by Various
Cartwright sipped his dry red wine as the conversation took on a life of its own. Admiral zh’Ferro looked down from her end of the table and quietly remarked, “We will also have to kill Empress Marlena.”
“Easily done,” Colonel West replied.
Admiral Morrow, who had been enjoying his soup one carefully lifted spoonful at a time, set down his spoon and cleared his throat. “Neutralizing Spock and Marlena is only the first step,” he said. “And I don’t mean to say that doing so will be easy. But before we take that step, we should know what we intend to do next. Once they’re gone, who should take their place?”
“Not another Vulcan,” West said. “That’s for damned sure.”
Quiniven’s upswept eyebrows and facial ridges gave a sinister cast to his broad grin. “And who would you rather see on the imperial throne, Colonel West?”
Defiantly lifting his chin to the Denobulan’s challenge, West replied, “Someone who deserves it…. A human. Someone of noble lineage, verified ancestry.”
“Please,” implored Admiral zh’Ferro, “tell me you aren’t suggesting who I think you are.”
“Why not?” West retorted. “He was born to rule!”
Within seconds, it was apparent that everyone else in the room knew exactly of whom West spoke, and that no one agreed with his recommendation. All shook their heads in mute refusal. Despite trying to remain neutral, Cartwright himself joined the chorus of rejection. “I’m sorry, Ivan,” Cartwright said. “They’re right. We can’t put Ranjit Singh on the throne. It’d be a disaster.”
West pushed away his bowl of soup and fumed. “Ridiculous,” he said. “He’s a direct descendant of Khan Noonien Singh. No one has a better claim to the Terran throne than he does.”
Quiniven tempered his usual haughtiness, no doubt in an effort to reach an accord. “With all respect, Colonel, bowing to the whims of megalomaniacs is what got us into this predicament. Installing another one as emperor is hardly the ideal solution.”
“The general’s right,” Morrow said. “Besides, if I know our host, I think you’ll like his plan for the future of the Empire even better than your own.”
With new curiosity, Colonel West turned slowly and looked at Admiral Cartwright. “Do you have a plan, Admiral?”
Cartwright dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “It’s more a vision than a plan,” he said. “We need a military government at the imperial level. Martial law, no civilians. Kill Spock, the Senate, the Forum…all of them.”
Shocked silence followed Cartwright’s declaration. General Quiniven was the first to recover his composure. “Assassinating Emperor Spock and his wife might be logistically feasible,” the Denobulan noted. “But to wipe out the Forum and the Senate would require destroying the imperial palace, and that’s far more difficult. Its shields can stand up to half the fleet—and Earth’s orbital defense network would shred us before we could breach its defenses.”
“All very true,” Cartwright said. “Fortunately, we have an alternative.” He looked down the table at the director of Starfleet Intelligence. “Commodore Vosrok, would you kindly tell the other guests what you told me last week, about S.I.’s latest innovation?”
Vosrok was a hard person to read by means of body language. His leathery face betrayed little or no emotion, and his thickly scaled body was stiff and slow-moving. Even as all the guests in the room fixed their shared attention upon him, he seemed like a dark, vaguely amphibian statue at the end of the table. Blinking his topaz-colored eyes, he said, “Starfleet Intelligence has discovered and refined a new explosive compound called ultritium. So far, it’s undetectable by any of the security scanners inside the palace. It won’t take much to incinerate everyone in the Forum Chamber—maybe a few kilograms. As I’m sure you’re aware, the search protocols at the palace are quite stringent. To smuggle the explosive in, it will have to be disguised as something else, something that is above reproach, that will not be searched, and that can get close enough to Emperor Spock and Empress Marlena to ensure their annihilation.”
At the first sign of Vosrok’s pause, Admiral Bennett asked, “And that ‘something’ is what, exactly?”
The Chelon paused to sip his drink. Cartwright appreciated the sly sadism of Vosrok’s dramatic timing. In molasses-slow motion, Vosrok put down his glass, swallowed, and took a breath. “The ultritium,” he continued, “will be disguised as the armor of one of Spock’s elite imperial guards. Our assassin will wear it into the Forum during a joint session of the Legislature, and, on a signal from myself, turn the entire government to dust in a single blast.”
