"Can't get any help from us if we've broken cloak and been attacked by Klingons. We'll have to assume that the comets are going to keep coming. As it gets darker, we might be able to see them hit the atmosphere, maybe get a better feel for the volume and frequency."
"Unfortunately," the science officer sighed, "that won't help us pinpoint the impact zones." Dax lifted her eyes only a fraction, but Kira knew she'd made eye contact with the Klingon matriarch still hovering behind Kira's right shoulder. "We'd be safer if we moved farther inland. Right now, a major impact in the ocean could flood this camp."
Kira couldn't help blurting a disbelieving laugh. "We're fifty kilometers from the ocean!"
"Someday, when we have time," Dax said sweetly, "I'll tell you all about how tsunamis on twelfth century Caladaan created coast-to-coast flood plains on most of their lesser continents."
Kira didn't really care to hear the whole explanation -- the fact that the example existed was point enough. "What about initiating a physical search for the survivors? Have we found out anything of use in your interviews?"
Dax shook her head, sighing. "Even if we knew exactly where to look, we can't get through the undergrowth unless we use phasers. And that would take longer than we have."
"What about using the banchory?"
Kira had meant the question to stimulate discussion, not to slap shock through the gathering like a hand across the face. The Klingons fell into knife-sharp silence, every one, and Dax asked, "The "war wagons?"' Kira, what are you talking about?"
"They're a native animal, four or five meters tall and built like a runabout. I saw one outside." She pointed behind her, out the door and vaguely in the direction of her encounter. "Dax, you've never seen something plow through brush the way these things can. We could cover literally kilometers every hour."
Dax turned a questioning look on the matriarch. "Epetai Vrag...?" she prompted.
Rekan spoke without looking up from her hands, apparently fascinated with their cords of muscle and patterns of veins. "Was anyone with this beast you saw?"
"A girl." Kira tried to decipher the strange flux of emotion across the old Klingon's face, only to find herself wondering if every deep Klingon emotion looked to a Bajoran like anger. "She said her name was K'Taran."
A Klingon so old that his brow ridge had begun to gnarl huffed with sour laughter. "Another intractable daughter of Vrag."
Rekan snarled what might have been a Klingon threat, or perhaps just an animal noise of anger. It came overlaid with a memory of a young girl's voice saying, Grandmother thinks we can do whatever we want, and a sudden awareness of how similar two individual faces could be. "Epetai Vrag," Kira heard herself saying, almost gently, "is K'Taran your granddaughter?"
Rekan answered almost before the question was finished. "I do not have a granddaughter."
"They do not cease to exist simply because you might wish it so." The older male Klingon who'd spoken before shook off one elder's grasping hand, and aimed a backhanded swing at another.
The epetai composed her face into a haughty mask that might almost have been convincing if not for the anguish in her eyes. "The young ones who have left us live and die by their own choosings now. They have chosen a path that holds no honor and are no longer a concern to this House."
"They're a concern to us, if they are the ones who found our comrades." For about the fiftieth time since beaming down to Armageddon, Kira wondered how Dax could maintain such a show of nonjudgmental courtesy when all Kira wanted to do was tear stubborn Klingon heads off. "If you know where they are, tell us, so we can talk to them and perhaps help them all survive."
Rekan met Dax's gaze with a glare of challenge, but otherwise gave no sign that she'd heard much less intended to answer. "Honor dictated that this House be destroyed," she said instead. "That could not be avoided, but it was never my decision. We stand where we are because honor gave us no choice."
"And because you've agreed to die, everyone else has to die here with you?" Even Dax's voice had begun to sharpen with annoyance.
"She does not know where they are." The older male sniffed at the air as though displeased with the smell. "None of us knows. They have made themselves native. They wander the tuq'mor like animals. Except for the trails from their banchory, we see nothing of them."
Dax glanced at Kira. "But you said K'Taran was just here?"
Kira nodded. "She thanked us for bringing in a doctor and said --" The words were barely out of her mouth before their implication kicked her in the stomach. Turning slightly away from Dax, away from the others, she slapped at her comm badge so hard she was sure it would bruise her palm. "Kira to Bashir."
Furious at her own stupidity, more furious still at her embarrassment when nothing but silence echoed back across subspace.
"Kira to Bashir!"
Nothing. No doctor, no wayward Klingon, not even an open channel to hint that Bashir's communicator still existed. The doctor was gone.
Rekan Vrag was the first to break the silence, and although there was triumph in her voice, its icy chill told Kira it wasn't a triumph she was proud of. "You have given up another hostage," she said accusingly. "Now do you begin to see what an abomination is a Klingon without honor?"
CHAPTER 5
BASHIR WASN'T SURE which irritated him more -- being bound and blindfolded like some sort of political prisoner, or knocking his head against the floor of his captors' lumbering vehicle every time it jolted over uneven terrain or crashed its way through a new stand of underbrush. He did know that the coil of fear gaining strength at the pit of his belly only exacerbated the more facile emotions that lurched to the surface. Fear for the Victoria Adams's still-missing crew; fear for his two assistants, who shouldn't be abandoned to deal with so many Klingon casualties on their own; and, yes, fear for himself at the thought of being separated from his landing party with a star system full of potential disaster hanging over all their heads. Being all alone in an alien scrub forest when a comet sterilized the ecosystem was not one of his more romantic visions of a heroic death.
