"I promise," she said in somber Klingon. "And I promise also to sing the honor of your actions in every great house in the Empire."
"Then it is a good day to die." The young man nodded a silent farewell to his companions, then turned on his heel and headed for the survivors in the unburnt hut. Kira frowned after him, then turned an urgent gaze on Dax.
"Do we have to--"
"Yes." Without flinching or protest, Dax watched the last two hunters of Gordek's house end their lives in equally dignified silence. Hers was now the task of cha'DIch, the honor witness, even if the battle here was only one of internal principles. She let her cold gaze settle afterwards on Gordek, still standing with clenched fists and scowling down at his fallen hunters as if their deaths had been an insult he could fight them over. "Gordek," she said softly. "You also have a knife."
His fire-lit gaze lifted to meet hers, swirling with resentment and frustrated fury. "Yes," he said thickly. "And I will use it on you!"
Dax took a quick step back when he launched himself, reaching desperately for her phaser even as her eyes judged the distance and her heartbeat drummed out too late, too late, too late! She heard the familiar shrill sound, but it wasn't until the big Klingon actually thudded down across the seared ground, sprawling limply over his own dead warriors, that she realized Kira had pulled her own weapon even earlier.
"Is he dead?" Dax demanded.
"Of course not." Kira rolled her victim off to one side, careful not to let any of his clothing come in contact with the geset. "He's coming back to the Defiant with us."
Dax frowned, her stomach roiling with the injustice of four honorable Klingons dead and this self-centered traitor saved. "You're really going to evacuate him from Armageddon?"
"That's right." Kira gave her a hard-edged Bajoran smile. "I'm going to wake him up just long enough for Odo to extract a confession that names the Cardassians as his buyers. Then we're going to extradite him -- straight to Dahar Master Kor's ship."
CHAPTER 9
"GET ME KOR. Now."
Sisko never particularly noticed how his voice sounded, especially in the middle of a tense situation. The only reason he suspected something about it changed was the way his bridge officers and ensigns dove into their work at times like these, as if Furies stood behind them breathing fire down their necks. Even Worf wasn't immune to the effect, although his stiff posture made it clear he could have resisted that aura of command if his officer's instincts ever told him to. Sisko suspected he himself had looked much the same way when he'd been on the receiving end of Admiral Nechayev's steely voice only a few hours before.
"Excellent work, Captain," the admiral had said, her ice-pale eyes gleaming despite the cometary interference that danced through her high-security transmission. "The loss of the Victoria Adams -- perhaps even the loss of her passengers -- may very well be worth finding out that the Cardassians planned to smuggle drevlocet off this Armageddon planet of yours. You may have just saved millions of lives."
"Thank you, Admiral," Sisko said shortly. "But don't start filing any obituaries. I haven't given up on the crash survivors yet, or on my away team."
Nechayev arched her eyebrows. "But I thought you said you had to drop back into a depowered and cloaked orbit to evade the Klingon blockade. How are you going to protect the planet from comet impacts now?"
Sisko grimaced. "I don't know." Dropping abruptly out of warp with his exhaust camouflaged and his shields repolarized to blend in with the magnetosphere had seemed like the best way to evade Kor's drunken, wild chase. It wasn't until after the fact that he'd realized he'd once again trapped himself into doing nothing. "I'll think of something."
"Perhaps," Nechayev suggested, "you could negotiate with Dahar Master Kor."
Sisko eyed his sector commander in deep suspicion. He'd never known the admiral to make a joke, especially not in a situation as tense as this one, but surely she couldn't be serious now. "What makes you think the Klingons are going to be any more amenable to negotiation now than when they fired on the Victoria Adams?"
"Because now," she pointed out gently, "you can inform them that this planet is a natural source of drevlocet."
That brought Worf's head up from his intent scrutiny of his piloting screens. "The Klingon High Council swore to uphold the military convention banning drevlocet!" he growled. "On the Honor of the Emperor Kahless! They would never use it."
"I am aware of that, Commander," the admiral retorted. "In fact, it's all that's keeping me from ordering five starships to take control of that system immediately. I trust the Klingons will protect Armageddon adequately, once they know how dangerous the planet really is."
"That's why you want me to talk to Kor," Sisko realized. "So he knows the real reason why the Cardassians have been trying to goad us into a fight."
"Precisely." The admiral transferred her steely gaze back to Sisko. "The stakes in this game are now very high, Captain. Whatever you and Kor decide to do, make sure it doesn't leave the system open to Cardassian intervention again. And that," she added, tapping her Starfleet Academy ring on the table in front of her for emphasis, "is an order."
Sisko gritted his teeth and agreed, recognizing the unwritten code that meant Nechayev really meant it this time. And as soon as her transmission had flickered out, he'd ordered the confessed traitor Gordek transferred over to Kor's ship. It had been his best stab at getting the Dahar Master to turn a sympathetic eye on Armageddon's evacuation. If Kor didn't respond to a warning that could save millions of Klingons from dying in a Cardassian chemical attack, he wasn't going to respond to anything.
Unfortunately, after an hour of silence, that looked to be exactly the case.
