For some reason, the Klingon matriarch looked taller on top the tuq'mor, standing proudly -- if not comfortably -- with her chin held high. She'd dragged loose the rhodium comb pinning her hair in place the moment the challenge was official. The mass of silver white hair that cascaded down her back gleamed unexpectedly bright in their ash-faded surroundings. A wild mane of icy fire. When she fitted the comb back into her hair, Kira thought it looked like a thin, silver tiara framing the back of her skull, an appropriate addendum to her cool alien beauty.
Kira positioned herself the required three paces in front of the epetai, resolutely squaring her tired shoulders. "The tuq'mor is the battleground," she announced, loudly enough that the Klingons now crowding the ground level could hear. "Falling from the tuq'mor constitutes leaving the combat, and that warrior is forfeit. Agreed?"
Rekan nodded once, fiercely. "Agreed. Qapla'!"
Kira had imagined a slightly more ritualized beginning to the combat, although it struck her upon reflection that this was naive. Klingons were nothing if not straightforward. Rekan launched herself at Kira like a leaping rock-cat, slamming the smaller Bajoran with the full weight of her body and driving them both to the tuq'mor. Limbs cracked and jabbed at Kira's back like broken ribs, then gave way and dropped her a good foot into the dry underbrush. Rekan pressed down on her from above, her hand clamped under Kira's jaw. "If this were a true Suv'batlh," she growled, "you would be dead and I would already be the victor. Yield!"
Kira sucked a painful breath and locked her arms in the tuq'mor beyond her head. "Warriors do not yield!" And she kicked downward with both feet before Rekan could respond. Limbs splintered in an irregular mass, reclosing around Kira's slim body with springy resilience all out of proportion to their brittleness. Rekan tangled in the upper story, her torso suddenly angled abruptly downward, and Kira willfully snatched double handfuls of white hair to twist among the brambles before dragging herself laterally out of the older Klingon's reach.
It felt like wriggling on her back through a shattered maintenance duct; cables of vine fouled her passage so that spindly fingers of shrubbery could tear at her uniform, prick at her eyes. By the time she found an opening to haul herself back to the upper surface, she bolted into the open like an ice-swimmer reclaiming the surface. The tuq'mor canopy no longer seemed such a sturdy playing field. Adrenaline spiked her bloodstream with every placement of her feet, every shift and crackle of failing timber. She floated her arms out to either side in search of a constantly wandering balance, and insisted to her fear that running along the jouncing bushtops was no different than walking scaffolding or climbing trees. The dry sourness at the back of her throat suggested she didn't find herself very convincing.
Kira half-hopped, half-stumbled in a circle to try and place herself in the combat. Rekan had vanished, leaving only snarls of torn silver hair fluttering in the hot breeze. Growls and labored breathing far to her right rear helped Kira locate K'Taran, where the young girl wrestled a tall male almost three times her age near the remnants of one great hut-tree. She's going to lose, Kira realized abruptly. It was a wonder she'd held out as long as she had. Wrenching free of the older male's hold, K'Taran jumped nearly as high as his shoulder and scrabbled up the charred stump to leap from its top. Her landing was awkward, but it put distance between her and the big male; he lurched across the canopy like a drunken mugatu, huffing and cursing. That's the way, Kira thought. If you can't beat him, wear him out.
Taking the hint, she trotted a few more long steps away from where she'd left Rekan, scanning the dark battleground for the rest of the Suv'batlh. She faced a distressing lack Of silhouettes against the flaming sky. "Dax?"
"Down here!" The Trill's voice floated up from below. She sounded distinctly irritated and impossibly far away. "I'm fine! K'Daq fell down with me, so we're both out."
Kira crouched as low as she dared, and peered between her feet for a closer look at shadow movement within the shadows. "You sure you're all right?"
"Nothing hurt but my pride. Look after yourself!"
Sound advice. If only it had come a moment sooner.
