“We’ve been through a lot recently,” Sulu said.
“I want you to make sure they’re all right,” Harriman told her. “Work with the medical staff to get them through this difficult time. Morell and Benzon and some of the nurses have some psychiatric training.”
“I will,” Sulu said. “I was going to ask you if we should make counselors available to the crew.”
“Let’s encourage activities too,” Harriman said. “It’s been hard for a while. I know we’ve had little downtime, and we’re not likely to get much more right now. I’ve noticed a decline in social activities throughout the ship, so I’d like to do what we can to change that. I want the crew to have some enjoyment in their days, and to lean on each other when they need to.” He raised his arms and wiped his hands down his face, sighing heavily. “I hate that they’re going through this.”
“It’s not just them, John,” Sulu said, realizing that Harriman had not bothered to include himself as being affected by recent events.
He looked at her in shock, as though it had never occurred to him that the Universe tragedy had impacted him the same as it had the crew. But then he seemed to recover from his surprise. “I know,” he said. “I’ll speak to Uta too. So should you.”
“Yes, sir,” Sulu said, recognizing the command as something more than friendly advice.
Harriman stood up from the sofa. “I should let you get back to sleep,” he said. “Thanks for listening. Sorry for stopping by so late.”
Demora got up from her chair. “At least I got to try some of this port,” she said. She lifted her glass, drank the small amount left in it, then set it down.
Harriman walked out around the table and headed for the door. Just before he got there, though, he stopped and turned back. He didn’t say anything right away, and he looked to Sulu as though he was trying to make a decision about something. Finally, he said, “I keep thinking about Iron Mike Paris.”
“He saved my life,” Sulu said, her reaction almost automatic. The memory of the events on Devron II remained as fresh for her as though they had happened yesterday.
Harriman nodded, and Sulu expected him to say more about Iron Mike, but instead, all he said was “Good night, Demora.”
“Good night,” she replied. As he left, she looked after him, sensing that he had just attempted to tell her something. She thought about it, but then, unable to conclude anything, shook off the feeling. She watched the doors slide closed, then sat heavily back down in the chair. On the table, she saw, Harriman’s glass of port sat untouched. She thought about drinking it herself, but instead, she got up and went back to bed.
It was a long time before Demora fell back to sleep, though, and when she did, she dreamed of Captain Harriman, Iron Mike Paris, and those horrible days on Devron II.
Azetbur, leader of the High Council, chancellor of the Klingon Empire, seethed. Even after she had calmed the uproar in her office, it required all of her willpower not to dive across the length of the table and wrap her hands around the throat of the Romulan envoy. Instead, she calmly rose, conscious not to allow her hands to roll into fists, though tempted by the release the feel of her sharp fingernails against her palm would have given her. “Thank you, Consul Vinok,” she said. “Please express my appreciation to the praetor for providing the Klingon Empire with this information.” She imagined the green blood of the envoy spurting through her fingers as she squeezed his ignoble life from him.
“Chancellor,” Vinok said, standing himself and bowing his head in her direction. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”
Azetbur nodded, but thought, As if I could have done otherwise. The praetor had sent word of the Starfleet treachery to the senior members of the Klingon High Council, and not simply to Azetbur herself—not technically a violation of the diplomatic protocols between the two governments, but a move clearly designed to undermine Klingon relations with the Federation. Had the Romulan intelligence been delivered to her exclusively, she would have quietly sought to confirm or deny it, with the hope of being able to preserve the relationship between Qo’noS and Earth. But now…
Consul Vinok withdrew from Azetbur’s office, his footsteps echoing on the stone floor, the tall, ornamented doors swinging open at his approach. Beyond the threshold, four members of Klingon Internal Security stood guard. Two of those, Azetbur knew, would escort the Romulan from the fortress of the Great Hall.
