by Peter David
“And not on whether you happened to belong to the few or to the many?”
“Spock,” she dropped the title, “are you testing to see just how Romulan I am?”
“The Romulans I have known best had a well-developed sense of honor that had very little to do with self-preservation. Sometimes greatly to their detriment. I suggest that you, too, should consider the subject from all points of view.”
“I’ve got something else to think about, Spock.”
“Indeed? What?”
“That ship’s spotted us inside this crater. I estimate it will be in weapons range in fifteen-point-nine-three seconds. Better brace yourself.”
“Locking on target,” said Spock. “Firing.”
The ship didn’t as much jolt as convulse from the hit it took. “Shields reduced to fifteen percent. Hull breach on decks three to five.”
“Weapons systems down to sixty percent efficiency. Firing.” Apparently, Spock was resolving his own needs-of-the-many crisis in favor of self-preservation too. “I suggest we retreat.”
She turned the ship and called for speed fast enough to cause warning lights to break out all over the screen.
The other ship pursued, firing as it advanced. “They’re targeting the warp nacelles—ugh!” She reeled away from controls, then regained her balance. “We’ve taken another hit.” The ship shuddered again. “Shields are down. And warp engines are offline. Shall I proceed on impulse?”
“Stand by,” said Spock.
If I were really Romulan, she thought, I would have blown this ship up before I let whoever those people are board and take me prisoner.
“Now what?” Soleta asked.
“Now, we wait. Please scan for tachyon emissions.”
“Aye, sir,” she said, good little Starfleet lieutenant at the last. “Nothing yet…wait! Tachyon levels rising…”
Spock opened a channel to the enemy ship. “I am giving you one last chance. We are awaiting reinforcements. It would be prudent for you to leave the vicinity of my ship at once.”
Raucous laughter resounded over the hailing frequency.
“Tachyon level rising…”
She really wasn’t that stupid, she thought. She only had to be hit over the head three times before she realized. Spock hadn’t expected to be able to escape; he had hoped that her best efforts would buy sufficient time…
…for reinforcements. Cloaked reinforcements.
“Captain!” The title burst out of her. “Ship decloaking at five thousand kilometers. Weapons systems online. It’s a Klingon bird-of-prey. Message coming in now. Shall I open a channel?”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Please welcome our Klingon friends. And tell them they may fire when ready.”
Soleta raised both her eyebrows at Spock. The solution was logical, of course. Spock had been in contact with the Klingons since the destruction of Praxis and the Khitomer Accords. Although it was crass and illogical (given human, Vulcan, Romulan, or Klingon nature) to expect payment for duty done, the Klingons did owe Spock big time, and he was skilled enough to summon them to pay off an installment on their debt.
“This is your last chance,” Spock told the other ship. “Surrender or die.”
They howled mirth and defiance at him. If they jeered that way at the Klingons’ challenge…
“Klingons are firing, sir,” Soleta informed Spock.
“I grieve for thee,” Spock whispered to the Pride’s creditors as the Klingons blew their ship out of space. The freighter rocked and bucked from the shock waves, but its shields held.
Over the com, Soleta could hear the victorious howls of the Klingons.
Captain Akachin gave a small moan. He actually seemed relieved to faint, joining his crew in blissful slumber.
It would take, Soleta thought, the heat death of the universe to throw Ambassador Spock’s appearance into disorder. Granted, he wore a ship’s coverall rather than the elaborate gemmed robes and tabard of a Vulcan official. But his hair, dusted only lightly by the silver of time, was impeccable; his shoulders were straight; and his face was composed, as opposed to Soleta herself. She knew perfectly well that her own hair was tumbling down about her shoulders, and her hands ached from the tension of orchestrating a ship takeover from the computers in their quarters.
Glancing away from Spock, she tugged her hair back into order, then bent to see to Captain Akachin.
“Spock of Vulcan! Thank you for the battle. It is always an honor to assist you. Lower shields and prepared to be boarded…if you please.”
“Now that,” remarked Soleta, “is a considerable concession.”
“A triumph of diplomacy over brute force,” Spock agreed.
