His communicator chirped. Only his mother would be calling him now and he considered ignoring the call, but it was difficult, very difficult to ignore Mother. He held the com to his mouth. “Yes, Mother?”
“The ground rumbled. What are you doing?”
Just like her, he thought, thinking it was my fault. It felt odd to be having such ungracious thoughts about Gothmara, but there they were and there was no denying them. “There was an ex ...” he began, but then changed his mind. “We’re using explosives to clear a way into the canyon.”
A moment of silence, then his mother said, “Good idea.”
“Anything else, Mother?”
“Good hunting.”
Dust and snow settled and Morjod lifted his field glasses to his eyes. Beyond the gap, he caught glimpses of fleeing figures. “Excellent,” he said, grinning, then shouted, “BEAT THE DRUMS AGAIN! FORWARD!”
The mass of warriors and monsters moved as he [271] commanded. Morjod enjoyed watching them march, loved the feel of the drums in his belly. Why did they ever stop using drums? he wondered. Telling your enemy that you’re coming to kill them is the most satisfying thing I can imagine.
“KEEP THE NOSE UP!” Worf shouted at Ezri, who barely spared him a look, let alone a word in response.
Father is venting, Alexander thought.
Pointing at Alexander without looking at him, Worf roared, “ANOTHER SPREAD OF TORPEDOES!” Rotarran had precisely four remaining in her tubes. Alexander doubted that this constituted a “spread,” but there was no sense in bothering the captain with facts that would only aggravate him; Alexander double-checked the firing solutions and popped the tubes.
On the main screen, the smooth, silver-white ball that he had come to know as Boreth resolved into a grayish blue, cracked and scalloped landscape. Flashing indicator lights laid over the image indicated that they were roughly on target. Somewhere down in those icy wastelands were a great many Klingons, and Martok might even be among them. Of course he is among them! Alexander told himself. He had to believe that Martok still lived, otherwise he would collapse beneath a crushing sense of futility.
Before him stood Ezri, unable to sit in the heavy space armor, the sword shining brightly even through the gloom of the bridge’s grease-choked atmosphere. The gauntlet’s chunky fingers made handling the controls nearly impossible. Alexander heard her muttering something about fire and ice as she struggled; he wondered if it was some kind of Trill prayer.
[272] Prayer or not, invoking fire and ice fit the Rotarran’s current situation. The edge of the main viewscreen was tinted a flickering red and Alexander checked the exterior hull temperature. Bad, but not unbearable. Leskit had inserted Rotarran into a perfect approach despite the practically nonexistent sensor data and then gotten them a fair way toward the surface before their pursuers caught up and started firing. Amazingly, Chak’ta and the others did not seem to want to destroy them, but only to discourage them from continuing toward Boreth. As they neared the surface, however, their enemies’ discretion began slipping. The most recent barrage had almost killed Ortakin and so now Ezri had the helm.
“TRANSPORTERS?” Worf hollered.
Alexander checked the status lights and was relieved to see that the carefully marshaled energy was still where he had left it. “Nominal,” he responded, though he wasn’t certain if his father really listened.
The engineers had been instructed to leave it until the last possible second, until the belly shields were just about to give in, but that didn’t seem likely until they broke through to the lower atmosphere and (theoretically) began to slow down and level out. Fortunately, they needed to put minimal energy into the impulse drive. Gravity was their engine. As his old friend and former shipmate Data might have put it, “Isaac Newton is driving now.” Alexander had met up with one of the bridge officers from the old Enterprise-D on DS9 several months ago, who had related the story of the day Deanna Troi and Data had successfully piloted the crippled saucer section onto the surface of Veridian III. “Such language!” the officer had said in response to Data’s now-legendary comment as he had felt gravity’s [273] final, inexorable tug on the seat of his pants. “He just hasn’t been the same since he got that emotion chip!”
Data with emotions: Alexander fervently hoped that he would have a chance to see that before he died.
