by Shards
"You presume much, Commodore," said Turag. "You bring us here on vague promises and offers of servitude, but now you talk as if we are in alliance."
"Yeah, the whole servitude thing, that was just a lie." He shrugged. "Just to get you here." Reyes didn't react as Lurqal's men reached for their weapons. His calmness intrigued her, and she waved them off, allowing him to continue. She found herself wanting to hear what he had to say. "I'm not real big on kowtowing, y'see. I have larger ambitions. Namely, carving out an empire of my own. Right here."
Turag blinked. "The Reach?"
"Dead on." The Terran nodded at the Orion. "Thanks to Ganz and his associates, I already have in place what you might call the infrastructure of a secession. I just need a little muscle and someone to watch my back. Someone with an aggressive, proactive mindset."
Lurqal smiled thinly at the audacity of the man. "You intend to secede from the Terran Empire and turn the Taurus Reach into your own private fiefdom."
She got a nod in return. "It's practically that already. This'll make it nice and legal."
The commander gestured at the walls. "This is a large base, with more than a thousand loyal Imperial subjects aboard. Will they all follow you into this? What is to prevent your grand plan from being derailed by one of your fellow officers of the Empire? I'm sure anyone who exposed your intentions would be richly rewarded by that witch Sato."
For a moment, Reyes's expression turned cold. "You shouldn't question my commitment, woman. I end the people who do that. Fact is, most of the rank-and-file crew on Vanguard don't give a damn who's in command, as long as they get their bread and circuses. Me, Sato, it doesn't matter to them."
"What about the ships stationed here?" she pressed. "What about their commanders?"
The callous grin returned. "Oh, I admit I did have some issues with one of them. Sadly, shortly after that, the I.S.S. Sagittarius suffered a freak accident, didn't it?" He glanced at Ganz.
"Warp-core malfunction," rumbled the Orion. "Boom."
"The other captains saw it my way thereafter. And I've taken steps to ensure their continued obedience." He crossed to the bond-slave and dragged it forward; Lurqal saw for the first time that it was a human woman, olive-skinned and sallow. "It's important to have leverage, isn't that right, Atish?"
The woman gave a shaky nod, and Lurqal saw the flash of hate in her eyes.
"What is this?" asked Turag.
"Khatami here has a special value to one of my captains, don't you?" He sniffed at her hair, leering. "Mmm. Zhao's got good taste." Reyes pushed her away toward Ganz. "I'm keeping her as my 'guest,' so to speak."
"A hostage," Lurqal said with distaste.
"That's such an unpleasant word. But yeah, you're pretty much on the money." He puffed out his chest. "So, there's no need to fret. There's nothing to stop me taking the Reach, and in return for support from my good neighbors in the Klingon sphere, I'll be willing to offer up a generous number of worlds ripe for exploitation."
Turag folded his arms and halted. "Ah, Commodore. You're only offering us what we can already take. And why would we wish to antagonize Empress Sato? Why would we draw the Tholians into a protracted fight? They're swarming around the fringes of this zone like angry glob-flies." He snorted. "I fail to see any incentive for my people."
"That's gonna change, real soon," Reyes replied. "Trust me on that. But to answer your question, well, as I said, Sato's a long way from here, and she's got problems of her own. And truth be told, she might gripe and moan when things go down, but in the long run, she'll deal, especially when I have you guys at my back. I'm already a king out here. She should know, she made it happen." He leaned closer. "The Tholians, well, they'll have to be put down, and hard-there's no argument about that-but I have the means. Empress Sato will deal, Turag, because she'll have no choice. Now it's time for me to show the same is true for you folks." Reyes nodded to Ganz, who crossed to a secure door and worked a code lock. "Come look at this," he said, smiling. "We call it the Vault."
The Klingons walked around the lab interior with their heads on swivels, and it was all Reyes could do not to laugh. Not a one of them had ever been this close to an Imperial secure facility on the scale of the Vault, and they didn't know where to look first. He pointed out the tall cylinders of the stasis tanks, where bodies drifted in a null-space field, preserving perfectly the manner in which they had died. "Take a gander at these poor fools. Have you ever seen wounds like that?"
Lurqal bent close to examine the bifurcated body of a Chelon. "There is matter accreted around the edges of the cut. It seems to be some kind of crystal. The flesh...it's been changed."
"Petrification." He threw her a nod; she was quite a looker, when you got past the tire-print forehead. "The cut goes down to the molecular level. The edge that did that can go through anything." Reyes led them on, amused as the lab staff scuttled to get out of his way. He showed them pieces of blackened matter. From a distance, they looked like melted stone, but up close, they glistened with fragments of mica. "These are remnants of a civilization that used to run this whole quadrant, back when your ancestors were still up in the trees, whacking each other with sticks. The Shedai, they called themselves." Turag's eyes narrowed, and the commodore knew immediately that the Klingons had heard the name before.
