The Art of the Impossible

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  “I’m a businessman just like you, Lig. Except, of course, that I’m better with a knife than you.” He started twirling the knife in a manuever that looked like he was about to cut his—or somebody else’s—hand off. “And if I don’t get my goods, I will declare you in breach and report it to the FCA.” He smiled, twirling the knife some more. “Liquidator Gant is one of my more reliable customers.” Gant was one of the Ferengi Commerce Authority’s agents in charge of external affairs, and he had developed a taste for bregit lung. Every time he visited Cardassia Prime—which was usually at least three times a year—he had all his meals at Kurrgo’s.

  “Fine, sic Gant on me,” Lig said, sounding less intimidated than Kurrgo would have liked. “It doesn’t change the fact that I can’t get at my ship and you can’t get at your targ s unless these fees are paid, and I can’t pay them. Either you come here with the money, or we both lose.”

  Much as Kurrgo hated to admit it to himself, the little toDSaH was right. “I’m in the middle of the dinner crowd right now. I’ll send Amon.” Amon was the head waiter, a wily Cardassian who was smart enough to not let Lig cheat him and Cardassian enough to not be gouged too badly by the customs officers. It meant he’d be two waiters down—unless Larkan had somehow materialized in the last five minutes—but it was better than being out a shipment of targ s. “He’ll bring a chit. Whatever we pay to customs will be an advance against payment of the next shipment.”

  “Just send him quickly. I’ve got perishables in there.”

  Kurrgo felt a momentary panic. “Aren’t the targs in stasis?”

  “ They are, yes. What, you think you’re my only client on Cardassia? If that were the case, I’d’ve gone out of business years ago. As it is, if these tariffs keep up, there may not be a next shipment.”

  Only the fact that Lig had been making the same threat for years prevented Kurrgo from worrying overmuch about him making it again.

  At least until he added: “I’m serious this time, Kurrgo. The way things are going, a Ferengi can’t make an honest living going back and forth between Qo’noS and Cardassia. I may have to find a less—troubled trade route.” Before Kurrgo had a chance to reply to that, Lig signed off.

  Damn him and his oversized ears. He summoned Amon to his side, handing him a blank credit chit. “Take this to the customs-house. Lig will meet you there. Find out from the customs officers what fees need to be paid. Pay everything directly to them. Do not put a single lek into Lig’s pocket, is that understood?”

  Amon smiled. “Of course.”

  He left. It’s not like I need all my waiters tonight in any event, Kurrgo thought sourly, looking at all the empty tables. Usually this was the busiest time of night, yet only a quarter of the restaurant was full. He looked around the restaurant walls, covered as they were with assorted Klingon memorabilia: weapons, Klingon artwork, a fake SoSnI’ tree, and more weapons. Perhaps I should make the décor more Cardassian.

  His redecorating thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of three men and one woman wearing military uniforms.

  No, there was a fifth with them—a stooped-over figure whose face Kurrgo could not see. At first, Kurrgo thought they were bringing a drunk in off the street, especially since the fifth figure wore civilian clothing.

  Kurrgo scowled. He had little use for this world’s military. Klingon soldiers were warriors, creatures of honor and duty, worthy of the highest place in Empire society. Cardassian soldiers, though, were just thugs with uniforms. Upon the newcomers’ entrance, he immediately moved to the front of the restaurant to greet them before they could come any further inside. “What do you want?” he asked, trying to maintain at least a facade of pleasantness, though he clenched his fists so tightly, his fingernails drew blood.

  “This creature says he belongs to you, Klingon,” one of them said. He gave a signal to the one dragging the fifth figure, who tossed said figure to the floor between him and Kurrgo.

  Only then did Kurrgo get a good look at the figure, and realized that it was a Klingon, his face bleeding from several cuts and covered in bruises, one eye completely sealed shut from the swelling.

  It took him a moment to recognize Larkan.

  “He is one of my waiters!” Kurrgo knelt down to check on the young man. He was breathing normally, if a bit raggedly.

  “I—am—all—right,” Larkan managed to say, spitting out blood and a tooth or two as he did so.

