A Burning House

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

“That was during Chancellor Kravokh’s reign,” Lorgh said. “It was several decades after Praxis exploded, and the empire was, for the first time in fifty turns, entering a time of prosperity. There was a shipbuilding boom, and dozens of businesses started up attempting to cash in on it. Most of them failed, including both Sokor and Turok. Gannik lost a considerable amount when Turok went under, and blamed L’Kor.”

  Again reading the padd, Toq shook his head. “The fact that L’Kor lost just as much did not matter?”

  “I have never known a highborn Klingon to use such insignificant criteria as facts to get in the way of a good fight, have you?”

  “No.” Toq set the padd down. He’d read about Chancellor Kravokh’s golden age. That must have been a glorious time to live in the empire. Looking at Lorgh he said, “You believe that Gannik is responsible for the attack on Carraya?”

  “That is not possible.” He handed Toq another padd.

  Looking at it, Toq saw that Gannik had died of an infection two months ago. According to the report, his oldest son Gorrik was now the head of the House. “Gorrik, then. It would not be unusual for the new House head to settle the debts of the old one.” Toq frowned. “But how did he know L’Kor was even alive?”

  “Someone told him.” Yet another padd was handed to Toq, this a report on communications coming in and out of the Great Hall. One was highlighted as coming from within the hall and being sent to the House Gannik estates. It had no identifier, which bespoke great resources on the part of the sender.

  “You do not know who sent this?” Toq asked.

  “No, but right after this message was sent, Gorrik hired a ship. Its flight plan was never filed, but its course away from Qo’noS could easily have taken it to Carraya. When he awakens, I will show Tokath images of Gorrik’s ship to see if it matches what he recalls. But that will simply confirm what we already know: Gorrik took L’Kor—and possibly Gi’ral. Now we must find out where.”

  “Gorrik’s ship may have left a warp trail.”

  Lorgh shook his head. “I have already scanned for one.”

  Toq thought a moment. “What type of ship did Gorrik procure?”

  “One of those Ferengi Star-Hopper models that they designed for Klingon use.”

  Brightening, Toq said, “A Mark 7?”

  Consulting another padd, Lorgh said, “Yes.”

  “Good. We had to trace Kinshaya pirates who had stolen a Mark 7 several months ago. I was able to trace their movements by retuning the sensors. It must be done while the ship has a clear path ahead, as it requires taking navigation sensors off-line.”

  “Then when we have finished here, you will accompany me to the bridge, where we will perform this retuning. And once the ship is found, you will have a mission.”

  That surprised Toq. Technically, he was on leave. He would, of course, do whatever Lorgh asked, but he was worried that whatever he did now for I.I. would affect his job as first officer of the Gorkon.

  On the other hand, if it had to do with finding Gorrik, Toq had already sworn to avenge the deaths of his comrades.

  “There is a shuttle on this vessel, which you will use to go after Gorrik. If Tokath or Ba’el wish to join you, they may. I have people watching the House Gannik estate in case he returns to Qo’noS, but I suspect he will go somewhere more secret until he concludes the feud with L’Kor. That gives us time, but not a great deal.”

  “I will, of course, do this for you, Father, gladly—but why not use your own people?”

  Shaking his head, Lorgh said, “I cannot use any I.I. personnel because then I must report the truth about Carraya. The people who serve on this ship are loyal to me and will keep it secret. If I divert any other agents to this, I will be required to write an official report, which will bring about the very disgrace to Worf, and therefore to Martok, that I would rather prevent. There are several councillors who would prefer to see Martok fall, and I suspect that one of them provided the information to Gorrik that led to this. That traitor must not be allowed to achieve that particular victory.”

  Toq shook his head. “I thought Martok appointed all of the current council. How can he have enemies on it?”

  “There are always enemies in politics, boy,” Lorgh said with a growl. “Do not forget that.” He got to his feet. “Your primary mission is to ensure the secrecy of the camp on Carraya IV. Do you understand me, Toq?”

  All too well, he thought angrily. Lorgh had made it clear that vengeance against Gorrik was secondary to preserving secrets. While Toq did not share Captain Quvmoh’s disdain for keeping them, Toq still was a good enough Klingon that he preferred never to lie.

