Valeris looked up as Kaj stalked across the bridge to recover her weapon. The rest of the boarding party were already dead, the metallic tang of spilled blood harsh in the air.
The major took her weapon and wiped it clean. “Don’t look so shocked, convict,” she said. “You’re on my ship, so I keep you alive.”
Valeris eyed her. “You did not do so for any reasons of honor. You did not let me perish because you need me. Do not insult us both by suggesting otherwise.”
Kaj hesitated, as if she were considering executing Valeris there and then; but then she turned away and returned to the command throne. “True,” she said over her shoulder. “So don’t make me regret my decision. Get the human to his feet and raise the shields, or we will all die.”
Valeris bent to help Vaughn rise shakily from the floor, and they set to work.
Distantly, Miller registered the sound of the bird-of-prey’s warp core drawing more power, and the ship shivered slightly, lights dimming. Deflectors are back up, he guessed. That meant that, for now, the Chon’m was protected from the arrival of any more troopers from the pursuit ships—but it did nothing to assist him with the ongoing melee in the engine room.
The hyperspanner in his hand bore scrapes and gouges of bright metal where the Klingon swordsman had struck it again and again. Miller fought back, making solid hits on the warrior’s head and neck, but his opponent seemed unaffected. There was nothing in the Klingon’s eyes but violence.
The commander feinted back a step and the Klingon came on, eager to draw blood from him. At the last second Miller shot out his arm and used the massive spanner in a stabbing motion, jamming it hard into the soft tissues of the warrior’s throat. Something gave a wet crack and the swordsman let out a strangled howl and clutched at his neck.
“Give it up!” Miller demanded, panting with effort. “Lay down the sword!”
“Die first,” said the Klingon, choking out every word. Miller wasn’t sure if that was a promise or a threat, but then the yan blade rose high once more, and the question became moot.
Vaughn’s head was ringing like a struck bell, the humming pain from the blow echoing thorough the bones of his skull. His hands seemed to move of their own accord across the systems panel, setting the cycle to reactivate the shield emitters, running through the motions with Valeris paralleling him every step of the way. She didn’t wait for Kaj’s permission: she touched the activator pad and a long second passed in silence. It seemed like an eternity, but then the shields re-formed and the major gave a sharp hiss. Elias decided that had to be some kind of compliment.
His timing was perfect. Light flared as disruptor bolts crackled through the void and the Chon’m was at their point of confluence: if the ship had been unprotected a few seconds longer, they would have been vapor and fragments.
Red Alert signals were flashing all around him, and the smoky air of the bridge was split by loud, braying alarms. Or perhaps the noise and the lights were all in his head, an echo of the damage done by the strike to his skull.
He blinked at the power curves displayed before him and heard a voice say, “We can’t take much more of this.” It took a second for him to register that the words were his.
“I am open to all suggestions,” snarled Kaj.
Vaughn shook his head and immediately regretted it. He tried to marshal his thoughts, and his brow knitted. “We . . . need to outthink them. Can’t do this as a stand-up fight . . .” He blinked owlishly at the panel, his thoughts clearing. “Wait. The holo-veil . . .”
“Useless,” began D’iaq.
“No,” Vaughn insisted. “We’re not going to use it to hide.” He looked toward Kaj. “How much energy can the holo-matrix on the hull put out in one go?”
“It’s not a weapon,” said the Klingon. “What are you thinking, Lieutenant?”
“My head is killing me,” he told her. “We can spread that around a little.”
“Your words make no sense.” D’iaq scowled.
Vaughn shot the crewman a look. “Let me put it another way,” he said. “Do you know what a flash bomb is?”
The damaged bird-of-prey began to drift. The cherry-red glow from the impulse manifolds dimmed, becoming dull yellow as power bled off and the scoutship listed to starboard. The Chon’m was no longer accelerating; instead it was directionless, as if there were no one at the helm.
