As far as the captain was concerned, he was lying through his teeth. She said as much. “So you’re going to remain here on my ship until we finish what we came here for.”
“You can’t do that!” he told her.
“Watch me,” she said, and turned to go.
“Damn you,” he said, his voice rising to a bellow that echoed in the confines of the bay. “This is kidnapping! Do you hear me? Come back here! Guinan!”
There was something about the way he said her name that set the captain’s teeth on edge. “Go screw yourself,” she muttered beneath her breath, and left the cargo bay.
In her most honest and forthright moments, Guinan had to admit to herself that she valued Gilaad Ben Zoma for more than his experience as a rebel.
True, the man had been trying to undermine the Alliance for the last decade or so. Also true, he knew his way around the quadrant as few others did. In fact, he had commanded a vessel of his own at one time, until the Alliance crippled it beyond repair.
But as much as all that, it was the way his eyes changed color as he went from light to shadow that she loved most about him. Just the way they were changing now from olive green to a deep, soft brown.
Ben Zoma was a handsome man, even if he wasn’t a member of her species.
“We’ve got to move quickly,” he told her, taking a seat beside her in the Lakul’s cramped little conference room.
The captain sat back in her chair and nodded. “It’s only a matter of time before the Klingons find Morgen on the fifth planet. And when they do, they’re not going to look kindly on his being there.”
Morgen was a prince of the Daa’Vit, a warrior species that had made a blood alliance with the Klingons several decades earlier. However, not all Daa’Vit were altogether pleased with the arrangement. Some of them had come to sympathize with the plight of the Terrans.
Morgen was the leader of that faction. He had reached Guinan through an intricate chain of contacts, not knowing her name but aware of her reputation. Just a couple of weeks earlier, they had agreed on a rendezvous—on the fifth planet in what Terrans called the Proteus system.
Morgen was down there now. And in another few minutes, the Klingons would be there as well. Unfortunately, Morgen didn’t know what kind of danger he was in.
“We can’t just fly by and beam him up,” said Ben Zoma, looking past her at one of the ship’s few undamaged observation ports. “It would take too long to establish a transporter lock.”
The captain thought about it. “True. But we can do the next best thing: drop off some of our people to apprise Morgen of the situation.”
Ben Zoma nodded. “Make it more difficult for the Klingons to find him, even with their advanced scanning systems.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll put a team together.”
“Make sure I’m on it,” said the captain.
Ben Zoma looked at her askance. “That’s a bad idea. You’re too valuable to us.”
“And what good is a chess piece,” she asked, “if you never use it?”
If he was going to voice another objection, he reconsidered. “Don’t forget to check the charge on your phaser,” he told her as he left the room.
One moment, the captain was on the Lakul’s transporter pad, surrounded by five of her fellow conspirators. The next, she was standing on the rocky brown slope of an immense, barren valley, watching tiny lavender-colored fuzz balls waft past her on a hot, acrid-smelling wind.
Somewhere beyond the cloud-ridden, vermilion expanse of sky, the Lakul was speeding off at full impulse, the highest velocity to which it could aspire within the labyrinthine gravity well of a solar system. With luck, Ben Zoma would tuck the ship into the asteroid belt they had identified near the system’s outskirts sometime before the Klingons arrived.
The captain looked around the expanse of the valley. So did Joseph, Paris, Wu, Pernell, and Ulelo. None of them saw anything except the fuzz balls.
“He should be here,” the captain said, her voice snatched by the wind.
“Maybe he had some trouble beaming down,” Joseph suggested. “Or maybe he plotted the wrong coordinates.”
Either was a possibility. But Morgen had known the seriousness of what he was doing and the penalty he would face if he were discovered. In his place, the captain would have made damned sure to eliminate the slightest chance of a slip-up—technical or otherwise.
“We’ve got to find him,” she said, removing her tricorder from her belt.
But she couldn’t find any life signs within the device’s effective radius. Judging by her colleagues’ expressions, they weren’t faring any better.
And they couldn’t use their communicators. Not when the Klingons could monitor their signals and trace them to their points of origin.
“What now?” asked Paris.
“It’s a big planet,” Wu reminded them.
“If he’s even on it,” said Joseph.
The wind whistled above them, spawning dust devils along the slopes. The captain swore beneath her breath. What if Joseph was right? What if Morgen hadn’t made it to the rendezvous point for one reason or another?
“We can’t assume that,” she decided. “Not until we’ve done a lot more looking.”
Morgen had risked his life to help them when no one else in the quadrant would do so. They couldn’t just write him off.
The captain turned to Ulelo, who knew more about sensor tech than the rest of them. “Ideas?” she said.
Ulelo bit his lip. “We can increase the range of our tricorders by linking them together. But that will take a while.” He glanced at the high, lurid sky. “And if we don’t find cover soon—”
“We’ll be of little use to Morgen or anyone else,” said the captain, finishing his sentence for him.
She scanned the slope on which they had materialized. There was an exposed shelf of light gray rock jutting out from it maybe thirty meters below them. If they could get underneath it, dig themselves in with their phasers…
She gave the others their orders. A few moments later, they were lying beneath the outcropping, gouging a hiding place for themselves with four converging phaser beams. Dust billowed from the point of pulverizing impact.