“Chancellor,” Brigadier Kuron blustered. “We must—”
“Silence,” Azetbur said firmly, waiting for the doors to shut behind Vinok. She could see the ire on Kuron’s long, angular face—ire for the Federation and for her, she was sure—but he quieted, just as he had done when she’d quashed his vociferous reactions during the Romulan’s presentation. The doors, climbing halfway up the stone walls to the vaulted ceilings and arcing to a peak, swung closed with a loud thump, resounding in the great room. “Your opinion is of value to us, Kuron,” Azetbur said with tact, a weapon her father had taught her to use in her youth. “But it is not of value to the Romulans, nor is it their place to hear it.” She sat back down at the head of the table, her right hand automatically coming up to take hold of the walking stick leaning against her chair. In front of her, to her left, a number of isolinear data spikes sat heaped on the tabletop.
“The Romulans already know what I have to say,” Kuron protested. “What all of us should have to say.” He raised a leather-gloved fist, triangular silver teeth marching up the fingers, and pointed around the table at the three other High Council members present, though he refrained from gesturing toward Azetbur. “I say that the Federation is our enemy and seeks to crush us.”
Azetbur waited, her hand tightening about the top of the walking stick, hoping that she would not have to be the first one to defend the Empire’s relationship with the Federation. In the wake of her father’s death eighteen years ago, she had stepped forward and assumed the mantle of Klingon leadership. She had signed the Khitomer Accords, enacting the peace with the Federation for which her father had so desperately worked, and she had strived since then to maintain that peace. But because of her years of service to that cause, her voice now carried less weight than it once had; her positions were so well known and so well established that the actual content of what she said now was often overlooked.
“Do you really think that the Federation is our enemy?” Councillor Kest asked across the table from Kuron. The only one of the senior Council members not in the Klingon Defense Force—he worked for Imperial Intelligence—he still cut an imposing figure. Bald, with a thin mustache falling past the sides of his mouth to his chin, he appeared almost sinister. “Do you really think the Federation has given us food and energy and other aid for all these years, helped us rebuild our infrastructure and keep our military intact, so that they could then face a reinvigorated opponent in battle?”
“Klingons would,” Kuron declared. “Klingons would seek the glory of battle against a worthy adversary.”
“Klingons, yes,” Kest allowed. “But humans? Vulcans? Betazoids?” Azetbur saw that she had been right to convene the four senior Council members for this meeting, rather than the entire Council, more than two dozen strong. While Kest no longer openly allied himself with Azetbur—few did these days, amid the public grumbling about the ignominy of continuing to accept Federation charity—he at least provided a thoughtful, stabilizing voice, a voice that could easily have been lost in a larger gathering.
“The Federation does not seek honorable battle,” Kuron persisted. “They seek to wipe us out with a single weapon.”
“If that were true,” Azetbur said, “then they had that weapon in their grasp years ago. After Praxis was destroyed, all the Federation had to use to defeat us was apathy. If they’d ignored us, if they hadn’t responded to our sudden and significant needs, then we would not now be able to feed our people, much less be able to go into battle.”
“We are not now able to go into battle,” General Kaarg said. �
��Not full-scale battle against a fully committed adversary. Yes, the Federation provides us aid, but not enough for us to make ourselves as strong as possible.” The general, one of the highest-ranking officers in the Klingon Defense Force, had sat through the Romulan envoy’s presentation saying very little, as had his peer in the military, General Gorak. Both commanded large segments of the KDF, but the similarities between the two men ended there, Azetbur knew.
“General,” Brigadier Kuron said, “do you doubt the might of the Empire?”
“I do not doubt the Empire, Kuron,” Kaarg said. “But as Kahless the Unforgettable told us, ‘Destroying an empire to win a war is no victory.’ ” Kaarg, beefy and physically sluggish, had earned a name for himself as a battlefield tactician, defeating enemies not on the basis of force, but through careful planning and clever strategy. Two years ago, he had managed to forestall a Tholian incursion into space claimed by the Empire, utilizing a squadron of vessels dwarfed by his foe’s. Azetbur had heard some classify him derogatorily as a backroom planner, a thinker who lacked the ability to genuinely lead. Yet he had still stormed up the ranks of the Klingon military to his present position, and to an upper seat on the High Council.
