Valeris frowned. “Why would you do that, sir?”
“Because I am in agreement with you, Cadet.” He came closer, speaking to her now almost as an equal. “I share your feelings about our most dogged foes. And that’s not all we have in common, Valeris. You and I . . . we have both seen their real faces.” Cartwright indicated the padd. “So, with that in mind, I suggest you delete this and write something much less confrontational. Something that won’t draw unwanted attention and ruin your career before it even begins.”
“Admiral, you are suggesting that I keep my opinions to myself.”
He nodded. “For now. At least until the political winds change, and they will, eventually. Even if we have to help things along the way . . .” Cartwright moved to the windows. “I’ve been looking for people who share my point of view, Valeris. Officers among the ranks who can be counted on to understand the realities of our situation. I see that in you.” He turned back to look at her. Cartwright’s dark eyes bored into Valeris. “Am I mistaken?”
She shook her head. “No sir, you are not.”
“I didn’t think so.” He smiled again. “I’ll see that your brief lapse of good judgment is kept off the Academy’s records. In return, I hope I can count on your reliability in the future.”
“Of course, Admiral,” Valeris said, weighing the padd in her hand and wondering what this meeting had set in motion.
“The Klingons are the greatest threat to the Federation,” Cartwright told her, “but only a few of us can really see that. We must work together if we are to defeat our enemy.”
“Aye, sir,” Valeris replied, as she tapped the padd’s DELETE key.
15
Object JDEK-3246553-AKV
Ikalian Asteroid Belt
Ty’Gokor Sector, Klingon Empire
Gattin found Tulo in the main corridor, a rough-hewn tunnel that ran the length of the asteroid, from pole to pole. As he moved into the nimbus of light cast by one of the work lamps strung along the passage, the expression on his face told her what she wanted to know before he spoke.
“A new hyperchannel message?” she asked.
Tulo’s head bobbed, and he traced the lines of his sallow pigment-spots. “It’s not time,” he said. “I don’t know why they broke radio silence.”
“I do,” she said. Gattin held out her hand. “The reply code?”
Tulo hesitated. “I should inform Rein first—”
“He’s busy with the work,” Gattin insisted, stepping to block Tulo’s path. “At this moment he’s in a work suit on the other side of the lock-out hatch.”
“In the assembly chamber?” The way Tulo said it made it sound like the gateway to a thousand hells.
She nodded. “He’s in there with the Vulcan. The weapon is almost ready. Rein wanted to oversee the final stages personally.” Gattin held out her hand. “I’ll deal with this. The . . . patrons don’t like to be kept waiting.”
Tulo reluctantly handed over the strip bearing the string of pictographs and Gattin studied it. “Stay close by,” she told him. “We may have to move swiftly.”
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Gattin replied.
The Klingon environment suit had left Vaughn with the stink of sweat and old polymers in his nostrils, but the Kriosians were reluctant to provide him with anything like a standard Starfleet fresher cubicle where he could clean up. After a cursory decontamination, he made his way through the corridors that were open to him, up to the cave-space that served as the base’s mess. With every step he took, he was aware that one of Rein’s men was following on behind, making no attempt to conceal himself. They had a long way to go before they could win over the members of the Thorn; Elias had his doubts that playing the long game would work. He had a grim feeling that, sooner or later, the weapons were going to come out.
Conversation from the knot of Kriosians in the corner of the mess stopped briefly when he entered, then resumed as he crossed the oval-shaped room. He found Kaj at one of the metal tables that was impact-bolted to the stone floor. Her violet skin tone gave her a shadowy quality; somehow it made the woman look even more predatory than she had in her true Klingon aspect. Vaughn got a flask of water and settled himself on a bench across from the major.
He glanced around. “Where’s the big guy?”
Kaj looked up from the bowl of dull, leafy shoots in front of her and jerked her head. “I sent Urkoj back to the ship. I think the dot-skins find him intimidating.” She growled at her food and pushed it away. “How do they eat this tasteless trash? It’s like chewing on ropes.”
Vaughn saw that his Kriosian shadow was busy getting himself a beverage, and he shifted closer, lowering his voice. “It’s worse than we thought,” he told her. “The third weapon is a lot more powerful.” Vaughn gave her a quick recap of his conversation with Valeris.
Kaj’s expression remained stony and unchanged as he spoke, but he could sense the fury lurking just below it. “When the moment comes, all of these fools will pay a blood cost,” she told him. “You would be advised not to stand in my way.”
“And how exactly are you going to make that happen? If we’re going to deal with the Thorn, it has to be a lightning-strike attack or else it won’t work. We have to take them all out at once. We leave a straggler, they could trigger the isolytic device or whatever other surprises Rein might have.”
“We should destroy this place before they can deploy another weapon. Burn out the nest.”
Vaughn sipped at the brackish, recycled water and made a face. “How? It’d take a couple of ships to crack this asteroid from the outside. Getting access to the subspace radio might be possible . . . If you think we can contact General Igdar—”
She gave a derisive snort, loud enough to draw the attention of the Kriosians. Kaj turned away. “That politician would never believe a word from my lips, nor yours. And certainly not the convict’s. No, he’s chasing the ghost-prey, and even if he knows it, he won’t end the hunt. He would die before losing face.”