Not knowing how deeply the outcropping was anchored, they didn’t want to go too far. Just far enough to shield themselves from the Klingons’ sensors.
“All right,” said the captain when she thought they had dug in far enough. “Let’s get comfortable.”
Coughing in the debris cloud they had created, the landing party wriggled into the space beneath the rock. Then, closely packed, they waited for Ulelo to link their tricorders. With every second that passed, the likelihood of the Klingons’ discovering Morgen’s party increased.
But Ulelo could work only so quickly. As the captain watched him, she reminded herself of that. No point in rushing him. He knows how much is at stake.
Finally, Ulelo completed his labors. With all five of their tricorders working together via a wireless link, he crawled out from cover and scanned the valley.
“Anything?” the captain whispered, doing her best not to cough too loudly.
“Nothing yet,” Ulelo reported.
Unfortunately, the Klingons’ sensor technology was more powerful than the landing party’s tricorders, link or no link. If anyone were going to find Morgen, it would be the marauder that had followed Picard into the star system.
“Wait a minute,” said Ulelo. He fine-tuned the controls on his tricorder. “I’ve got something.”
Melekh, second in command on the Klingon Imperial Cruiser Tlhab, took out his disruptor pistol and aimed it at the transport’s metallic, slightly convex control console. With a squeeze of his finger, he speared the console with a narrow blue beam of destructive force, which ripped through the metallic surface and elicited a geyser of white-hot sparks.
It was just a token gesture, a release of the smallest part of the frustration the Klingon felt.
Of
course, the two warriors who had teleported with him to the transport didn’t know that. They jumped at the crimson flash of disruptor fire, their lips pulling back from their teeth, their hands darting to the weapons on their hips.
Seeing that there was no danger, they appeared to relax again. But their eyes remained narrowed as they resumed their inspection of the craft’s navigation logs.
Melekh smiled to himself. A warrior needed to be alert. It was good that he had shaken the others up a little, even if that hadn’t necessarily been his intention.
But his good humor didn’t last long. He had been sent there to find either the pilot of the transport or some indication of what had happened to him. He had found neither.
Melekh watched a thin, black twist of smoke ascend from the ruined console and collect under the low ceiling, and considered the facts as he knew them. The Tlhab had picked up the Terran transport’s presence on long-range sensors and, in accordance with standing orders, had moved to intercept. When the transport ducked into this star system, the Tlhab had slowed to sublight speed and maintained pursuit.
That was when the second transport showed up on the Klingon cruiser’s sensor screens, making Melekh’s captain glad that he had followed the vessel. It was one thing to discover an unauthorized Terran transport in this sector and quite another to find two such transports. Clearly, there was something going on.
But the second transport had vanished almost as quickly as it appeared, no doubt taking refuge somewhere in the system. While the Tlhab tried to pinpoint its location, a scan of the first transport identified it as the Stargazer, a vessel registered to one Jean-Luc Picard and known to the Empire.
But what was it doing there? Why was it meeting the second transport? Attempts to establish communication with the Stargazer had been unsuccessful, raising further questions. Hence Melekh’s mission.
Unfortunately, he had nothing to report. Nonetheless, he took out his communicator and opened a link to the Tlhab, knowing that his captain would want to know what had transpired.
The communications officer, a gray-bearded fellow named Pejor, responded instantly.
“Give me the captain,” said Melekh.
“He is occupied with the High Command,” came the response.
Melekh was surprised. Had he been the captain of the Tlhab, he would have waited for some positive developments before he communicated anything to his superiors. However, it was too curious an incident not to mention it at some point.
“The captain was fortunate to obtain an audience so quickly,” Melekh observed, knowing how difficult it could be to get through to the High Command.
“Actually,” said Pejor, “the High Command contacted him.”
Melekh absorbed the information, chewing it over like a stick of dried targh meat. “Interesting timing,” he replied.
“I thought so, too,” said Pejor.
As Ben Zoma deposited himself in the captain’s chair of the Lakul, he took quick note of the image on the viewscreen. As before, it displayed only a thickly packed field of copper-and-blue asteroids.
No sign of the Klingon cruiser, he thought. At least, not yet.
“How are our shields holding up?” he asked Gerda Idun.
She glanced back at him from the pilot’s seat. “They’re at eighty-eight percent. But with all this radioactivity…”
“I know,” Ben Zoma replied.
“How’s our guest?” she asked in return.
He smiled to himself. “Settling in. He still claims he’s innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Gerda Idun turned back to her control panel. “Of course he does.”
“Sounds unlikely,” said Ben Zoma, “I know.”
And yet he found himself starting to believe Picard’s protests. What if the poor bastard really was innocent?
It doesn’t matter, he insisted inwardly. He’s still a Klingon collaborator. If he’s not guilty of this, he’s guilty of something else.
Ben Zoma couldn’t afford to trust anyone beyond his crewmates. None of them could. They had too little margin for error.
