The Left Hand of Destiny, Book 2

by J. G. Hertzler

  “What is it, Martok?” she hissed. “I asked you to never disturb me …” Then she noticed that he was holding weapons. “Are we in battle? My father did not alert me …”

  “No battle,” Martok snapped. “None from the outside.” He grabbed her arm and tugged her into the lab. “Perhaps in our midst, however. But first, you answer my questions.”

  She tried to prevent him from moving past the antechamber and into the main lab. He noticed that the small room had been transformed into a makeshift airlock, that it was even pressurized so that no atmosphere could escape the inner lab. Martok also noted that Gothmara was wearing an airy semitrans-parent gown instead of her uniform—but, incongruously, that she had a biofilter mask dangling around her neck.

  “What are you doing down here?” he asked, unable to hide the suspicion in his voice.

  Removing the filter mask, Gothmara placed the heel of her hand against the center of his chest and pushed back as hard as she could against his advance. “None of your damned business, Lieutenant. You are off limits here. Go!” Martok’s head snapped back as if she had struck him. Her voice … her voice had a curious tone and he felt confused yet compliant. Why was he here anyway, surely he had work to do? His reason for coming … he mused. And it struck him. My reason for coming. He wrested his anger from the muddle in his mind and clung to it.

  Tugging the data spike from his belt and holding it aloft, he said, “Here is something you must see. Your father has dishonored your house and threatens to bring ruin to the empire. He …”

  Gothmara flicked her hand against Martok’s and sent the data spike spinning out of his hand to crash against a wall. “My father,” she snarled, “has done nothing of the sort. My father is a visionary.” When the word emerged from her lips, a thrill ran down Martok’s spine and he momentarily found his respect and, yes, even affection for Kultan rising up within him. “He alone understands what we must do to make the empire great again.”

  “Again?” Martok asked angrily. “What do you mean again? When have we ever enjoyed a greater period of prosperity and prestige? The Klingon Defense Force is unrivaled throughout the quadrant. Our warriors are respected and the other races have even begun to see the value of our arts and culture. Kahless and Lukara was performed last month before the entire Federation Council …”

  “Opera!” Gothmara shouted. “Before the Federation Council! What unfettered delight! And did our ambassador go down on his hands and knees so that the Federation president could use him for a footstool? Fifty years ago, if a company of a hundred Klingons had stood before the Federation Council it would have been because they were about to slay them! But no, not now, not today. Now we sing before them!”

  Momentarily struck dumb by the depth of Gothmara’s rebuke, Martok tried to recapture some of his rage. “But your father … Bioweapons are dishonorable….”

  “Bioweapons are weapons, just as proffered aid and cultural exchange and ‘combined scientific research’ are weapons. Are the lessons of history lost? What about our alliance with the Romulans? What happened there?”

  “The Romulans were untrustworthy….”

  “But the Federation is not?”

  “There are, among them, warriors of honor….”

  “Such as who? Or are you referring to the legend of the petaQ Kirk? My father told me of him. Yes, he was a man of ‘honor’ when it suited him. After killing thousands of Klingon warriors, in his dotage he decided it might be time to make peace and have a few less ghosts spitting on him.”

  Shocked, Martok reeled back. “This is lunacy!” he shouted. “What kind of crazed ravings has your father been…?”

  Gothmara slapped him. This was not an angry, peevish smack to the cheek, but a body-twisting crack to the jaw. Martok almost fell to the ground, and it was only the cold stream of air from one of the pressurized blowers that kept him conscious. Rising up to his full height, he towered over her and felt hot blood pour down his cheek and jawline. She had scratched him, too, and the cut throbbed and pulsed. Looking down at her hands, he saw his blood on her nails; the sight made his pulse pound even harder.

  “My father,” Gothmara said, her voice unexpectedly low and seductive, “is a hero.” Then she lifted her bloody hand to her lips. She tasted the blood; then, moving her hand slowly and seductively, Gothmara drew her fingers down over her throat, painting a line of crimson that trickled between her breasts. Without warning, Martok suddenly felt light-headed, as if the pressure pumps were drawing atmosphere away from his head; he stumbled forward only to find that he held Gothmara in his arms. He breathed deeply, inhaling her scent.

