” Chekov asked, in the same understanding “Uncle Pavel” manner he’d used many times over the years to help her cope with Hikaru Sulu’s countless other duty-related absences. Chekov’s compassionate gaze momentarily transported her back a decade or more, to a time when she had first begun to believe that getting through the Academy and earning a Starfleet commission of her own would enable her, finally, to understand and forgive her perpetually elsewhere father.

  But the present was simply not as she had imagined it would be back then. Now she was beginning to suspect that some old wounds simply ran too deep ever to heal adequately.

  Demora nodded in Chekov’s direction. “Excelsior received new orders as soon as the Triskelion ambassador was beamed down.” She couldn’t help but wonder if her father might have tried to avoid seeing her again, had Excelsior’s current itinerary been left to his own discretion.

  “Now let’s be fair, lass,” Scott said gently, though she could hear a stern undercurrent surfacing beneath his convivial pub-crawler persona. “There’s been trouble along the Klingon border ever since Praxis exploded. Captain Sulu’s new assignment might be more of the same.”

  Demora’s face flushed with shame at her own self-centeredness. Her unwillingness even to consider giving her father the benefit of the doubt suddenly made her feel more like a petulant child than a commissioned officer in humanity’s primary instrument of civilization and exploration.

  Counterfeiting a carefree smile, she raised her glass, which was still more than half full of white wine. She vowed to empty it at least twice more before returning, just for the night, to her small studio apartment in the Presidio District.

  “To absent friends, family, and well-wishers,” she said. “Godspeed to them all.”

  Whether or not they really deserve the benefit of the doubt for being absent, she thought as she returned her attention to the tart liquid in her cup.

  • • •

  Veret felt a single large bead of cold sweat swell against his backbone before making its swift, chilly descent along his spine. He did his best to ignore it.

  There she is, he thought, watching from the drinking establishment’s southeast corner as his Starfleet prey raised and lowered a delicate, transparent drinking vessel.

  But Veret had a problem: a trio of other uniformed Starfleet officers surrounded his target. Veret felt confident enough that he could handle either the slender young human male or the rather hefty older male who sat near him. But he didn’t like his chances should he be forced into an altercation with the apparently middle-aged, brown-haired man who shared a table with his prey — a young woman who might also prove surprisingly formidable should she happen to notice what he was about to attempt before it was too late.

  He wished he could simply turn and exit the café and lose himself in the fog-shrouded night. His skills were such that he could certainly liberate whatever he needed in order to survive, even in this antiseptic so-called paradise that these Earthers so revered. Had he not already proved himself to be more than adept at quietly skimming his employer’s profits? All he needed was a few hours to recover his stash of illicit latinum and bearer notes, and then disappear once and for all.

  But Veret understood all too well that even his considerable skills as a freebooter were far from the only determiner of his continued survival. Were he to disobey the orders he’d been given, either the albino or one of his other operatives would most likely find him no matter where he tried to hide. The albino had made it abundantly clear how very important this particular prey was to him; Demora Sulu was one of a very few targets he had been stalking for the past
three Federation standard years.

  And even if the albino never so much as lifted a finger to pursue him, Veret understood that the retroviruses with which he’d been injected some five years earlier would enforce his employer’s will more effectively than could a phaser-barrel aimed straight at his head. Veret knew that without the regular infusions of antidotes that only the albino could supply — drugs that his chalk-skinned taskmaster had laboriously developed in order to ensure both life and loyalty among those in his employ — he’d be dead inside of a week’s time.

  He knew with terrible certainty that the albino’s retroviral threat was no bluff; he’d seen with his own eyes just how little was left of one of the albino’s other operatives, a young woman who had tried to betray her master three years before.

  The deed has to be done tonight, Veret thought, hugging the shadows in the corner of the café. Tomorrow, she’ll be billeted aboard a high-security Federation starship.

  And therefore far harder, perhaps even impossible, to reach. But the albino did not react well to his operatives telling him that any task was impossible.

  As Veret looked on anxiously, the young woman he sought rose from her table and began walking straight toward his corner of the café. His heart suddenly leaped into his throat, and he felt the slickness of perspiration collecting on his neck-gills. Had he somehow given away his identity and purpose? If he had, his life would almost certainly be forfeit.

  Then he noticed the restroom sign that lay between him and his victim, and flushed with embarrassment at his own obtuseness; while he was largely unfamiliar with the details of the human urinary tract, he did understand basic hydraulics enough to know that liquids not only could not be compressed, but also had to be released from the human body on a fairly regular basis.

  Now is the time, Veret told himself. As the uniformed young woman approached, he reached into his cloak and stepped directly into her path.

  The impact of his shoulder slamming into hers rattled his teeth, despite his already having braced himself for it. He did his best to appear surprised by this “accidental” contact — even as the contents of the small hypospray concealed in his left hand hissed home through his target’s uniform jacket, emptying into her forearm.