“Damn . . .” Vaughn muttered. “They poisoned themselves to build the bombs. How many of those things did they make? There could be dozens of isolytic weapons out there.”
A guttural chirp sounded from Urkoj’s communicator and the Orion snatched it up, grunting an acknowledgment. Major Kaj’s voice carried through the cold air. “All teams, regroup at the main hub. This place is a worthless tomb. We’re wasting our time here.”
“She doesn’t sound happy,” Vaughn noted.
The blunt maw of the plasma shotgun rose to aim at them both. Urkoj jerked the weapon in a beckoning manner, the gesture making it clear he expected no defiance.
Valeris studied the Orion before she began to walk. There was going to come a moment, and soon, when she would need to make a choice. The Vulcan began to wonder how many lives she might need to end in order to facilitate her own survival.
Vaughn turned over the sheer How-the-hell-did-I-end-up-here? of his situation and tried to push those thoughts out of his mind. This wasn’t how he had wanted to find himself in command of a mission: by dint of a murderous Klingon. Miller had seemed so effortlessly in control of his situation, even to the very end as he bled to death there on the deck, while Vaughn was still struggling to gather in the scope of where he was and what it meant. Miller’s experience had given Elias the belief that they could make this mission succeed. Without him, all that was left to rely on was Kaj’s desire for vengeance, the unreadable motivations Valeris kept hidden, and Vaughn’s dogged determination not to fail.
And he had no idea if it would be enough. Vaughn pulled at his jacket, in the place where his rank insignia would have lain, if it were a Starfleet uniform. This is where you are, Lieutenant, he told himself. You’ve got no choice but to make it work.
He looked up and met Kaj’s fiery eyes as he crossed the gloomy circular space of the hub deck. The rest of the landing party teams were assembled in a loose knot around her, grumbling and surly with the cold.
Kaj threw a look at Urkoj and pointed in the direction of Valeris. The Orion reacted instantly by drawing a knife as long as Elias’s forearm and pulling the Vulcan woman into a headlock. He pressed the tip of the weapon to her throat and she immediately ceased any attempt to struggle.
When Vaughn looked back at Kaj, all her men had drawn their pistols and taken aim at his chest. “So this is how it’s going to be, then?”
“Have you enjoyed your sport, convict?” Kaj spat at Valeris. “Tell me, did something go wrong? Did you bring us here with intent to flee, or have us ambushed? Did your cohorts leave you twisting in the wind?”
“Where are you getting that from?” Vaughn demanded, determined to draw her attention. “Did you expect Valeris to deliver your sister’s killers wrapped like a gift box?”
Mentioning Kaj’s sibling made the tension in the chamber leap, and the major’s simmering glare finally turned on him. She looked at the lieutenant as if she were picturing a point in the middle of his head and contemplating how to get there the hard way. “I should execute you both. There is nothing here,” she said, her voice low and loaded with menace. “The Kriosians are gone! The convict has led us down a blind canyon!”
“Not so,” Valeris managed, talking around Urkoj’s unmoving grip. “We found traces—”
“From the isolytic weapons,” Vaughn broke in. He quickly explained what they had discovered, the assembly room and the radiation readings.
Kaj folded her arms. He noticed that the strange gene alteration the major had undertaken was turning her skin a shade of violet that seemed to darken as she spoke. “Finding the spoor of your prey has no value if you cannot track it any farther. Tell me, Lieutenant Vaughn. How do you propose to use this data to lead us to the Thorn?” When he didn’t answer at once, she gave a dismissive snarl. “Do you still trust this Vulcan? Do you think Miller would trust her now?”
Vaughn’s jaw hardened. “Yes,” he said firmly, “to both questions.” No time for doubts now, he told himself.
“If . . .” Valeris said, half gasping, “ . . . if I may offer a suggestion?”
Kaj gestured to the Orion. “Let the convict speak.”
Urkoj relaxed his grip on her, but only a little. “Whoever assembled those weapons exposed themselves to a great deal of energetic particulate radiation. They would likely be in dire need of urgent medical attention.”