Elias shook his head in disbelief. “Igdar’s got to suspect that the House of Q’unat is a smoke screen, at the very least. He’s a sector commander . . . You don’t earn that rank by being an idiot.”
Kaj gave him an arch look. “You think so? In some places the Empire is such a web of clannish inbreeding and privileged dolts, it’s a miracle we haven’t killed ourselves yet.” She frowned. “Without your assistance after Praxis, we probably would have . . . ” After a moment, the major went on. “What you fail to understand is that Igdar does not care who was behind the attacks. He sees only the quick gains the tragedy can net him. His honor is cheap; he builds a throne for himself from the corpses of the Thorn’s victims. Igdar will let this go on as long as it means he gathers more power to him. He is an opportunist. The High Council is enraged at what has happened, so Igdar is given more ships to punish the criminals. Then he asks for more, and more, and they give it to him.”
“And all the time, he’s strengthening his own position instead of doing his job.”
Kaj tapped the table with her cup. “Now the human sees. I am only sorry I won’t get to put the knife in his liver myself.”
There was a ring of fatality about her words that Elias didn’t like. “What do you mean?”
“You are correct about any external attack. Two ships at least. But there’s another option. A full-yield photon torpedo, fired from the Chon’m.”
“But the Chon’m is parked in the landing bay.”
“Exactly.”
Vaughn felt the blood drain from his face. “That would be suicide. And you don’t even know if it would work!”
“I think the odds are good. And it would be a noble way to die.”
He took another drink to stifle his shock. “You are actually serious. What is it with your kind? Do you all have some kind of death wish?”
“Why are you so afraid to die?” Kaj retorted.
“Why are you so e
ager?” Vaughn shot back.
A shadow passed over the woman’s face and he saw genuine sorrow in her dark eyes. “Because there is nothing left for me, human, nothing but my revenge.” She glared around the room, the sadness fading and a feral hate taking its place. “My sister and I were the only remaining scions of the House of Tus’tai. She was betrothed . . . Our family line would have carried on. But now my clan dies with me.”
“Isn’t that all the more reason for you to live?” Vaughn said quietly, so his voice would not carry. “You could . . . find someone . . . ”
She met his gaze. “I am barren. A price my career exacted from me many years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling a sudden jolt of empathy for the woman.
“And so,” Kaj went on, “why not make my death have meaning?”
“Or,” Vaughn added, “why not forget the whole death thing entirely and try something else?”
The major opened her long-fingered hands. “I see now why Miller liked you. The two of you are similar in spirit. Tenacious. Unwilling to face defeat.” She sighed. “Tell me your plan.”
He leaned in again. “We can’t use transporters because the actinide deposits in the rock interfere with the locks, right? But what if we could get around that?”
Kaj showed some teeth. “You’re talking about transponder beacons.”
“We just need to secrete them in all the places we want to capture.”
The major nodded slowly. “That could work. The only obstacle is convincing the Thorn to give us access to the most sensitive areas of their base.”
Vaughn shrugged. “I never said it would be simple.”
Gattin left Tulo outside the communications room and took the seat before the subspace radio. With a few keystrokes she ordered the system to extend the base’s antenna, and out on the surface of the asteroid a hair-thin monomolecular wire extruded from a concealed nozzle. The sensors—the only ones that worked with any kind of real accuracy in the Ikalian belt—showed no signs of any vessels in the area, so for the moment it was safe to transmit. The antenna unspooled until several kilometers of it were adrift out in the void, soaking up the low-level spatial frequencies threaded through the hiss and hum of cosmic background radiation.
She typed in the reply code and went through the familiar motions of the communications protocols, waiting for the hyperchannel to connect. Nervous energy was collecting at the tips of her fingers, the same sensation that came upon her every time the Thorn embarked on a new sortie against the tyrants. Gattin was suddenly conscious of the weight of her weapon in the holster on her belt. She liked the feel of it in her hand, with her finger on the trigger plate: all the pain and fear that had dogged her from childhood would melt away. The weapon made her feel strong, just like the tyrants had been when they demolished the village she grew up in. It made things even.
The comm gear sounded a tone and she snapped back to the moment. The glyph signaling a strong connection was illuminated, and she bent to speak into the console’s vox pickup. “This is Gattin. Proceed.”
The pause before the reply was long, and for a second she wondered if the link might have been lost; but then the flat mechanical voice issued out, the words marching down the screen in synchrony. “Gattin we confirm we have information your instincts were correct.”
“I knew it . . . ” She tensed. “I knew this could not be a coincidence! Tell me!”
“We have determined that the Vulcan female Valeris is operating under the guidance of the Federation’s covert intelligence bureau two humans are accompanying her Vaughn and Miller.”
Gattin considered this. “There’s only one human here, the once called Vaughn. The other could be on the ship. What about the mercenary, Kaj?”
“Kaj is known to us she is an agent of Klingon Imperial Intelligence highly resourceful and violent she should be dealt with immediately.”
