A Burning House

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Tabona stared at her for a moment, then said, “B’Ellor, get out here.”

  B’Ellor came running out, also still carrying a bloody knife. “Yes, Grandmother?”

  “Take Wol here to your room and get her some clothes. You two are almost the same height.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t want you to starve to death while you were here.”

  Wol bowed, Tabona’s implication confirming Kagak’s earlier statement that she would not be allowed at the supper table in uniform. She was not pleased about it, but she had accepted this mad old woman’s hospitality.

  After nodding to Tabona, B’Ellor walked to the corridor. Wol followed her.

  B’Ellor’s room had four beds. No wonder they have space for guests, Wol thought. The young woman moved to a pile of clothing in one corner—not to be confused with the other piles in the room, which were even worse than the ones in the foyer, which at least were pushed against the walls to allow space to move. You could barely see the floor in this room.

  “Here.” B’Ellor held out a brown one-piece outfit with a flared bottom, with the middle cut out. It looked like a low-class version of the dresses she wore when she was Eral, daughter of B’Etakk—which, she supposed, it was.

  Wol began removing her armor, snarling as she did so.

  “What is wrong?” B’Ellor asked.

  “I do not wish to remove my armor. I will abide by your grandmother’s rules of hospitality, of course,” she added quickly, not wishing to insult her host.

  “Why?”

  Wol hesitated, using the removal of her boots to cover it. Finally, she said, “When I wear this armor, I am Leader Wol, commander of the fifteenth. I am a soldier, a warrior, worthy of respect.”

  “Aren’t you still Leader Wol without the armor?”

  “No one sees that,” Wol said as she removed her leg-wear. She held up the outfit B’Ellor had handed her as if it were a diseased animal. Then she held it up over her head and shrugged into it. As her head poked out through the neck, she went on: “Without the two medallions on my biceps, I simply become Wol, a woman without a House.”

  “So?” B’Ellor sounded genuinely confused. “Nobody here has a House, either. We don’t need all that silly stuff. Besides, Grandmother welcomed you—that means you’re part of the family as long as you stay here. So you don’t need the uniform, because you have us.”

  Wol straightened the dress out, adjusting the cutout around her breasts. “It is not that simple.”

  “Of course it is,” B’Ellor said. “You are Kagak’s squad leader. That makes you as welcome here as he is.”

  “Because your grandmother says so?”

  “Yes. It’s her house.” She smiled shyly. “Is that any different from you having respect based on what you’re wearing?”

  Wol found she didn’t have an answer for that.

  Ten

  The Lukara Edifice

  Novat, Qo���noS

  The third day of the KPE conference had actually gone worse than the first two.

  The first of two talks scheduled for that day was at high sun, and it was intended to discuss the mapping of the brain that was done for criminal prisoners and apply it to healing head injuries. B’Oraq entered the room to find only three people in the audience and nobody on the stage. Two of those present were Kandless and Valatra; she did not recognize the third.

  B’Oraq took a seat and overheard Valatra telling Kandless about an operation she had performed at B’Alda’ar Base after the Kreel attacked it. The procedure she described was one B’Oraq had learned at Starfleet Medical to treat belly wounds, and she wondered where Valatra had discovered it.

  Unfortunately, the speaker never bothered to show up, which might have created more of a fuss if there weren’t only four people in the audience. After it was clear that there would be no talk, B’Oraq walked over to the physician she did not know, who quickly ran out of the room at her approach.

  When she turned toward Kandless and Valatra, they too were departing. She considered calling after them but decided that it was a wasted effort. It was obvious from the overheard conversation—not to mention their questions yesterday—that they were far more dedicated than the average Klingon doctor, but it was also obvious that they didn’t want to get anywhere near her. She supposed she couldn’t blame them. For all that she had become one of Klag’s closest advisers, and for all that Chancellor Martok was on her side, she had made herself an outcast in the Klingon medical community. Associating with her would be professional suicide for Valatra and Kandless, and suicide was dishonorable.