“In whatever battles we fight,” General Gorak offered, “we will be victorious, or we will die honorable deaths. That is the Klingon way.” A stark contrast to Kaarg, Gorak was lean and muscular, and had developed a reputation as a warrior’s warrior, leading his men on the front ranks. Within the last year, he had crushed a major uprising on Ganalda IV, charging the battlements himself and slaying the rebel leader with a d’k tahg through the heart. From every report Azetbur had received, Gorak’s men worshipped him, and would follow him all the way to Sto-Vo-Kor.“But we need a reason to go to battle,” Gorak finished. He said nothing about how one of his men, Ditagh, worked even now to provide him with that reason by undermining the trilateral peace negotiations.
“There is the fact of Federation treachery,” Kuron fumed.
“It is a fact in name only,” Azetbur insisted, but she understood at once that the veracity of the Romulan assertion was irrelevant. The praetor would not have sent an envoy with sensor logs demonstrating the Starfleet testing of a metaweapon if those logs could have been easily dismissed. In one way or another, she would have to address the Romulan allegation, as well as its implications.
“Do you doubt what we just saw, Chancellor?” Kuron said, leaping to his feet and pointing at the clutch of data spikes. Azetbur and the councillors, along with the Romulan envoy, had viewed the contents of some of the spikes on a large monitor set into the wall to the left of the table, opposite the great chair that sat raised on a dais to the right. “Do you doubt—”
Azetbur swung the walking stick—the long, tapered incisor of some long-extinct saber-toothed beast—in a wide arc and brought it down on the tabletop, filling the chamber of her office with a loud report. The data spikes jumped. “Do not question me, Kuron,” Azetbur said. “I doubt everybody and everything. That is my duty as chancellor.” She paused, fixing the brigadier’s gaze with her own. “Now sit down,” she commanded him.
Kuron remained standing, though, and Azetbur thought that the challenge to her leadership from within the upper High Council had finally come. She tightened her hand around the walking stick—it had belonged to her father—and brought her free hand up to the d’k tahg she wore at her waist. She prepared to vault to her feet and fight—for her chancellorship, and for her life. She had fought traitors to assume and keep her position, had survived early attempts from almost all quarters to see her relinquish it, and had daily battled her own prejudices and her own instinct for violence in order to do what was best for her people. She would not step down quietly.
But then General Kaarg stood from his chair, rising slowly. When he reached his full height, he turned his gaze upon Kuron, his eyes peering intensely from the soft, slack flesh of his face. “The chancellor told you to sit,” Kaarg told the brigadier calmly, though there was no mistaking the menace in his voice. Azetbur saw Kuron flex the fingers of both hands, the material of his gloves making scraping sounds as he did so. She thought for a moment that he might actually engage Kaarg, but then he returned to his seat, fixing his eyes downward.
It would not be the last time that the soft-brained partisan would confront her, Azetbur was sure, but that assessment concerned her very little; the brigadier’s blatant and head-strong opposition called too much attention to itself to be truly dangerous. What gave her pause had been the reactions of Kest and Gorak to Kuron’s brief challenge: neither of them had moved to defend the Chancellor of the Klingon Empire. She might have expected that of Gorak, considering his furtive machinations to sabotage the peace process, but that also told Azetbur something she needed to know about Kest. Public dissent for the Empire’s current relationship with the Federation must have been stronger than she thought for him to fail to come to her defense. Now more than ever, she would have to proceed with caution and vigilance. At least General Kaarg had revealed his loyalties to her.
As Azetbur pulled the walking stick from the table, returning it to its place at her side, Kest asked, “Federation treachery or no, what action will you take now, Chancellor?”
“I will have the Romulan information analyzed,” she said, dropping her hand onto the collection of data spikes. “If necessary, I will demand an explanation from the Federation.”
