“Is your ship okay, Captain?” Archer asked, his worried face reappearing on the forward viewer.
“It’s nothing a little time and baling wire can’t fix,” Hernandez said through a wry but grateful smile. “But we still have one more ship to deal with first. Let’s see if we can get them to surrender in one piece.”
“They’re Klingons,” Archer said. “I’m not sure their language even has a word for ‘surrender.’” His gaze shifted to his right for a moment as someone spoke to him.
Fletcher spoke up then as well. “Captain, it’s not just one ship.”
“What?”
“Three more Klingon battle cruisers have just dropped out of warp. They’re flanking the surviving vessel.”
“Damn,” Archer said, his image frowning into his own central bridge viewer. “So much for trying to stack the odds in our favor. Are you seeing what we’re seeing, Captain?”
“On-screen tactical,” Hernandez said. “Enterprise to audio-only.”
There were now indeed four Klingon vessels orbiting Draylax, and not a one of them showed so much as a dented fender’s worth of damage.
“Hail the newcomers, Sidra,” Hernandez said.
“They’re priming their weapons,” Thayer shouted, her voice ragged.
“All available power to hull plating!” Hernandez barked. She wondered if the system’s remaining power would be enough to resist even the first shots of the new arrivals, or if this was to be Columbia’s last stand.
A moment later, all four of the Klingon vessels fired, but only one seemed to be taking aim at either of the Starfleet ships.
The other three had directed their disruptor blasts at the fourth cruiser, the last of the original trio that had attacked Draylax.
Caught in a withering crossfire, the cruiser erupted instantly in a series of conflagrations that might have been brilliant enough to damage every optic nerve on Columbia’s bridge had the main viewer’s luminal filters not intervened to prevent it.
“What the…” Hernandez couldn’t even finish her thought.
A moment later, the newly arrived trio of Klingon cruisers abruptly turned about and sped away, accelerating to warp almost instantly on a direct heading toward Klingon space.
Hernandez looked around at her bridge crew. “What the hell just happened here?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Archer said from the audio speakers.
Focusing on the screen, Hernandez watched as the last molecular fires from the destroyed Klingon ship’s expanding debris field silently burned themselves out several hundred kilometers over Draylax.
Something extremely strange had just happened here, and the only people who might supply the answer to the mystery—the Klingons aboard the three just-departed battle cruisers—were gone, leaving nothing but destruction and questions in their wake.
SIXTEEN
Friday, July 18, 2155
Enterprise NX-01, near the Draylax system
THE AFTER-BATTLE REPAIRS, which mostly centered on Columbia’s rather extensive but thankfully nonfatal damage, had made for a long day that had challenged the combined engineering teams of both Enterprise and Columbia. And now, despite the lateness of the hour, Jonathan Archer found that he couldn’t sleep. Lying on the bed in his night-dimmed quarters, he felt a desperate need, almost a physical hunger, to talk to someone about his current problem with the Klingons.
At least someone other than Porthos, whom he noted was still watching him in the semidarkness, his large black eyes alert as he lay on the pillow in the corner he used for sleeping. Though he knew he was anthropomorphizing, Archer couldn’t help but read the beagle’s vaguely quizzical expression as one of canine concern about the current pensive state of his human.
Still recumbent, Archer reached across the bed to the small com panel mounted on the wall nearest to the bed. He hesitated as his fingers made contact with the button.
Archer paused for a moment. While he certainly had the authority to interrupt his senior officers’ off-duty activities when circumstances warranted, even in the dead of ship’s night, he didn’t consider his personal feelings of isolation and loneliness to be sufficient cause. And despite the unprecedented emotional closeness he and his first officer had come to share over the past few months, he hadn’t forgotten the ingrained tendency of Vulcans toward a certain standoffishness. He also knew how emotionally stressed T’Pol had been lately, perhaps as much by Trip’s feigned death as by the need to keep the truth behind it concealed from all but a small handful of her crewmates and friends. Considering all she’d been through since she’d first set foot aboard Enterprise, she deserved to be allowed to continue doing whatever she needed to do in order to keep body and katra together.
