“Your assignment is here at Starfleet Command,” Akaar told him briskly. “Your designation will be ‘flag officer without portfolio,’ but you will report directly to me. Your mission is to act in support of my command in the current time of crisis.”
“And . . . my crew?”
“For now, you have leave to retain the Titan as your flagship, if that is what you wish.”
Riker took a deep breath, his fist tightening around the rank pin. He spoke quietly. “Admiral Akaar, sir, I don’t think that I can accept this.”
Akaar’s dark eyes flashed. “Put it on, man,” he growled, low and angry. “Or you’ll leave this room with your discharge papers. Clear?”
Refusal, it seemed, was not an option. Riker glanced at the Tellarite and the other civilians, who were already gathering themselves to leave, as if they had dismissed the entire discussion. He had the sudden, damning sense that he was being used as a proxy in this arena, pulled without justification into a game where he didn’t know the rules or the players.
A flare of anger lit inside him, a resentment at being treated like a dupe. He wanted to demand an explanation, to force it from Akaar then and there, but he knew that would never happen. What choice did he have to find the answers he wanted unless he accepted? More was going on in the Federation’s corridors of power than he could guess at, that much was certain.
Riker felt as if he had been pushed to the edge of a cliff. He could fall . . . or he could stand fast.
Slowly and carefully, he reached up to his collar and snapped the sigil into place.
* * *
Feathery flakes of toxin-laden snow fell from a sky that resembled a sheet of beaten lead. The lower-than-standard gravity of the frigid little world encouraged the lazy blizzards that constantly washed across its surface, a far-off and feeble sun doing little more than warming the landscape to somewhere just below freezing point. Rounded towers of greenish ice, polluted by heavy metals in the soil, reached for the low clouds, occasionally backlit by flashes of lightning from over the line of the near horizon.
The planet was an unwelcoming place, barely capable of holding on to a thin and unforgiving biosphere. What life existed here was ugly and full of fury, rapacious beasts that preyed on each other in bursts of brutal savagery.
Some of the warriors expressed the desire to sharpen their skills with an impromptu hunt of the larger ursine forms, but their leader put down any such thoughts with an angry snarl. This was not a huntsman’s retreat, not some game for youths. They had been called here for a mission, a deed that involved a weight of blood spilled and blood yet to be spilled.
The leader was the only one of them who knew the full dimension of the sortie. She alone knew why they were on this nameless, ice-rimed rock, and she had seen fit not to impart it to her men. She required only their obedience.
Some of them, the ones too quick to act and too slow to consider, would not have shown the correct dedication to the deed had they known its origins. No matter. All that they needed to know they had been told. This mission was about revenge, and that emotion sang to the heart of every Klingon.
Commander Ga’trk rolled back the hood of the gray battle cloak from her head and allowed the burning cold to sear her face. Ice crystals had already turned her brows a muddy white, and she brushed them away, taking care not to let the toxic snow anywhere near her eyes or lips. She peered owlishly through the storm, surveying the shapes of the prefabricated buildings below her. At her side, her subaltern Koir was using a periscope sight to do the same, running a passive scan for sensor beams or cloaked guardians.
From the top of the ridge where they crouched, Ga’trk could count six distinct dome-tents, common structures of Ferengi manufacture built for temporary colonies and used on a thousand different frontier worlds. Flexible tube corridors connected some of them, and dim illuminators picked out the shapes of heat-lock doors.
“No detections,” reported Koir. “Transport inhibitor remains active.” His words were as much for her ears as they were for those observing the unfolding events through the monitor device clipped to the warrior’s shoulder. Through its omni-directional eye, a real-time holographic relay of the mission was being beamed back to their support ship and on to some nameless place where Ga’trk’s masters watched and waited.
The commander accepted Koir’s report without comment. Somewhere in the camp, a dispersal field generator was throwing out enough ionic distortion to render a direct beam-in impossible, but that did not deter the Klingon. To teleport in at point-blank range, to appear standing over an enemy as he rested and gut him before he could rise? Where was the challenge in that? Similarly, they could have bombarded the site from low orbit with a stun blast or erased it completely with a photon torpedo, but such tactics were the tools of weaklings.
