Star Trek - Day Of Honor 02

by Armageddon Sky

  Sisko saw the urgent look Thornton cast him and cut ruthlessly across his science officer's explanation. "You can explain all the gory details to me later, old man. I've got a Cardassian Gul getting ready to tip his hand, and I want to be ready to slap it."

  "Understood." There was a muffled grunt behind Kira's voice, as if someone's toe had been stepped on. "Away team out."

  "I'm reading a power surge in the circuits around the Cardassians' main shuttle door," Thornton told him, before the crackle of static had even faded from the bridge. "I think they're getting ready to launch an expedition to the planet."

  "Shields at full power, cloak controls set for imminent drop," Sisko said. "Set tractor beam coordinates for a kilometer away from the launch door."

  "Coordinates laid in," O'Brien confirmed. "Tractor beam fully charged and ready."

  "Launch doors opening," Thornton said. The Olxinder slowly rotated as she orbited the ash-dark planet, bringing her belly-slit shuttle bay into gloriously clear resolution. "Shuttle deploying inside launch bay."

  "Red alert. Quantum torpedoes armed and ready for launch." Sisko didn't really expect Hidret to put up a fight, but you could never tell what a weasel would do when cornered. It would be stupid to be unprepared. "Shuttle position, Mr. Thornton?"

  "Four hundred meters and accelerating. Six hundred, eight hundred --"

  "Drop cloak and engage tractor beam," Sisko snapped, anticipating the thousand meter mark. O'Brien must have been equally primed for action -- the tractor beam flashed out before he'd even finished calling for it, its gold-dust glitter smacking through the silver cometary haze to seize on the Cardassian shuttlecraft. Sisko felt the Defiant rock with an unexpected jolt of backwash inertia, and threw a frown at O'Brien. The chief engineer was growling at his controls.

  "If you're going to stay locked even though we were first, the least you could do is match your beam intensity... damn arrogant Klingons!"

  Sisko's gaze rose to the viewscreen, startled. He could see, now that O'Brien had

  pointed it out, the mirror glimmer of a second tractor beam, refracting back across the planet's horizon. An instant later, the uncloaked silhouette of a Jfolokh-class ship rose above the ashen atmosphere, tracking back along its beam toward the mammoth Cardassian battleship like a fish reeling itself toward the fisherman.

  "Hail the Cardassians on an open channel." The corner of Sisko's mouth kicked upward wryly. "And prepare for a three-way conference, Mr. Thornton."

  "Aye, sir."

  Armageddon's seared image vanished, replaced by a duplicate image of scowling, furrowed faces. Kor's expression, however, was one of pure military ferocity, while Gul Hidret's had clearly been plastered over shock and indecision.

  "Is this an act of war, Captain Sisko?" he demanded, in what was probably meant to be a preemptive strike. "Are you actually working in league with these Klingon ruffians after all?"

  "Yes, I am." Sisko allowed a cold slice of smile to show. "I'm legally required to, Gul Hidret, since this is now a joint Klingon-Federation protectorate."

  "What?" The Cardassian's scowl lost a little more of its assurance. "When was that treaty signed?"

  "An hour ago, in Klingon and Human blood," Kor retorted. "All it needs now is some Cardassian blood to be complete."

  "Nonsense!" Hidret sounded as though he might choke on his own disbelief. "You think to fool me by making such wild, unreasonable claims."

  "I admit, you were the one who first suggested this alliance," Sisko said wickedly. "The more I thought about it, the better an idea it seemed."

  Hidret shook his head. "I don't believe it. You're going to let this Starfleet officer interfere with your dishonored exiles, Kor?"

  "No," said the Dahar Master grimly. "We're going to make sure that my dishonored exiles haven't interfered with the sentient natives whose civilization we just discovered. Of course," he added maliciously, "any little ecological problems they may have caused will pale in comparison with the devastation we just saw you create."

  "What?" Gul Hidret looked like a man whose worst fevered nightmares had just erupted into waking life. "You're lying! There are no sentients on that planet --"

  "And how would you know that, Gul, if you've never set foot on Cha'xirrac?" Sisko asked silkily.

  "It -- it was surveyed by the medical teams scouring this region for the cure to ptarvo fever."

  Kor snorted. "If you ever needed a cure for the randiness of youth -- which I very much doubt -- your searches here found no cure for it."

  "All you found here," Sisko continued, "was a cheap and easy source of drevlocet. Isn't that right, Gul Hidret?"

  "Drevlocet that the Cardassian High Command would like to modify to use on Klingons," Kor finished. "Isn't that right, Gul Hidret?"

