Star Trek Prometheus -Fire with Fire

by Christian Humberg

  Commander Roaas tilted his furry head. His whiskers twitched almost imperceptibly. The Caitian was proud to serve aboard the Prometheus, and he always appreciated appraisal by specialists. “I don’t know whether you’d really want that, Chief. Usually, we’re in fairly precarious situations when we have to separate the Prometheus.”

  O’Brien scratched the back of his head. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “I would also like to express my gratitude,” Nog piped up. “It was very kind of you to make time for us.”

  Roaas looked at O’Brien’s deputy. Nog was a Ferengi—a species that wasn’t particularly renowned for selflessness and honorable service. Roaas wondered which personal experiences had brought Nog to Starfleet. “You have helped us out with parts and personnel during these past few days in order to put this ship back in immaculate condition. Commander Kirk was extremely pleased with your crew’s work. It seemed only fair to give you the grand tour.”

  “Oh, on the subject of Kirk…” O’Brien hesitated as if he was embarrassed to ask this question. “Is she… I mean, is she a member of the Kirk family?”

  “Why didn’t you ask her yourself when we were in the engine room?” said Roaas.

  “Well, I didn’t want to be pushy. I’m sure people probably ask her that all the time.”

  Roaas couldn’t help but grinning. “Actually, you might have a point there.”

  “So? Is she related to James T. Kirk? You know, we used to have a Jamie Samantha Kirk on the station, she was a granddaughter of Kirk’s brother… if I’m not wrong.”

  “In which case those two ladies might indeed be related. Commander Kirk is his brother’s great-granddaughter.”

  “Ha, I knew she bore a resemblance to him.”

  “If you say so.” For Roaas, human women looked completely different from human men. As far as he was concerned, Jenna Kirk might as well have been Captain Adams’s daughter.

  O’Brien’s expression became pensive. “I wonder if there’s ever been a Kirk in Starfleet who wasn’t related to the captain of the NCC-1701.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” said Roaas.

  The combadge fastened to his uniform jacket beeped, and the captain’s sonorous voice said, “Adams to Roaas.”

  The Caitian said, “Please, excuse me for a moment.” He tapped his chest. “Roaas here.”

  “Commander, please join me in my ready room immediately.”

  “I have just finished a guided tour for Chief O’Brien and Lieutenant Commander Nog. I’m on my way.”

  “Very well. Adams Out.”

  Terminating the connection, he faced his guests. “I’m very sorry, but I’ve got to leave you now. Duty calls.” He approached the lock, touching the control on the wall to open it.

  “No problem at all,” O’Brien replied, waving his hand dismissively. “We’ve taken up enough of your time. It was a pleasure to meet you, Commander.”

  “The pleasure has been all mine.” Roaas nodded farewell. “Chief, Commander.”

  While both engineers left for DS9, Roaas headed toward the turbolift to go up to deck one where the captain’s ready room was located. He approached the door and buzzed in.

  “Come,” Adams’s voice came through the door, which prompted the door to hiss open. He entered the room, and the door closed behind him.

  “Captain.”

  Adams stood by the window on the other side of the room, staring out toward the cold, distant stars on the other side of the pane. The light was dimmed and there was no indication Adams had been working on anything immediate.

  The captain greeted his first officer without turning around. “I’m glad you’re here, Roaas.” His voice was filled with gloom, which caught Roaas’s attention immediately. Adams seemed slumped, as if a heavy burden weighed on his shoulders.

  “Are you all right, Captain?” he asked, approaching him.

  Adams didn’t answer for a while. He kept staring out of the window. A portion of the new Deep Space 9 was visible, behind it the vanishing shape of a Rigelian freighter, heading toward a seemingly empty point in space. A moment later, space seemed to explode into an enormous blue vortex with a center, glowing in gold. The freighter headed into the wormhole, which collapsed almost immediately upon the freighter entering it.