  She beamed back to the Gorkon and went to her cabin, stepping over and around dozens of engineers on the way. As she turned one corner, she saw Kurak yelling at one of them. “What petaQ told you to use that to repair the junction? By Kahless’s hand, I am surrounded by imbeciles!”

  The tone surprised B’Oraq. Since Elabrej, Kurak’s perpetual bad mood had been ameliorated, presumably by her liaisons with Lieutenant Leskit combined with her cessation of excessive alcohol consumption. B’Oraq had never known a Klingon who drank enough to endanger her life until Kurak.

  “If this junction is not repaired, and properly, by the end of the shift, I will put you to death myself!”

  B’Oraq noticed that Kurak was gripping her right wrist with her left hand, something else she hadn’t done since Elabrej.

  Kurak seemed to notice that B’Oraq was looking at her, as she whirled on the doctor and said, “What do you want?”

  “Merely concerned about your health, Commander. I—”

  “My health is fine, Doctor. If it changes, I will let you know.”

  With that, she turned on her heel. The engineer she had upbraided was digging through a toolbox, apparently seeking out the correct tool for the job.

  Tugging on her braid, B’Oraq turned and continued on to her cabin.

  As soon as the door rumbled shut behind her, she sat at her desk and opened a communication to the House of M’Raq estate.

  The face of an older man appeared on the screen. “What?”

  “I would speak with Captain Klag.”

  “Very well.” The man, whom B’Oraq presumed to be the House ghIntaq, reached for a control, and then his image was replaced with the empire’s trefoil.

  Moments later, Klag’s more pleasant features appeared. “B’Oraq. How goes the conference?”

  “There are many things I would be happy to speak to you about, Captain, but the conference is not one of them.”

  Klag smiled. “It goes that poorly?”

  “Yes.” She shook her head. “In truth, I expected little else, but that makes it no less frustrating. I contacted you to see how your drills were progressing, so I can provide as recent an update as possible for my talk this afternoon.”

  “I have not been able to schedule one. The servant with whom I intended to spar is not here. My mother, despite knowing that I was coming home, has taken a trip to Qimpo, and she took most of the staff with her, leaving only Dokil—that was the sour-faced toDSaH who answered your call.”

  “Is he your ghIntaq?”

  “Hardly.” Klag chuckled. “He is in charge of the cleaning staff. No, my darling mother took the ghIntaq with her, along with everyone else. I have been forced to transport to the First City in order to eat, as the larder barely has enough for the cleaning staff.”

  “She did not even leave enough food for you?”

  Klag shook his head. “It is possible that Mother simply forgot. She is not as young as she used to be.” Then he let out a breath. “It is equally possible that she has taken Dorrek’s side.”

  “Aren’t you House head now? By denying you food—”

  “I will not upbraid my own mother.”

  B’Oraq refrained from pointing out that he did far worse to his father when he was alive. Perhaps he sees now that that was a mistake.

  His face softened as he continued. “Besides—Dorrek did not pay attention to my being the House head, so why should sh
e? It is of no consequence.”

  “When will she return?”

  “She provided no timetable for such. I suspect it will relate to when the Gorkon is spaceworthy again. In the meanwhile, I have been summoned to the Great Hall in a week’s time, a summons that includes all the shipmasters who fought at Elabrej.”

  “All of them? Even General Goluk?”

  Klag nodded. “And the vessels with him. That is the reason for the delay, as it will take that long for his fleet and the Kesh to return. They would be returning in any case—apparently, the Elabrej were not deemed worthy of conquest. They will be left to their own devices and to reflect on the folly of firing unprovoked on an alien ship.”

  B’Oraq thought that to be an abrogation of responsibility. True, the Elabrej fired on the Kravokh first, but should an entire nation suffer because of the actions of one foolish ship captain?