A dark hand shot upward out of the tuq'mor, as fast and fierce as a spider. Kira backpedaled, lifting her knees high to take her feet out of grabbing range, but not quickly enough. Rekan clamped strong fingers around one ankle, and Kira knew even before the Klingon hauled back on her leg that she'd run out of options. There was nowhere left to run. Kira hit the tuq'mor canopy full length, her shoulders taking the brunt of the impact, just ahead of the back of her skull. She felt the tuq'mor creak and shiver, like a stand of marsh grass under the thrashing of a great wind, and her mind reeled wildly, I didn't fall that hard? Did I really fall that hard? Then she heard the thunder, and realized that these stomach-wrenching tremors came from farther away than her own collision with the tuq'mor. She struggled to climb to all fours. At first, Rekan's torso blocked her view of the clearing and the Klingons standing witness on the ground. The epetai had dragged herself halfway out of the understory, the scratches on her cheeks and the brilliant blood in her hair only accentuating her fearful wildness. Now, her eyes met Kira's with a flash of purest hatred, and Kira knew in that instant that this battle wasn't between epetai Vrag and Kira Nerys -- it was a battle between what used to be and what could never be again.
Kira said only, "Listen."
Tremors shook the brush in angry fists. Ash the color of powdered bone drifted up from the tuq'mor like smoke, and Kira had to grab at whatever whipping limbs she could reach to keep from being shaken down between the branches. Rekan only knelt where she'd stopped, head lifted, face hollow. She reminded Kira of one of the Klingons' dead goddesses. Even perched and bleeding on the edges of sylshessa, her dignity and grace were breathtaking
Below them, the Klingons did not panic. It occurred to Kira that perhaps they were a people incapable of panic, those genes having been shriven from their species ages ago by warriors unwilling to tolerate such weakness. When K'Taran's banchory groaned a long, low bellow of distress, even the youngest of the children merely scurried clear of its thrashing. Then the first of the mounted banchory crashed into the open, and the bawling of these lumbering newcomers nearly drowned out the cries of surprise.
Ash-stained primates -- the little green-gray lemurs Kira had seen haunting the edges of the camp from the beginning -- crowded the backs of the great pachyderms. One of them scampered forward, down its banchory's plated rill to crouch on the wide nose-bridge between the mammoth's eyes. The "come hither" curling of its hands and wrists seemed unmistakable to Kira. And, apparently, to one of the children clustered at the base of the tuq'mor. The boy took only a single step forward before one of the older women reached out to stop him, stating simply, "Epetai says we must stay."
Kira shivered at the helplessly loyal chill that passed through the family. A few -- most of them very young, although some might have been the parents of K'Taran and her rebel adolescents -- turned their eyes upward toward Rekan. No recrimination in those stark gazes, no pleas. As though they all stated fact to one another, and their epetai simply represented what they already knew to be true.
Duty, Kira realized. Honor. It mattered so much to them, they would willingly forsake all else, even survival.
Sinking slowly to her heels, Rekan stared down at her children, and their children, and all the pasts and futures every Klingon House created. "Must honor always be cruel?" she asked softly. Not really to Kira, the major knew, even though there was no one else-close enough to hear. "I know in my heart what honor demands of us... yet now that we face the final moments... I would not see my children die. ..."
Kira looked down at her hands, not knowing what to say, and sensing the question was rhetorical anyway.
"I would not have love and honor always run in separate ways." The epetai straightened, and her voice rang purely, clearly over the roar of exploding comets and the rumble of fidgeting banchory. "Go. Take the children -- they are this House's future. Put yoursel
ves in safety until the sky no longer burns." When no one moved, she announced, more gently, "Honor commanded only that we remain on Cha'xirrac forever. Not that we must die."
She turned to Kira as the first of the elders lifted a youngster into one of the primates' waiting arms. "The Suv'batlh is ended," she told Kira, very, very quietly. "Go."
Kira touched the epetai's arm when Rekan moved to turn away. "You should come with us."
Rekan stared toward the burning horizon, immobile.