He resigned himself to dealing on his own with the Klingon problem.
He sat up with a sigh, and Porthos regarded him with an expectant look and a wagging tail for a moment before launching himself into Archer’s lap. Scratching the dog’s head behind the right ear, he said, “Porthos, how do you feel about trading jobs with me?”
Porthos tipped his head and whined, and his swiftly wagging tail abruptly dropped out of warp.
Archer chuckled. “Sorry. You’re way too smart to fall for that. Get some sleep. One of us should.”
He patted Porthos near the rump, and the dog jumped back down and returned to his sleeping corner while Archer finally gave up on the idea of slumber entirely. Sometime during the few minutes it took Archer to doff his bathrobe and don his standard blue duty uniform, the beagle had closed his eyes and drifted off into what looked like a bottomlessly deep slumber.
Archer looked on wistfully as the sleeping animal’s paws jerked three times, probably in response to the appearance of a sprawling dream-pasture, a wish granted by some merciful canine Morpheus. Until he got to the bottom of this mess with the Klingons, he seriously doubted he’d be able to follow Porthos’s wise example.
Moving quietly, he crossed the small room to his desk and took a seat in front of the computer terminal there. He entered his personal com access code manually, along with a particular subspace frequency, and then drummed his fingers on the desk for several seconds while the screen’s ship status updates vanished.
Archer ceased his drumming when a blood-red Klingon trefoil emblem appeared, standing out starkly against a background as black as space itself. A moment later, the alien sigil was replaced by the scowling visage of a middle-aged male Klingon dressed in a warrior’s battle armor. For an absurd moment, Archer wondered whether everybody on Qo’noS dressed like that, right down to the receptionists in the lobby who answered the incoming com transmissions and whoever came in at night to mop the floors and empty out the wastepaper baskets.
“NuqneH, Tera’ngan?” the frowning warrior said as Enterprise’s linguistic translation matrix took a beat to calibrate before beginning its continuous real-time translation stream. “What do you want, Terran?”
Noting that the man on the other end of the comlink had a conspicuously smooth, humanlike forehead, Archer knew he would have to proceed with no small amount of caution. After all, any Klingon who bore a permanent reminder of that particular crisis was bound to have a chip on his shoulder when it came to dealing with humans.
But he also understood Klingons well enough to know that they preferred plain talk to beating around the bush.
“I am Captain Jonathan Archer of the Starship Enterprise. I must speak with Fleet Admiral Krell immediately regarding the Draylax situation.”
“I am Captain Qapegh, Fleet Admiral Krell’s adjutant,” the Klingon said with a pronounced sneer. “You have already been privileged to speak with the admiral very recently. Why should I permit you to do so again so soon after the previous occasion?”
Although Archer never broke eye contact with the Klingon on the monitor, his hands moved busily across his desktop keyboard as he composed a covert text message just out of the line of sight.
Can’t afford to let myself look like a
timid beggar, Archer told himself as he fixed the other man with his hardest, most withering stare.
“I called before to seek an explanation for the Klingon Empire’s hostilities against Draylax,” he said, discreetly hitting the “transmit” key as he spoke. “Admiral Krell has yet to provide a satisfactory one.”
Though Qapegh bared his sharpened teeth aggressively, he appeared impressed by Archer’s audacity nevertheless. “You risk much, human.”
“It’s all part of the service, Sparky.”
The Klingon suddenly broke off from Archer’s stare, apparently not out of intimidation, but rather because something outside the Klingon com system’s field of view had just demanded his attention.
“You have targ-backed a text transmission onto the subspace channel you used to reach this office,” Qapegh said, his face adorned in undisguised surprise as he looked back in Archer’s direction.
“Uh-huh,” Archer said, nodding.
“It is coded,” Qapegh said in truculent tones.