  Then she shrugged the thought off. You are thinking like a Federation politician, not a Klingon doctor. The Elabrej had many opportunities to surrender with honor, and they chose to fight instead. Worse, they experimented on their prisoners instead of letting them die. B’Oraq recalled with disgust the report Leader Wol had written about her treatment at the hands of Elabrej “scientists” before she was able to escape.

  “Perhaps you will be rewarded for a well-fought campaign.”

  “I have my doubts.” Klag then told her of the questions I.I. had required General Kriz to ask Klag during his report. “I suspect that I.I. is displeased with how their agents were treated and is causing problems for the High Council.”

  “If you say so.” B’Oraq had enough trouble dealing with the politics of her profession. If she tried to follow the greater politics of the empire with any but a cursory interest, she’d go mad.

  “That is simply a guess, but it fits the evidence. After all, the abused always kick downward. I.I. kicks the High Council, the High Council kicks General Goluk and the ship captains.”

  “And you kick Toq?” B’Oraq asked with a smile.

  Klag returned the smile. “Either him or the cleaning staff.”

  B’Oraq laughed, then looked at the screen. She had not intended to make this request of Klag, but since the estate was all but empty…“Captain, I was wondering if you wouldn’t object to company tonight after the conference.”

  Laughing, Klag said, “Your uncle will not object?”

  “My uncle will never know.”

  “I will send the estate’s coordinates to the Gorkon,” he said, his smile widening.

  “Then I will see you tonight.”

  After receiving those coordinates—which were, B’Oraq noted, to a transporter station just outside the estate, as one did not beam directly into a home, especially that of a noble House—B’Oraq went over her talk one final time, reciting it as much from memory as she could. Consulting notes might be construed as a sign of weakness, after all. True, most physicians would not care one way or the other, but B’Oraq’s talk would be under the finest of sensors, and her every movement would be dissected like a lab animal. It would be best if she did not provide her detractors with additional reasons to dismiss her.

  An alarm sang out when it was fifteen minutes before low sun, which gave B’Oraq just enough time to go to one of the Gorkon’s transporter rooms and beam down to the Lukara Edifice.

  When she arrived at the room where her talk was to be given, she nearly fell over from shock to see that most of the stools were occupied. Tugging nervously on her braid, she walked to the front of the room, an action that served to quiet all those in the audience, aside from the occasional whisper.

  She walked up onto the stage, at which point the silence was almost deafening. B’Oraq wouldn’t have believed it possible for so many Klingons to be so quiet. What’s more, most of them gazed upon her with hostility. The only exceptions were Kandless and Valatra, who were in the front row, and perhaps one or two others. Valatra, she noticed, was in her full Defense Force armor, not the more casual medical uniform, a token of respect that B’Oraq appreciated.

  Right in the center of the front row, and with the nastiest expression on his visage, was Doctor Kowag. Wonderful.

  Setting the padd with her notes down on the podium, B’Oraq took a moment to compose herself, realizing that Kowag’s presence did a lot more to explain the crowds. These people—like the ones who gathered around her duel with Tiklor yesterday—didn’t want to hear about Klag’s transplant procedure.

  They were here to see a fight. And Kowag had made it clear that he was going to give her one.

  So be it. The moment she decided to apply to study at the Starfleet Medical Academy—a process that itself was a mighty battle against the bureaucracies of two large interstellar nations—she had commenced a war. That war had seen dozens of battles, some of which she lost and left her bloody, but none of which led to her defeat. What’s more, she’d won more than she’d lost, and the very existence of this conference, regardless of what happened during it, counted as one of her finest victories.

  “Honored physicians,” she began, as all the talks had begun, “I salute you. I will be telling you this day about a procedure that I performed half a turn ago: the grafting of an arm onto a living warrior who had lost the limb during the Dominion War.”

  She touched a control on her padd, which lit up the screen behind her with an image of Klag from after Marcan V, but before the procedure, when he had no right arm.

  “Klag, son of M’Raq, was the sole survivor of the crash landing of the I.K.S. Pagh during the Battle of Marcan. However, the crash took his right arm. Klag continued to fight against the Jem’Hadar until he was rescued by the I.K.S. Ro’Kronos. The wound was sealed, and Klag continued to serve the empire.”

