“The Empress has given the Reach to Reyes. In return for keeping the colonies there in line, the commodore has a free hand to do as he wishes.” Spock paused. “His governance of the zone resembles that of a feudal bandit warlord more than an Imperial officer.”
“You have a source inside his command?” Given the admiral’s breadth of information, it seemed a logical deduction.
Spock confirmed her conclusion with a nod. “I have cultivated an agent within the staff involved on ‘Operation Vanguard’ and learned the true purpose of Starbase 47’s presence in the Reach. Vanguard station is the nexus for a series of scientific missions across the zone, gathering and conducting research into relics of alien technology from a highly advanced precursor civilization. These ongoing intrusions are antagonizing the Tholian Assembly and drawing the attention of the Klingons.”
“And that is why you wish to move now?”
He nodded. “My source has fallen silent. I am concerned that Reyes’s staff have discovered something that will radically alter the balance of power in the quadrant. This cannot be allowed to occur, but I cannot openly oppose the commodore at this time.”
She looked at the data card again. “You want me to eliminate Reyes?” She had killed many for Spock, men and women, from range and from close enough to taste their last breaths. She remembered them all.
“I require you to cultivate a cat’s paw in order to eradicate the threat that Reyes and Vanguard present to my plans. All of the information you will require is in your hand.”
When T’Prynn looked up at him again, she could not keep the weariness from her expression. She had come there today hoping, as she did each time, that he would free her from this servitude. The endless cycle of lies and subterfuge, the duplicity of being Spock’s spy piled on top of the everyday deceit of life in the Imperial Fleet, dragged her down like iron chains. She wanted nothing more than to end it. To be free to be who she was, unfettered by her secrets.
“This will be the last,” she said, the words tumbling from her lips. “After this, I will walk away.” T’Prynn met Spock’s gaze. “I believe in your vision, Admiral, and I will do all I can to serve that. But I have reached my limit with the Empire and the blood I must wade through as a Fleet officer, the mendacity of it. This far and no further.” She held up the disc. “I do this, and I leave Starfleet behind, forever.”
Spock answered without hesitation. “Agreed.”
The corridors of the station became real around her, and Commander Lurqal stiffened. It was force of habit; every other time she had been transported aboard an Imperial craft, it had been with disruptor and mek’leth in hand, ready to strike out and kill everything she saw. It felt peculiar to be under different, almost cordial, circumstances. She eyed the walls of the complex and took in the troop of Imperial security officers arrayed around the reception area. They stood at parade-ground ready, clearly meant as a gesture of respect for the new arrivals; but she had no doubts that they would draw their phasers if any Klingon in the delegation made the slightest aggressive move. She heard a grunt from Turag at her side; the envoy from Qo’noS was no more impressed than Lurqal was.
The commander took a moment to gauge the scope of the chamber. The walls were adorned with rich hangings and battle pennants, flags lined with brocade drooping down to the deck, and here and there what appeared to be trophy items. The skulls of aliens, pieces of shredded hull metal recovered from dead enemies. Lurqal recognized what was certainly part of a hatch from a Romulan troopship.
She sniffed. Such displays were beneath the notice of a true warrior. Lurqal preferred to have her deeds speak for themselves, instead of constructing a museum to aggrandize them; but then the profligate display was certainly in character for the man who commanded this station, if Turag’s intelligence reports were to be believed.
And now that man approached them, with a heavy-set Orion a step behind him and a bowed bond-slave following. His uniform tunic was heavy with showy decorations and rank insignia, and at his hip rested a long-barreled energy weapon. The human’s face was craggy and lined, with old scars upon a shorn skull. His right eye was an augmetic replacement, a bulbous thing of polished steel. It stared back at her with an unblinking red lens. He had a mocking grin playing about his lips.
“At last,” he began. “Here you are. Welcome to my castle keep, Envoy. Welcome to Vanguard.”
“Thank you, Commodore Reyes,” Turag said silkily. “I must confess, my agents were quite surprised by your overtures to us.” He gave a little laugh. “We thought this might be some attempt at subterfuge on your part. Perhaps a ham-fisted attempt at assassination?”
“Really?” Reyes mimicked Turag’s tone and manner. “That would have been a silly thing to do, don’t you agree?” He glanced at Lurqal for a split second, and she felt the man’s gaze rake over her. “And you are?”
“Commander Lurqal is my military counterpart,” Turag explained. “If what you have to offer us appears legitimate, she will make an evaluation for the Klingon warfleet.”
She took her cue. “We have come as you requested, Reyes. I suggest you show us why we should waste our time with you as soon as possible. My people are not known for their patience.”
The commodore grinned. “I do like a woman who knows her own mind. Don’t you agree, Ganz?” He addressed the comment to the Orion, who nodded slightly, maintaining an air of watchful menace at Reyes’s side. “You’re right. Why waste time? Let’s cut to the chase.” He beckoned them to follow. “C’mon. Let me show you why you ought to get into bed with me.”
Lurqal grimaced at the ugly metaphor but said nothing and fell in line with Turag and his bodyguards.
Reyes threw a look over his shoulder as they walked. “Let’s put our cards on the table. I know you ridge-heads know about Erilon and all the other places we’ve been digging up inside the Reach.” He winked. “You know something’s out here, something big, but you don’t know what, and you still want it anyway, right?” He eyed Lurqal.
“Whatever has value to an enemy has value to us,” she retorted. “We can take it or destroy it.”
“If you can actually get it, yeah,” replied Reyes.
Turag’s manner cooled. “Did you bring us here to insult us, Commodore?”
Lurqal answered before Reyes could speak. “He brought us here to impress us.” She gestured around at the walls of the starbase. “The commodore is showing off his space fortress.”
“I am, at that,” Reyes admitted, turning the red eye on her. “But that’s just the curtain raiser. See, we’ve found a few things out here, Commander. Leftovers, of a sort. Relics from a species that at first we thought were dead and gone. Technology that makes our starships look like rowboats. But I’m getting ahead of myself.” He patted the Orion on the shoulder, a gesture of familiarity that drew a cold glower from the emerald-skinned alien. “Ganz here, he and I have come to an understanding about a lot of things. We’ve both had a…I suppose you could say it was an epiphany. I’ve come to realize my own worth, if you follow.”
“I don’t,” Lurqal replied.
Reyes’s grin widened, and he flicked at the Imperial insignia on his tunic. “One thing I’ve learned is that out here in the dark, the Earth is a long, long way away. A man has to be his own emperor as captain of a ship or starbase. And after a while, the size of that small kingdom…” He chuckled, amused by himself. “Well, it gets a little tight around the britches, you know what I mean?”
“You want more power.”
“And I’m going to get it. Matter of fact, you’re going to help me.”
“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 he
rself 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—”
“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.”
Star Trek®: Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows Page 13