He bent to check on Revex. “Captain Akachin appears to be coming around. It might be advisable to vent the gas that subdued the Pride’s crew. It would hardly do to render our benefactors unconscious.
“Spock here,” he told the Klingon ship. “A moment, please. We have been assisting this ship’s captain in defending his ship not just against the invader you destroyed but against a mutiny. We have gassed the crew and need to restore them to consciousness.”
“Hah!” the ship’s captain laughed. “I am Klovagh, son of Klaa, master of the K’raiykh. We saw your battle, with those pathetic weapons I would not give a child. My father, who served with you and General Korrd, always said his service with you was too brief. He praised your skills as a gunner. I can see he said too little.”
“He honors me,” Spock said, inclining his head at the computer screen. “I remember his valor.”
Sensors showed the gas levels throughout the ship dissipating.
“The air is now acceptable,” Spock said. “If you would be pleased to come on board?”
“We’ll bring guards to assist your brave captain.”
Revex Akachin stirred at the term “captain,” saw a Klingon’s face on the screen, and fainted again.
“On your feet, mister,” said Soleta, and suited actions to words by means of one hand at the throat of his coverall, hauling him up. “They think you’re a hero, so don’t tell them any different.”
Releasing the doors, she went out into the corridor to see to the recovering crew.
She informed various moaning, burping, or otherwise under-the-weather crew, “We’ve got Klingons preparing to board. Yes, Klingons. Do you think they’re going to bring you medical officers? They’re likelier to bring guards: Ambassador Spock told the Klingon commander, who turns out to be the son of an old comrade, that we were helping Captain Akachin resist a mutiny.”
Perhaps that was not the most effective way of convincing them to stand on their own two feet. At least, those of them who had only two.
Spock and Soleta went to the Pride’s bridge, where the Klingons materialized in the red blaze of a transporter effect. Green cassocks covered what she was certain was the officers’ finest parade armor, donned in honor of Ambassador Spock. Large red gems adorned the spiked collar and leash of the Klingon commander’s targ. Its head came up higher than its master’s waist, and he was at least half a meter taller than Spock.
The Bolian cast an appealing glance at Soleta. “Stand straight,” she murmured under her breath. “Klingons can smell fear. And if they can’t, that targ can.”
Spock cast her a faintly reproachful glance.
“It is a logical assumption,” she told him. “The targ is a predator; predators have keen senses of smell. Therefore…”
“Lieutenant, you are old enough to know the meaning of the term ‘rationalization.’ ” In other words, he knew she was enjoying herself in a most un-Vulcan manner, and he was calling her on it.
Must be the Romulan coming out in me, Soleta thought. Just wonderful. But she’d been locked up with a living legend in this miserable ship for days; she’d helped fight a ship’s action that logic, assuming they’d bothered to listen to it, said they should not have started, much less won, and she was, pure and simply, frustrated with the whole situation, which was
the sort of thing she’d once heard her Midwestern classmate describe as “out of the frying pan into the fire.”
Interesting place, Iowa must be. If she survived this trip, maybe she’d put it on her itinerary of places to go so she didn’t have to go back to Starfleet. Or home to Vulcan.
But which fire did the humans who’d coined that phrase mean? Soleta could think of several. She suppressed a sigh that she was sure would permanently have lowered her in the ambassador’s estimation, assuming she could fall any further, and braced herself to welcome their Klingon rescuers appropriately.
Whack!
Captain Klovagh’s slap on Revex Akachin’s back sent the little man halfway across the bridge. He caught himself against a guardrail, and Soleta wondered if any of the disks in his spine had been ruptured. “Captain defends his ship with the help of two Vulcans, even when one of them is Spock himself…little man, you’ve got more butlh than I’d have thought.”
Soleta glanced down at her own fingernails, under which there was, naturally enough, no dirt at all. Poor grooming as a synonym for male, or or tho-male, pride? Highly idiomatic, she decided, and potentially improper. She filed the reference in her capacious memory, which, right now, felt as if she needed to download at least half of it to storage and then lose the storage unit.
At a gesture of Klovagh’s elaborately gloved hand—and a flash of the metal studs that turned glove into deadly weapon—guards dispersed throughout the ship.