  Now she changed the image, this time to one of Klag’s holodeck sessions. Klag had often re-created the Battle of Marcan on the Gorkon’s holodeck, but that was not what B’Oraq showed now. Instead, she showed the time that Klag changed the parameters of the program so that it was not a re-creation of a battle Klag had long since memorized but instead a random encounter with half a dozen Jem’Hadar. The audience members watched as Klag fared very poorly, able to use only one arm and a mek’leth.

  “When Klag first faced six Jem’Hadar and one Vorta—”

  One audience member interrupted. “I heard it was a dozen Jem’Hadar and three Vorta!”

  B’Oraq sighed. The story of Marcan V had been told many times, and each telling exaggerated it more. B’Oraq herself had heard Klag go as high as twenty Jem’Hadar. However, while such exaggerations were acceptable for stories told around a bloodwine barrel, for a talk such as this, precision was important.

  Well, maybe not that important. “Perhaps it was,” she said. “But the numbers matter less than Klag himself. His ship had been destroyed, his crewmates lost. On Marcan V, he had adrenaline, fueled by anger at the loss of his ship, aiding him. In that state, he may well have slaughtered dozens of Jem’Hadar. In the Gorkon holodeck, however, he had no such aid, and he paid for it. Indeed, the circumstances under which he would be a whole warrior again were unlikely ever to return.”

  Again she changed the image, this to Klag as a youth, holding a bat’leth. “When Klag was a child, he participated in the Young Warrior Bat’leth Tournament five times and never finished lower than second. As he grew older, that skill improved tremendously. But the bat’leth is a two-handed weapon. When Klag realized that he would not be a whole warrior without a good right arm, I was able to provide him with options.”

  At this stage, B’Oraq had planned to list those options, but she decided that this room would be no more receptive to artificial prosthetics than Klag was, so she skipped over that. “The option that he chose was a transplant.”

  Now she provided a moving image, one of a Klingon with no right arm, one of an arm, both fairly generic. The arm then moved toward the empty shoulder.

  “The procedure involves the attachment of a limb that the patient was not born with. Now there a
re risks—”

  Kowag suddenly spoke. “Did you warn your captain of these risks?”

  “Of course.” And of course you’re going to heckle me with inane questions, you brainless targ. “I also told him of other procedures that carried less risk, but this was the method Captain Klag preferred for personal reasons.”

  “And what would those reasons be?” Kowag asked.

  Glowering at Kowag, B’Oraq said, “They would be personal ones. If you wish the answer, I suggest you ask Captain Klag.” That was a conversation B’Oraq would have paid to see, especially given the turn her and Klag’s relationship had taken of late. “In any event, the first thing that had to be done was to remove the limb from the donor, Klag’s recently dead father, M’Raq.”

  “What would have happened if the arm was not compatible?”

  B’Oraq sighed. “That had already been determined, as you would have learned had you shown some patience, Doctor. Klag and his father have the same blood type. The greatest risk with this procedure is the possibility of the nerve endings not lining up. However, I was able to adapt a procedure by a Vulcan physician, Doctor Survan, originally intended for use on burn victims, to redirect the pathways of the central nervous system to return feeling to limbs that had been burned. I performed this CNS therapy on M’Raq’s limb so that the nerves of the arm would line up with the nerves of Captain Klag’s shoulder.”

  Another audience member spoke up. “And what of the arm’s spirit?”

  That brought B’Oraq up short. “What?”

  “What of the arm’s spirit?”

  B’Oraq looked around and saw that the questioner was an older woman in the back row. “If the arm had any spirit—and a cleric would be better qualified to speak to this than I—then that spirit was Klag’s own father and should be able to coexist with his son’s.” This was not the place to bring up Klag’s paternal feud. “And if M’Raq’s spirit had moved on to the afterlife, then it was free for Klag’s spirit to infuse it.”