No. The work of Ga’trk and her unit was to be the silent, lethal hand of the Empire. They had no formal designation within the ranks of the imperial military; they eschewed the gaudy trappings of honor and tribute that so many of their kinsmen counted as measure of their worth. Their trophies were in darkness and silence, in the unseen footprint and the vanishing of a foe.
Commander Ga’trk and her warriors had no medals and chains of status. The only thing they bore with pride was a brand—a single word, written across their chest beneath an Imperial trefoil.
The word was qa’; some translated it in the tongues of other races as if it meant ghost, but that did not plumb the full depths of the name. These were soldiers whose duty was to move like the breath of wind and leave no trace they had ever been there. No trace, that is, but the erasure of their chosen targets.
Ga’trk drew her mek’leth from the scabbard beneath her cloak with one hand and with the other hand, she drew a shrouded disruptor pistol. It was the signal Koir and the five other Klingons had been waiting for.
Like stalking wolves, they swept fast and silent over the lip of the ice ridge. Keeping low, the warriors fanned out into three smaller groups, approaching the encampment in a pincer formation.
The orders from the general had been direct and gave no room for interpretation. The terrorists hiding in this place were to be captured alive for forcible after-action interrogation. Terminations would be seen as failures and punished as such; Ga’trk’s warriors were as skilled as surgeons with their blades, and they were expected to be precise.
It had been in a mission under similar parameters that intelligence had come to light, the same intelligence that had led them to this ice world. In that instance, the boarding of a gunrunner ship and the execution of a crew of Orions had given up this locale. Ga’trk frowned at the thought of that operation; compared to this sortie, it had been undisciplined, all noise and brute force. In the aftermath, mistakes made had required her to discharge two errant soldiers with her own bat’leth.
She hoped the data they had compelled from the Orions before they died had been worthwhile. Up until the moment she laid eyes on the camp, the commander had thought this to be a fool’s errand.
The cowards in those domes, hiding in the snows and unaware of the killers that stalked them, had murdered an empress, and they were soon to pay for it. Not Ga’trk’s queen, of course, but still the leader of an honored ally and thus undeserving of a wastrel’s fate.
They reached the nearest dome and Koir’s hands rose up, a pair of razor-sharp daggers glinting dully in each fist. He pierced the fabric skin of the building and cut open an entrance with two downward slashes. A tongue of thick material lolled out, and a gust of warm interior air blew across their faces.
Koir took a step closer, but Ga’trk hesitated, gripping her mek’leth tightly. The inside of the dome-tent was completely empty.
A new chill ran through her, something ingrained in her marrow from years of walking a warrior’s path. The commander spun in place, drawing in a lungful of acrid air for a shout.
Not fast enough.
Buried in the snow, deep enough that they were lost to Koir’s sensor sc
ans, a dozen spherical pods now blinked into life and shot up through the slush to waist height, buoyed by antigravity generators. Each silvery globe was split around its equator by a glowing orange line; the emitter band for a multidirectional phaser discharge.
They fired as one, each pod releasing a ring of fire that expanded outward in a blazing sweep. Those caught in the path of the beam—and there were none who avoided that fate—were cut through. Some bisected like herd beasts at slaughter, others rendered without limbs or heads.
Ga’trk saw her mek’leth, her hand still gripping it tightly, forearm up to the elbow neatly severed, fall away in a jet of purple blood to the dirty snow at her feet. Agony poured into her, and she howled into the blizzard as the domes caught light. Plasma charges hidden beneath the floors turned them all into crackling bonfires, and the churn of flames briefly set the blizzard to a hissing, poisonous rain.
She staggered a short distance before the pressure wave from the plasma detonations knocked her off her feet and face-first into the snow. The ache of the cut limb was nothing to what came next; the unspeakable pain as her cloak burned, the armor plates on her back slagging and melting into her flesh.