  Yet he’d spent his entire life since leaving Carraya lying, and on Carraya he’d lived a lie. So for whose benefit, precisely, is this insistence on being truthful?

  Besides, the best way to get Gorrik to stay quiet would be to kill him.

  “I understand,” he said.

  Lorgh had come around to the other side of the desk and now put a gauntleted hand on Toq’s shoulder. “Good. We will repair to the bridge.”

  As he followed Lorgh out of his office, Toq swore that he would fulfill all his missions this day.

  Twelve

  The Promenade

  Federation Starbase Deep Space 9

  Rodek really detested aliens.

  It didn’t bother him so very much on the Gorkon, as the only aliens were the various jeghpu’wI’ who performed menial tasks. They were beneath his notice and therefore easy to ignore. His position as ship’s gunner had kept him on the bridge for most of the Gorkon’s mission to date, so his encounters with aliens were limited to blowing them out of the stars.

  What he hated most about aliens was the smell. All of them, the jeghpu’wI’, the Children of San-Tarah, the humans they’d worked with against Malkus, the Elabrej resistance fighters they’d encountered, they all smelled like taknar droppings.

  Walking around this Federation space station again made Rodek want to plug up his nose forever—that or vomit all over the deck. He’d not seen so many aliens in one place since he last set foot here, and the stench of all of them—Bajorans, humans, Cardassians, Ferengi, Bolians, Vulcans and Romulans, Andorians, Yridians, even his fellow Klingons—was overwhelming.

  This station used to be Bajoran, but they had joined the Federation recently, so now it was entirely run by Starfleet. Rodek looked for someone in one of their drab gray-and-black uniforms. As soon as he saw one—a Bajoran woman, whose collar was gold—he grabbed her arm.

  “Infirmary!” he bellowed.

  The woman’s initial reaction was anger, but when she got a look at Rodek’s face, she relented, no doubt recognizing how much Rodek needed to get out of this damned Promenade. Turning, she pointed at an open doorway farther down the Promenade. “That way.”

  Nodding his head, Rodek quickly moved toward the doorway in question, pushing aside several foul-smelling Bolians and another Starfleet officer.

  When he entered, he saw a woman sitting at a desk, studying a Cardassian shatterframe display. Rodek was confused about that at first, then recalled that this station was originally a Cardassian mining outpost before the Bajorans took their world back.

  “I am looking for Doctor Bashir,” he said upon entering.

  The woman turned around. “He’s seeing a patient right now. Can I help you with something, Lieutenant?”

  Rodek managed to get his breathing under control. The stenches had lessened with his ingress to the infir-mary, in part due to the many medicines that were stored here, plus the place was kept particularly clean due to the human need to scrub the life out of everything. Rodek had never understood why a species with such poor olfactory senses had such a need for cleanliness.

  “No,” he said after a moment. “I must see Doctor Bashir. I will wait for him.”

  Pointing to a bench against one wall, the woman said, “You can have a seat over there, Lieutenant—?”

  Ignoring the prompt to give his name—he did not wish
Bashir to know he was coming—he took the profferred seat.

  The trip to the station had been relatively easy to arrange. The I.K.S. Yorkang was travelling from Qo’noS to DS9 with the intent of going through the Bajoran wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant. The captain was an old friend of Noggra’s and was happy to provide passage for Rodek.

  In the days spent on the Yorkang, the dreams grew even more vivid. Qa’Hos’s drugs had done him no good whatsoever.

  “Lieutenant?”

  He looked up to see a frail human with wide eyes and a sickeningly sweet voice. It was Bashir.

  “I am Lieutenant Rodek, son of Noggra. I will speak to you.”

  “Of course, Lieutenant. It’s good to see you again.”

  “Is it?”

  The human seemed taken aback by the harshness of Rodek’s words. “Well, it’s been a few years, but I still recall the shuttle accident you and your father were in. Are you suffering any ill effects?”

  “Yes, Doctor, you might say that I am suffering ‘ill effects.’ ” Rodek got to his feet and approached Bashir, deliberately towering over the human. “I have twice in recent times suffered head injuries. Since then, I have had strange dreams and fragments of memories that are not my own.”

  “Are you sure—I mean,” Bashir added quickly, “are you sure that they’re not your own?”