  Standing upright, Kurrgo faced the lead Cardassian. He kept an old disruptor pistol in the back room, but he’d never get to it in time. Even the bat’leth on the west wall was too far to do him any good. Besides, I will not endanger my customers. “Who did this to him?” he asked, knowing the answer.

  “He was out after curfew.”

  Kurrgo blinked. “What curfew?”

  “The curfew that was announced this afternoon. All Klingons are to be indoors after sundown. No exceptions.”

  Tightly, Kurrgo said, “I was not informed of this.”

  The officer looked around. “Yes, I can see that you don’t have any monitors in here. Why is that, I wonder?”

  “My customers come here to get away from Cardassia, to get a taste of tlhInghan’a’.” There was no adequate Cardassian way of expressing the word, which basically meant “Klingon-ness.” “To have a Cardassian face prominently displayed would spoil the ambience.” Clenching his fists once again, he added, “I have all the necessary permits to—”

  “I do not care what permits you have, Klingon!” The officer spit on the floor. “This restaurant is an abomination. It offends the memory of every Cardassian who has died at Klingon hands, and will be shut down. Your waiter will be arrested for violation of curfew. You will be escorted to your home. We will no longer allow your kind to walk about freely where you can poison our children and murder our people.”

  At first Kurrgo was aghast. He had now moved on to furious. “This is my property! You cannot—”

  “This is Cardassian property,” the officer said, standing face-to-face with Kurrgo. “We simply allow you—or, rather,” he added with a supercilious smile, “allowed you to use it to poison our people with your vile foodstuffs. But that is over now. I have orders to close this—establishment. If you need a place to work, I’m sure the mines on Bajor could use someone of your bulk.” Raising his voice for all to hear, he continued: “Everyone please leave the premises immediately. This restaurant has been shut down. Anyone left within these walls in five minutes will be arrested for trespassing on Central Command property.”

  “You cannot do this.” Kurrgo spoke the words even though he knew them to be a lie—never mind that he had indeed bought the land ten years earlier. Cardassia was a military dictatorship, after all, and that meant that people did what the military said. Now the military had, in the person of this petaQ of an officer, declared his deed of ownership to this restaurant null and void.

  There were four of them and only one of him. They were trained in combat, where Kurrgo knew a few knife tricks that might allow him to hold his own in a one-on-one brawl. Against these odds, he’d be torn apart.

  He decided to wield one last weapon. “Gul Hallitz is one of my regular customers. I do not think he will be pleased by this.” In truth, he had no idea one way or the other how important Hallitz was in the grand scheme of Cardassian Central Command, nor what influence he could wield, but at this point Kurrgo had little to lose.

  The officer just laughed at that, as did his fellows. “Gul Hallitz is the one who cut the orders to shut this charnel house down.”

  So, there it is. Kurrgo had hoped it would not come to this. But if they closed his restaurant, he had nothing. He doubted he would be able to make a third attempt to open such an establishment, and he could not live with the shame of returning to the Empire a failure twice over. If they insist on taking my life’s work, they shall do so only by stepping over my corpse to do it.

  Without any warning, he struck the lead officer on his neck under his chin. It
was an especially vulnerable spot for Cardassians if one aimed it properly, and Kurrgo did—it was no doubt why they had evolved such tough chins, to protect that weakness. The officer went down like a sack of HaroS.

  He turned to face the others, but they were too fast. Each of them had unholstered phasers and started firing.

  As the phaser fire burned his flesh and muscle, as the pain lanced through his body, as the screams ripped from his throat, Kurrgo thought, My death may not be worthy of song, but I died defending my land. I could have hoped for no better end.

  As he fell to the floor, he heard the voices of the Cardassians.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” A cough. “Hadn’t expected that.”

  “Who’s Gul Hallitz, anyhow?”

  “I have no idea. I just thought I’d twist the knife in that alien scum’s heart is all.”

  Laughter.