A tremendous explosion rocked Rotarran, sending Alexander tumbling to the deck. Alarms blared, panels flashed warning lights, and every station on the ship called the bridge asking for advice, instructions, or simple reassurance. Alexander righted himself (Ezri didn’t look like she had moved at all), started to respond to the first call, but then saw the two blinking messages on his status board:
In one minute the ship would be within their damaged transporters’ limited range.
And, more pressing, Chak’ta had shot off their port nacelle, requiring that reserve power be fed into the shields.
All the energy Alexander had set aside for the transporters would be gone in seconds.
Gothmara watched the tiny symbols that represented her son’s forces move through the narrow valley toward the circular plain where Martok’s pitiful band waited. She recognized the place from her explorations, the only unfrozen body of water on Boreth. A geothermal vent at the bottom prevented the lake from freezing solid. When she had been searching the area for other Hur’q, she had also studied the lake bed, hypothesizing that the Hur’q had used the geothermals to power their bases, but had never found any evidence to support that supposition.
While the lake was not a particularly deep body of water—hardly a “bottomless pit”—she wondered what would happen if a large explosion took place at its center. If, against all expectation, Martok’s forces began to [274] win, she might have to crack the ice. She had tried every other way she knew to kill the man; drowning might have to do.
Again, her communicator beeped, but she knew it wasn’t Morjod. She knew his signal intimately. One of the ships in orbit was trying to contact her, but Gothmara did not wish to be bothered. Leaning closer to her sensor board, she absently reached over and switched off the channel. Nothing happening in space right now could be more interesting than what was occurring before her.
Halfway down the canyon, the katai encountered a column of perhaps two hundred running warriors led by Kahless. When they spotted Martok, the troops began cheering, but Martok, seated behind Angwar, silenced them with a chopping motion and pointed them back toward the lake. “Did you take out the guns?” he questioned.
Several of the commanders looked at each other and then one of them spoke up. “I think so, General. Most of them.”
Martok cast his glance heavenward in frustration. Gods of Qo’noS preserve me: Most of them! “Go back and take all of them! Stop acting like a rabble! Be an army!” He pointed his bat’leth at the emperor and shouted, “Kahless, array them in the Columns of Koloth.”
“It shall be done, Chancellor!” Kahless turned to the two warriors beside him and said, “Carry out the chancellor’s orders: Six columns with sixty men each arranged in wedges. Array them around the perimeter where the enemy will enter the field.”
One of the two warriors hesitated. “Three hundred sixty, sire? I don’t know if we have ...”
[275] “Do your best, then,” Kahless said. “And take the guns!”
Kahless rushed up to Angwar and Martok and asked in a low voice, “How many?”
Neither man answered at first, but finally Martok had to say, “We do not know for certain. The way the ground shook, I’d say easily two thousand and perhaps more.”
Kahless looked grim, but was undeterred. “They will fight for you, Martok. You know that.”
“They may die for me, Kahless, and no one will ever know because Gothmara will see to it that there is no empire left.”
“We must prevail,” Angwar said.
“We must move,” Starn shouted over the rising tide of drumbeats. “If we are to do anything at all.”
Angwar nodded and spurred on the jarq. Martok left behind the emperor and the bulk of his column to see what he could do with those remaining on the lake. No doubt I will find my son there, he decided. And perhaps I will discover what happened to Worf.
As they rounded the last corner that led to the lake, Martok thought he saw the body of a man wedged between two rocks, but the jarq moved too fast and he could not see if the warrior was alive or dead. One more unknown warrior if we do not succeed, he thought, then bent his will to the coming battle.
On Rotarran’s smoke-choked bridge, Ezri Dax lifted her helmet and, just before locking it down into the collar, shouted, “WE’RE GOING IN!” She didn’t know why she said it. Anyone still alive on the bridge knew the destination; it just seemed appropriate to announce their forthcoming doom.
