Apella barked laughter. “I would never trust you, Freeholder. You have already shown yourself to be a traitor. Are you also a fool?”
“I . . .”
“Take him out of my sight!” Apella ordered. “And bring Tyree to me. Now!”
* * *
“No answer, J. D.,” Makin said.
J. D. Grumm swiveled in his chair and fixed his navigator with a steady gaze. “Try again.”
“I’ve been trying,” Makin replied. She worked the controls at her console. “Twenty times. Nothing.”
Grumm muttered a curse. The Captain Cook had been in Neural’s orbit for almost an hour already. Admiral Kirk had been explicit in his instructions. He had not wanted the Klingons to know the ship was in the vicinity, and he had definitely not wanted them to know that a Starfleet admiral was on the planet. That meant communications had to be brief, limited to specific times, and the ship couldn’t stay in orbit for long.
“What do you wanna do, Cap?” Makin asked.
“I want Kirk to answer our hails.”
“I’ll keep trying.”
“J. D.,” LaMotte said from his position at the helm. “You’re going to have to make the call.”
“When I’m ready.”
“I’m just saying. Kirk said if we couldn’t raise him on this run, we were to let Starfleet Command know.”
The helmsman wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. Grumm had left Starfleet because he didn’t like taking orders. He wasn’t cut out for bureaucracy, and despite all the freedom a starship captain had—and he’d been a long way from achieving that rank—Starfleet was still a bureaucracy.
The idea of giving up on Kirk and reporting him as missing grated on him. Not just because he would, no doubt, have to deal with layers upon layers of bureaucracy, although that was a driving consideration. But he had met Kirk, and he’d admired him. Subspace communication with Starfleet, from this distance, would eat up precious time. They couldn’t even begin it until they had left Neural’s system, so as not to tip off the Klingons.
For the first time since he had resigned his commission, Grumm wished he had a Starfleet ship under his command, with all its weapons and defenses. But his decommissioned Starfleet vessel had only the barest defensive capabilities. He couldn’t attack the Klingons, couldn’t show himself.
He had to retreat, to leave Kirk down there, and to call in Starfleet.
He hated to do it. But he had no choice.
“Take us out, Mister LaMotte,” Grumm said at last. “I have a call to make.”
Twenty-Six
Kirk dragged himself back into the pit at the end of his workday, more exhausted than usual thanks to the increase in his quota, and frustrated that he had not yet found a way out of captivity and back to the buried communicators. He had failed Neural once before; this mission was supposed to set that right. Instead, he had failed again, or so it appeared. The Captain Cook had, by now, entered the planet’s orbit and left it again. Starfleet would have to dispatch ships to Neural, and when they came they would encounter Klingon vessels. War, at that point, would be hard to avoid.
The sun had set, the evening was cool, and fires had already been lit. The flames warmed him as he passed them, but Kirk barely noticed. He had almost reached his cutaway—he wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep, even food held no appeal at the moment—when he saw Nyran bolt upright, from a sitting position, and charge up the path toward him. Vengeful fire burned in the boy’s eyes.
Kirk braced for attack, although he didn’t know why. Then he realized that Nyran’s gaze was directed past him, not at him. He spun around and saw Keran coming behind, escorted by two guards. Kirk’s own escort had left him at the top of the path, as usual.
“Nyran!” Kirk called. “Why . . .”
Nyran rocketed past him. The guards, caught as unaware as Kirk was, reacted too slowly, and in an instant Nyran sprang, fingers hooked into claws, at Keran. The two of them fell in a heap, barely missing somebody’s fire. They rolled the other way—toward the edge of the path and the drop-off into the pit.
“Stop them!” Kirk shouted.
The guards stood by, watching but not interfering. Kirk brushed past them and waded into the melee. He reached down and snared a limb; a forearm, he thought, though he couldn’t tell whose. The wrestling pair’s momentum threatened to drag him to the edge, but he planted his feet and held on to the writhing arm with both hands. Then somebody—Rowland—got a grip on him. Kirk was sliding toward the precipice, and he scrambled for purchase. But Rowland’s weight held him back, and together they kept the Freeholders from plummeting over the side.