Vosrok’s plan was met with the same incredulous stares that had stifled Colonel West’s proposition. Quiniven shook his head and looked almost ready to laugh. “One of Spock’s guards? Are you mad? He recruits only Vulcans and makes them spend years proving their loyalty before they can serve in the palace. You will never infiltrate his guard corps.”
Vosrok looked to Cartwright, who broke the news to the table: “We already have.”
2289
11
Missives and Messengers
K orvat was more than just a desirable place to start a colony, and it was more than the Klingon Empire’s first solid foothold inside what had once been inviolable Terran space. Listening to General Kang address the assembly of Klingon and foreign dignitaries as the Klingons asserted their claim to sovereignty over the planet, Regent Gorkon knew that this annexation was nothing less than a test of the Terran Empire’s collective will.
The Terrans’ sole representative at the ceremony, a young male Trill diplomat named Curzon Dax, had arrived late and made no effort to be inconspicuous. Quite to the contrary, he had seemed intent on disrupting General Kang by walking brazenly up the center aisle, his footfalls snapping sharp echoes. Gorkon had watched from the balcony level as, down below, Dax forced himself into a front-row seat, jostling aside several high-ranking Klingons in the process. Kang, to his credit, had ignored the obnoxious Trill and continued his address, the force of his voice stealing back the attention of the audience and subduing its angry mutterings about the latecomer.
“This world,” Kang bellowed, “has been the rightful territory of the Klingon Empire for more than a century. Too long has it been neglected, left under the careless dominion of the Terrans. By right, we have reclaimed it in honorable combat. But the Terrans, unable to defend this world by force of arms, now wish to beg for its return with diplomacy!” The large number of Klingons seated in the auditorium roared with indignation, exactly as Kang had coaxed them to. “Once, the Terrans were warriors, and they understood that warriors do not talk, they act. They were an enemy we could respect.” Grumbles of glum agreement rolled like an undercurrent through the crowd. “But now they are weak and fearful, plying us with concessions and bribes. They are not the warriors we used to know; they are nothing more than jeghpu’wI, waiting for us to put our boots on their necks!” Furious howls of approval and a thunder of stomping feet filled the hall.
Curzon Dax sat with his arms folded, looking quite bored. As the bellicose chanting of the crowd began to subside, the Trill stood and walked up the nearby stairs onto the stage with Kang. Quickly, the room fell silent as the two men faced each other. Kang returned Curzon’s unblinking stare for several seconds, then Curzon spat at the ground in front of Kang’s feet.
“Pathetic,” Dax said with naked contempt. To the crowd, he added, “All of you.” He prowled like a hunting beast across the front of the stage as he hurled his sarcastic verbal attacks. “Such mighty warriors! You conquered an unarmed farming colony less than a light-year from your border. This is the greatest victory you’ve scored against the Terran Empire in sixty years?” He shook his head and sneered. “What a miserable empire you have. Congratulating yourselves for the least audacious victory in our shared history. I’m ashamed to think I once respected you as soldiers.” Now he turned and directed his comments at Kang. “I wasn’t sent to beg for Korvat; I was sent to nego
tiate the safe return of its people. But I’ve changed my mind, General. I hereby request that you execute our colonists—because they would be shamed to death if they had to return home and admit they were conquered by petaQpu like you.” Dax walked back to the stairs and looked out at the Klingons in the audience. “You want me to call you warriors? Bring your fleet to Ramatis. We’ll send it back to your widows in a box.” The Trill descended the stairs and strode back down the center aisle, ignoring the hostile jeers and overlapping threats. All the way to the exit, he never looked back. Then he was out the door, and the Terran-Klingon negotiations for Korvat were ended before they had begun.
Energized and enraged, the crowd surged with a magnetic fervor, but Regent Gorkon found himself more interested in General Kang’s reaction. Kang had paced to the back of the stage, where he stood alone and silent, peering through the shadows into some dark corner of himself.