  “Your father …” he began, struggling to find his words, but then her mouth was on his, her tongue probing between his lips. Breaking the kiss, she playfully bit his lower lip, licked along the edge of his jaw until her tongue was in his ear. He found that he cupped the curve of her hip with one hand, stroked the swelling curve of her breast with the other. When she bit his jaw, Martok groaned and his knees weakened. Clutching a handful of her hair, he yanked back her head, exposing her throat to his teeth….

  * * *

  When his blood had cooled, Martok found himself lying in a heap of discarded clothes, his head cushioned with her gown, Gothmara astride his hips. He felt a strange buzzing sensation behind his eyes, as if she had removed a portion of his brain and replaced it with tiny whirling insects. “What … what … happened?” he stammered.

  Gothmara leaned down over him, her breasts brushing against his chest. “We were just discussing my father,” she murmured. “And your place in our future plans.”

  “Our future plans?” Martok muttered. He knew there was something he had to do, someplace he had to be, but he couldn’t dredge up the memory. His jaw ached and his tongue tingled and Gothmara had just moved her hips in that way. Martok wanted to rest, wanted to close his eyes and let the darkness descend, oblivion….

  “We have a campaign mapped out,” Gothmara said into his ear. “But I can only imagine it would be improved by your review. My father has told me he has never met a warrior with your gift for tactical planning.”

  This provoked a smile. He reached up to caress her, but his hand missed her face and flopped against the floor. “Ow!” he yelled. Something had stabbed him. He grasped the offending object and held it up so he could see what it was.

  The data spike.

  Gothmara snarled when she saw it and tried to wrest the spike from Martok’s grip, but he refused to release it. She sank her teeth into his hand, but that only made him grasp it tighter so that the spike’s tip sank into his palm. The pain … the pain was a good thing. It helped him focus, to clear his mind. Blood ran down over his wrist and dripped into the cleft of his elbow. Gothmara’s rage grew and the growl in her throat became higher and louder with every passing second. Before his eyes, the red curtain fell.

  Martok snapped his arm forward and she tumbled off him, a piece of his flesh between her teeth. He grabbed for his weapons among the wreckage on the floor, found the disruptor, and pointed it at his lover’s head. There was blood on her mouth, her chin, and tiny spots on her breasts. The streak of blood she had painted earlier was gone now, erased with sweat and friction. “Don’t move,” he said. “I will kill you now if I must, but I’d rather turn you over to the council alive.”

  Gothmara spit and some inner voice warned Martok to avoid letting it hit him. With his head clearing, he began to wonder how much of their affair was chemistry and how much was simply bio chemisty.

  Moving lightly on bare feet, Martok crept sideways to the inner door to the lab and waited anxiously until the sensor registered his presence. The doors slid open and he took a step backward, not taking his eyes off Gothmara. “In here,” he said, pointing with the disruptor’s barrel. “Now.”

  She complied. Her long hair had come undone and now was tumbling down around her shoulders. With blood on her mouth and nails, Gothmara looked like a crazed beast. “Down,” he said. “Sit down.”
>
  “Martok,” she said as she crouched on her haunches. “We can talk about this….”

  “No,” he said evenly. “No talking. Stay there.”

  Moving quickly, only risking taking his eyes off her for a few seconds at a time, Martok completed a quick tour of the lab and found worse than he could have imagined. It was, he thought, as if she wanted to wallow in her twisted experiments, covering her floor and worktables with specimens and odd, tortuous equipment. There, under a counter, Martok spied a rack of the very same bioshielded cases he had seen in the video. On her computer screen he saw detailed notes for a study on an engineered virus designed to affect only humans and Alpha Centaurians. Most repulsive were the stasis tubes along the wall. Each contained dissected slabs of meat that could only have been specimens and experiments. Some of them, mercifully few, Martok saw, had faces, each wearing a death mask of agony.