That was how it appeared to the pursuit vessels. The leading D-7 cruiser moved in, with the second vessel now coming up to join in formation. There was hesitation. Neither ship could communicate with the boarding parties they had transported to the target, so they could not know if their men had taken the craft. A steady rattle of jamming kept any signal from reaching the cruisers. The commander of the lead vessel waited, watching as his gunnery officers found firing solutions and trained all their weapons on the bird-of-prey. It was suddenly an easy target, but like a pair of careful predators, the pursuit ships were wary.
General Igdar’s orders had been direct. Major Kaj was wanted dead or alive, but preferably dead. Agents of Imperial Intelligence had a tendency to be survivors—they were trained that way—and it was better to see them terminated with extreme prejudice than chance a last-second revival or escape from custody. Such things had happened often.
But the ship . . . The ship was a different matter. One of a handful of experimental prototypes built in a secret manufactory that had since been obliterated, the Chon’m would be a valuable prize for any officer who could take her intact. It was that greed that slowed the commander’s impulse to order a barrage of photon torpedoes and disruptor blasts, a hesitation that now turned to ruin.
It happened with great speed. In the first few seconds the levels of power across the Chon’m dipped, and the ratings working the scanner hoods aboard the D-7s saw what looked like the start of a cascade systems failure. They reported this to their captains.
But the energy was not lost: it was being rerouted, diverted from the impulse drive and life support, the weapons grid, and any other system that could spare it. With the help of Valeris and Kaj, Elias Vaughn assembled a holographic program on the fly, something simple in concept but complex in execution.
And after a few moments it was ready. The cruisers were poised over the scoutship like winged carrion eaters hovering above a dying man. They came closer.
The system of the Chon’m’s holo-matrix was designed to simulate the three-dimensional image of another vessel in perfect detail; the plan to use it was crude and risky, but it was inspired.
Every holographic emitter on the ship’s hull released a burst of light at the exact same instant, a pulse of white auroral display that blazed like a starburst. The light frequency was harsh, and through Valeris’s ministrations it had been carefully tuned to a wave band that matched the sensing apertures of the detector grids mounted on the D-7s.
A flash of brilliant, intense color dazzled the pursuit vessels, momentarily overloading their optical sensors and radiation-ranging gear. Automatic baffles cut down the brightness of the flash as it washed across the bridges of the two cruisers, but the glare was so bright that a handful of crew, unfortunate enough to be looking out of viewports at the wrong moment, found themselves blinded. The searing glare lit the dark for less than a few seconds, but it was enough. The crew of the Chon’m had shut off their sensors, blindfolding their ship to survive the pulse. Now they shrugged off the pretense and the bird-of-prey’s engines went live with power.
The smaller ship shot away as lances of particle-beam energy extended outward, stabbing sightlessly toward where the Chon’m had been. Kaj’s vessel wove through the rain of fire and left its enemies reeling behind it.
• • •
“It actually worked,” said D’iaq, half disbelieving. “Kai the human!”
Vaughn seemed to be capable of only a shallow nod. Valeris noted he seemed pale and sluggish, and she wondered if he was suffering the first effects of a concussion. She had to remind herself that human skulls were
not as resilient as those of her species or the Klingons.
“Don’t praise him yet,” said Kaj, scowling at her console. “That ploy was clever, but it won’t last long. We need to make warp speed now, or else they will catch up and run us down once again . . .”
D’iaq worked the helm panel. “Major, there’s a field of cometary fragments two points off our current course. If we can swing closer, we can use the backscatter effect there to break up our ion trail.”
“That would buy us some valuable time,” Valeris noted.
“I’m so glad you agree,” Kaj said, sneering slightly. “Do it, D’iaq. Put all power to the engines. I want you to wring every fraction of speed from this ship.”
“Understood,” said the helmsman, and he bent forward, almost as if he were encouraging the ship along with him.
On the viewscreen, the star field shifted as the Chon’m accelerated away from the stalled cruisers. Valeris turned back to the major. “Commander Miller—”
The Klingon waved her away. “Engine room,” she called, speaking into the intership. “Report! Is the warp core secure?”