“The tyrants and their Federation allies, working in unison . . . ”
“You must isolate and terminate these spies they will do all they can to undermine our partnership. You cannot delay any more. The third attack must proceed now.”
“Yes, of course,” she replied. “Leave it to me. I’ll deal with the situation.”
“If Rein will not proceed you must take over. Gattin we cannot protect you anymore do you understand?”
Gattin’s hand slipped to her weapon. “I understand.”
The hyperchannel connection ceased abruptly, and she rose to her feet. At last she pulled the laser pistol and checked the energy charge. There was no real need to do it—she had loaded a fresh power clip in that morning—but it felt necessary, like a ritual.
Tulo was still waiting out in the corridor, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. He saw the look on her face and became still. “It’s not good news, is it?”
“That all depends on who you are,” she told him. “Get everyone who isn’t sick or on the work team together. Draw weapons and armor from the equipment pool, anything suitable for a boarding operation. Then talk to Drell.”
“The healer?” Tulo sniffed. “I don’t like the man. You want him to gear up too?”
Gattin shook her head. The group’s medic hardly ever left the base’s infirmary, and given his caustic personality, that was largely considered a good thing. But he had his uses. “Drell will have something you can use. He’ll know what it is.” She took a breath. “Now, listen to me carefully. These are your orders—”
Tulo held up a hand. “Wait, we’re not waiting for Rein?”
She shook her head again. “We’re not waiting for Rein.”
“We’ll need Valeris’s help to make this work,” said Vaughn as he led Kaj down the tunnel.
The major eyed him. “I don’t think so. I consider her usefulness to me at an end.”
He stopped and met her gaze. “What’s that, Klingon code for ‘time to slit her throat’?” Vaughn drew a line across his neck. “I’m not letting you do that.”
Kaj looked back at him. “You know so little about us. We’re not all the barbarians you think we are, human. She did what she said she would: she delivered us to the Thorn. So I won’t kill her unless she gives me cause to.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “But my point stands. We could use her skills.” Vaughn glanced over his shoulder as he heard footsteps approaching. It was his erstwhile shadow.
“I have more faith in my own abilities,” Kaj replied as the Kriosian came closer.
“What are you two doing here?” demanded the other man. He was thickset, with a heavy brow and no hair on his scalp. “This part of the base is off-limits to outsiders.”
“Oh, right,” offered Vaughn. Up ahead, he could see an open hatch leading into a makeshift hydroponics garden. The level directly above was the main life support node, a vital target they would need to capture to take the asteroid from the Kriosians. “We were just . . . looking around.”
Then Kaj did something Elias would never have expected in a million years. She let out a throaty, sultry chuckle and snaked one arm around his back, pulling herself to him. “We were just looking for somewhere we could be . . . together.”
“Yeah,” Vaughn added. “Together.”
Kaj gave a coy smile. “Maybe your friend would like to join us?” she asked Vaughn, her hand passing out of sight toward her belt.
The Kriosian’s eyes widened, more with moral outrage than enticement. “I am a bonded man!” he snapped. “And this is no place for you to amuse yourselves!”
“Pity,” Kaj replied, and her hand came back up like a striking snake. The same slender dagger Vaughn had seen her use on the Chon’m’s bridge flashed in the half-light and buried itself in the man’s chest. Kaj put a hand over the Kriosian’s mouth to muffle his death cry.
“Damn it!” Vaughn staggered back a step, shocked by the speed of the execution. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Committing us to the course,” Kaj replied, dragging the corpse into the hydroponics compartmen
t. She found a row of planters and dumped the body out of sight behind them.
“If he’s missed—”
She shot Vaughn a look. “We’ll give them something else to think about.” Kaj pulled a rod-shaped device from her pocket and threw it to him. “Here. Plant this on the rock wall. When we’re done, I’ll signal D’iaq to beam a squad in here and they’ll blow their way into the life support compartment.” She pointed at the ceiling.
Vaughn caught the transponder device and grudgingly did as the major had ordered. “What about the power core and the armory? We need to isolate those as well.”
“Neither of those things will be important if you’re suffocating.”
He frowned and turned away. “Wasn’t this my idea?” he muttered.
Kaj heard him and laughed. “It’s a good plan. Just stand clear until I complete it. You’re innovative, that much is certain, but what’s needed now is experience.”
“I could not agree more,” said a voice from the hatchway.
Vaughn spun, reaching for his phaser, but there were four Kriosians, each with weapons drawn and aimed, standing on the threshold. Gattin was among them, a heavy laser pistol in her hand.
She waved the weapon at him. “Drop it, human, or I’ll burn you down.” He sighed and let the weapon fall to the floor.
“Is there something wrong?” Kaj was almost conversational. “Do you have some sort of law against disturbing the plants on Krios?”
“Your subterfuge is as clumsy and loutish as your race, you Klingon petaQ!” Gattin’s eyes flashed. “That disguise of yours is worthless. You take us for fools, as you always do . . . But not this time!”
Vaughn raised his hands. “Look, there’s got to be some kind of mistake here . . . ”
Star Trek® Cast no Shadow Page 24