  “I’ve seen this at least a dozen times in the past few days,” Adams said into the silence. “But I’ve never actually appreciated it. The beauty of the wormhole, I mean. Are we now so apathetic due to all these galactic crises that we don’t even perceive the wonders surrounding us? Do we just look at them, and our spirit of research remains dormant?” He faced Roaas. It seemed to the Caitian as if the wrinkles in his old friend’s face had sharpened.

  “What’s happened, Captain?” he asked quietly.

  “We’ve got a new mission.”

  That didn’t bode well. After the required repairs had been finished, the Prometheus was meant to head to Risa for a well-deserved week’s shore leave. “What is it?”

  Adams stared out of the window again. “Some lunatics have blown up Starbase 91. The U.S.S. Lakota was docked there, and has also been destroyed. Almost four thousand are dead. Starfleet has received a video with a claim of responsibility from a group of radicals. They claim that this attack is their way of declaring war on the entire galaxy. They’re not just after the Federation, they’re also coming for the Klingons, the Ferengi, and heaven knows who else. Supposedly, the Renao are behind it.”

  Roaas’s ears twitched. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. The Renao aren’t advanced enough for such an attack, and they’re also isolationists. Galactic politics have never interested them so far.”

  “The Typhon Pact?” Roaas asked.

  “We can’t rule that out, although we have official condemnations of this act already, one of them from the Gorn. We’ve been tasked with heading there, and finding out what happened. We’re also supposed to contact the government on Onferin in order to find out their stance on this incident. A special envoy has already been dispatched.”

  Roaas nodded. “I see. When are we going to depart?”

  “Tomorrow at 0800.”

  “I’ll get everything ready.”

  “Thanks, Roaas.”

  The Caitian took that as a hint to withdraw and return to work but he hesitated. Something about Adams’s demeanor deeply irritated him. The loss of a starbase and a starship was tragic, without the shadow of a doubt. But usually, that kind of news didn’t affect Adams that way. Roaas hadn’t seen his friend this distraught since the destruction of the U.S.S. Red Cloud. The heavy cruiser of the Akira-class had been under the command of Adams’s wife, Rhea Kadani, and it had been part of the fleet consisting of forty ships that defended the planet Vulcan against the Borg during those horrendous days in 2381, just like the Prometheus.

  Only four ships had survived that battle. The Red Cloud hadn’t been one of them.

  Suddenly it dawned on Roaas: The captain’s niece, his sister’s only child, had been serving on the starbase. She had to be one of the four thousand victims. A wave of compassion swept over Roaas. The Caitians were a people to whom their family, their clan, meant everything. Roaas could empathize very well what Adams must have been going through in that moment.

  “Captain,” he said quietly. “Your niece?” He let the words linger in the air.

  Adams stiffened almost imperceptibly. “Initial reports state that there have been no survivors.”

  Roaas put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I feel for you. We’ll find the perpetrators. And they will pay for that.”

  The captain glanced at his first officer, nodding quietly.

  The intercom beeped, and Harris’s voice said, “Bridge to captain.”

  Roaas lowered his hand, and Adams straightened as he walked over to his desk. “Yes?”

  “Captain, we… are receiving an official communiqué from the president of the Federation. She is talking to the pr
ess in the Palais de la Concorde. Apparently… there’s been a terrorist attack. Starbase 91 has been completely wiped out.”

  Roaas saw his captain drawing a deep breath. “I know, Ensign,” he said.

  As of that moment, the whole entire galaxy knew.

  8

  NOVEMBER 5, 2385

  Tika System, Klingon Empire

  Tika IV was not a beautiful world by any stretch of the imagination. Several broad ice and stone rings orbited around the dirt-brown gas giant that consisted of helium and hydrogen. A solitary, tiny space station drifted in orbit. It had been abandoned and left to discover its own destiny in the vacuum long ago. Now it was adrift and it ended up a little closer to the planet every year. The gas mining company it had once belonged to had ceased to exist ages ago.

  Silent space, silent night. If it hadn’t been for the gas giant’s small moon that was dotted with deep craters and rough boulders, the entire Tika system would have fallen into oblivion. With this moon, however, it boasted at least one valuable waypoint.