  “I am the son of an advocate from a minor House, Doctor. Until the Dominion War, I had never served in the Defense Force, and to this day I have never set foot in the Great Hall. Yet my memories are of captaining a Defense Force vessel and of serving on the High Council! These are not my memories, Doctor—or, at least, not the memories I should have.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say anything without examining you first, Lieutenant. If you’d like, I’ll do so now.”

  “Yes, Doctor, I would ‘like.’ And while you perform this examination, you may also explain why my crest has been altered.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Rodek pointed to the top of his head. “According to Qa’Hos, the doctor I saw on the homeworld—the same doctor who told me that there was no evidence of plasma damage to my hippocampus—my crest has been surgically altered. Why would I have done this?”

  “The reasons are legion, Lieutenant,” Bashir said tightly, “as you well know, and I don’t appreciate your tone. I’m perfectly happy to examine you, but you seem to be accusing me of something.”

  “I am doing no such thing, Doctor—yet. Perform your tests. We will see what they tell you—and what you tell me.”

  Julian Bashir had never expected this to bite him on the ass.

  He went through the motions, of course. He examined the man who called himself Rodek—but whom Bashir had first met as Kurn, son of Mogh, younger brother to Worf—quite thoroughly. The lieutenant had indeed suffered brain damage, some from physical trauma, more from disruptor fire, but whoever treated him did excellent work in repairing the damage—which alone was a surprise on a Klingon Defense Force vessel. Klingon doctors’ ideas of healing an injury was to cut off the offending limb—or to prescribe bloodwine for the pain.

  Checking Rodek’s service record, he saw that he served on the I.K.S. Gorkon, which meant his physician was B’Oraq. That explained a great deal. Some of Bashir’s time at Starfleet Medical Academy overlapped with B’Oraq’s, and he remembered her as a revolutionary. In truth, Bashir was amazed she’d survived this long in the Defense Force. She’d wanted to change the state of Klingon medicine, and it was Bashir’s considered opinion, after treating Klingons on and off for years, that that was a lost cause.

  On the other hand, he wouldn’t have expected a Klingon doctor, this Qa’Hos person, to notice the lack of plasma traces on the hippocampus. Bashir concocted some nonsense about how the traces fade with time, and while they don’t often do so in so short a time as four years, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

  Rodek greeted that news with a snarl.

  Finally, when he was done, he said, “All right, Lieutenant, we’re done. I’m afraid I have other business to take care of before I can process these tests. Will you be remaining on the station?”

  “I have not taken quarters. I will be in the Klingon restaurant for the next several hours. You may find me there.”

  With that, Rodek turned and left the infirmary. Only then did Bashir allow himself to breathe regularly again.

  Seeing Rodek in a Klingon Defense Force uniform had been frightening enough. The last time he saw the man in question, he’d been a civilian, the amnesiac child of an advocate named Noggra—or, at least, that was the fiction Worf had devised, with Noggra’s help. In the normal course of events, he would never have returned to DS9.

  But he said he enlisted after the Dominion War started. Bashir sighed. That war changed so much…

  Shaking it off, he then said, “Computer, locate Lieutenant Dax.”

  “Lieutenant Dax is aboard Runabout Rio Grande, en route to Deep Space 9 from Bajor.”

  “Right, the meeting with the ministers.” Dax had accompanied Captain Kira and Commander Vaughn for a meeting with the Chamber of Ministers and Councillor Krim on Bajor. He tapped his combadge. “Bashir to Dax.”

  “Go ahead, Julian.”

  “When you return to the station and have a moment, could you come to the infirmary, please? It’s nothing urgent,” he added quickly, so neither Kira nor Vaughn assumed a medical emergency. “It has to do with a patient.”

  “Sure. I’ll be there in two hours?”

  “Fine.”

  Two hours later, Ezri Dax came into the infirmary. She had ended her relationship with Bashir on Trill, and given the recentness of that breakup, he might not have come to her for advice. But she was the only person on the station to whom he could talk right now.

  “What can I do for you, Julian?” she asked, all business.

  “I just received a visit from a Lieutenant Rodek, son of Noggra.”

  Dax frowned. “I know that name.”