“That’s right. For the admiral’s eyes only. And I expect he’s going to be pretty damned unhappy with anybody who delays his seeing it. Needless to say, it’s fairly time-sensitive stuff. Admiral Krell can contact me on the secure frequency specified in the message header to receive the encryption key.”
Archer closed off the channel before the goggle-eyed Klingon could finish drawing breath to make a reply that was doubtless now being delivered at a full-throated shout before a blank screen. After all, the last thing he needed was to have some pissed-off Klingon waking up his dog in the middle of the night.
That certainly felt good, Archer thought as he leaned back in his chair and waited patiently for the inevitable return call. He listened to the gentle susurration of Porthos’s snoring in his otherwise dark and silent cabin.
He was a little surprised that it had taken six whole minutes for the incoming call indicator on his com-panel to light up. Suppressing a grin, he transmitted the encryption code in response to the text message that scrolled up his screen, and then allowed nearly another whole minute to pass. The incoming light came on again, and he sat up straight and assayed his best parade-ground military bearing just before toggling the “accept” key.
“Thank you for contacting me so soon after our last conversation, Admiral,” he said to the older, gray-bearded Klingon whose glowering face and almost human-smooth forehead now filled his viewer like a looming mountainside. “You do me honor.”
“Do not play games with me, Archer,” Krell said. “You know as well as I do that my decision to respond to your summons has little to do with honor, either yours or mine.”
Archer suppressed a smile, as well as any further comment regarding matters of honor. Krell was obviously making a veiled reference to Archer’s encrypted text message, which had intimated that Krell might want to cooperate, lest the admiral’s covert cooperation with a human espionage bureau during the Qu’Vat affair the previous year become generally known throughout the Klingon Empire.
“Your honor remains safe with me, Admiral Krell,” Archer said carefully. “As well as other matters that are best never spoken about again.”
“I can see that a RomuluSngan might envy your skill in the dark art of blackmail, Archer,” Krell said with a grunt. “You spoke to my aide of the Draylax incident. Why can you not leave the matter alone?”
“Because I’m still having trouble making sense of it, Admiral,” Archer said. “Perhaps if you were to help me shed a little more light on what really happened here at Draylax—and why—I might be able to see my way clear to talking about it a whole lot less from now on.”
Krell’s eyes narrowed as he stroked his grizzled chin in apparent contemplation. With another grunt, he said, “Your threats aside, you have proved trustworthy with confidences thus far, Captain. Perhaps I can afford to trust you somewhat further. Particularly if doing so makes you less of a pain in the ’o’yoS. And makes you go away as well.”
Archer smiled, though he was even less sure about the meaning of ’o’yoS than the translator evidently was. “Nothing would make me happier, Admiral. You, too, I expect.”
“Very well, Captain,” Krell said, nodding. “But I shall add only this to what I have told you already: The three battle cruisers that attacked Draylax were commanded by rogue captains. Men who were operating without the legitimate authorization of either the High Council or the Klingon Defense Force. They were killed during the commission of their treachery. Their Houses, as well as the Houses of the craven subordinates who followed their un-lawful orders, have since been dispossessed and discommended for their lack of honor and discipline.”
Archer had no pretensions to serious expertise about Klingon culture. Nevertheless, he felt more than justified in assuming that virtually everyone in the Empire who might know anything about the Draylax affair was no longer available for questioning. At least, he thought, not without an extremely sensitive Ouija board. One that’s tuned in to Sto-Vo-Top, or whatever the hell the Klingons call their version of the hereafter.
“Forgive me for making this observation, Admiral,” Archer said aloud. “But that sounds awfully convenient.”
Krell leaned forward and displayed a pair of curved and wickedly sharpened incisors. “That is as may be, Captain Archer. But it is also my final word on the subject. Admiral Krell out.”
And with that, Krell’s image vanished, replaced for an instant by the Klingon trefoil emblem, which yielded to the ship’s status screen a heartbeat or so later as the subspace channel closed.
He sat alone in the darkness, staring into the empty blue glow of the screen. “Naghs,” he muttered, thinking that mastering the Klingon spoken language might not be as difficult as he’d once thought.