"I fail to be impressed," said Lurqal. "Is this all you have to show us? Corpses and blackened pebbles?"
Reyes felt his ire rising again, and he glared at the woman. Okay, so she was pretty, but now that he thought about it, Diego realized that she had to be little more than a kid by ridge-head standards. The damned Klingons, they're mocking me. They sent me a slip of a girl instead of a real warrior. This is an insult! He felt the optic implant grow hot against the scarred flesh of his face. "Don't try to play me," he growled. "I know you tried to screw around with Shedai tech you found in the Ravanar system. But while you monkeys have been hitting it with hammers and getting nowhere, we got ourselves something better." He loomed over her.
"Much better," offered Ganz.
His insouciant manner resurfaced. "I'm just building the drama, y'see? Saving the best until last." He snapped his fingers, beckoning over two men in blue sciences tunics. "Zeke. Mr. Ming. Would you be so kind as to bring out the cage? I want our new friends here to meet the star of the show."
Lieutenant Ming Xiong hesitated, shooting a look at Surgeon-Commandant Fisher's ever-cold expression. "Commodore," he began, "is that wise?"
"Didn't ask you for advice," Reyes growled. "Gave you an order."
"Aye, sir," came the reply, and the lieutenant moved to a control console to work alongside Fisher.
"Stand back," ordered the doctor. A hatch in the floor began to iris open.
Reyes glanced at Turag. "Palgrenax. You got a scout ship near there, don't you? You people been thinking about establishing an outpost on the planet."
Turag stiffened. "How are you aware of that?"
"These things come to me." He threw a nod in Ganz's direction. "Call your vessel. Get them to send a message to that ship, tell them to light outta there."
"And why would we do that?" Lurqal demanded.
The hatch was open now, and a cube of glowing metal tubes was rising up from the space below. In between the bars, something moved, flowing like smoke.
"Just do as I say," Reyes told her. "Or you'll regret it."
The Klingon commander glared at him and then spoke a string of guttural orders into her communicator.
The cage locked into place, and Turag backed off a step. He couldn't look away from the writhing, formless shape inside the structure. Reyes nodded to himself. The thing was a sight, all right. It was gas, and then it was water; it was stone, and then it was fire; it tried, as it always did, to thrash its way out of the confinement, banging against the phase-destabilized bars.
"It's quite safe," Fisher reported, in his usual flat monotone. "The Shedai cannot escape."
"You captured one of those...beings?" Turag blinked.
"More by blind luck than judgment," admitted Ming. "We managed to-"
Reyes silenced him with a sharp cut of the hand. "The envoy doesn't need to know how. He just needs to know that we got Smokey here on a leash."
"Smoh-kee?"
The commodore's smile flashed. "A pet name."
Energy lashed at the junctions of the crackling bars, and a wave of pressure flooded the room. Telinaruul! The psychic cry beat at their thoughts. Release me! Release me or perish!
Reyes swore. "Oh, she's peppery today, ain't she?" He nodded to Fisher. "Give her a jolt. Make sure she knows who's boss."
The doctor worked the console and gave a dial there a savage twist. Power flashed through the cage, and the Shedai wailed, the unearthly noise grating around them.
Strange colors glistened inside the bars. "Conduit is opening," reported Ming.
"Just a fraction now, we don't want her running," Reyes ordered. "Your people had your warning," he said to Lurqal, before turning away. "Fisher? Make the bitch do her trick."
The doctor nodded again and sent another powerful surge of energy through the Shedai's enclosure; in reply, it screamed and flashed blue-white. Reyes had the impression of brilliant fires streaking away, vanishing down a pinhole tunnel of warp light, then gone. Abruptly, the alien moaned and recoiled into itself, becoming dark and sullen.
After a long moment, Lurqal's expression shifted to incredulity as a tinny voice snapped out of her communicator in terse, urgent Klingon. Paling slightly, she looked first to Reyes and then to the envoy. "Our scout ship reports...the planet Palgrenax is breaking apart. Massive energy distortions all across the surface."
"You like that?" Reyes spread his hands. "Maybe now you'd be willing to talk some business."
A slow smile crept across Turag's lips. "With the master of the Taurus Reach? Of course."
Zhao Sheng studied the Vulcan woman before him at the table, poised and silent. Her offer hung in the air between them, the charged lethality of what she had demanded of him in Spock's stead as deadly as a poisoned dagger. The way the light in the cabin crossed her hair reminded him of Atish, and the sudden flash of recall brought a small gasp from him. Khatami had been much more than just the captain's woman aboard Endeavour; she had been his confidante, his sounding board, his comrade in battle as well as his lover. Not for the first time, he cursed himself for his attachment to the tawny-skinned woman. If only he had cared less, then he would not have forced himself and his crew into the bloody service of Red Reyes.