  Pointing at an apparatus sitting on a counter under a ventilation hood, he asked, “And what’s this?”

  “A new idea,” she said. “Something I would use on Klingons.”

  “The brew you used on me? Did you dip your claws in it just before you answered the door? What would you have done if it was someone else?”

  “It depends,” Gothmara said, all pretense of affection gone. “On whether or not I wanted something from them.”

  “Ha’DIbaH,” Martok hissed.

  “Fool,” she replied with equanimity, reaching around behind her head.

  Suspicious of her movement, Martok hesitated until he heard a sharp snapping sound. Though his aim was off, he fired without thinking.

  The disruptor bolt grazed Gothmara’s left arm, spinning her around and jerking her head to the side just as she was opening her mouth as wide as she could, jaws locked in a serpentlike grimace. A high-pitched whine whizzed past Martok’s ear and he saw a tiny, white puff of smoke hiss out from between Gothmara’s lips. A skull gun, he thought. Kahless! She’s even madder than I had thought! He gaped, staggered by the revelation that Gothmara would use surgically implanted weapons. Such weapons were even less honorable—if possible—than bioweapons.

  And, apparently, they were very painful too. Gothmara collapsed into a groaning heap, grasping the sides of her head. Martok had read enough about skull guns to know that if the shooter didn’t hold his head in exactly the right position, he could snap his own neck with the recoil.

  Stepping carefully around and behind her, Martok grasped both of Gothmara’s wrists in one of his large hands and pulled her to her feet. Her head lolled to the side, but he could see that she was at least semiconscious and … hissing?

  He cocked his head and listened carefully. No, the sound was not coming from Gothmara. Martok scanned the lab quickly, then saw it: a canister on the worktable near where he had been standing when she shot at him. A thin stream of gas was spewing from a crack. “Gothmara,” Martok said, releasing her arms and jerking her head up. “What is that?”

  Her eyes focused, then widened in fear. She tried to say something, possibly to scream, but Martok did not wait to hear what it was. As he leapt backward, his grip must have loosened, because Gothmara slithered out from between his arms and skittered across the floor and under a table. Not hesitating for a moment, not looking back, Martok charged through the pressure door, scooped up his uniform as he ran through the anteroom, and, hardly pausing to let it open, charged through the outer door. As it snapped shut, Martok heard an abbreviated crash from the lab, which was cut short by a clanging alarm.

  Crew members appeared seemingly out of thin air and clustered around Martok, less curious about the alarm than about why he was standing there nearly naked with a disruptor in his hand. Someone even made a crude remark about getting into a fight with Gothmara before Martok collected his wits and tried to shove them all away from the doors. “Get back, you fools! The alarm!”

  “What is it?” someone asked. “I’ve never heard that one before. Not a hull breach …”

  We should only be so lucky, Martok thought, but didn’t have time to reply because suddenly Kultan arrived, crewmen standing aside as the captain plowed through the crowd. “What in the name of Kahless is going on here!” he shouted. “Martok! What are you doing…?”

  Without hesitation, Martok lifted his disruptor and pointed it at Kultan’s chest. Just as quickly, Kultan swiped one gigantic arm and the weapon crashed into the wall. Kultan drew his mek’leth and grabbed Martok by his throat. “Explain yourself,” he said, “and if I like it, I’ll kill you quickly.”

  “Gothmara,” Martok choked. “Bioweapons …”

  The light of understanding flickered in Kultan’s eyes and he released Martok, who fell to the deck retching. Above him, voices murmuring questions mixed with stunned silence. Only Kultan moved.

  “Daughter!” he shouted. Martok saw his feet disappear from his line of vision and knew the lab’s outer door had opened, because the volume of the alarm suddenly rose, then muted.