Still lying in the corner, Porthos came out of his apparent slumber, raised his head slightly, and released a low growl that might have done a Klingon captain proud. Archer chose to take it as a noise of solidarity rather than a reprimand for his rude use of Klingon vocabulary.
“I agree completely, Porthos. I can’t buy what Krell’s trying to sell, either.”
He knew that the Klingon Defense Force ran on discipline just as much as Starfleet and the MACOs did. Perhaps even more so.
Three trained Klingon captains wouldn’t just suddenly go rogue for no apparent reason, he thought. Krell still knows a hell of a lot more about this than he wants anyone else to find out. And he’s prepared to sweep it all under the rug to make sure that nobody does.
Once again, Archer felt an all but overwhelming need to talk to someone he could trust. Somebody with fewer than four legs.
He toggled open the intercom switch on his desk. “Archer to T’Pol.”
No answer. His second try wasn’t any more successful. Despite the lateness of the hour, and his knowledge of T’Pol’s habit of retreating behind a veil of Vulcan meditation, a small worm of suspicion began to turn in his guts. He rose and crossed to the hatchway, letting himself out into E deck’s main corridor, and onto the tubolift to B deck, determined to prove that suspicion unfounded.
After a brisk trot nearly a quarter of the way along the hallway’s gentle curvature, he came to a stop before the door to T’Pol’s quarters and buzzed the keypad to announce his presence.
Still no answer. The suspicion in his belly was quickly congealing into an awful certainty as he entered his override code into the controls. The hatch hissed obediently open, and he slowly stepped into the darkened chamber beyond.
It only took a few moments to determine that T’Pol wasn’t in her quarters. The pattern of T’Pol’s recent behavior—particularly her recent insistence that Trip was in urgent need of rescue, and her even more recent withdrawal behind the impenetrable veil of “Vulcan meditation”—suddenly began to make sense.
He sincerely hoped the conclusion to which he had just jumped was wrong. Crossing to a desk illuminated only by the wan light of a neutral monitor screen and the distant stars beyond the viewport, Archer toggled open a
nother com channel.
“Archer to Launch Bay One.”
“Launch Bay One,” came a young crewman’s crisp, almost instantaneous reply. If he sounded surprised to be hearing directly from Archer, particularly at such a late hour, it didn’t show. “Ensign Nguyen here, sir. What can I do for you?”
“I need a status report on Shuttlepod One and Shuttlepod Two, Ensign.”
“Shuttlepod One is fueled and ready to go,” Nguyen said.
“And Shuttlepod Two?”
“I can give you a detailed status report on her just as soon as she returns to Enterprise.”
Goddammit! Archer thought, kicking himself, hard. Why didn’t I see this coming?
Struggling to keep any trace of anger out of his voice, he said, “When did Commander T’Pol depart, Ensign?”
“Let me check the log, sir.” A pause. “Yesterday evening at eleven-hundred hours, nine minutes.”
“Thank you, Ensign. Archer out.”
T’Pol had no doubt wanted him to believe that she’d been in meditation continuously since around that time, Archer reflected. Now he understood clearly the real reason she hadn’t been on the bridge when Enterprise had received Columbia’s report about the Klingon attack on Draylax. So much for that renowned Vulcan inability to lie, he thought. That little whopper has got to be the most useful lie the Vulcans ever got us to swallow.
And as a partial consequence of that lie, T’Pol was now off on a foolish quest in hostile territory.
All alone.
He keyed the com again. “Archer to Reed.” He paused to await a response, but none came. Though he hated to bother a man afflicted with the sort of nasty gastrointestinal trouble that had sidelined Malcolm—especially at such a late hour—he pressed on. “Malcolm, I need to talk to you. Even if we have to chat through the bathroom door.”
Still nothing.
Oh, no, he thought, shaking his head as he struggled to tamp down a rising tide of anger. Well, at least she hasn’t charged off to oblivion alone.
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