“No doubt,” Kaj allowed. “But I ask you for the last time, Vulcan. How do we find them?”
“We do not,” said Valeris. “The solution to our dilemma is eminently logical. We will let the Thorn find us.”
Object JDEK-3246553-AKV
Ikalian Asteroid Belt
Ty’Gokor Sector, Klingon Empire
“It feels like it should be cold in here,” said Tulo, ducking to avoid an outcropping of rock. “Why isn’t it cold?”
Rein threw a sideways glance at the thin-faced man and jutted his chin in the direction of the ceiling. “The minerals in the rocks,” he told him. “The actinides and the metallics. The very same ores that hide us from the scopes of the tyrants. They have thermal properties.”
“Isn’t that . . . dangerous?” Tulo blinked.
“No more dangerous than anything we have done.” Rein looked away, to the slab-sided walls rising up around them, cut by phaser beams from the original network of natural caverns that threaded through the asteroid. The rocky chamber had been retrofitted with gear from an elderly Tellarite mining rig, and it was in many ways a crude mirror of the equipment they had left behind on Xand Depot.
Inside the shimmering envelopes of force walls and radiation baffles, figures in heavy environment suits moved with sluggish, careful motions. They crowded around the weapon, which sat on its cradle like an exploded technical diagram, pieces of its framework gathered in clumps, coming together with painstaking effort. Rein frowned and absently brushed at his pigmentation lines. They were quite a way behind schedule, and the move from the depot to the blind here had only added more days to the construction regimen. It didn’t help that his most experienced men were unable to work, too sickened by radiation exposure.
As if on cue, Tulo spoke again. “We need to move quicker.”
Rein made a bowing gesture. “You have my blessing to go in there and help. Of course, we’re shy of suits, so it would have to be as you are now.”
Tulo colored slightly. “That’s not what I, uh, meant. Perhaps we could run the shifts longer? Keep the men working for more—”
“Tired men make mistakes!” Rein exploded, turning on him with a flash of sudden fury. “We’ve seen the result of that already! Our first two blows, hobbled!” He prodded Tulo hard in the chest. “That won’t happen again. This time it will be done right!”
Tulo’s mouth opened and closed, and finally he managed to find his voice again. “Is . . . is that the only reason, Rein?”
“Watch where you take this,” he warned. “I’m not in the mood!”
“Colen . . . ” Tulo said the name of Rein’s brother and then halted, trying to find the right words. “His bravery is an example to all of us, but he knew . . . he knew what he was doing. And so do they.” He pointed at the figures on the other side of the shields. “They volunteered for it.”
Rein’s lips thinned. His anger wasn’t just spared for his frustration; Colen had lied to him, kept his illness hidden for as long as he could. Worse, his brother had encouraged the other men similarly afflicted to do the same, so as not to cause a distraction. There had been two deaths already on the journey back from Xand Depot, and Rein did not want to think about who might be the next to succumb.
Rein took the energy of the emotion churning inside him and channeled it. He turned and grabbed Tulo’s shoulder. The other man was startled. “You trust me, don’t you?”
Tulo nodded. “Of . . . of course I do, Rein. Have I done something to make you think otherwise?”
“No, no. Never.” Rein gripped him tightly, his gaze intense. “But at times like this, I need to he
ar you say it. This is a difficult path we walk, my friend. One mistake and we are done for.”
“I know. We all know that.”
Rein nodded back at him. He remembered when Tulo had first joined the group; he had been directionless and afraid, and they had given him purpose. “Good. Good.”
Tulo licked dry lips. “It is just that . . . perhaps, if we had remained at the depot, then—”
“No,” Rein stopped him before he could go on, his tone hard and sharp. Tulo reacted, and Rein realized he had overstepped the mark. “No,” he repeated, metering his voice. “If there had been any other option open to us, I would have taken it. I never wanted us to return to that derelict . . . We should have abandoned it years ago and never returned . . . But we needed a location that was distant from this one.” Rein gestured at the rocky walls. “I only took us back to Xand Depot because we needed a place to meet with our new patrons. To keep this bolt-hole unknown to them, do you see?”
Tulo nodded.