  The elderly Cardassian grimaced, the wrinkled canyons of his face growing deep and darkly shadowed. "I refuse to answer such accusations in this -- this inappropriate setting! I came here in response to a willful attack against the Cardassian people, only to find it was a trap!"

  Sisko permitted himself a scowl. "Our diplomats can settle who set the traps in this system, Gul Hidret. But the fact remains that this planet beneath us is now its own sovereign state, subject to no external interference in its ecology or its affairs."

  "Exactly what I'd be the first to tell you," the elderly Cardassian insisted. "And just as soon as you release my shuttle full of emergency medical personnel, I'll be on my way."

  "Good," Kor said. "I hate to break it to you, old enemy, but your ship seems to have a most unfortunate attraction to comets. It would be a shame if one actually penetrated your shields and caused a hull breach." Snaggle-teeth bared in a grin that would have done credit to a crocodile. "And the longer you stay in this area, the more likely that is to happen. Don't you agree, Captain Sisko?"

  "Definitely."

  Gul Hidret slapped at his communicator controls, breaking the connection without another word. Kor promptly broke into a massive roar of laughter.

  "That old targ's going to be swerving aroun d every speck of dust between here and Cardassia Prime, thinking each one's got a photon torpedo buried in it," he decided. "I think I'll follow him halfway back and plant one, just to put him out of his misery."

  "Be my guest." Sisko nodded at Thornton and O'Brien to disengage. The Defiant's viewscreen shimmered back to a view of comet-haloed ships, just in time to show their tractor beam vanishing. The Klingons' paler beam twinkled out a moment later, and the Cardassian shuttle darted back into its launch pad like a reef fish diving for cover. A moment later, the battleship's warp nacelles glowed to life and it was gone, shaking them with the nearness of its jump to lightspeed. Kor's ship rippled into cloaked invisibility in that same instant, and Sisko felt a second wash of ion discharge tremble through his ship.

  "Alone at last," said O'Brien, sighing.

  "Not quite." Sisko lifted his gaze to the sliver of Armageddon's -- no, Cha'xirrac's -- darkened skies, seeing the charred but living planet beneath that ashen veil. "We have some new friends to meet, Chief. Let's hope they're a little easier to get along with."

  "Than the Klingons and the Cardassians?" Odo snorted. "Captain, I believe that's what Quark would call an ears-on certainty."

  Kira had climbed out of the cave system feeling worn, ancient, as battered as the surface of Cha'xirrac. She'd kept her eyes downcast, preparing for the onslaught of bright light after hours in the womblike dark. Instead, a soft grayness enveloped the world, and the muted features of the terrain sent her memory tumbling backward a dozen years.

  Before the Federation came to safeguard Bajor -- before the Cardassians declared the planet raped to a shell and no longer worth the expense to maintain -- Kira had walked through this same armageddon landscape under a different name. Rota Province had been battered for forty days and forty nights by every surface-launchable warhead the Cardassians bothered to keep on Bajor. Not atomics -- the Cardassians were far too frugal to waste expensive destruction on Bajora
n sheep who had no way to fight back or run. They'd shattered Rota with slow-moving conventional weaponry, all because of rumors that the Salbhai resistance cell had taken up hiding among the homesteads and villages of that wealthy province.

  Well, they'd gotten Salbhai and her fighters, along with eleven thousand farmers, timbermen, and peng herders. The resultant desolation looked exactly like Cha'xirrac did now -- soil blasted down to the bedrock, trees blown down like a children's stick game, the rivers and marshes choked with carcasses, mud-slides, and debris. It had been hard to imagine that anything would ever be able to live in Rota ever again. And it was hard to imagine Cha'xirrac coming back to life after such apocalyptic devastation.

  The view had not improved much from the roof of a shuttle. Kira sat, knees hugged to her chest, and watched a distant curtain of smoke ripple against a sky only just now dimming down to the color of natural dawn. No more trees poked their heads above the tuq'mor canopy. No more banchory crashed their slow, gentle ways through the foliage. Only ash pattered like sand through the brush still standing, tainted with the bitter scent of distant fires.

  "Looking for someone?"

  She glanced down, startled by Sisko's sudden presence. "Not really." The smile she forced on his behalf didn't feel very convincing, and his own amused expression suggested she could have done better. Sighing, she scooted toward the front of the small craft to slide down its nose. "How're negotiations coming?"

  "Very well." The captain stepped judiciously aside as she jumped to the ground, neither helping nor hindering her descent. "Actually, there doesn't seem much to negotiate. The xirri are still more than happy to share Cha'xirrac with their Klingon friends, and the Klingons still have nowhere else to go." He gave a little shrug that Kira thought indicated acceptance of the situation, although she wasn't completely sure. "I think the House of Vrag is relieved to have some purpose here. Something to call themselves other than 'exiles.'"