Zhao shook his head, feeling the moment fall away. Perhaps once there had been a time when he might have defied the commodore, but not now. The proud, ruthless soldier of the Empire he once was had vanished, and in his place was the dissolute man he was now. Little more than a pirate, just a bandit with a fancy starship operating under letters of marque and reprisal. A slave with a longer leash but still a slave nonetheless.
The sensible choice would be to throw her into the brig and turn her over to Leone's tender mercies for interrogation. I'm certain he would relish the opportunity. Reyes would reward him if he brought T'Prynn back to Vanguard, broken and begging. He might let me see Atish again...perhaps for a little while.
T'Prynn watched him carefully. "I require an answer, Captain Zhao."
Was she reading his thoughts? He had heard stories of the psychic powers that some Vulcans were alleged to possess. They say Admiral Spock can make a man vanish with just a thought. What tricks might he have taught this one? "Vanguard is too well protected," he told her. "Endeavour would be destroyed trying to attack it."
"We have a spy in place in the command crew, ready to sabotage the starbase's systems," she countered. "And your trusted status will allow you to close to point-blank distance before opening fire."
He sighed, shaking his head. "I have great admiration for Spock, and in any other circumstance, I would put my colors to his mast. But what you ask of me I cannot do. I...I am a defeated man." Zhao looked away, grabbing the brandy bottle and taking a long pull from it. "The captain your admiral sent you to find is gone. Go back and tell him that."
T'Prynn was silent for a long moment before she spoke again. "Tell me, Zhao Sheng. How did you rise to the captaincy of this vessel?"
He snorted. "The usual method. I terminated my commander."
She cocked her head. "Why?"
"Does it matter?" He took another swig of brandy. "He was in my way. I murdered him. End of story."
"That is not an explanation. Tell me what made you want to kill a man in cold blood. Tell me why you murdered an officer your oath of allegiance bound you to obey."
"Because he deserved it!" The Vulcan's words lit a sudden fire inside him, and he threw the bottle aside. "He had appetites that sickened me! He did not deserve to wear the uniform of a soldier of the Empire! He...he was..."
"Dishonorable?"
"Yes." Zhao sat heavily. "And now I am no better."
When he looked up again, T'Prynn was holding the data card in her hand, offering it to him. "Are you certain? Has your honor truly fled, or have you only misplaced it?"
He saw her without really seeing, his thoughts far away. Atish. Does she think I have abandoned her? Is she even still alive? Do I have anything left to lose?
The whistle of the intercom broke through his thoughts, and he tapped the panel. "What?"
"Sir, something odd on long-range sensors," said Klisiewicz. "We're reading a massive energy spike in the Palgrenax system. It looks...well, like a planet there just exploded."
"It's starting," said T'Prynn. "You must make your choice."
He did. "Yellow alert," Zhao ordered. "Set course for Vanguard, maximum warp, and prep the weapons. We have a fight ahead of us."
T'Prynn had been prepared for dissent; she had a small phaser hidden in the bracelet around her wrist, powerful enough for a single disintegration blast. She had been quite ready to use it, standing carefully at Zhao's shoulder, so that any member of his crew who objected to their new orders could be dispatched if the need arose.
The fact that it did not was a source of mild surprise for the Vulcan. For all the level of open debauchery and disorder shown by Endeavour's rabble of a crew, when the man spoke, all of them listened. And none of them complained; in fact, many of them took the commands to attack Vanguard with rough humor, as if it was something they had been waiting for.
Zhao glanced up at her from his command throne. "You're wondering why no one is trying to oppose me?"
She nodded.
He smiled. "Well. Ask yourself this, then. What does it tell you about Diego Reyes when every member of my crew would happily see the bastard and his comrades dead?"
"Rather," she replied, "I am considering what that tells me about you."
He shrugged. "My crew trust me."
"A rare commodity in the Empire."
On the main viewscreen, the massive clamshell doors of docking bay 3 were retracting into Vanguard's saucerlike upper hull. T'Prynn saw a ship moored there, a yacht of Orion design.
"Ganz's boat," Klisiewicz noted, reading a display. "I see his pennant on the hull. He's aboard."
"Distance?"
"Point-blank range in ten seconds." He frowned. "I'm also detecting a Klingon ship docked at one of the lower pylons."
Zhao threw a nod at his weapons officer, a younger man with a savage smirk on his lips. "Pen? You assured me this would work?"
"It will, boss," said the officer. "We'll fire without using sensors, so they won't detect a thing until it's too late. I've removed the safety interlocks from the torpedoes. They'll arm the moment they leave the tubes." He gave a giggle.