[276] On the monitor she saw a circular plain covered with tiny scurrying dots. Some ran to the left, some to the right, and others stood stock-still, no doubt more than a few of them pointing up at the red and smoking point of light headed their way.
Get ready, Martok, she thought. Special delivery coming your way.
19
About a quarter of the way across the ice plain, Pharh guessed that the mass of battling warriors were about two hundred meters away, all of them manfully (or womanfully) bashing one another. Going toward them, actually attempting to find his way into the mass of these fighters, even with the shield the katai had given to him strapped to his arm, ran counter to every instinct he possessed. Well, not instinct really. Instinct has nothing to do with it, he thought. Common sense tells me that running into a mob of Klingons and giant monsters is a bad idea; I don’t need instinct to tell me anything.
But Pharh went forward anyway. Reflecting on what Darok had said, he realized that he still had no definitive reason for his behavior except that he didn’t have any other ideas that would make a bit of difference. Would finding Martok and standing by him make a single bit of difference? Pharh had no clue, though he knew for a fact that not finding Martok and not standing beside him [278] would make no difference at all. And with everything that had happened to him over the past several days, the idea of making a difference had become important to Pharh.
He earnestly trudged along for several minutes—he was not a fleet-footed Ferengi—but concluded that he wasn’t getting any closer to the mass of the warriors since the fighting appeared to be moving farther away. Feeling ridiculous, Pharh stopped, panting heavily and sweating through the inner layers of clothing despite the freezing wind. He squinted, studying the figures against the blue-white background of the ice-encrusted canyon walls. Was he seeing an optical illusion?
The sun had climbed high enough in the cloudy sky that most of the ice field was bathed in an eerie luminescence, as much light reflected back up to the eye from the ground as fell from the sky. In between his gasps, he heard distant, isolated grunts and cries as tricks of the wind carried random sounds to Pharh’s sensitive ears.
Frax it all, they’re getting farther and farther away! Where in Eternal Bankruptcy are they going? Squinting, he thought he saw a gap in the far wall, but why would the warriors be going that way? As Pharh approached the center of the plain, he passed isolated couples of combatants who still circled one another warily, like pairs of lovers in some archaic dance. The Ferengi gave these pairs and trios as much space as he could, but, in truth, he did not have to try very hard. Even to his untrained eye, he could tell that anyone still fighting for Morjod was doing so for ego’s sake. Klingons, he understood, were like that sometimes.
All the Hur’q, Pharh noted with satisfaction, were dead, their bodies half-buried in the snow, their backs [279] and necks chopped repeatedly. Apparently, when a Hur’q fell, warriors on all sides made sure it stayed down.
Starting across the field again, though at a less determined pace, Pharh saw that most of the warriors had passed into the canyon. Martok must be in there, he decided, and altered his course slightly to the west in order to go that way, though his Ferengi common sense was asserting itself more strongly. It’s one thing to think you can cross afield of warriors, maybe ducking and weaving in and out between fighters until you find your ... your ... He was stuck. Though he knew he was the kr’tach, Pharh did not know what the other guy in the pair was called. He shook his head. Whatever ... Pushing through a bunch of packed-together warriors will be a completely different problem, especially since most of them don’t know who you are. ...
Confidence ebbing away even as the cold began to ooze up into his boots, Pharh halted. “Well, skritz,” he said, facing the trial every well-meaning but sensible person faced under similar circumstances. “This isn’t nearly as heroic as I’d hoped.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he heard an explosion ripple across the plain. Though the crack wasn’t fantastically loud at his location, Pharh’s sensitive hearing told him that the sound had been amazingly loud wherever it had begun. Turning his head from side to side, he attempted to track the thudding vibrations back to their source and found he was tipping his head backward and facing into the east, out toward the wide gap that led onto the circular plain.
Up there, he thought. Quite a way above the horizon. It’s a gray dot.