  Oddly, the treachery brought comfort to Kurrgo as he died. At least my customers are loyal…

  Chapter 18

  Qo’nos

  Of all the mountain-climbing excursions Arn Teldin had taken on dozens of worlds throughout the quadrant, this trip to the Sutor mountains on Qo’noS had been the best yet.

  The biggest problem with Cardassia II, where Teldin grew up, was its near total lack of mountains. Teldin had always felt the urge to climb, ever since he was a small boy trying to scale the tree in his backyard. The first time he went off-world was when his father’s business took him to Chin’toka III, to a city near the Likra mountain range. His father wouldn’t let him climb then—he was only seven—but Teldin studied climbing when he went to school, becoming a champion. He won dozens of competitions and left his mother living in constant fear for her son’s life.

  With adulthood came responsibility, of course. It was all well and good to indulge in one’s fantasies as a youth, but Cardassia gave him a home and a life, and in return for that, he owed the state service. He became an archivist for the Central Command library, soon rising to the position of chief archivist. Eventually, after a long and distinguished career during which he revolutionized Central Command’s record-keeping abilities, he retired, determined to spend the rest of his life traveling the galaxy and climbing mountains.

  He’d climbed peaks all over Cardassian space and on several Federation worlds. The trip to Qo’noS had been expensive, but worth it. Klingons, for all their peculiarities, had a fondness for preservation of nature, so the wildnerness of Sutor was left mostly untouched by the ravages of industry and technology. It had been the purest climb he’d had since his school days.

  Even as he waited for the transport that would take him back to the First City, where he would find lodgings before heading back home to Cardassia in the morning, he missed the sensation of rock under his hands, the searing cold air slicing into his lungs, the feel of the wind through his white hair—more, he missed the sound of the wind. When the transport arrived, he planned to compose a letter to his mother—still alive, and well cared for by the state—telling her of the adventure. His mother had long since given up being worried about her son’s jaunts across the galaxy. Whether or not it was old age or just resignation to the inevitable, she at least no longer tried to talk him out of it, and pretended to enjoy hearing about his adventures.

  It was only after he’d been at the kiosk for fifteen minutes that he noticed the odd looks he was getting from the Klingons around him.

  Teldin had never given much thought to Klingons. Until coming to Qo’noS, he’d never even met one. He didn’t like the way they all tended to snarl and bare their teeth and shout. But then, they probably didn’t like how quiet and unassuming Teldin himself was, so he figured it all balanced out. Besides, they let him climb their mountain, and he couldn’t bring himself to be too badly disposed toward them.

  “Hey! Cardassian!”

  Blinking, Teldin turned to the large Klingon who spoke. “Are you talking to me?”

  The Klingon, who was a broad-shouldered young man with a thick beard and a wild mane of red hair framing a heavily ridged crest, laughed heartily. “Do you see any other Cardassians around, old man?”

  “Er, no. Can I help you with something?”

  Another laugh. “Why, yes! Yes, you can, Cardassian! You can tell me why you’re here!” The Klingon walked up to Teldin and stood face-to-face with him. The Klingon’s breath was beyond foul—it smelled like something that had lived a very unpleasant life died in the man’s mouth. Teldin knew that Klingons had odd taste in food—he was grateful that he’d packed his own rations before leaving Cardassian space—but this was beyond the pale. “You don’t belong on a Klingon world, old man!”

  “I’ve—I’ve been climbing the Sutor p-peak.” Teldin started to grow nervous. He was just a retired archivist, after all. In good shape for a man his age, but against one of these brutes—who lived for combat, or so he had heard—he wouldn’t stand a chance. Where is that transport?

  “Oho!” Yet another laugh. It sounded like the braying of a wompat. Several others around him joined in the laugh. Others simply moved away. “Then you haven’t heard the news! The High Council has decided, in its great wisdom, to expel all you toDSaH from the Empire.” He looked around at the crowd. “No longer will we have to allow the thieves of Ch’gran to sully our worlds!”

  “Ch’gran? What are you talking about?” The Klingon was ranting. Teldin was prepared to dismiss him as a lunatic, albeit a dangerous one.