When their momentum had been broken, Kirk grabbed Nyran and pulled him away from Keran. Nyran wriggled and tried to break free, throwing ineffectual punches toward Keran and trying to kick Kirk’s legs out from under him. “Nyran, calm down,” Kirk said. “What’s this all about?”
Rowland, meanwhile, was holding Keran back. Kirk noted that Keran wasn’t trying nearly as hard as Nyran to continue the brawl.
“He—he—he betrayed Tyree!” Nyran managed. His face was filthy, the dirt streaked through with tears.
“He what?”
“He went to talk to someone, one of the Victors. A short while later, guards came for Tyree!”
“Where is he now?” Kirk asked. “Where’s Tyree?”
“I don’t know!” Nyran cried. “They took him!”
Kirk turned to the guards who had accompanied Keran. They had stood back and watched the ruckus without doing anything about it. “Where is he? The man who was taken from here?”
“I know nothing of any man,” one of the guards answered. The other stared silently.
“Take me to Apella!” Kirk demanded.
“You are to stay in the pit at night.”
Kirk grabbed the guard’s shirt and shook the man, perilously close to the edge. “Take me to him! Now!”
The guards locked eyes for a moment. “Very well,” the one Kirk was hanging on to said. “We’ll take you. Whether he will see you, I cannot say.”
“He’ll see me,” Kirk said.
* * *
Despite the hour, lights were burning inside the mine office building. One of the guards entered, and Kirk heard muffled conversation. The guard reappeared a moment later, held the door open, and said, “He’ll see you.”
Flanked by the guards, Kirk entered a long, high-ceilinged room, illuminated only by the light spilling from a doorway at its other end. The walls were lined with storage for mining equipment, medical supplies, weapons and ammunition, and more. A vaguely musty odor hung in the air. Another pair of guards stood to either side of that far doorway, eyeing Kirk with suspicion. Kirk kept his gaze forward, his head high, and strode quickly toward the open door. His escorts had to hustle to keep up.
The guards at the doorway moved as if to block his way, but then, perhaps in response to a signal from behind that Kirk couldn’t see, they shifted aside again and allowed him to pass into an inner office.
Tyree stood, bound and bloodied, against a wall. His head was down, chin on his chest, until Kirk spoke his name. Then he lifted it, blinked a couple of times. “James.”
“I’ll get you out of here, Tyree,” Kirk said. He turned to Apella, who sat at what looked like a poorly made wooden desk. The office was plain, its walls bare, with only the desk and a couple of chairs as furnishings. A single lightbulb dangled from an exposed cord, flickering as it swayed slightly from side to side. A set of windows provided a view of the pit, dark now but for whatever fires were burning, and a door opened onto the deck that Kirk had seen from below. Apella didn’t seem to have a computer, which didn’t surprise Kirk, but neither did he apparently put much stock in paperwork.
Two other uniformed men were in the room, and one of them was lightly rubbing skinned knuckles with his other hand. He was the first bald man Kirk had seen here on Neural, where a thick head of hair was almost de rigeur. This guy’s head was lik
e a pale cannonball perched atop a massive torso, with no neck in between.
“Why . . . ?” Kirk began.
“Simply a demonstration,” Apella said. “Tyree had to be shown who is in control of his life now.”
“If you’ve hurt him, Apella, I’ll—”
“You are in no position to make threats,” Apella said. He put his elbows on the desk and folded his hands together. Kirk half-expected him to twirl the tips of his mustache, like the villain in a silent movie from early twentieth-century Earth. “Or promises, for that matter.”
Kirk glanced once more at the guards, letting his gaze rest slightly longer on the one with the damaged hand, then silently dismissed them by sitting and turning his full attention to the Victor governor. “We have a problem here, Apella.”