"Kor refuses to acknowledge our hail, Captain." Thornton looked frustrated, as if the Klingon's stubborn silence were his own personal failure. "I've coded it as a priority request, but the Klingons still won't answer."
"Are they jamming our transmission?"
"No, sir. Just refusing to reply."
"Maybe Kor's still interrogating Gordek," O'Brien said doubtfully. "Just because he told Odo all the gory details of his dealings with the Cardassians doesn't mean he's going to be as cooperative with Kor."
"Unlikely," Worf said. "We transported the exile collaborator over three hours ago. By now, Kor has either debriefed him or killed him."
"Or both," Odo said dryly.
Sisko rubbed a hand across his beard, his gaze never leaving the dangerous haze of cometary debris haloing Armageddon's horizon. "Ensign Osgood, how much time do we have before the next fragment is scheduled to impact the planet?"
The science officer glanced up from her computer model, looking worried. "Almost forty-five minutes, sir -- but the next impact isn't a single fragment, it's a cluster that stretches over two degrees of arc. Unless we start soon, I'm not sure we'll have time to deflect them all."
"Then we can't afford to wait on Kor's convenience." Sisko launched himself out of his chair, a flare of anger burning off the stiffness that came from too long a period of inactivity. "After seeing us fire on the comet fragments that he blew apart, he must know what we've been doing to protect the planet. He might even know what maneuvers we've been using to do it. The only thing he doesn't know right now is exactly which comet fragments we need to deflect."
"I wouldn't be too sure of that, Captain," Thornton said. "I've been seeing a lot of diffuse scanner activity from the Klingon ship in the past three hours. It looks like they're tracking the whole cometary debris cloud now, just like we are."
"Kor is making sure he knows our next move in advance." Sisko smacked a hand against his useless weapons panel as he passed it, making both Thornton and Osgood start. Odo merely gave him an inquiring, upward look. "So when we go to deflect those comets --"
"-- Kor will obliterate us," Worf finished grimly. Sisko scowled and paced off another circuit of his bridge. "What we need is a way to distract the Klingon blockade long enough for us to deflect that cluster of comets. The tro
uble is, if I were Kor, I wouldn't be taking my eyes off those comets for a second. What could possibly distract me and my whole crew?"
"An act of God?" asked O'Brien. "Like an ion storm or a solar flare?"
Sisko shook his head. "Hard to duplicate in under an hour, Chief. What else?"
"A summons from the Emperor, or from Chancellor Gowron?" Odo suggested.
"Constable, if a summons came in from Starfleet calling us away from Armageddon right now, would you believe it?"
"No," Odo admitted.
"Me, either. What else?"
A long silence followed his question this time. It was broken at last not by words, but by one of the rarest sounds Sisko had ever heard on the bridge of the Defiant.
Worf was laughing.
It was a full-throated roar of Klingon amusement, barely distinguishable from a warrior's fighting bellow. It made Odo jump and O'Brien curse, while Sisko swung around to stare at his tactical officer in disbelief and dawning hope. "What?" he demanded. "What have you thought of?"
"The Batlh Jaj!" Worf's eyes gleamed with the dancing red sparks that either danger or delight could ignite. He saw Sisko's baffled look and shook his head, so hard his braid whipped against his shoulders. "The Batlh Jaj, Captain. The Klingon Day of Honor. It is today!"
"What?" Two long strides took Sisko over to the nearest panel, which happened to be Osgood's. She gave him a quizzical look when he leaned over her shoulder, but it wasn't the arcane model of cometary orbits he was interested in -- it was the standard date-time readout in the corner of her display screen. "Stardate 3692 is the Day of Honor?"
"It varies from year to year, since the Klingon calendar does not correspond to Federation standard," Worf informed him. "But the day we left Deep Space Nine was wa'ChorghDIch – first day of the ninth month. The Day of Honor falls three days after that."
"I don't know about the wa'ChorghDIch," said O'Brien. "But it has been almost exactly three Standard days since we left the station."
Adrenaline began to fizz through Sisko's blood, born of both excitement and foreboding. "Let me see if I can remember my Klingon history," he said slowly. "'On the Day of Honor, the Klingons treat even their fiercest enemies as blooded Klingon warriors, with all the privileges and rights and ceremonial duties that entails.'" He threw a challenging look at his tactical officer. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Worf's savage, glinting smile told him the answer without any need for words.
"Oh, no." Odo's deep voice was heavy with foreboding. "Commander, you're not going to make us fight one of those hand-to-hand ritual battles again, are you?"
"In reality, the Suv'batlh is not a ritual," Worf replied. "It is a battle to the death to resolve a challenge to one's honor."
"And on the Day of Honor, the combatants don't need to be blooded Klingon warriors. They can even," Sisko said in deep satisfaction, "be Starfleet officers."
"Correct," said Worf.
Sisko swung to face Thornton again. "I want you to ram a connection through to the Klingons -- don't wait for them to acknowledge it, just patch it straight into their display. Can you do that?"