  Under his hands and knees, Martok felt an explosion rock the deck, this one killing the alarm. All around him, crewmen collapsed; arms and heads cracked against the bulkheads. Lights flickered red. Above him, Martok heard a crewman say, “The primary power junction for this deck just went. What was she storing in there?”

  Struggling to his feet, Martok said in a cracked voice, “Death.” He tried to clear his throat and said, “Run! Get away from here! If we can seal the deck …”

  But it was too late for that. Even as he staggered up to the deck’s main pressure doors, another explosion ripped through Gothmara’s lab, blowing the outer door out of its frame. Shrapnel and fire instantly killed anyone who was standing within five meters of it. The pressure doors began to drop and Martok saw in an instant how it would all play out. The captain was dead—good riddance—but he had to try to save as many of the others as he could.

  The deck bucked under his feet again as another power junction farther up the hall blew out. Green plasma fire crept up the walls ten meters behind him. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe, and a part of Martok’s brain was glad of it. Fire might kill it, whatever it was in the canister. But they had to get away. Staggering to the intercom, he slapped the All Decks switch and shouted, “Abandon ship! All hands! Abandon ship!” Instantly, a Klaxon screamed above his head. Yellow lights flashed and pointed the way to escape pods. Martok was surprised to see that there was a pod door directly across the corridor from him. How odd, he thought. I had no intention of surviving this. Destiny, it seemed, had other plans for him.

  The green flames crept closer and the air grew thinner.

  A hatch door opened and Martok fell inside. Recorded voices spoke, counting down numbers, and then there was the sensation of thrust, thrust, thrust, then blackness and nothing more.

  Strangely, as he slept, he dreamt of Gothmara as he would for many, many months thereafter.

  6

  They were all so afraid of how she would react that Sirella could practically smell their fear. She wanted to laugh, but she did not dare. Several captains would probably flee from the room if she did. Her laugh had that effect on some people, especially the weak-willed.

  Moving only her eyes, Sirella studied the others in the room. Both Worf and Dax waited patiently for Martok to signal them as to what they were to do. Worf, she knew, could wait forever without impatience if he thought the cause was worthy. This new Dax, though—Sirella was not sure what to make of her. In many ways, this Ezri could not be much less like the infuriating and much-missed Jadzia: she was at once more somber and flightier, if that made any sense. But then, Sirella had looked into the girl’s eyes when she stood up to Sirella’s challenge, and again when she and Kahless and B’Tak had discussed the soul of their people. Sirella had seen something of Jadzia’s blue steel in those eyes.

  If Sirella could ever be said to worry, she might be said to have some small anxiety about how the four captains, their only allies, were reacting to this situation. The emperor had as much as admitted that he had abd
icated his office and now her husband was telling them all that he had once had an affair with a madwoman and fathered her son. Yet, there they sat, still attentive and respectful. Martok had that ability, she reflected. Men tolerated his vices because they recognized that his virtues eclipsed them. If only he could recognize that about himself.

  Then there was Drex, her only son and now her only child. She knew him well enough to know he was about to leap out of his chair—his armor, his very skin—for want of action. All this talk, talk, talk! It must be driving him mad, yet he had not jumped up onto the table and sworn to slay his half brother and avenge his sisters. Sirella had to wonder about that. Could these events actually be having an impact on what she had always assumed to be her son’s impenetrably dense skull? If so, this was unexpected; Sirella had credited Shen and Lazhna as being the ones with the brains, the ones she could shape and refine. Drex was, had always been, his father’s, though her husband had too often seemed oblivious to this fact.

  Last, there was Darok, the old reprobate. She had been unaccountably pleased when she had learned he had survived the taking of House Martok. Of course, he had probably slipped out a long-hidden secret entrance as soon as Sirella had been captured, but she could not begrudge him his survival. Sirella could not have escaped; she had known that when the Hur’q came for her, but her sacrifice had made it possible for others to flee. The house had not escaped destruction, but Darok reported that he had seen several of the servants make it successfully into the scrub forest at the edge of the main compound. After that, he said, there was no way to know where they’d gone, or what had become of them.