  But then he saw the rest of the group waiting for the transport. Those who hadn’t moved away were nodding their assent. Some were cheering. Others joined the burly red-haired one in his wompat-bray of a laugh. Could he be speaking the truth?

  Then a noise filled Teldin’s ears: the transport. It was coming down to land on a pad some distance before them. An attendant came out to take their tickets and allow them ingress to the transport—but when Teldin reached the front of the line, she would not let him through. “You may not pass.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The attendant sneered. “Your kind is not permitted to mix with Klingons, murderer.”

  This was getting ridiculous. “I’m not a murderer.”

  “Tell that to the souls of the dead on the Chut!”

  Teldin was baffled. “I don’t even know what a chut is. Please, I just came here to climb the mountain, and—”

  “Go back where you came from!” shouted one person from behind him on the queue.

  “Thief!”

  “Murderer!”

  “First you soil our history, then you soil our world!”

  “Cardassian filth!”

  “Look,” Teldin said to the attendant over the din, “I just want to get back to the First City so I can go home.”

  “Oh, you’ll be going home, all right.” The attendant signaled to someone. Teldin followed her gaze to see two Klingons in full military uniform approaching. “Just not in comfort.”

  The two uniformed men violently grabbed his arms. It felt like they were trying to rip them out of their sockets. As they led him off, the cheers of the crowd, particularly the laughing redhead, echoed in Arn Teldin’s ears.

  The tik’leth went flying from Kravokh’s opponent’s hands, clattering to the wooden floor. Kravokh stood with his bat’leth, smiling, ready to strike the killing blow, when Ruuv, his aide, entered the large practice room.

  “Oh, good, you’re practicing. You’ll need it. Ditagh is dying.”

  Kravokh snorted. “Ditagh’s been dying for years. His inability to actually take the final step has grown tiresome.”

  The councillor touched a control on his belt, and his opponent disappeared in a puff of photons. The holographic technology was every bit as good as the human merchant said it would be.

  “What was that?” Ruuv asked.

  “A holographic opponent. The Federation has perfected the technology to the point where one can create a solid object. Makes a fine sparring partner, if programmed right.” Kravokh walked
over to where the tik’leth had landed and picked it up. “We should be trading for such technology, not holding the Federation at arm’s length.”

  “You may have your chance to implement that plan soon.”

  Kravokh hung the long sword and the bat’leth in their respective cradles on the eastern wall of the practice room. Said wall also contained a mek’leth and half a dozen other weapons—some of Romulan, Vulcan, Kinshaya, and human design. The opposite wall was a giant window that looked out over the Qora forest. The array of sepia leaves and red bark against the blue-and-white sky provided a fine backdrop for his combat drills.

  He regarded his aide. Ruuv was lanky, tall but with skinny shoulders. Still, Kravokh knew he was reliable in battle, and he was also a keen observer—which was why he’d made him his top aide in the first place. “Ditagh is really dying this time?”

  “The doctors do not think he will last the night.”

  Another snort. “These same doctors said he was due to cross into Sto-Vo-Kor ‘any minute’ three months ago.”

  Ruuv smiled. “In fact, it is a different doctor, and she is quite sure of her diagnosis. She was convincing enough that Ditagh has named an Arbiter of Succession.”

  Kravokh started pacing across the wooden floor toward the window. When a chancellor died in a manner other than in combat, an Arbiter was chosen, who had the task of determining the two most qualified candidates to become the new head of the High Council. Those two then fought each other for the right to rise to the chancellorship. “Who has he named?”

  “K’Tal.”

  Kravokh whirled away from the spectacular view to give Ruuv a shocked look. “That child?”

  “I suspect that is why Ditagh chose him. He is new enough not to have any prejudices.”

  Laughing, Kravokh said, “Ditagh must be dying—it’s addled his brains. Since when has he preferred those with no prejudices?”

  Ruuv joined in the laugh. “It is a wise move. K’Tal may be young, but his House is strong, and he will be the head of that House before long. Making him Arbiter gives him a position of respect, and will indebt the next chancellor to his House even more so.”