"Not if they are on the opposite side of the planet at the time," Worf said simply.
"But that means solving some intricate orbital mechanics equations --" Sisko came to a halt in the center of his bridge, stymied once again by the absence of Dax at the science station. There was no way he could expect a single-brained human to do all the monitoring, modeling, and scanning his Trill science officer could have handled with ease. "Mr. Farabaugh, who else on the Defiant's crew has had science officer training?"
"Um -- well, I went to the Academy with Ensign Osgood down in the main weapons bay, sir. I know she aced all her celestial mechanics courses. And I think there's an engineering tech named Thornton who did a stint on a science research vessel. He's also an expert on sensor systems."
"Good. Contact Thornton and tell him to come up and man your station. His job will be to scan the Klingons and report back to you on any changes in their orbit. You and Osgood commandeer one of the science labs and a sector of the main computer, and set up a full-scale model of the comet belt. I don't just want to know when every comet's going to hit this planet, I want to know far enough in advance to adjust our orbit, so we can intersect and deflect it while it's still on the Klingon's blind side. Is that clear?"
"Aye, sir!"
"I want your first report by --" Sisko glanced at the shipboard clock to estimate a reasonable deadline, and only then realized why his eyes felt like he was squinting past sand. From the time they'd left Deep Space Nine yesterday until now, he'd put in seventeen straight hours on duty. And so had the rest of his original bridge crew, with the exception of Odo, who had been forced to return to his cabin and regenerate several hours ago.
"-- oh-three-hundred hours. Odo, you have the conn. Commander Worf, call up replacements for your station and Chief O'Brien's." He got the scowl he'd expected from the Klingon. "Captain –"
"No buts, Mr. Worf," Sisko said crisply. "I refuse to take the Defiant slow-dancing with comets unless my pilot is fit and rested. Report back to the bridge by oh-four-hundred. I assume we won't be looking to deflect any impacts before then, Mr. Farabaugh?"
"No, sir."
"Unless the Klingons start up some target practice of their own." Odo's ability to find a cloud in every silver lining would have amused Sisko if his chief of security wasn't right so depressingly often.
"Let's hope that doesn't happen, Constable." Sisko C ast a sardonic look at the viewscreen. "Although if our glee-riding friends over there do decide to start shooting, with any luck they'll either be too drunk or too motion-sick to aim straight."
The first dull crash jerked Kira's head around so fast she nearly tumbled off the tall root she'd been straddling. A puff of dust -- or dislodged vapor? -- belched skyward like volcanic ejecta above the impenetrable tract of plant life before her. A tree just like the one on which she sat shuddered dully where it poked up through the brush a dozen meters away. Another unhurried tremor; she felt this one vibrate through her bones, and clenched at the roots underneath her as a flock of silent, grey-green primates scattered away from the rumble like startled pigeons.
For just an instant, she thought about calling out in alarm. She'd never heard anything like this, couldn't scramble up any kind of mental image to scare away more dire thoughts. The closest thing memory could offer was the Cardassians' giant mining drones, crunching their way through everything that wasn't the ores they sought. But there were no ores here, and presumably no Cardassians, either, so her mind leapt to the only other thing this alien environment had to offer: a comet.
The very ridiculousness of that mental leap blew the rest of her fears into silence. Back toward the main expanse of clearing, dark Klingon figures slunk moodily from place to place. Quiet yet surly, biding the time leading up to their destruction with what no doubt constituted a Klingon display of good grace. While their lack of alarm helped solidify her suspicion that no murderous rain of ice was imminent, it also made her scowl in private disgust.
In the years since Bajor had won its independence from Cardassia, Kira had spent a great deal of effort trying to free herself of what seemed unavoidable racism. In her youth, fierce pride in her Bajoran heritage had been the only thing that let her justify the anger and bloodshed saturating her life as an anti-Cardassian terrorist. It wasn't until she worked side by side with Humans and Trills and Ferengi and Vulcans every day that she became aware of how much her hatred of Cardassians had slipped over into hatred of anything not Bajoran.
The realization had proved unexpectedly painful. Disgust and loathing for the race who tortured your people to near extinction had always seemed fair and right. To forgive was the first step in forgetting, and forgetting was a dishonor to the millions of Bajorans who had died under Cardassian rule. She'd taken a private satisfaction in flaunting the Prophets' warning, "Hatred poisons the soil so that nothing but more hatred can grow there." Her hatred was different. Her hatred was just.
And her impatience with the Humans? Her distrust of the Ferengi? Her disbelief in the Vulcans' sincerity? Her secret suspicion that Trills did something immoral by sharing themselves with a symbiont? It took her many months to accept that all her fears, dislikes, suspicions, and disdain were simply fruits of the soil she'd let her just hatred poison. After that, she'd begun the long task of redemption. She'd even allowed herself the vanity of believing she'd made brilliant progress in learning to embrace the values offered by other worlds and cultures.
Until today.
She'd spent the better part of the last two hours trying to wrap her mind around the concept that being thumped, spat on, and snarled at by scowling Klingons was little more than exchanging social pleasantries. Not that she was any sort of expert in their cultural ways. Still, her gut instincts just didn't seem able to align themselves with what amounted to a cultural habit of aggression.