Commander Ga’trk died cursing a foe that had never even shown her a face, an enemy who would lay a trap so craven. She died there, on that nameless ball of ice and rock, she and her men now ghosts in more than name.
* * *
Light-years away, on a military base on the planet Archanis, in a bunker that showed on no maps and behind a door that bore no detail, an aging warrior took up his d’k tahg and cut a wound along his forearm. The fresh mark made by the general’s honor blade joined other long-healed white scars that webbed his flesh.
He let blood drip from the knife to the floor and grimaced at the other senior warriors in the command chamber. The glassy artificiality of the ice world faded around them, and they were once more standing upon the grid of a holodeck. Behind them, the technicians and operations crew said nothing, waiting.
The general began; first a low growl in the deepest register, held in the pit of his chest. Building and building until he gave it voice, made it a roar. He threw back his head and bellowed defiance, the echo of his cry calling from the lips of every Klingon in the room.
When the death shout faded, the old soldier sheathed his blade, considering his self-inflicted wound. It was his way to do this, to remember each and every death that came from his command. Each cut was a warrior, a ship, a battle squad lost to Sto-Vo-Kor, a blood cost that he had been responsible for.
“Enough,” he muttered, turning to his adjutant. “This is the end to it.”
The adjutant exchanged a wary glance with the other officers. “General. This endeavor stems from a request of great import. From the highest levels.”
“I know that, whelp.” The general ran a hand through his thinning beard, his forehead ridges thickening as he grimaced. “And we have done as the alliance demands of us. But enough now. No more Klingon blood will be spilled in the name of this.”
“Honorless dogs,” muttered another of the warriors. “They knew we were coming. Perhaps the Orions managed to warn them. . . .”
“What shall we tell our ally?” demanded the adjutant. “We were asked this favor because we were capable of it! Now we taste blood and we halt in our tracks?”
The general’s blow came out of nowhere, a sweeping backhand that shattered the adjutant’s nose and turned his face into a blood-streaked mess. He had the strength not to fall, but only barely, staggering back and clutching at the injury.
“Never dare to lecture me on the taste of blood,” said the old warrior, pausing to lick a little of the purple fluid that had gathered over the studs of his gauntlet. “We were asked to perform this deed, flattered by praise of our martial prowess! But it is hollow. See the truth, fool. The ally asks this of us not because we are capable of it, but because he considers our warriors disposable. He does not wish to sully himself with acts of murder, even in righteous vengeance. Better he uses the Klingons to be his wolves.” He eyed the others in the room, daring them to speak against him. “He has us do what he will not.” He shook his head. “But we have done enough already.”
The general stalked forward and set his burning gaze on the adjutant. “Heed me,” he told the other Klingon. “This is the message you will pass on. Say it to him, word for word, so there is no error.” The old warrior switched from his native tongue to the human language of Federation Standard. “Tell him that the Bajoran will have to do his own dirty work from now on.”
* * *
Vale became aware that she was pacing the captain’s ready room in a slow, continuous orbit, and she sighed, pausing before she sat down on the edge of Riker’s desk. The padd in her hand was filled with pages of regulation-issue Starfleet paperwork, docking protocols and the like transmitted over from McKinley Station after Titan had berthed at the platform; essentially it was boilerplate documentation, but it still needed the authorization of a ship’s commanding officer—and as Riker had been summoned away before Titan’s impulse grids had a chance to cool, right now that was her.
She stared at the page without really seeing it, and she blew out a breath. Looking away, Christine glanced out the ready room’s window to where the curve of the Earth’s surface caught the glow of a sunrise. It looked the same as it ever had, she thought. From up here, peaceful and quiet.
Down there, it had to be a careful, civil chaos. In the entire history of the United Federation of Planets, from its formation more than two centuries ago, no serving president had ever been assassinated in office. Not that there hadn’t been attempts, of course. Ra-Ghoratreii of Efros had come the closest to taking that dubious honor, after the whole Gorkon conspiracy business, and it was barely a year ago that Nan Bacco herself had been the target of a failed effort on the Orion homeworld.