[280] If it was a missile, it was the slowest, worst-directed missile imaginable. Weaving back and forth across the sky, the gray dot trailed a thick, black tail of smoke, the kind he associated with the smokestacks of loading equipment that was destined to become part of someone’s insurance claim.
He heard another dull thud—the wump of a ship without shields breaking the sound barrier—and the gray dot hopped, skittered to the left, then recentered itself.
He thought, That leaves out a meteor. Whatever this thing was, someone was driving it. Someone was trying to bring in a ship, though slowing down enough to make a safe landing would be problematic. He cocked his head to the side and realized the dot was growing a lot faster than he preferred seeing.
Again, Pharh considered the wide open plain and, finally, all the tumblers clicked into place. “Skritz again,” he said, and scanned for possible escape routes. Turning toward the canyon, he headed down the only path that offered even a chance of salvation. As he turned, he ran into the first of the Klingons who fled the valley. Pharh spun around, desperate to keep his balance, because right behind the first Klingon he spotted Klingons number two through three hundred hot on number one’s heels. Everyone was leaving the canyon as quickly as they could.
Pharh tried getting their attention, waving his arms and fending them off, but the warriors ignored him. Probably that was a good thing; if anyone had paid him any mind, they would have sliced him in half. He noticed that while the Klingons were running, they weren’t precisely fleeing. Most of them had a very specific goal in mind.
“STOP!” the Ferengi shouted over and over. “LOOK [281] TO THE SKIES! UP THERE! LOOK! LOOK!” No one spared him a glance.
Finally, one of the lady katai reined in beside him on her smelly beast and asked, “What is it, kr’tach? Why are you here? Why aren’t you with your kr’mact?” (One question answered, Pharh thought.)
“I would be if I could find him,” Pharh shouted, “but, listen, we have more important problems right now.”
“Such as?” the katai asked sardonically.
“That!” Pharh shouted, pointing up into the sky.
She looked where his finger pointed and he had the grim satisfaction of watching her eyes widen. She said a word he suspected that nice lady Klingon warrior priestesses aren’t supposed to know. After fumbling at her side for what seemed an eternity, she drew a bone horn decorated with silver filigree letters around its border and blew as if her life depended on it, which it did.
Everyone within a hundred-meter radius turned to look at her. Naturally, Pharh thought, and she pointed heavenward.
Approximately one hundred and fifty Klingon warriors—maybe more since it’s always difficult to estimate under those kinds of circumstances—uttered
the same word the warrior priestess had used (or slight variations) and began running like frinx for the edges of the circle.
And Pharh, easily the slowest person on the ice as he pelted for the perimeter, had the satisfaction of thinking, At least I did something important.
Wings stretched wide, thrusters screaming, Rotarran slashed through the lower atmosphere, hull burning, her damaged warp nacelle sputtering coolant that turned [282] into black smoke upon contact with the oxygen-nitrogen mix.
Ezri braced herself against the navigational console, the fingers of her clumsy gauntlets almost too large to manipulate the control surfaces. The question was no longer if she possessed the necessary piloting skills, but whether Klingon engineers built airframes tough enough to take the punishment she was asking Rotarran’s to endure. Watching the flight-path indicator overlaid on the main monitor, she pointed the ship down the pipeline and tried ignoring the alarm Klaxons that told her she was flying too fast, too low, with too little reserve energy in the shields. She possessed the piloting knowledge, if not the skill, of the fifth Dax host, Torias, which told her that the ship could stand the strain. Of course, there was the nagging doubt of what Torias could possibly know about Klingon ships, but Ezri told that little traitor voice to shut up.
At the edge of her vision, the armor’s indicator lights nagged her about the rise of carbon-dioxide levels in the suit, but Ezri switched off the sensor. Suffocating was the least of her worries. In fact, considering her other options, asphyxiating inside her armor was one of the more pleasant prospects facing her.
STAR TREK: DS9 - The Left Hand of Destiny, Book Two Page 23