  Those who only knew this moon from afar called it Tika IV-B, and all they cared about was its profitability; those, who actually set up camp here, called it qung—the Hole.

  K’mpoch had never known a more beautiful place in his life. The muscular worker with his shoulder-length brown hair and the scarred chest had grown up on one of the worlds on the periphery of the Klingon Empire, where the youth indulged in bloodwine and brawling so they didn’t have to contemplate more useful pastimes. When he was barely old enough to find a space port by himself, K’mpoch had hidden in the bay of a smelly freighter, his mind set on fleeing toward the future. He had no aim, no plan—he just wanted to get away.

  His way led him into some of the most disgusting areas of the Empire, including one penal colony. Then he wound up at the Hole.

  He had been blind drunk when he signed up, and he truly couldn’t remember anything about it. One night, after he had just left the penal colony behind, he had been roaming around some bars and dives looking for arguments and alcohol, and he had found both in abundance. Next thing he knew, he woke up with a huge gap in his memory on a transport ship among a bunch of guys who were even more dumb and rugged than he was. In his pocket, he found his first wages and a five-year contract with his signature on it.

  Since then, K’mpoch had been working underground. The Hole—that insignificant looking piece of rock in orbit around Tika IV—boasted rich dilithium reserves, and K’mpoch now belonged to a two-hundred-strong workforce prospecting for crystal treasures deep underground. They hauled the stuff to the surface that fueled the empire’s space ships. They were living in plain barracks, far away from any civilization, protected from the void of space only by a vaguely glimmering energy field high above their heads, but they fulfilled an honorable duty.

  At least, that’s what they told themselves whenever the Hole stretched their patience.

  “DenIb Qatlh!” cursed Rotal, furiously punching his gloved fist onto the controls of their small and old yolok, their mining vehicle.

  “Is it still not starting? How many times do I have to inform the main office before someone moves their ridges down here to fix it?”

  K’mpoch stifled a cynical grin. He didn’t see any point in increasing his foreman’s fury. “Try again,” he suggested, just like he had done many times during the past few days. “Right hand on the drive control, left hand on the steering controls, and then take it slow and steady.”

  Rotal glared at him as if he intended to rip his head off, before spitting into his throat. “You reckon?” he growled, every syllable dripping with sarcasm.

  They were both wedged into the driver cabin. Behind them, on the long truck bed, lay several tools waiting for their daily usage. When K’mpoch looked through the small cabin window and beyond the open vehicle hangar doors, he could spot the blocks made from perma-concrete and transparent aluminum in the twilight. He and his boss had only left them a few minutes ago to start their work. The early shift was settling down to rest there now. Artificial light illuminated the plain facades. Their mine was located on the dark side of the moon. Even during daytime, it was black as night here.

  “Come on,” said K’mpoch, ignoring Rotal’s tone of voice, and nodded toward the yolok’s console. Patience was a virtue, not a weakness. That was one of the things the Hole had taught him. “Just like yesterday, wait ’til it’s warmed up slightly, and then…”

  Rotal hit his helping hand aside. “Are you the foreman now?” he snapped at his passenger. Rotal was almost eight years younger than K’mpoch, but he had never heard about the concept of respecting his elders. “You think you know better than me?”

  K’mpoch waved his hand dismissively. “I just want to get into the mine, boss.”

  “And I want new vehicles. And if I don’t get what I want, why should you be so lucky?”

  K’mpoch kept quiet. He wasn’t looking for a fight, not this early in the day. He’d rather save his energy for the mine and its dilithium veins.

  “Well?” Rotal followed up aggressively, grinning menacingly when his passenger didn’t reply. Several of his teeth were blackened from decay, and his breath reeked. “That’s what I thought. You have a big mouth but don’t know anything.”

  Silently, K’mpoch counted to ten. It wasn’t worth getting agitated. Rotal was a stubborn idiot, and he would never change.