Rein went on: “I hope I have succeeded in that. To keep this haven safe. We’ve risked so much . . .” He looked back at Tulo, eyes narrowing. “I know what the men have been saying. I hear them speaking. You want to strike while the iron is hot, yes? Take the killing blow to the heart of the tyrants . . .”
Tulo’s head bobbed again. “If we wait too long . . . if they find us . . .”
“They can’t stop us!” Rein snapped. “Do you know what we have done? Before, no matter what blows we struck, we were an insect to them, fleabites against a wolf’s hide. And then we abased ourselves, drew into collusion with the very beings we wished dead!” He scowled. “The thorn in their sides . . . but nothing more than an irritant!”
“You changed that,” Tulo told him.
“I did!” Rein replied. “And look at us now! Striking from the darkness, leaving destruction in our wake. We have the tyrants turned about, looking in all the wrong places. The mighty Klingon wolf, barking at shadows!” He gave Tulo’s shoulder another squeeze. “And soon we will kill the beast. We’ll cut out its heart and watch the body wither and die . . . and that’s when the tyrants will know, when it is too late for them to stop us. They will learn that the men of one single world can cripple an empire of a hundred star systems, if their resolve is strong enough.” He released his grip and stepped away. After a moment he spoke again. “We will do these things, and we will do them right. No more mistakes. No more imprudence. I won’t waste lives needlessly. I lead, and the responsibility falls to me.”
He gave Tulo a look that dared him to disagree, but the other man said nothing, instead struggling to find a way to respond. In truth, Rein was not only sensing the pressure from his own men to strike the final blow in their campaign, their patrons had also communicated a degree of “dismay” at the delays he had put in place. But the third attack would not be squandered on an objective of middling importance: it had to be a high-value target, something much more than just the place where the Klingons and their Federation allies played at cooperation. It had to be a symbol, the loss of which would wound the tyrants for eternity.
He could make it happen. He just needed time, and men—but neither were in great supply.
Finally, Tulo found his voice again. “Colen and the others . . . What will be done with them? If we had their skills . . .”
“We do not have the medicines required to treat their sickness,” Rein told him. The raw energy that had driven his words before suddenly bled away in the face of the hard reality. He thought of the lesions and the weeping sores that Colen had kept hidden beneath his tunic, and a stab of guilt buried itself in his heart. I drove him to that. He did these things for me, for the cause. Because I asked it of him. “We cannot even lessen the pain of those . . .” he trailed off. “Colen cannot help us,” Rein concluded. He heard footsteps approaching, and turned to see Gattin enter through the far hatch.
She stepped through the doorway, a ring of metal cut from an old starship and retrofitted to the stone walls with thick gobs of polymer sealants. “I can hear you talking all the way down the corridor,” she told him, her perpetually severe face barely sparing Tulo a look. “You pick the poorest of times to give speeches. Do it in front of everyone, not just him.”
Rein folded his arms. “You make it sound like my words are some cheap theater. I mean everything I say, Gattin. You’ve been my second long enough to know that by now.”
“Morale is low,” she retorted. “I understand your reasons for delaying the next strike, but without that to focus on, the men can only listen to the wounded moaning in the infirmary and wonder how long it will be before they join them.”
“Only those who were exposed—”
Gattin spoke over him. “Everyone is afraid they were exposed, whether they admit it or not. Then every cough or ache seems a harbinger of slow, painful death.” She shook her head. “We signed up for this fight willing to die in battle, Rein, not to perish by degrees like your brother.”
He stepped closer, matching her gaze. “And what do you propose? Put them out of their misery?” Rein glared at her. “We are not like the tyrants! We don’t put a knife in the chests of our wounded and pretend it is some kind of mercy!”
A rare flicker of emotion crossed Gattin’s face: disgust. “I would never suggest such a thing. You know me better than that.” She frowned. “I have a more proactive solution, one that will be of benefit to everyone.” The woman pulled a padd from a holster on her belt and offered it to Rein.
He took it and examined the information it displayed. “What is this?”