  “You should. As I recall, you were the one who suggested it to Worf.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Right! Curzon knew a Klingon named Rodek—he was an aide of Kang’s back in the day. Really good grinnak player.” She regarded Bashir curiously. “It can’t have been him, he died fifty years ago. No, wait, you said Worf. That was the name we gave Kurn!”

  “Yes, and he’s back, with some rather interesting complaints.”

  After Bashir shared with her what “Rodek” had said to him, as well as the results of his examination, Dax said, “I can’t believe you actually did that.”

  “You can’t believe I did that? Worf found him drunk with a disruptor at his head. He’d already tried to commit suicide on any number of other occasions prior to that, including when he served as one of Odo’s deputies. He tried to have Worf commit Mauk-to’Vor on him, but Captain Sisko wouldn’t permit it. The procedure—which, by the way, you endorsed at the time—was the only alternative to killing him.”

  “You may as well have killed him,” Dax said angrily, “and I didn’t endorse a damn thing—Jadzia did.”

  Bashir shook his head. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Whenever a previous host does something wonderful or funny or thrilling, or you want to go on about how you’ve been around for three centuries, then it’s something ‘I’ did. But if it’s anything you don’t approve of, then all of a sudden, that was a different host and you’re not responsible.”

  Through clenched teeth, Dax said, “This isn’t about me.”

  “Yes, Ezri, it is, because you—or one of your previous hosts, however you wish to rationalize it—came to me with Worf four years ago and said that Worf’s brother Kurn needed to have his crest altered, his genetic profile changed, and his memory erased. Simple enough procedure—now, though, it’s unraveling.”

  “How?” she yelled. “You said it was impossible to reverse!”

  Holding up a finger, Bashir said, “No I said it was almost impossible to reverse!” Realizing that they were both shou
ting, he forced himself to breathe out slowly. More calmly, he continued. “Humanoid brains remember everything they’re exposed to. After that, it’s a question of access. What I did to Kurn was remove his ability to access his memories.”

  “What changed?”

  Shrugging and moving to sit at a console—he suddenly found himself to be exhausted—Bashir said, “Head trauma. He lived through an explosion that almost killed him and took a disruptor hit to the face.”

  Dax moved over to sit next to him. Her own anger seemed to have burned to ashes as his had. “Wouldn’t that make it worse?”

  “The damage? Almost certainly. But the ship Rodek serves on is blessed with one of the few Klingon doctors who actually deserve a medical degree. When she repaired the damage to his brain, she unknowingly reconstructed several of the neural pathways to the hippocampus that my procedure cut off. He’s started remembering aspects of his life as Kurn, like being a captain in the Klingon Defense Force, like serving on the High Council—even being one of Odo’s deputies.”

  Now sounding concerned, Dax leaned forward. “Julian, I think you need to tell him the truth. And maybe give him the rest of his memory back.”

  Bashir closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “You’re probably right.”

  “I am right. Look, let’s say I agree with what Jadzia did four years ago—in fact, in some ways I do, since at least this didn’t kill him. But what made sense then doesn’t now. Kurn was dishonored because Worf opposed Gowron’s invasion of Cardassia, so Gowron eliminated the House of Mogh. But now Gowron’s dead, and Worf is part of Martok’s House. The dishonor you operated on Kurn to eliminate doesn’t exist anymore. I can’t think of any good reason why we can’t have Kurn back. Can you?”

  At first, Bashir said nothing, simply stared at the bench where “Rodek” had sat while waiting to see him. “You know,” he finally said, “at the time, I had my doubts. But you—Jadzia—and Worf both made such a compelling case that I went ahead with it, especially once I met Noggra. He seemed willing to do whatever was necessary to make Rodek a real part of Klingon society. And look at him.” He turned around and called up Rodek’s service record. “He’s second officer on one of the finest ships in the Klingon fleet. He has commendations, medals, citations—he’s had a good life.” Turning to look at Dax, he said, “I’m not disagreeing with you, Ezri. In fact, I think I asked you in here because I knew you’d say what you just said. But it’s not as simple as that. Four years ago, yes, Rodek was a tabula rasa that Noggra and Worf added lies to—but now? Rodek’s a person. It’s not as cut-and-dried as that.”