The young sensor tech grinned back at him, as if his reckless energy were contagious. "I can feed it right through their viewing sensor circuits, sir, so it replaces their external scan. The only problem is, they can probably jam it within a few minutes if they want to."
"They won't want to. Just give me a minute's warning before we're online." Sisko turned back toward Worf. "We'll need to hold the Suv'batlh on the Klingons" ship, to distract them while the Defiant deflects comets."
"Agreed. But allow me to point out, sir, that if we win, we will not only have defended our honor." Red battle sparks were dancing in Worf's eyes again. "We will also have forced Kor to grant any request we ask on that day."
"Any request?" Sisko demanded. "Even cooperating with us to keep the Cardassians away from Armageddon?"
"Yes, sir."
Sisko's breath hissed between clenched teeth as he weighed the odds and juggled probabilities. "It's a gamble," he said at last. "But I think we have a chance of success. And if we fail, we'll still have managed to distract the Klingons without making any overt acts of war against them."
"Somehow, that wasn't what I had in mind for my official Starfleet obituary," O'Brien commented.
"Don't worry, Chief," Sisko told him. "You're not going. You've got a family at home to worry about --"
"-- and you'd like a chance to actually win this fight," O'Brien finished, sounding resigned. "Thank you, sir. So who are you taking?"
"Worf," Sisko said, then glanced over his shoulder inquiringly. He got a reluctant Changeling nod in return, but the metal-hard gleam in his constable's eyes told him his instincts were correct. "And Odo. That way --"
"I've punched into the Klingon sensors, Captain," Thornton interrupted, voice calm despite the frantic way his fingers flew across his controls. "Communications signal will be on their viewscreen in ten seconds. Nine... eight... seven..."
Sisko took a deep breath and prepared himself to glare straight at the unoffending curve of Armageddon's rusty atmosphere. He'd get no return signal from this unauthorized transmission, at least at first.
"... three... two... on-line."
"Kor, this day is Batlh Jaj," Sisko said, cutting straight to the heart of the matter with Klingon-like brusqueness. "You cannot refuse a challenge, even from a Starfleet officer who has interfered in your blockade. I challenge you on behalf of my insulted honor to engage in Suv'batlh, three on three." He saw Worf nod at him approvingly, although he wasn't sure if it was his phrasing or his Klingon pronunciation that was being evaluated. "Right here, Kor. Right now. Suv'batlh."
There was an agonizingly long pause, during which the distant spiked bloom of an upper-atmosphere comet impact flared at him from the curve of Armageddon's smoke-clouded sky, a foretaste of the disaster looming just outside the gravity well. Then the screen rippled and became Kor's broad-shouldered form, seated in his own stark command chair. The older Klingon's furrowed face was alight with surprise, respect, and laughter.
"A noble effort, Sisko!" Kor applauded in the Klingon style, fist thumping on chest, while the warriors around him watched and rumbled with amusement. "Ironic, but still noble!"
Sisko narrowed his eyes, ignoring the queasy ripple of unease that twisted in his gut. "What do you mean, 'ironic'?"
"Ironic because your request comes just a little too late." Kor's grin showed stained and straggling teeth, but its honesty couldn't be doubted. "You may have matched the Klingon calendar to your Federation days correctly, but you forgot about the length of the Klingon day. The day of Batlh Jaj -- what you call our Day of Honor -- ended ten minutes ago."
The devastation to Armageddon's surface seemed endless. Kira had given up hoping to find any sign of life among the burned and buried wreckage. Ash carpeted what remained of the tuq'mor like a silky gray shroud, and the mud no longer steamed or simmered. A fatureless black cloud of ejecta had crept inland from over the ocean, dimming the sky to dull amber. Only the hiss and creak of cooling embers accompanied them as they trudged along the dark tunnel that used to be a banchory trail. That, and the distant, hollow boom of comet fragments bursting not nearly far enough away.
Kira couldn't remember the last time her body had hurt so much. Her ankles ached from supporting her full weight on toes and arches while climbing the jungle-gym roadblocks of tuq'mor thrown down in their way; every other muscle all the way up to her ass burned with a fatigue so deep she almost couldn't imagine it fading. Dax had made her last humorous comment uncounted hours ago. Now, all Kira heard from the Trill was the squelch and slap of her feet in the sticking mud, and hoarse panting that sounded suspiciously like Kira's own.
If i ever get home, Kira thought, I will never walk anywhere without pavement again.
Dax's grab at her sleeve stung the burns on her arm and made her gasp. "Do you hear that?" the Trill whispered, hauling her to a stop.
She pushed Dax toward one singed-but-still-living hedge. "Come on!"
Finding cover within the blackened tuq'mor was probably the easiest thing Kira had done in the last seven hours. Wriggling between knotted limbs like a fish darting among river reeds, she hauled herself into what now served as the topmost story. What parts of her weren't already blackened by ash, burns, and mud readily picked up a grimy coating of soot from the limbs and brush that had taken the brunt of the last big air strike. She crouched as low to the burned-out canopy as exhausted muscles would allow, then hoped she looked like any other clump of burned foliage as she peered back down the trail.
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