And I thought I was a barbarian, she admitted with a sigh. Picking her way carefully up the tree's rough bark, she found a handhold above the tallest knee of root and used that to hike herself almost a full meter higher in an effort to improve her view. My problem is, I just can't pretend I don't feel what I feel. Dax's careful, rational explanations aside, Kira found it hard to silence those old instincts just for the sake of pretending she respected any society that functioned more on intimidation and posturing than on any kind of true merit. Sympathy kept running aground on the basic reality that every interview she and Dax conducted had someone shouting and growling as though eager to encourage a fight. If Dax hadn't suggested that Kira spend some time off on her own --to "cool off-- the major might just have precipitated a political situation of her own.
A slow, chuffing grumble crack-crashed its way closer through the stand of brush to her left. Kira craned up on tiptoes to steal a glimpse of the topmost surface of the foliage, and instead caught only a methane-tangy belch of breath in the face when the creature making its way toward her finally smashed its languorous way out of the undergrowth.
By the time her brain released some of its processing capabilities from the act of bolting straight up the tree, she was perhaps another two meters farther from the clearing floor. She peered down -- at least slightly down -- at the peaceful behemoth now stripping bark from the woody growth it had just muscled through. Not a Cardassian mining drone, but easily a hefty second in both mass and size. It towered a good four meters at the shoulder, with a huge, blunt head that sloped down and forward to give it the look of a crashball guardsman. A flare of bony plate ridged the back of its skull like a tiara, angling to fit almost seamlessly with the armorlike skin encasing the rest of its bulk; necessary, no doubt, to protect against whips and thorns and brambles as it plowed its way through the hostile overgrowth that Dax and Kira had reluctantly deemed impossible to move through. The eyes it turned up toward Kira were gentle, if stupid, and it paid her no more attention than it took to fondle her toe with the tip of its mobile upper lip before seeking out more edible fare among the tree's scrubby leaves.
"Don't worry -- she's ha
rmless."
Kira twisted a look toward the voice, trying to look more annoyed than embarrassed. "I was just climbing up for a better view." Then she realized how awkwardly she'd wrapped herself around a limb too narrow to truly hold her weight, and couldn't hold back her blush. "I guess I wasn't expecting company," she finally managed.
The Klingon girl smiled -- a smile remarkably free of Klingon disdain, for all that it came and went like a shooting star. Tossing a coil of woven plant fiber onto one shoulder, the girl picked her way across the top of the undisturbed brush-forest with an ease almost rivaling that of the silent primates who still danced back and forth across the large pachyderm's trail. Even the bloody bandage cinched around her thigh didn't seem to slow her much. She was easily the youngest Klingon Kira had seen here at the Vrag main camp, maybe a year or two past puberty, the equivalent of a Bajoran fourteen-year-old. She'd braided her glossy black hair into a queue more severe even than Worf habitually wore, but managed to offset that austerity with simple formfitting clothes and not so much as a suggestion of the armor and metalwork normally incorporated into even the most casual Klingon attire. She trailed one hand lightly down the huge animal's side as she passed. The gesture reminded Kira of nothing so much as the Bajoran farmers of her youth, dropping unconscious touches here and there as they walked among their herds, lest the clumsy creatures forget a fragile humanoid moved among them.
"It's not like you couldn't have heard her coming," the girl remarked as she stepped from brush-tops to tree and offered Kira her hand. "Banchory aren't very good at sneaking up on anyone."
Kira was surprised to recognize the Klingon word for war wagon. She cast another nervous look at the beast now languidly splintering a branch the size of her thigh, and it occurred to her that "war wagon" wasn't a bad description for these animals.
Gingerly lowering one foot toward the brace the girl created with her fist against the tree, Kira did her best to unwind herself from her perch in something resembling a dignified manner. "So did you bring these..." She tried to remember exactly how the girl had pronounced the word. "... these banchory from Qo'nos with you?"
The girl shook her head, caught Kira's other foot against her shoulder before the major could lose her balance, and guided her to the relative safety of the roots with a strength that would have been disproportionate in a Bajoran girl her age. "No, the banchory are native to Cha'xirrac. There used to be thousands of them." She watched the banchory near them strip a long peel of bark from one of the other trees, turning it over, around, and inside out using nothing but the delicate manipulations of its lips and tongue. A flash of what might have been anger darkened the young girl's face. "They once used this clearing in the tuq'mor as an overnight spot, but they pretty much avoid us now."
By now, Kira had come to understand that "tuq'mor" meant the impossibly thick snarl of vines, bushes, trees, and ferns that seemed to cover every inch of Armageddon's surface. It occurred to Kira that she should have known that even Klingons couldn't beat out a clearing the size of this one without some kind of assistance.
Kira forced herself to sit without flinching when the banchory turned to examine the other side of its newly made clearing, all but brushing Kira with its stubby tail as it lumbered past. "So why do they stay away now?" she asked, as much to distract herself as because she really cared for an answer. She remembered the pile of mammoth carcasses by the sea. "Is it because you hunt them?"