  Kira nodded, warding off a thought about how a certain caliber of Klingon would have worn that label proudly, and looked out into the wounded tuq'mor again. If she looked very carefully, she could find a few spots of defiant green amid the wreckage.

  "It looks like we'll be making several trips with the Victoria Adams's crew," Sisko went on. "I'd rather not stack them in three deep this time, but I also don't want to make any more shuttle runs than absolutely necessary. Our friend George is busy sorting the survivors into shiploads while the Klingons work out the terms of an ongoing scientific study with Dax."

  Kira nodded, a bit absently. "He's your secret dignitary -- the one Starfleet didn't want the Klingons to get their hands on." When Sisko didn't say anything to refute that, she angled a weary grin up at him. "His name isn't really George, is it?"

  Her captain changed the subject as smoothly as if she'd never brought it up at all. "So how is Dr. Bashir holding up?"

  "Ledonne says he'll be fine. She's given him something that'll keep him out until we get back to the station." She glanced reflexively back toward the shuttle, even though she couldn't see inside. "She was doing patient triage with him when he was kidnapped. I think she's feeling guilty for not realizing what was happening and doing something to stop it."

  Sisko followed her gaze briefly, then somehow ended up scrutinizing Kira with his head tipped slightly toward his shoulder. "And what are you feeling guilty about?"

  The question caught her without a ready answer. "I don't know. Nothing." Everything. She started to pace away from him, aborted it, and ended up making a frustrated circle that only put her back where she'd started. "I guess I just don't understand what Klingon honor is supposed to be good for," she finally blurted. "What purpose does it serve to take the best, most noble members of their society and... sacrifice them! Why can't there be some middle ground between perfect compliance to honor and death?"

  "Because sometimes perfect compliance is death." Sisko met her angry glare with a placidity that said he hadn't been making light of her dilemma. "Curzon once told me that he didn't think he would ever fully understand what the Klingons call honor, even if he had a dozen lifetimes to study it. In many ways, I think the Klingons are still learning and refining their own concepts every day. It's part of what makes a culture vibrant and adaptive. But it is a hard thing," he said with resonant seriousness. "A hard taskmaster. It's not our place to say whether or not the rewards are worth it.".

  Federation rhetoric -- noninterference, respect for another culture's ways. Worse yet, it was rhetoric Kira's head believed in, even when her heart ached for want of a better, less tragic way.

  "I've often thought honor among Klingons is more religion than social," Sisko continued, leaning back against the shuttle's nose and crossing his arms. "Like fate among Humans, av'adeh'dna among Vulcans, and pagh among your own people. Honor isn't just a list of rules that Klingons adhere to the way you might a recipe. It shapes them, leads them, determines the character of their souls." He motioned back toward the huddle of Klingons and xirri inside the mouth of the caves, and Kira was abruptly struck with the incongruity of that sight. Of the wondrous potential represented by a handful of battered warriors and the small gray-green primates who had adopted them. "Honor led them here to be protectors of Cha'xirrac – better protectors than any combination of starships or comets could be. They've been reborn, through fire and ice." He smiled a little at the drama of his words. "No rebirth ever comes without loss. Epetai Vrag knew that." He caught Kira's gaze up in his own. "Maybe honor required a sacrifice to balance the scales -- life for life. You can't hold it against her if she willingly made that choice."

  Perhaps not. But Kira couldn't help wishing for a solution that didn't require bloodshed to water the seeds of new life.

  "Dax says the planet will recover," she said suddenly. It was something to hang on to. A memory of Rota Province as it had been just a few months ago, soft and green and scattered with delicate prairie flowers that couldn't have existed in the shadows of Rota's forests. New life, celebrating with a song of colors. Someday, this planet would look like that, too.

  "So not just a new life for the Klingons," Sisko commented. "A whole new existence. A whole new world."

  "Yes." Kira stood up with sudden decision. "And maybe, if they're lucky, a whole new meaning of honor. One that involves cooperation rather than fighting, and survival rather than sacrifice."

  Sisko made a somber noise. "I'm not sure that they'll still be Klingons then," he said. "And, somehow, I think there will always be a Day of Honor celebration on Cha'xirrac."

  "That's all right." Kira glanced back at those glints of water-shielded vegetation, as stubbornly tough as Klingons and as quietly surprising as the xirri. "Just as long as it is followed by a Day of Rebirth."

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 12