And without them, the Alliance would continue to inflict one cruelty after another on the human species without fear of reprisal. If he doubted that, all he had to do was recall the events of a few weeks earlier.
They had stopped at a cold, barren place called Bering’s World, where some much-needed repairs to the Lakul could be carried out by people they trusted—insurrectionists who hadn’t yet gathered the resources they needed to join the fray. Unfortunately, the Lakul’s visit coincided with a Cardassian inspection.
The Cardassians made a few arrests, just to remind everyone of who was in charge in the sector. And, of course, the ones arrested weren’t the ones who should have been. The inspection was almost over when one of the Cardassians was hit by a rock.
The perpetrator was a little girl, but no one knew that until after the Cardassian had fired his disruptor in retaliation. The child was dead before she hit the ground.
In the riot that followed, Guinan got to the offending spoonhead and put a phaser bolt in his ear. But before she could get away, she was busted up by the Cardassian’s comrades.
Or so it seemed to Ben Zoma, who wasn’t all that far away from her. And in fact, she disappeared for a while. But hardly an hour after the melee, as her crew was canvassing the capital for her, she turned up in pretty good shape.
Just a few bruises were all. Ben Zoma was grateful. He could have captained the ship without her, but not as well as she would have.
After all, he wasn’t of her species. He couldn’t read people the way she did.
Melekh had hardly materialized on the Tlhab’s transporter platform when he was summoned by the captain to the ship’s council chamber.
He found Captain Druja sitting in his customary seat at the head of the chamber’s heavy wooden table. As Melekh entered, the captain gestured for him to take a seat at the table’s opposite end.
Druja of the House of Ajaq was short for a Klingon but very broad and muscular, with a neck like the trunk of a century-old s’naiah tree. In his youth, he had been a wrestler, in which capacity he had cracked the ribs of more than one overconfident opponent—or so he was quick to claim.
However, it took more than a talent for rib cracking to command a battle cruiser. After all, Klingons were political creatures. They seldom said exactly what they meant. Those who thrived in the Empire and all its institutions, the Imperial Fleet in particular, were those who could discern the grain of truth in a pile of chaff.
It was this quality that the captain occasionally lacked.
Nor was it a secret in the Fleet. In fact, Melekh had requested to serve on the Tlhab for that very reason—that Druja had his failings and that an ambitious officer, eager for the captain’s chair, could at some point take advantage of them.
“As you know,” said Druja even before Melekh was seated, “I was contacted by the High Command. It was not a coincidence that they chose to speak with me at this particular juncture.”
“They were aware of the transports?” asked Melekh.
“One of them,” said the captain. “The one we have yet to locate. It was here to conduct a secret rendezvous with a party of Daa’Vit, led by none other than the son of the Daa’Vit leader.”
“Morgen?” asked Melekh.
The captain scowled, then said, “I forgot that you were on the Daa’Vit homeworld for a time.”
Melekh’s first assignment, on the HeghmoH, was to participate in war games with the Daa’Vit. Afterward there were ceremonies, renewed pledges of allegiance, a crimson liqueur with the kick of an enraged s’tarahk.
“I was,” he confirmed.
Since that time, he had held the Daa’Vit in high esteem. They were not Klingons, but they were fierce and combative in their own way. However, if Morgen had come to talk with humans in secret…
“Then the information I received from the High Command may not surprise you,” said the captain.
He
spoke of what he had learned. Melekh listened intently, hearing each word not only for itself but also for its ramifications, which were manifold.
“The High Command,” said Druja, “has apparently been tracking this meeting for some time. Our interference, while well intended, has complicated matters. However, the High Command still foresees the possibility of a positive outcome. As a result, it has devised a new plan—one it has entrusted us to carry out.”
He went on to reveal what it was.
“It will be my pleasure,” said Melekh, “to be instrumental in the success of this effort.”
Druja nodded. “You are dismissed.”
As Melekh departed from the council chamber, he turned the possibilities over in his mind. Just as he had guessed, this was not a trivial matter. Far from it.
His captain had blundered. The best Druja could hope for was to regain his stature in the fleet by capturing some of the conspirators. But there were many ways for the conspirators to be apprehended.
And at least some of them would allow Melekh to shine more brightly than his superior.
Ben Zoma was still sitting in the captain’s chair of the Lakul, wondering if Guinan and the others were still alive, when he noticed something on the viewscreen.
The asteroids there seemed to be moving to starboard. But that would only be the case if the Lakul was changing position—and he hadn’t seen any reason for Gerda Idun to make a change.
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
“I’m not doing anything,” she told him, her hands starting to crawl over her console.
Ben Zoma leaned forward. “What’s the matter?”
“My controls aren’t responding,” said Gerda Idun.
“Run a diagnostic.”
But she was way ahead of him. “The controls have been bypassed.” She shot a glance back over her shoulder. “All helm functions have been rerouted to the auxiliary control panel in the cargo bay.”
“It’s not just the helm,” said Kochman, who had taken Joseph’s place at the tactical station. “It’s everything. Engine core, life support, shields…”
Star Trek®: Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows Page 16