"You can't abandon them now," Kira said. "Your House is going to need you when the comet strikes are over."
The Klingon shook her head, and a ghostly smile brushed her eyes without appearing on her features. "This House is of Cha'xirrac now. It will need an epetai who is of Cha'xirrac as well." She was silent for a moment, watching K'Taran and her Suv'batlh opponent work as allies in herding children onto the banchory. Then she caught sight of Kira from the corner of her eye, and smiled with what seemed genuine warmth. "Such a look! There is no shame in admitting that one's service is finished." She gave the major one last nod toward the others as she rose slowly to full height. "I go to Sto-Vo-Kor at peace with the state of my honor," she assured her. "Save your pity for the survivors."
CHAPTER 12
ARMAGEDDON HAD, HORRIBLY, lived up to its name.
The comet storm had started violently enough, with the enormous smoke-shrouded flares of near-surface explosions. Within ten minutes, the planet's atmosphere had congealed and darkened everywhere, giving it an oddly opaque look in the oblivious saffron sunlight. Watching from his command chair on the bridge of the Defiant, Sisko realized he was watching the fall of cometary night, a dust-driven darkness whose dawn might not arrive for days or even weeks. But that was just the start.
"The first really big fragment is going in now." Ensign Farabaugh turned at the comet-tracking station, his eyes sober beneath a tidy bandage. "Impact in two minutes."
"Will it explode in the atmosphere?" Odo inquired. "Like the others, only bigger?"
"I don't think so," the young science officer said. "It looks like this one is actually big enough and solid enough to hit the surface. If it does, it could excavate a crater one or two kilometers deep."
"So much for being protected in a cave." O'Brien saw the irritated look Sisko sent him and shrugged. "Optimism is for command officers, Captain. Engineers prefer pessimism, because it saves lives instead of risking them. Are you sure we can't just beam up the away team? We've had a lock on their comms for the last ten minutes, and they've barely moved."
"Not while the Cardassians are on our side of the planet," Sisko said. "Chief, if you want to be pessimistic, why don't you send those comm coordinates to Farabaugh? That way, he can alert us if it looks like a surface impact is going to come too close."
"Good idea." The chief engineer bent over his panel, just in time to miss the enormous steel-colored light that exploded across the upper half of Armageddon's huge eastern ocean. A slowly towering column of fire rose above it, its crenulated ash-black clouds rising so high into the planet's stratosphere that the topmost debris drifted out of the gravity well completely and was lost to space. A collective gasp of horror hit the bridge, bringing O'Brien's sandy head around toward the viewscreen so fast he almost slammed into his console. "God Almighty! Is that anywhere near the away team?"
"The impact wasn't," Farabaugh assured him. "And I don't think the tsunami will run quite that far inland --"
"The tsunami?" That was Ensign Frisinger, Worf's substitute pilot, whose fascinated gaze hadn't wavered from the viewscreen once since the comet storm had begun. Sisko hoped he knew his panel controls by touch. "What's that?"
"The shock wave in the ocean that the impact creates," Osgood explained. "High-level explosions don't usually make them, since they displace air instead of water."
Farabaugh was punching a quick calculation into his station. "Looks like the main wave should hit shore starting about three hours from now. The backwash and secondary waves will probably last through tomorrow evening."
"Let's hope the Cardassians don't know that," Sisko said, grimacing. "I don't feel like waiting that long to confront them."
The barrage of high-level airbursts rose to an almost continuous glare of explosions after that, as if the ocean impact had been some kind of floodgate, opening to let all the rest of the swarm pour through. The increasingly ash-choked sky turned each bloom of light a deeper crimson-tinted black, like roses charring in a celestial flame. It was hard, watching from the distant bridge of the Defiant, to remember that these silent fireworks represented destruction on a planetary scale.
"Still getting signal back from the away team, Chief?." Sisko couldn't repress the question any longer. A second surface impact had geysered up, this time from the shadowy darkness that he thought represented the main continent. This mushroom-shaped debris cloud rose even higher than the first, high enough that the debris sparked a firefly glitter of auroral light when it burst through the planet's magnetic storms.