"Because Gordek and the other men hunt them." The bitterness in her young voice startled Kira. She clutched the rope over her shoulder as though it were a precious bat'leth, defiantly meeting Kira's gaze. "Grandmother thinks we can do whatever we want because everyone on Cha'xirrac will soon be dead. Gordek thinks we can do whatever we want just because we can." A peculiarly childlike frustration pursed the girl's lips. "I thought honor was about more than just how long your conduct was remembered, or what you could force others to do."
Kira's comm badge chirped before she could think of how best to respond to such a comment. "Dax to Kira." The Trill's voice sounded stiff with frustration. "Could you join me and epetai Vrag?"
"I'll be right there." She tapped off her badge, then managed a smile for the girl with less effort than she'd expected. "It was a pleasure to meet you –"
"K'Taran." She thrust out her hand with charmingly Human exuberance, but performed the actual handshake with a certain clumsiness that told Kira she'd never actually performed the social ritual before. "Any pleasure belongs to me," she said with deep sincerity. "The adults say that you are the one who brought a doctor, to help relieve our suffering while we wait for the end."
"Yes, we did." Kira felt abruptly stupid. Here she was chatting about local wildlife when it seemed almost everyone and everything in the House of Vrag could benefit from medical attention. "He was over in the children's billet earlier, but probably has time to look at your leg." She pointed out the trio of dugouts where she'd last seen Bashir, as though K'Taran might not know which ones they were. "He's slim and dark, with dark hair." Then she remembered the awkward Human handshake, and realized the girl might have mistaken her for Human despite her distinctly Bajoran Features. If recognizing more subtle racial differences was challenging for Klingons, she didn't want to think about how hard it might be for the girl to tell Human male from Human female. Especially when the female was as tall and strong-boned as Dax. "He's the one with short hair, and no freckles."
"Thank you." For a moment, she looked like she might try the handshake again, but instead defaulted to one fist against her chest in the Klingon equivalent. "The concern you show for my people is honorable."
Kira watched her clamber off across the tuq'mor, marveling again at the complexity of any word that so many people could use to mean so many different things. That there could be so many different forms of Klingon pleasantry seemed only slightly more remarkable.
The dugout tree-cave currently hosting the Vrag Household conference didn't look appreciably different than when Kira had fled it more than an hour ago. Still too dark, still too humid, still crammed with snarling, snapping Klingons battling over yet another gradation in the definition of "honor." Roots snaked and intertwined so tightly through the walls that it was impossible to tell what had been naturally eroded into hollows by dripping water and what the Klingons had excavated themselves. All their attempts to personalize the dank, formless space -- all their tapestries and sculptures and crudely fashioned furniture -- only accentuated what a dark, dirty, pitiful hovel the dugout really was.
"Kira…"
Dax seemed to appear out of nowhere, her soft summons coalescing her figure from the shadows just inside the dugout's low door. She stood beside a rickety table, toying with the handle of a simple water jug and watching the Klingons as they argued. "We've got a problem."
Kira nodded. "You mean besides a shipload of missing Starfleet retirees and rocks the size of space stations falling on our heads?"
The humor seemed to break through Dax's pensiveness, and she turned away from the discussion with a crooked smile. "In addition to that." She dropped her voice to a more conspiratorial tone. "The Klingon blockade is back. Captain Sisko's going to cloak the Defiant and try to avoid detection."
Kira felt a little clench in her stomach. "What about the away team? Can we beam out?"
"Only if we leave now. No guarantees if the Defiant is discovered."
Because then the ship would have to raise shields, and there'd be no telling when they could lower them again. Kira paced in a slow circle, rubbing at her eyes. "That would mean leaving without the Victoria Adams's crew." Prophets, what time was it back on board the Defiant? She felt as though she hadn't slept in weeks. "And we'll have to drag Bashir out by the hair. He won't leave as long as there are casualties."
"But if we don't leave now," Dax pointed out, ruthlessly nonpartisan, "we might not leave at all."
"Then you will simply be equal to the rest of us."
Kira tossed a glance over her should
er, surprised to find what had seemed a truly apocalyptic argument now lulled enough for Rekan to eavesdrop. The others arrayed beyond her, waiting; Kira couldn't tell how much of their sour expressions were aimed at their epetai and how much at her. "We're not completely equal." Kira turned to face them squarely. She'd be damned if she'd let anyone claim the moral high ground, least of all a band of defeatist Klingon exiles. "We intend to survive."
Epetai Vrag lifted her lip in a civilized snarl. "Fighting a pointless battle does not add to your honor. The comets grow more thick daily. The longer you are here, the greater the likelihood you will be involved in a large-scale strike." She reached out with almost prim disapproval and flicked Dax's hand away from the water jug. "You would better serve yourselves by accepting the inevitable and preparing your spirits for their passage, or taking the one soldier you have found and leaving now."
Kira forced herself not to slap the jug to the floor. "I'm not ready to ignore all our options just yet." She turned pointedly to Dax. "Now that the blockade is back, we can't count on the Defiant deflecting any comets away from the planet."
"But the Klingons holding the hostages --"
Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02 Page 9