“A communication from one of our supporters,” she explained. While the core of their group was a relatively small cell, there were others who never picked up a weapon but kept eyes and ears open for them in return for coin or a chance to lend a hand to the resistance. “An Axanarri medical ship has been observed passing along the colonial border. They might have what Colen needs. We could mount a fast raid, take the supplies.”
Rein held out the padd. “Too risky. Too many unknowns.”
“We’ve done this sort of thing a dozen times over!” Gattin shook her head. “The men feel useless, Rein! This will give them something to do. They need that right now.”
He frowned and turned to Tulo. “Is she right?”
The other man nodded once. “She is right.”
With a flick of his wrist, Rein tossed the padd and Gattin caught it easily. “Then we’ll do it,” he said. “Ready the ship.”
Kaitaama’s Daughter
Ka’Vala Sector, Colonial Border
Klingon Empire
A generous description for the vessel could have been “warship,” but the reality was that the dart-shaped craft was hardly a threat to any of the Klingon cruisers that regularly patrolled the border zone. The Daughter wasn’t designed for toe-to-toe fights against the heavily armored ships of the Imperial Defense Force; it had been built in an age when the Kriosian military engaged in hit-and-fade skirmishes with their age-old adversaries on Valt Minor. When the Empire had finally thrown off the pretense of treaty and collaboration, moving in to annex the Krios System with troop carriers and battle cruisers, they had not even graced the Royal Fleet by meeting them on the field of conflict. Instead, they held the inner worlds hostage and forced the naval commanders to bring their ships home under pennants of surrender. A proxy force was left intact, but the majority of the craft were dismantled in the interests of what the invaders called “regional stability.” Rather than risk the wholesale bombardment of their worlds, the Kriosian monarchy capitulated—but not all of their starship captains did the same.
Some fled, and for a few months they held out and attempted to mount a guerrilla war against the tyrants. But ultimately, one by one, the last holdouts were hunted down and ruthlessly exterminated by the Klingon military.
The Daughter was one of those that escaped, but her crew had, like their rebellious countrymen, been whittled down by the actions of time, battle, and frailty. The ship her
self—a warp-capable cutter built for system patrol duties—had already been elderly at the time of the invasion. Nearly three decades later, she was kept alive by Rein and his people, having fallen into their possession during the rise of their movement. The vessel resembled a cross between a throwing dart and a sharp-edged buckler, the hull made up of a central fuselage and two dagger-tipped wings.
She was at best a raider. When the group went through leaner times, the Daughter had prowled the freight lanes beyond the Ikalian Belt and preyed on unlucky transports, the freedom fighters taking what they needed when the donations of their supporters back on Krios Prime were not enough. The crew had run attacks like this one many times—they went about the work soberly—but Rein detected a sense of anticipation on the ship’s narrow bridge. Gattin had been correct: the moment he announced that they were taking out the Daughter for a sortie, the men were eager to go.
It concerned him that he hadn’t realized that himself. He should have been aware of what was going on among the rest of the group, not concentrating on Colen’s deterioration and the assembly of the last device. But then Gattin, for all her dour nature and coldness, was better at observing the mood of others than Rein had ever been. It was one of the reasons he kept her at his side. Her aloof manner—callous, even, at times—masked deeper insights that few were aware of.
The Axanarri transport wasn’t difficult to locate. The Daughter caught it on the long range sensors several light-days from the dust clouds of the Ubeac Range. The vessel moved at low warp, a stubby metallic rod made up of numerous cargo modules arranged end to end. The scanners could not get a solid read on the contents of the pods, but Rein knew from experience that such ships were typically well stocked, making circuits around colony worlds without centralized hospital facilities, supplying drugs and medical gear to those who needed it.
As they closed, matching course with the target, Tulo noted that the scans remained fuzzy and indistinct; but then, the Daughter was an old ship, and warp travel caused ghosting on her sensor grid. They reached the point of no return as the Axanarri ship spotted them and reacted: Rein committed the cutter to the attack. To turn back now would only make him seem weak and indecisive in front of the others, and he needed their confidence to follow their mission through to the bitter end. And it would become bitter, he had no doubt of that.
Star Trek® Cast no Shadow Page 20