  The idiot reached out with his left hand, touching the small comm device below the cabin roof. Immediately, it sprang to a colorful life, and random noises crackled inside the transport’s cabin. “Yolok II calling main office. Base, respond.”

  No response. The crackling seemed to increase as if even the radio was conspiring against Rotal.

  “Yolok II to base,” the foreman repeated. “Damnit, are you still sleeping it off over there? What’s going on with you? I’m sitting here in a broken-down vehicle, again!”

  Nothing. If anyone in the main office was able to hear him, they obviously didn’t care about his accusing tone of voice. K’mpoch found it increasingly difficult to stifle a grin.

  The moon didn’t have any atmosphere at all, apart from the artificial one inside the dome. There was no greenery, no water, and no life. But there were ample mineral resources; in fact, the moon was so rich in these resources that beaming posed an incalculable risk due to their radiation. Every last piece of equipment needed to be transported by “worm”—or yolok as the workers called their small plated-wheel mining vehicles in their native Klingon language—into the mines. The same applied to the workers, of course. Around the beginning and end of each shift, the dirt roads between the mines and the accommodation area became very busy. Minor collisions were commonplace, and it showed on the yoloks.

  “Kahless give me strength,” Rotal grumbled, making another futile attempt at starting the old transporter. “I’m surrounded by idiots…” He glared at the comm device. “Yolok II to the pujwI’ sitting in the main office and is apparently a few worms short of a full plate of gagh… respond, damnit! Come in!”

  K’mpoch shook his head. “Let’s just take another car.”

  “We will,” his seatmate growled. “But before I heave all that stuff from this truck bed to another, I want to let the idiots up there know how much they’re getting on my nerves! Yolok II to…”

  A piercing howl interrupted his call. It came from the hidden loudspeakers of the comm system, and only lasted a few seconds. As soon as it ended, a loud alarm siren sounded.

  K’mpoch looked at Rotal quizzically. “What’s that all about?”

  “I tell you, what it’s about,” the foreman answered angrily, “our pujwI’ up there fell asleep on the wrong console.”

  Lights came on in the barracks. Apparently, the alarm was not only audible via the radio. K’mpoch reached for the door’s opening mechanism. “Hang on,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  K’mpoch opened the door. There it was—the sirens were wailing loudly across the entire comple
x. The sound rose and fell, and it seemed to come from all directions at the same time.

  “What is going on?” Rotal took his hands off the controls. “Nobody mentioned anything about a drill.”

  It wasn’t a drill. K’mpoch didn’t know why he was so sure, but he was. He had an extremely uneasy feeling. “Let’s go and have a look,” he said, and was already halfway outside the cabin.

  “Bah.” His foreman shook his fist, before following him. “Look at what, exactly? The idiots who are scared by a drill?”

  K’mpoch quickly crossed the hangar. Before stepping outside, he hesitated in the doorway, scanning the area with his eyes. People had appeared by the windows and doors of the barracks—tired men from the earlier shift. They seemed puzzled. K’mpoch looked left toward where the administration building marked the perimeter of the complex. It was brightly lit. Did his eyes deceive him, or did he notice hectic movements behind the main office’s windows?

  “We’re under attack,” he murmured, more amazed than concerned.

  “Nonsense,” Rotal growled, suddenly standing next to him. But K’mpoch sensed doubt in his voice. “Why should anyone attack us? This is merely a zit on the spotted ass of the empire. Where’s the honor in that, you fool?”

  K’mpoch shrugged, looking up to the energy dome and the distant stars of the Tika system. “Not everyone is looking for honor…”

  Nothing was out there. No aggressor anywhere. No noticeable danger—just quiet, silent space.

  “And anyway,” added Rotal. “If we were to have visitors, that pujwI’ should have mentioned something ages ag—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. A low voice added to the wailing of the sirens, shouting from the loudspeakers all over the complex. “Attention! Attention! Intruder alert. To arms! I repeat: Intruder alert. To arms!”

  But it was already too late. A fraction of a second later, the energy dome high above K’mpoch’s head glowed bright red. It was the last thing that the Klingon saw in his life.