“An explanation,” Kuron repeated disgustedly, but he did not look up and he said nothing more.
“Will an explanation be enough?” Kest asked.
“We will see,” Azetbur said, but she already knew that an explanation would not be enough. Fury boiled within her, and she imagined wielding her walking stick like a bludgeon, pounding the treacherous life out of whoever had put her in this position. Either the Romulans had manufactured the tale of a new Starfleet metaweapon, or the Federation had lied to her about their condemnation and repudiation of the creation of such weapons. Whichever the case, Azetbur would now be forced to react. And she would do so, but she pledged to herself that the action she would take would be of her own choosing, and not dictated by the political maneuverings of either the Romulans or the Federation. “I will do whatever I must to protect the Empire,” she concluded.
“Even if it means opposing the Federation?” Gorak asked.
Azetbur knew that she would seek to preserve the peace, because that served all sides, but she also knew that her only true loyalty was to her people. If she had to, she would fight against the Romulans or beside them, she would fight against the worlds of the Federation or beside them, as long as, in the end, the Klingon Empire remained standing. And it would matter not at all to Azetbur if that meant standing amid the dead bodies of Romulans, or the dead bodies of humans and Vulcans and Betazoids. All that mattered was Qo’noS.
“Yes,” she said, “even if it means opposing the Federation.” All eyes turned toward her then, even those of Kuron, all no doubt attempting to take the measure of her words. Azetbur did not wait for them to reach their judgments. Instead, she stood and addressed them. “I will convene a gathering of the full Council in a few days,” she told them. “We will discuss these matters and my decisions about them then.” She lifted her walking stick, turned, and walked away from the table, effectively dismissing the councillors.
Azetbur strode over to the wall opposite the door, in which a dozen tall, peaked windows stood open. As the sounds of chairs scraping along the floor and of retreating footsteps reached her from behind, she peered out from the top floor of the Great Hall at the First City, the capital of Qo’noS. In the distance, she spied the ritual flames of the Temples of Rogax and Molgar, both reaching upward like fiery fingers clutching at the sky. The spires of imperial structures dotted the urban landscape, proud and mighty symbols of a proud and mighty race. And down below the window, marking the entrance to the Great Hall, stood the great bronze statue of Kahless and Morath, depicted in their epic twelve-day battle over honor.
>
Azetbur gazed out of the window in silence for long moments, until she heard the door to her office open and somebody enter. She turned to see her efficient aide, Rinla, approaching.
“Chancellor,” Rinla said. “Do you require anything?”
“Yes,” Azetbur said, because she had already begun to formulate a means of dealing with the Romulans and the Federation. “Contact the Romulan space station Algeron,” she said. “I want to talk to Ambassador Kage.”
Minus Six: Smoke
Los Tirasol Mentir swam with abandon. He flexed his muscles with all of his strength, sending massive sinusoidal motion coursing through the length of his body—down from his head, through his torso, and into his tail structure and caudal fin. The walls and floor of the artificial watercourse dashed past to either side and below, a ceiling of air above. He could feel the cooling touch of the lubrication he secreted, allowing a laminar flow of water past his scales.
Inside, though, he felt only heat. His grief manifested as anger, the terrible end of Universe and its crew seeming like a betrayal by life itself. Nor had the tragedy finished its taking; Blackjack Harriman, a man Mentir had called a friend for half a century, lay comatose in the station’s infirmary, waiting helplessly for the black tides of death to envelop him and carry him away.
Mentir thrust his tail left, right, and on, channeling his rage into movement. He sliced through the water with ease, his short but limblike pectoral fins swept back along his sides and, together with his smaller dorsal and pelvic fins, keeping his body stable as he swam. Once, twice, half a dozen times around the two-hundred-meter elliptical canal, racing like a silvery torpedo, Mentir sought to exhaust himself. He spent the energy he could, attempting to starve his emotions of their force.
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