But now it had actually happened. Bacco’s death was something new and terrible. The people of the Federation had never lost a leader like this, and no one knew where to start to process it. Candlelight vigils and memorial ceremonies were already being held on member-worlds across the quadrant, and the scenes of public despair from the late president’s home Cestus III were harrowing.
The timing of it couldn’t have been worse. The wounds of a Federation bloodied by the Borg Invasion were finally healing, and concerns over the rise of the Typhon Pact, the newest power in the galactic arena, had found some measure of stability. Olive branches had been extended to the Gorn and the Romulans. There was a sense of moving forward, that perhaps the quadrant was past the most terrible, that there was hope again.
But now this brutal attack on someone respected across the galaxy had shaken the people of the UFP once more. Add to that the uncertainty surrounding the relationship between the Federation and Andor, one of its founding members, and the ramifications of Bacco’s death went far beyond Vale’s ability to grasp.
She lost herself in the view from the window, measuring her own thoughts. In a way, she felt a little coldblooded about it all. At first, Vale had experienced the same hard jolt of shock and anger that many of her crewmates did, the moment of breathless astonishment at the scenes of the assassination. But then, like a switch flipping inside her mind, all that emotion had been buried.
She looked at the news footage of the incident light-years distant on DS9, and she was analyzing it, calculating the clinical facts of the killing. Before Titan, before Starfleet, Christine Vale had been a peace officer in the Pibroch City Police Department on Izar, and somewhere underneath the arrowhead combadge and black uniform tunic, she was still a cop at heart. She looked at Bacco’s death and saw a crime scene, disconnecting herself from the emotional content of the offense and asking the dispassionate questions. Who was the shooter? How did they get a weapon through station security? What was the motive?
On one level, she knew that the best investigative minds in the UFP were already finding answers to those questions and many more, but right at that mome
nt, Vale wanted to be there with them, working the case. If for no other reason than to be able to begin to make sense of the brutality of the act, to feel as if she were doing something about it.
A sigh escaped her lips and she looked back to the padd, tapping the authorization tab, reluctantly returning to the matter at hand. When the intercom chimed in the quiet of the ready room, she almost jumped.
“Commander Vale?” Out on the bridge, Tuvok was keeping a watch on things. “Incoming message for your attention.”
Despite the fact that she was alone in the room, Vale drew up and straightened. “Pipe it in here, will you?”
A moment later, Will Riker’s voice issued out of the air. “Christine? Do we have privacy?” She could hear the faint sound of wind noise in the background, as if he was up on a roof somewhere.
“It’s just me. Go ahead, sir.”
“I have had . . . a very interesting morning.”
“Let me guess. The brass decided to give you early retirement, Captain?” It was a weak attempt to lighten her tone, and it fell flat.
“Worse than that,” said Riker. “As of now, I am the brass. It’s not ‘Captain’ anymore. Akaar just promoted me to rear admiral.”
She was genuinely speechless for a long moment before finding her voice again. “Does it make me a bad person that the first thought I have is, ‘Do I get the ship now?’ ”
Vale heard the brief smile in his voice. “Don’t push your luck, Commander. I’ve got you right where I need you.”
It was tough to frame her next question, so in the end she gave up. “Look, I’m just going to put this out there; what the hell is going on, sir?”
“Damned if I know. Apparently I get an office and an aide, but so far this promotion doesn’t appear to come with any explanations. But there’s more going on down here than just the fallout from the shooting. I’m going to need your steady hand up there, Chris.”
She nodded. “Aye, sir. The crew should be told. And they’ll have questions.”
“They can take a number and get in line behind me.” He hesitated. “Here’s the thing. We don’t know how long Titan is going to be here, so my first order with this new rank is to run up a shore leave schedule, grant liberty to whomever needs it. I think our people could use some air and open sky. And McKinley’s tech staff can take the opportunity to give the ship a tune-up. Make that happen. In the meantime . . .” He drifted off for a second. “I’ll try to figure out how to explain this to Deanna. It’s a lot to process.”
Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice Page 2