“We?”
“Okay, more to the point, you have a problem.”
“And that would be . . . ?”
“You might want some privacy for this part.”
Apella regarded him for a long moment, then waved his hand toward the door. “Leave us,” he instructed. “Wait just outside, though. If there is any commotion, kill him first, then his friend.”
One of the guards started to protest, but Apella quieted him with a glance. They filed dutifully outside, and Kirk waited until the door had closed. When they were gone, Kirk carried another chair over to Tyree and helped him sit.
“Your problem is me,” Kirk said, returning to his own seat. “And I’ll tell you why.” He was winging it, and he knew he had to tread carefully around the Prime Directive, although the Victors in general and Apella in particular had already been exposed to greatly advanced technology, through their contact with Klingons. “Your friends the Klingons are a technologically sophisticated race. They’re aggressive and imperialistic and have no doubt made you a lot of promises, some of them backed up by action. They’ve no doubt made a lot of threats, too. And they’re capable of following through on those.
“But the people I represent are not a single race. They’re a confederation of many races, from many planets. As such, our technology is more advanced than the Klingons’. We are more numerous than they. We have more ships, with more powerful weapons.
“As of today, I am officially considered missing. Which means my people will be sending ships to look for me. Lots of them. I’m a pretty important guy.”
Kirk paused a moment to let his tale sink in. Some of it he was making up on the fly—he didn’t really know how numerous the Klingons were, though he doubted there were more of them than of all the member races of the Federation. And they had developed some technology, like cloaking devices, ahead of the Federation. They were not a force to be taken lightly.
Then again, neither was Starfleet.
“So, what you are saying is—” Apella began.
Kirk cut him off. “I’m saying that soon there’s going to be a massive armada knocking on your door, wondering where I am. They’re almost here, in ships outfitted with weapons you can’t even conceive of. I’m not at liberty to describe them in any detail, but you should know that what the Klingons have given you are primitive—not much more advanced than arrows and spears—in comparison.
“Now, your Klingon friends might try to protect you—well, no, they wouldn’t do that. But they’d want to protect their vital interests here. If they did, it could mean war against my people. A war my people would win. But the cost to you, in blood and in treasure, would be incalculable. I can’t guarantee that any of you would survive.”
He was laying it on thick, but he had to be persuasive while still not providing much in the way of actual detail. His hope was that he could make Apella believe he was better off not knowing the facts of the situation.
Apella’s face had started to go pale, and he was picking nervously at a hangnail, so Kirk thought he was succeeding.
“They’ve been using you for a long time, Apella. Making promises. Keeping just enough of them to string you along. But I doubt that whatever you’re getting back is worth dying for. You were promised a whole world, once. Do you have it yet?”
Apella’s bushy eyebrows rose and his mouth dropped open. “How do you know that?”
“It’s enough that I do,” Kirk said.
The governor brought himself under control again. “Many have died already. On both sides,” Apella said.
“And yet, the first time I came here, Villagers and Hill People lived in peace. Villagers started the war. You changed what had been an idyllic paradise into a bloody battlefield, and for what? So you could be used, taken advantage of, by the Klingons.”
“James is right, Apella,” Tyree said. His voice was thick, and Kirk saw bruising on his throat. When he opened his mouth again, he revealed a gap where two teeth had been. “Your people and mine had lived in harmony for all time, until those aliens gave you fire sticks. Only then did the killing begin. And the dying.”
“It’s not too late to set things right,” Kirk said. “And to prevent much more bloodshed—maybe even the total eradication of your people, the destruction of this planet.”
“But how?” Apella asked. “Your ships are already on the way, you said.”
“I can still call them off. If they arrive and don’t find Klingons here, there’ll be no need for war.”
Apella swallowed, and his eyes were liquid with terror and pain. “The Klingons do not listen to me,” he admitted. “You are right, Kirk. The one called Krell has promised much and delivered little.”