General Chang, Gorkon’s senior military adviser, leaned over from the seat next to the Regent’s and said in a low voice, “The Trill got under Kang’s ridges.” Gorkon grimaced at Chang, who sat to his left. The general always sat on Gorkon’s left side, to make sure that his intact right eye—and not his triangular, leather eyepatch—faced the Regent.
“For a diplomat,” Gorkon said, “Dax went out of his way to provoke us. Why would Spock send us such an envoy?”
Chang picked up a bottle of warnog and refilled his stein with the pungent elixir. “Perhaps Dax was chosen in haste,” he said, offering to refill Gorkon’s stein. The Regent declined. Resealing the bottle, Chang added, “It’s possible that Spock did not realize how the man would comport himself.”
“That doesn’t sound like Spock,” Gorkon said. “It also doesn’t track with Curzon Dax’s reputation.”
“True,” Chang said. In the decade since Spock had begun reforming the Terrans’ political landscape, Dax had emerged as one of Spock’s most skillful negotiators. For him to inflame the battle rage of the Klingon Empire by losing his temper over such a minor affront was horribly out of character.
An unlikely notion pushed its way to the forefront of Gorkon’s thoughts. He guzzled the last dregs of warnog from his stein, then said, “Would Spock and Dax have deliberately set out to sabotage the Korvat talks?”
Chang squinted his right eye as he considered the question. “To what end, my lord?”
“To push us closer to war,” Gorkon said.
This time the general chortled. “As if we needed the push.” Becoming more serious, he added, “After all the efforts Spock’s ambassadors have made to establish diplomatic relations, for him to suddenly reverse his foreign policy makes no sense.”
“Then how should we interpret Ambassador Dax’s actions?”
Leaning back in his chair, Chang said, “There is a third possibility, my lord, one that I have raised before. Maybe Spock’s diplomatic efforts were strictly domestic. By using enticement and diplomacy to pacify his own people, he is free to deploy all his Starfleet assets against external threats.”
It wasn’t based on a social model that the Klingons would tolerate within their own empire, but Gorkon had to admit that Chang’s theory made sense. For Spock, being able to direct all his empire’s strength outward, instead of having to constantly re-deploy forces to quell internal uprisings, would be an enormous tactical advantage. “If you’re right,” Gorkon said, “then all of Spock’s progressive reforms have been a prelude to a war—one that he now feels confident goading us to begin.”
“Vulcans aren’t direct,” Chang said, “but they are cunning. If he wants us to go to war now, he must believe he has the upper hand. But before we engage the Terrans, we should guarantee that we hold the advantage.”
Gorkon understood exactly what Chang was referring to. For years the general had been overseeing a secret starship-design team, which was working on a bird-of-prey prototype that could fire torpedoes while cloaked. “How close is the prototype to being ready for assembly-line production?”
“Immediately,” Chang said. “All we need to start building a new fleet is enough power to cloak the Praxis shipyard from the Terrans’ spy arrays.”
“I’ll give the order to triple energy production at Praxis immediately,” Gorkon said. “How long will it take to build a fleet capable of crushing the Terrans in a single offensive?”
Chang stroked thoughtfully at the two tufts of mustache above the corners of his mouth. After several seconds of consideration, he said, “Nine years.”
“That’s a long time to wait, General.”
With a rueful grin, Chang replied, “The Terran Empire is vast, my lord. Subduing it all in one sneak attack will take a lot of ships. We could expand our starship production to other shipyards, but the more facilities that receive the prototype’s design, the greater the risk of espionage.”
“Very well, then,” Gorkon said. “Keep the program secret at the Praxis facility. But work quickly, General. It’s time for us to wipe the Terran Empire off the map, and I am eager to begin.”
“As am I, my lord,” Chang said. “As am I.”
2293
12
The Architects of War
M arlena walked alone across the frozen gray expanse of the ocean. Thunderous rumbles trembled the ice under her bare feet. Great fissures cracked open the snow-dusted horizon, which churned with dark water, like blood erupting from a wound.