From the speaker grille came the sound of a strangled scream as a throat was cut with a blade.
Miller sensed the ship was in motion, but he couldn’t give the thought any more than the most cursory consideration. Over by the main controls beneath the matter-antimatter stack, he saw Klingon fighting Klingon as one of Kaj’s men tussled with a tall warrior in armor. A bat’leth, rimed in dark blood, cut a brutal upward arc, and the crewman died with a cry as he was opened by a wound that started at his sternum and ended at his jaw.
The Starfleet officer had his own fight to deal with. The snarling Defense Force trooper with the yan sword was on him with every step, trying to block his path or force him into the corners of the cramped engine room. The light of a berserker’s rage was in the warrior’s eyes, and Miller knew that a single mistake would cost him.
He tried a new tactic, dodging toward a support stanchion as the sword danced in the smoky air. Miller grabbed at the sloped support with one hand and leapt to it, scrambling up the steep angle, his boots taking purchase on the massive rivet heads that stuck out of them.
The Klingon swore at him, cursing him for fleeing like a coward, and overextended with the blade in his haste to strike a killing blow. The razor-edged yan struck the metal support and the sword bit, a good two centimeters of it cutting into the stanchion before it stopped dead. The warrior tugged at his weapon, but it refused to budge.
Miller took the opportunity and let go of this handhold, dropping back to the deck with the battered hyperspanner in his grip. With all the brute force he could muster, the commander brought the heavy tool down on the flat of the shining blade. The weapon, stressed beyond its tolerances, snapped with a sound like breaking bones. Most of the blade remained stuck in the stanchion, and the rest of it, the hilt and pommel, clattered to the deck.
Miller didn’t arrest the momentum; he let the club carry on and used it to swat away his adversary. The Klingon took the broad head of the spanner in the face and dropped hard, a fan of blood sputtering from his nostrils.
At last, Miller tossed the tool away, his hands stinging with the impact of his blow, and he panted, drawing in breaths of hot air. He glanced around, seeing that the invasion had been stalled, that the assault team from the pursuit ships had all been neutralized. The warp core’s pulses quickened, casting fiery light through the chamber, and he caught the eye of Kaj’s Orion enforcer. “Urkoj,” he gasped. “Tell the major we’re secure.”
The commander began to say something else, but his words fell away as he caught the sound of boots scraping over the gridded deck plates. Miller turned as the warrior he had just put down came hurtling at him, blinded by a mask of blood from the cuts on his face. He tried to block the attack, but the Klingon had the blunt stub of the broken yan blade in his hand, and he buried it in Miller’s stomach, right down to the guard.
Miller struggled with the rage-blinded Klingon, fighting to stop him from ripping the jagged metal up, cutting him deeper. Pain like he had never felt ran through him, and it was cold, like deep space.
A green shape blurred at the edge of his vision and Urkoj was suddenly there, slamming the Klingon away with the butt of his heavy plasma shotgun. Miller stumbled and fell back against the stanchion as the Orion spun his weapon around and executed the swordsman with a point-blank shot.
His eyes fell to the alien blade protruding from his belly, and the blossom of crimson growing across his tunic. “I . . . can’t die here,” he managed.
But even as the words left his mouth, he realized that choice had been taken from him.
Vaughn entered the Chon’m’s engine room at a run, Valeris a few footsteps behind him. His boots clanged across the metal as he sprinted to where Miller lay slumped against a heavy metal support. The first thing that struck him was the thick, coppery scent of the other man’s blood.
Valeris had secured a Klingon medical kit and she produced a tricorder, dispassionately sweeping it back and forth to gain a reading on the commander’s condition.
It was hardly worth the effort, though. The man’s teak-dark skin had a pallor that horrified the lieutenant, and he was drenched in sweat. Miller’s breath was coming in short, tight chugs that pained him with every inhalation.
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to go,” Miller managed. “It’s all wrong, Elias.”