He felt the little flutter of his comm badge's chirp from where his body weight pinned it against the rocking floor. Above him, the Klingon whose knee had been in contact with his back since the beginning of their trip stirred uneasily, grunting.
"Look, this is ridiculous." Bashir paused, waiting with muscles tensed for a blow or a shove or a wad of gag in his mouth to silence him. When none came, he swallowed hard and disciplined his voice into something resembling composure. "That's my away team. If you don't let me talk to them, they'll just trace my badge signal and find me."
A strong hand snaked beneath him, prying him away from the floor less roughly than Bashir expected and plucking the badge from his uniform breast with the same casual dexterity an entomologist might use to capture a roving beetle. He thought he felt his captor shift and spin the way a person did when flinging a small object, but couldn't very well listen for the whisper of the badge's flight over the crash and rumble of their transportation. Fear finally cut its moorings in his stomach and diffused throughout his system.
"All right. The badge is gone. Fine." Pushing up with one knee and one elbow, he managed to roll himself clumsily. If hopelessness had one good trait, it was that it wasted little time converting fear into the anger more useful for survival. "Can you please untie me now?"
A grab at the front of his uniform caught him when he struggled to his knees. "Sit!"
It was the first time anyone had spoken to him since the girl who'd served as bait lured him into the underbrush in search of casualties. This voice sounded suspiciously the same. "Just tell me where --"
"Sit!"
She didn't wait for his compliance this time. Tugging firmly downward on the front of his tunic, she clearly meant to muscle him back to the floor, where he'd spent the first part of this liaison. He didn't consciously resist -- rearing back away from her grip was no more than an instinctive reaction against being forcibly placed anywhere
when he couldn't see the world around him. But he knew it was a mistake the moment his center of gravity slipped past thirty degrees. Hands clutched first at his shoulders, then at his waistband as he tumbled backward, then disappeared entirely when he hit free-fall.
The ground he landed on was softer than he'd thought, not to mention much closer to the start of his fall than it had seemed when he'd first been hauled up several meters and dumped into the transport's open bed. It poked and prodded him like a bundle of sticks, but gave just enough not to puncture anything. Springy vibrations sketched frantic movement all around him, but it was the young girl's voice -- "Get aside! Humans are fragile -- let him breathe!" -- that surprised him the most. Perhaps he wasn't such an insignificant prisoner after all.
Thin, rough fingers picked at the bindings on his wrists, the knot at the base of his skull cinching his blindfold into place. He squinted hard against the light -- Oh, God, it's only barely morning back home! -- and blinked focus into the ring of faces crouched around him.
For one instant, the term "going native" meant a little more to him than it ever had before. Then he realized that none of the muzzled, grayish faces bending over him were Klingons, and it relieved his confusion at least a little. Their eyes seemed big only in comparison to the smallness of their other features, muddy green and curious above a button rodent-nose and a mouth so tiny that it announced "insectivore" even before the first of them rolled out a long, prehensile tongue to swipe at its corneas. Bashir thought he might be able to scoop one up under either arm -- they couldn't have massed more than fifteen kilos apiece -- but they probably didn't need his help to move about their native environment. They ran on all fours like lemurs, their slim question-mark tails lifted playfully over their backs. The grace with which they navigated the upper storys of dense foliage put a zero-g dancer to shame.
They didn't even scatter or squawk when the young female Klingon jumped down into their midst. "Are you damaged?" she demanded of Bashir, somewhat testily.
"I... uh..." He managed to tear his eyes away from the plushly furred primates, only to fixate all over again on the huge, armor-plated monster calmly picking at whatever brush and limbs it could reach. It had smashed an impressive trail through the knotted undergrowth without even breaking a sweat; Bashir was suddenly glad he'd been caught by the foliage canopy and hadn't toppled all the way to the ground, another two or three meters down. "Uh... no..." he finally stammered. A Klingon -- that's right, there was a Klingon, and he should probably look at her when he answered instead of staring at her strange menagerie. "No, I'm fine, thank you..."
"Good." She clapped both hands to the front of his uniform, then hauled him very carefully to his feet, as though afraid he might break if she dropped him again. "Then will you behave?"
Bashir hazarded a glance to left and right. Except for the winding trail torn like a scar through the brush cover, there was nothing to see except kilometer upon kilometer of undulating, scrubby plain. As though the plants had clawed their way a half-dozen meters above the ground and recreated their own surface beyond the touch of mud and burrowing creatures. Even though a loose, light foliage above them shielded most of the humid undergrowth from the sun, Bashir couldn't glimpse so much as a hint of the massive trees that had marked the perimeter of the Klingon's camp.
"Will you behave?" the girl asked again, more loudly.
How many days would it take people on foot to cross the same terrain this creature had traveled in an hour? "Yes," he admitted faintly. "Yes... I guess I will."