As she walked, the glaciated terrain was cleaved in twain beneath her, and jagged shards of ice sliced into her heels. She clutched the bundle in her arms, its cargo more precious than any she had ever held before. Warm against her bosom, safe in her embrace, the fruit of her womb was all that mattered to her now in this desolate, frigid wasteland.
Fire, on the horizon. The figure of a man robed in flames. Reddish-gold against the grayish-white emptiness that seemed to have no horizon, surrounded by widening gulfs of black seawater. A silhouette, a gaunt outline of a lanky form, burning bright in the falling gloom, ushering her onward against the bitter wind.
She trudged across the bobbing ice floes, her torn feet leaving bloody prints. The man in the flames was her father, François—it had to be. He was waiting for her, waiting to see her son, to reach out and give his blessing to her child. All she had to do was traverse a treacherous sea of broken ice.
A short leap, then a longer one. Deep cracking sounds, like the breaking of a giant’s bones, filled the dreary dusk. The faster Marlena tried to reach her father, the more quickly the ice broke apart, the farther the pieces drifted.
I have to hurry, she knew. Time is running out.
From the back edge of a long strip of ice, she took a running start. Her final step, the push-off, dipped the leading edge of the floe under the inky surface of the sea.
Aloft, airborne, floating weightless upon a breeze, Marlena drifted through the air, the ghostly vapors of her breath ringed about her like a halo, a maternal blessing of mist. Below her, the bottomless ocean, darker than the deepest hours of the night, colder than an unforgiving heart.
Marlena landed like a feather at her father’s feet. She looked up at the pillar of golden fire that surrounded him. Trapped inside his incandescent cocoon, her father resembled a dark statue, as unyielding and mysterious as he had always seemed to her during her childhood.
She extended her arms and held out her swaddled son. “Look, Daddy,” she said. “My son. Your grandson.”
Her sire of shadows looked down and spoke with disdain. “I see nothing but broken promises.”
“No!” she protested. “He’s your grandson! Look at him!” She pulled away the outer fold of the blanket, then the next, and the next. With every unfolded corner, she expected to reveal her glory, the heir of Spock, the offspring she had borne into the world…but then the blanket tumbled from her hands, completely undone, fluttering empty to the icy ground.
The wind howled in mourning. Bitter tears ran hotly across her frost-numbed cheeks. She collapsed onto her knees and pawed helplessly at the
child’s blanket, at its frayed edges. A low tender cry strained to break free of her chest. Looking up to her father for mercy, forgiveness, and comfort, instead she beheld Spock, frozen and one step removed from real, a sculpture chiseled roughly from soft ice. She reached out to touch it. It broke apart at the grazing brush of her fingertip, collecting itself into a mound of ash and snow.
Nighttime edged across the sky, swallowing the light, and Marlena was surrounded by the widening ocean, eternal and fathomless. She was alone in the world, with no one to hear her weeping. Hers was not the maudlin sobbing of a madwoman, but a funereal wail that was all the more terrible for its clarity.
Stinging cold water bit at her hands and knees as the ocean claimed the floe beneath her. There was nowhere to run to, no one to beg for rescue. Marlena fell forward and surrendered to the irresistible pull of the sea. Her arms and legs numbed on contact with the frigid water. As she slipped under the waves, she made no effort to hold her breath. She exhaled, felt heat and life escape in a flourish of bubbles. Pulling the sea into her lungs, tasting death in all its briny coldness, was easier than she had expected.
The scant light from above the water’s surface was deep blue, then blue-black…but only as Marlena felt herself vanishing into the darkness did the last, desperate spark of terror ignite in her soul—lonely, afraid, not ready to let go, not ready to be extinguished…but darkness had no mercy, and its grip choked away her final cries for help….
A gasp and a shudder, and Marlena was awake in her bed, her heart pounding, musky sweat coating her face and arms and chest. She stared at the ceiling of her bedroom in the imperial palace. Every undulating pattern of light and shadow on the walls and ceiling seemed infused with sinister intent. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. You’re hyperventilating, she told herself. Calm down. Force yourself to slow down. Breathe.