“They’ll listen to all of us together,” Kirk said. “You can speak for all the Victors, and Tyree for all the Freeholders—that makes up the vast majority of Neural’s people. By being here and arming you, the Klingons have broken an agreement they made with another race, which they fear—and rightly so—even more than they do my people. They won’t want to face us, but they especially won’t want to face us and those others combined.” He was again stretching the truth; the Organians had the capability to enforce the treaty they had imposed, but he doubted they’d join with the Federation. They had proven themselves to be officially neutral, interested only in peace.
Still, Kirk’s goal was to frighten Apella, and it looked like he might be succeeding. The sides of the man’s shirt were plastered to him, drenched in sweat. More trickled from beneath his thick mop of hair. “You believe if we just tell the Klingons to leave here, they will?”
“If we phrase it the right way,” Kirk replied. “Yes, I think they will.”
“Why should we not have the Freeholders join us in inviting them to stay? Would that not satisfy the treaty?”
“It might,” Kirk admitted. “But at what cost? Working together, cooperatively, you could run the mine for the benefit of all Neural. The leutrinium will always have value. As it is, all Neural is enslaved by the Klingons—even those of you who believe yourselves unshackled. That won’t last. In the end, everybody wants to live free.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I’m not sure that war can be avoided. Real war, with devastating effects.”
“Apella,” Tyree said. “I would sooner see you dead than take another breath. But I am a chief, and I must think of tomorrow. The lives of our children, and our children’s children, may depend on the next thing you say.”
Apella hesitated. Kirk filled the silence. “It’s never easy to change course, or to admit a mistake. Believe me, I know that. But the choice here is simple, Apella. You go along with me, and everybody lives. Or you stick with the Klingons, and there’s no telling who lives. If anybody.”
Apella was breathing through his mouth, taking short, rasping inhalations and blowing them out quickly. He looked, Kirk thought, like he was on the verge of a panic attack. His gaze darted back and forth, to Kirk, then Tyree, then some indeterminate space between them before starting the circuit again. Kirk almost felt bad for putting him in this position.
Almost, but not quite.
Finally, the governor seemed to make up his mind. His fists clenc
hed on the desk, his jaw became set, and he nodded once. “I will do it,” he said. “I will tell the Klingons to leave Neural.”
“We will,” Tyree corrected.
Kirk was about to say something else when he became aware of a noise from outside, a swelling rumble, as if from many voices speaking at once. Apella heard it, too, and rose from his chair. He was almost to a window when the front door burst open. One of the guards came in. “Apella!” he cried. “We’re under attack!”
Twenty-Seven
“Is it your people, then?” Apella asked Kirk.
Kirk tried to make out details from the dull roar outside. “I don’t think so.”
Apella rose from his seat and hurried to the door, flinging it wide and stepping out onto the deck. Kirk followed, and Tyree, moving more slowly, joined them moments later.
Across the pit, a throng had gathered outside the fence. Uniformed guards and armed Victors were racing toward them, on the broad, flat plain around the pit. Rifles cracked in the night on both sides, their muzzle flashes bright, and acrid smoke already filled the air.
A couple of guards crowded into the doorway behind them. “What’s going on down there?” Apella asked.
“Freeholders, sir,” one replied. “Lots of them.”
“Freeholders?” Apella whirled on Tyree. “Your people!”
“You have had me in custody all afternoon,” Tyree said. “I had nothing to do with this.”
As Kirk watched, helpless to interfere, the Freeholders on the far side of the fence tore at it, while others tried to climb over. Victors fired on them, and Freeholders dropped like stones. Still, more came. Hundreds of them, it seemed. They would get through the fence, Kirk was certain.
But it would be a bloodbath.
“You’ve got to stop it!” Kirk said.
“How?” Apella asked. “I am here, and they are down there.”
“Tell your people not to fire. Tell them that the Victors and the Freeholders are on the same side. Tell them we’re united against the Klingon threat—and once we inform the Klingons of that, they’ll leave.”
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