The big herbivore was more comfortable to ride than Bashir expected. More comfortable than when he'd thought its broad back was the floor of a land-going truck, at least, and he'd been forced to endure every bump and thump and rattle. He knelt just aft of the great beast's shoulders the way the girl showed him, tucking his heels beneath him and being careful to keep all body parts clear of where its bony skull ridge scissored against the plates on its back when it moved its head. The rocking of its big, slow steps proved almost soothing now that he could see where he was going and move his body to compensate.
It pushed through the snarl of plant life with such unhurried power that Bashir smiled slightly in awe. One ponderous step at a time, chin lifted above the froth of greenery, casually splintering thickets and trampling bracken like a ship smashing through Arctic ice. It didn't even seem to notice the schools of primates capering alongside it, dolphins in the wake of a great whale. Bashir twisted to look at the silent girl behind him. "This... animal --"
"They're called banchory."
This was the first word she'd spoken that wasn't in Standard. The unconscious data collector at the back of his brain noted this as an interesting detail, even though nothing about it really seemed to mean anything. "These banchory, then. I saw some of their carcasses when we first beamed down, back on the beach near Gordek's camp." Feeling the life and majesty in the animal under him only made that memory all the more horrific. "they're clearly not Klingon in origin. I hadn't realized you'd had time to domesticate anything on Armageddon."
The girl still didn't look at him, her eyes trained forward as though guiding the banchory with her own sight. "The Klingons have domesticated nothing here. The banchory belong to the xirri."
"The...?" He broke off the question when she swept a gesture toward the rear of their mount. No point trying to turn any further without standing -- he'd only tip himself off the banchory again. Besides, he had a feeling he knew what she'd meant to indicate. They surrounded the banchory like monkey-tailed butterflies.
The slender, silent primates snatched handfuls and tonguefuls of bugs from the air as the banchory shook the undergrowth with its passage. Once or twice, a bevy of what appeared to be adolescents bounced eagerly up from below with forelimbs full of broken nuts and shattered seed pods. Bashir couldn't tell if it was insects their agile tongues probed for among those broken pieces, or pulverized bits of plant meat to complement the rest of their diet. Whichever it was, they hardly looked the role of master banchory trainers as they chased after swarms of disturbed lizards and jumped for escaping flies. More like ramoras, taking advantage of some greater creature's impact on the world.
It didn't seem an observation worth sharing, considering his situation.
Looking behind him, he offered his hand over his left shoulder and tried on one of his more charming smiles. "By the way, I'm Dr. Julian Bashir. I thought you might like to know who you were kidnapping."
"I know." But, to his surprise, she still took his hand and shook it with solemn gusto. "K'Taran."
"Of the House of Vrag?"
A flush of warm magenta darkened her face, and she gnashed her teeth quietly. "Of the House of me."
"I see..." That seemed as good an end to that round of discussion as any. Shifting himself to look forward again, Bashir watched the world dip and sway in time with the banchory's ground-eating strides. "Might I ask where we're going?"
"You're a doctor," K'Taran said bluntly in his ear. "We have wounded."
His first thought was to question who exactly "we" might be. Then he caught a flash of velvet khaki out of the corner of his eye, as three playful xirri raced past in some kind of game, and he thought perhaps he already knew. "K'Taran..." He glanced away from the bobbing horizon, wanting to look back at her but unsure if she'd appreciate his scrutiny. "You realize there's a very good chance everything on this planet -- xirri and banchory included -- will be dead in just another few days?"
He almost thought he felt the chill of her denial sweep its way up his spine. But perhaps it was just the threat of imminent rain that seemed to hang on every dew-damp leaf they passed. "Klingons don't cease to fight just because the odds are hopeless."
"I'm sure that's true. But the crash victims you've been holding hostage aren't a part of your fight. If you let us evacuate them, I'm sure we can make arrangements to take anyone else who --"
"My grandmother will never let anyone go." For just that moment, she sounded like a lit
tle girl -- petulant, angry, despairing for something she'd hoped for from her adults but never gotten. "Besides," she continued in a more Defiant tone, "my shield-mates and I would never leave without the xirri. They're our friends. Like your scientists, they took no honor promise to die."
Neither did I, Bashir wanted to tell her. But a roll of distant thunder distracted him, and a vision of tragedy swirled up from the forest floor to swallow his thinking before he could recapture his train of thought. Despite the unchanging nature of the planet's overgrown surface, the site of the devastation somehow snuck up on them when Bashir wasn't ready to see it. Naked, burn-scarred limbs jutted out over a wasteland of mud, charcoal, and blackened bone The brush was singed well beyond this terminal edge; it hadn't been easy to see amid the normal mix of woody scrub and needlelike leaves, but now Bashir recognized the sere of heat so intense it had razed a vast patch of forest down to stubble. The local plants had already begun to fight their way back -- faster-growing and more tenacious even than Britain's notorious heather. A furry blush of green laid an inch-high carpet over stubble, stones, and half-dead brush. Rather than renewing the desolation, though, it served instead to highlight the great emptiness. As though someone had thrown a hasty blanket over the corpses in the hopes no one would recognize the outlined forms.
Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02 Page 10