"Off and on, between the EM pulses. At least, it doesn't seem to be getting any weaker." O'Brien glanced back over his shoulder. "There aren't any big fragments aiming for those caves, are there, ensign?"
"No, sir." Farabaugh glanced over at Sisko, the pale damp sheen of his face belying his claim of being completely healed. "In fact, there aren't any more big pieces left. The whole storm is tapering off. In another ten minutes, Armageddon should be back to business as usual."
Sisko sat up, his pulse sharpening to battle-ready alertness. "Scan for the Cardassian ship, maximum resolution."
"Got it." Thornton's hand flew across the science station, fine-tuning the resolution on his sensors. There was something to be said for assigning an engineering specialist to use his own instruments, Sisko thought. "Image coming through now, sir. It's the Olxinder, for sure."
"I can see that." The Cardassian battleship's sharp-edged silhouette was just rounding the planet's smoky horizon, leaving Kor's patrol and entering their own. Sisko would have bet all the antique baseballs in his collection that the Klingon Dahar Master followed them, and probably at a none-too-discreet distance. "I want to know the instant you get the hint of a shuttle launch, a transporter beam, or --"
"-- a scan of the planet?" Thornton glanced over his shoulder, his quiet face lit with an unexpected smile. "They're doing it now, sir. Sensors seem to be set for native life-signs."
"Can their instruments penetrate into the caves?" Odo demanded. "The Cardassians might cut and run if they find evidence of any surviving Klingons, not to mention Humans, Trills, and Bajorans."
The young engineering tech shook his head. "I don't think they've even got the resolution to cut through the leftover EM furze. They're going to have to go down."
"In a shuttle, too, at least if they know what's good for them." O'Brien saw Odo's questioning look. "You wouldn't catch me trying to transport through that electromagnetic mess."
Sisko grunted. "Then get a tractor beam ready, Chief. Frisinger, make sure we're never out of tractor range -- but don't bump into Kor while you do it."
"Aye, sir."
"—to Defiant." The crackle of static coming from his chair's communicator couldn't disguise the vibrancy of Dax's voice --or the scientific excitement that ran through it. "Dax to Defiant. Can you --?"
"I'm working on it," O'Brien said, forestalling Sisko's unspoken command. "Signal resolution coming up now."
"Link a secure channel to Kor," Sisko said quietly. "He'll want to know that Dax is alive."
"Dax to Sisko. Can you read us yet, Benjamin?"
"Sisko here. What's your situation?"
"Completely secured, Captain." That was his second-in-command, sounding exhausted but just as competent as ever. "All the Klingon refugees are in stable health, and so are the survivors from Victoria Adams's crew -- all thirty-one of them. We've managed to save a surprising number of the natives, too, even the big pachyderms. They seemed to have an instinct --"
"It's more than an instinct for some of them." Sisko lifted an eyebrow, knowing Dax was never that rude unless a major scientific breakthrough was bubbling to the surface. "Benjamin, some of the natives are sentient!"
"Not just sentient." That was a voice Sisko hadn't heard in too long. Its weary British accent and carefully precise language dissolved a knot of tension he hadn't even realized he was feeling. "The xirri are a full-fledged Class-two civilization, Captain: oral history, medicine, long-distance radio communication –"
"The natives have technology?" Sisko exchanged startled looks with O'Brien and Odo. If the Klingons had knowingly violated the Prime Directive when they'd chosen this planet for their honorable exile, it was going to be a lot harder to convince the Federation that they now owned half of it.
"The xirri's ability to communicate in radio wavelengths isn't technological, Benjamin." Dax sounded both dazed and delighted by that fact. "It's a biological adaptation, bred into them by reproductive isolation and the stress of cometary impact. As far as we can tell, all the native vertebrates have the same capacity, but --"
Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02 Page 22