With the business of mopping up after a victory now taken care of, Klovagh and his personal guards turned toward Spock. As one, they saluted, a noisy matter of chests being thumped and bat’leth s brandished. Even the targ seemed to raise its tail in salute. At least that’s what Soleta, standing a respectful two paces behind and to the side of the ambassador, hoped was all that the targ was doing. She managed to keep her nostrils from flaring at the creature; the Klingons might misunderstand even so trivial an involuntary physical reaction.
Klovagh strode forward, clearly intending to clasp arms with Spock, if not to embrace him, but something in the Vulcan’s demeanor kept him quite literally at arm’s length.
“Captain,” Spock said. “May I present…”
“A female,” said Captain Klovagh. “A Vulcan female.” He grinned, exposing crooked, yellowed teeth that looked very strong. “But Ambassador, though I do not mean to intrude”—which had to be a first, Soleta thought, while keeping her face expressionless—“on Qo’noS, we had not heard that you took a new mate.”
“This is Starfleet Lieutenant Soleta, indeed of Vulcan,” Spock said with immense dignity. “She is my student.”
Klovagh bellowed laughter, then advanced on Soleta, who drew herself up in a salute to keep him at bay. “Your student, you say! And what do you study, Lieutenant?” he demanded.
Under such close observation, Soleta knew she was on her own. She couldn’t even flash Spock an “I’ll get you for this!” glance—which would have been extremely disrespectful, at any rate.
“Ship’s design, sir,” she said. “And psychology. Applied alien psychology.”
Klovagh roared again. The targ barked, turning the noise into a duet painful to sensitive Vulcan ears.
“I am glad to hear this, Ambassador. Your mate has deserved well of us, and we would not wish to have her angry at us.”
“I agree, Captain. It would be profoundly illogical for me to take a new consort. Not to mention life-threatening.”
As Klovagh roared, thinking Spock had made a most un-Vulcan joke, Soleta glanced down and away. She had never seen such a master of lying with the truth, even with truths that must not be spoken of before outsiders.
Someone touched her sleeve. Quickly, she turned, suppressing a combat-honed reflex to send Revex Akachin back along the trajectory he’d gone when Klovagh slapped his back. “Lieutenant? You’re a Starfleet lieutenant?”
She tilted her head at him. “That is indeed my title. I am, however, on extended leave of absence.”
“But I thought…you made me think you were a…”
Her impersonation of a Romulan on a really bad day wasn’t a subject she wished to discuss at any time, let alone in front of the Klingons. “I told you nothing of my origins. You made inaccurate assumptions. You would be wise to attend the ambassador and the Klingon captain. I believe they are discussing your best interests.”
“Well, Captain,” asked Klovagh as the Qualorian turned toward him with the expression of a man facing slow, painful execution, “what shall be done with your crew? Not just disloyal but incompetent! One man—and two Vulcans—against an entire ship, and you held out. Our bards would sing of it, if only you were Klingon. As it is,” the Klingon captain said, becoming all business for one brief moment, “we will probably tell this story in bars, which is honor enough for one not born a conqueror. Tell me about your crew. Shall we shoot them naked out your ship’s airlocks? Feed them to my targ? He was last fed two days ago and should be hungry soon.”
“You might render your targ ill,” said Spock. “That would be regrettable. Not to mention a waste of a fine targ.”
“So it would,” Klovagh said. He tossed his head, sending his great braided mane flying. “Your ship is disabled. Here is what you will do: We shall take your ship in tow to our nearest base and repair it. There will be no charge; it is an honor to help so noble a fighter, as well as Spock, friend of our Empire. You will remain on board your ship with guards, although you will dine with us tonight. Fresh rokeg pie! And we shall make the bloodwine flow and your blood burn!”
This time Spock looked down and to the side too. And was that a faint flush of green Soleta saw starting on the tips of his ears?
“Ambassador, I ask for the privilege of having you and your…student as my guests. She will learn much among my crew.”
Soleta inclined her head two degrees further than Spock and held her bow four seconds longer as he accepted for both of them.