Vaughn shot a look over his shoulder. Major Kaj had followed them down the corridor, and she stood in grave conversation with the burly Orion. He looked back and fell into a crouch. “Sir, you’re badly hurt. We need to get you into a stasis chamber . . .”
“If we move him, he will die,” Valeris said flatly.
“That’s gonna happen no matter what,” Miller retorted. He groaned with pain. “Elias. Listen to me.” With difficulty, the commander fished in a pocket and produced a small padd-style device. “The code is ‘reindeer flotilla,’ right? Say it back to me.”
Vaughn did as he was told, and Miller pressed the unit into his hands. “Sir, I don’t—”
“Operational command of this mission now falls to you, Lieutenant,” he went on. “You’re going to see this through, Elias. Through to the end. Remember what I said to you in the travel pod?”
“ ‘Have the conviction to follow your instincts.’ ” Vaughn nodded. “ ‘Wherever they take you.’ ”
Miller nodded toward the Vulcan, the simple action causing him great pain. “She’s your responsibility now. Don’t screw it up.”
Vaughn looked to Valeris and met her gaze. Without warning, the tricorder in her hand emitted a long, uninterrupted tone.
When he turned back to Miller, the commander’s eyes were still open, staring blankly at the throbbing colors of the warp core.
“He died well,” Vaughn heard Kaj said. “In battle. With honor.”
The lieutenant came to his feet, propelled by a swell of anger. “He’s dead because of you,” he snapped. “Because you didn’t tell us Igdar had death squads looking out for this ship! Because you had a traitor on your bridge crew!”
Urkoj snarled and took a warning step forward, but Kaj stopped him. “Take care, human. Miller earned my respect, and so he had it in return.” She nodded toward Valeris. “And I need her. But you? That is a different matter.”
“Respect?” he spat. “The man is dead! This mission is blown!”
“Incorrect,” said the Vulcan. “Commander Miller’s demise is regrettable. But we can still proceed without him. He knew that.”
Vaughn’s hands tightened into fists. This is turning into a nightmare, he thought. Everything is going wrong.
I’m not ready for this.
At a nod from the major, Urkoj came forward and gathered up Miller’s body. “With care!” she demanded. “He was an honorable enemy, and a willing ally. The commander’s remains will be treated with the reverence they deserve.”
Vaughn cast his gaze down at th
e patch of blood on the deck and then turned away. He found the Vulcan woman studying him. “Perhaps,” she began, “I could—”
“Take charge?” he cut her off. “Don’t push your luck, Valeris.”
“That was not my intention,” she told him. “I wished only to remind you—and Major Kaj—that our mission will require all our skill sets to meet with success. We must work together to find the terrorists that attacked Da’Kel. Without the commander, that is truer than ever.”
Kaj grunted. “I find myself in rare agreement with the convict.” The agent studied Vaughn with her peculiarly modified, not-quite-Klingon features. “We three cannot afford the luxury of hating one another anymore. Our shared endeavor grows beyond that petty concern.”
Vaughn closed his eyes and shut out his doubts. “Agreed.”
11
Ten Years Earlier
U.S.S. BonHomme Richard, NCC-1776
Sol System
Sector 001, United Federation of Planets
“I once met an Academy cadet who asked me to define the word ‘duty.’ ” The voice carried out across the rec deck, over the sea of wine-dark uniforms and upturned faces, all of them listening intently to the speaker. A hover-drone was relaying an image of him to the screen on the high wall above, but the officers and enlisted men were focused on the man himself. They wanted to see him, to look him in the eyes. They wanted to be able to tell people that they had stood in the same room as James T. Kirk.
The captain gave a crooked smile as he remembered. “I’m not a philosopher,” he went on. “And there are a thousand answers to that question. So I went with the one that was the closest to my experience. I told the cadet that for a Starfleet officer, ‘duty’ means ‘challenge.’ It can be a myriad of other things, but challenge is at the heart of the duty we perform.” Kirk touched the insignia on his chest. “It’s at the heart of the oath we’ve sworn, that gives us permission to wear this.”
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