“So that is settled!” Klovagh slapped his gloved hands together. “I have ordered my private shuttle to take you to my ship so you may be received in all honor,” he told Spock. “If you would be pleased to go to the docking bay? Captain, you and I will escort the ambassador.” He grabbed Captain Akachin and propelled him to the head of what became a very rough-and-ready procession. The targ sniffed at his buttocks, and Akachiu jumped forward, suppressing another moan.
Soleta took the opportunity to lean closer to Spock (but respectfully so, now that Klovagh’s inappropriate suspicions were allayed for the time being). “Sir, I neglected to consider all possibilities in context. I didn’t know…”
“A master of human philosophy once said that admitting ignorance was the beginning of wisdom. In that statement, T’Plana-hath, Matron of Vulcan philosophy, concurred. You might wish to consider this. When I began my career, the Klingon Empire was the enemy of the Federation. Now we are allies, and Klingons have just saved our lives. It may be that the Romulans will follow that same path.”
“Do you truly think so?” Soleta asked.
“There are always possibilities, Lieutenant. As I told you back on Thallon, life is anticipation. Life is constant surprise.”
She paused for a moment, trying to work it out.
“And I suspect,” said Spock, “that we should find out what surprises await us on the Klingon ship.”
Soleta followed Spock out of the “frying pan” of the Qualor’s Pride into what she fervently hoped would not be yet another fire. But even if they ran into more trouble, she suspected that she and Spock could come up with a few surprises of their own.
BURGOYNE 172
Through the Looking Glass
Susan Wright
After hir term on the Livingston, Burgoyne became assistant chief engineer of the U.S.S. Excalibur under Captain Morgan Korsmo. “Through the Looking Glass” takes place in that time period, about two years prior to hir promotion to chief engineer when Captain Calhoun took command of the ship.
Susan Wright
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br /> The first novel of Susan Wright’s science fiction trilogy, Slave Trade, was published in April 2003. She has written nine Star Trek novels, among them Dark Passions, Gateways: One Small Step, and The Badlands. She also writes nonfiction books on art and popular culture, including Destination Mars, UFO Headquarters, and New York in Photographs. For more information, go to www.susanwright.info.
Burgoyne stripped off hir clothes and dropped them on the fancy tiled floor. Hir suite was in the best R-and-R resort on Argelius II. The Hermat leaped toward hir private pool, going down on all fours to pick up speed as hir arms and legs bent at joints normally hidden by hir uniform. The oblong of clear green water yawned under hir as s/he neatly dived in without a splash.
Burgoyne resurfaced as Keeten Planx, a joined Trill whom Burgoyne had met during shore leave, slowly applauded hir feat. “I didn’t know you were so talented, Burgy! That’s some fast moving.”
Burgoyne floated on hir back, kicking with hir legs. “There’s plenty of room in here. But I have a standing rule…no clothes allowed.”
For a moment, Burgoyne thought the burly Trill would refuse with his customary grin. “Why not?” he agreed. “But I’m warning you, my entrance won’t be as spectacular as yours.”
To Burgoyne’s delight, Keeten Planx slipped off his vest and kilt, revealing a male physique worthy of applause himself. Keeten flexed his chest and arms, tightening his spectacular abs for Burgoyne’s benefit, before strolling forward with true athletic grace. His dark spots ran from his forehead all the way down to his toes. He dived into the pool and swam underwater toward Burgoyne with strong, sure strokes.
Burgoyne had been eyeing Keeten Planx ever since the Trill had arrived at the resort a few days ago. This was hir last evening before returning to Excalibur, so Burgoyne intended to make the most of it. Captain Korsmo had been generous to grant hir two weeks of shore leave, and hir request had been duly approved by Excalibur’s first officer, Commander Shelby.
Keeten emerged from the water, letting it pour off his head and shoulders. Burgoyne was drawn to him. Desire had lurked in every word and look they exchanged. S/he leaned forward, hir lips brushing against his cheek and mouth. His arms slid around hir back, holding hir close. Just as s/he suspected, Keeten didn’t need conversational foreplay like most other people. It would be like jumping into a raging fire—