As long as nothing goes wrong. Seryl made a negative noise to himself and shook off the idea. Rein had been right, of course. Nothing would be allowed to go wrong. They were more than ready. Cadik ventured into the shuttle’s sealed freight compartment time and again, checking and rechecking his work, never satisfied with his own perfection. Seryl could not afford the luxury of doubts. They were committed to this, and although he would never live to see it end, he believed in his heart they would succeed.
He called Cadik’s name as he crested the ridge, but the only sound was the mutter of the rain. And then he saw the young man lying facedown in the mud, a few steps from the shuttle’s open hatch.
Seryl dropped the water bottles and ran the rest of the distance to his comrade, bending to turn him over. Cadik’s eyes fluttered and he convulsed with a sudden, fluid cough. There was blood among the mud smeared on his face, and he was ashen.
With effort, Seryl dragged the other man to his feet and together they lurched back under the camouflage net. The night before, Cadik had been pale and sweaty, complaining of stomach cramps. Seryl had written it off as a bad reaction to the rations, but now he wondered if it might have been something else. The younger man was on the edge of unconsciousness.
Seryl managed to get him into the shuttle and he almost collapsed while putting him in the crew compartment behind the cockpit. Cadik raised his hand, trying to point at something, but Seryl ignored the weak gesture. Instead, he loosened Cadik’s clothing and the young man’s tunic fell open.
He recoiled. Cadik’s chest was a mess of fresh lesions that wept thin liquid, grotesque discolorations like burns that were deep in his flesh. Seryl knew radiation exposure when he saw it, and yet he was perfectly well. He cradled the young man’s head in his hands, turning his face. “Cadik? Cadik, do you hear me? How did this happen?”
“Nuh,” managed the other man. “Nuh-no.” He tried to point again.
This time Seryl turned to look, and through the companionway to the cockpit he saw an indicator blinking steadily on one of the control panels. “What is that?”
“Kuh,” Cadik sputtered. “Klingons. Tried to. Come to warn. Sick . . . ”
Seryl frowned; neither of them were carrying communicators, for fear that any signal might be picked up by a patrol ship passing nearby.
Then suddenly, out beyond the sloped canopy of the shuttle where the tree line began, there was a thrashing motion among the branches. Two Klingon warriors in full duty armor stepped into the clearing, each with a disruptor pistol in their grip, grimacing at the sight of a parked ship where no such craft had a right to be.
Seryl scrambled for the hatch. The cargo shuttle’s passive sensors must have detected the approach of the Klingons and Cadik had collapsed trying to get to him, to warn him to get back under the sensor web before his life signs were detected.
This is my fault, he realized. I brought them here.
They could not be allowed to report in. Seryl exited the shuttle as the first of the Klingons, a stocky female, shouted at him and aimed with her disruptor.
“Identify yourself!” she bellowed. “What are you doing on this world?”
He made himself look weak and pathetic—not difficult to do when his species was by nature a good head shorter than the average Klingon trooper. “Apologies, warrior,” he began, closing the distance between them. “Apologies. My ship suffered an engine malfunction and I was forced to put down on this moon for repairs. I mean no harm. If I have transgressed . . . ”
“Be silent, petaQ!” she snarled. “You are lying! The Da’Kel System is a security-restricted zone: there has been a terrorist attack here!”
Seryl reached for her arm, playing up to the role of a simpering outworlder. “Apologies, apologies,” he went on, head bowed.
“We will search your vessel!” Before he could lay a hand on her, the female trooper grabbed him and yanked Seryl off balance, throwing him to the mud at the feet of the second Klingon, a dark-skinned male who sneered at him and let out a gruff chug of amusement.
Seryl scanned their armor and spotted the status tabs that indicated both of them were bekks, low-level enlisted troopers, doubtless press-ganged into taking on the increased number of patrols of the Da’Kel System following the bombing. He gambled that they would be part of a small crew, perhaps no more than four or five, stretched thin, dealing with too many orders and not enough time. There was probably a picket ship in orbit somewhere overhead.
And then, when the male Klingon’s gaze flicked away from him for a moment, Seryl let the shimmerknife fall from the pocket in his sleeve and into his hand. Moving with a speed that belied his age, he pushed off the muddy ground and slammed the blade of the weapon right into the spine of the warrior. The crystalline knife, sheathed in a membrane of energy, found the joint between the leaves of the Klingon’s torso armor and pressed through. Seryl knew how to make this attack work from experience: he’d done it more than once, and it almost always worked the same way. The tyrants always underestimated them.
With a cry, the male Klingon was already falling, his legs failing him as his spinal column was severed. Seryl drew back the knife and slashed at his throat as he fell, sending a spray of purple blood out across the mud.
The other bekk, half in and half out of the shuttle hatch, turned back at the sound of the commotion, but Seryl already had her compatriot’s disruptor in his hand. She fired wide in his direction, tried to duck his return shot, and almost succeeded; but the halo of the flame-orange beam tore across her face and neck, throwing her to the ground with the shock of it.
Seryl’s chest was heaving as he crossed the distance back to her, and he felt light-headed from the exertion. His hands, the shimmerknife in one, the disruptor in the other, twitched with adrenaline.
He smelled the sweet tang of seared flesh and the odor of burning hair. The woman was a strong one; she was already trying to get back on her feet. Seryl delivered a savage kick to her stomach that put her down again, and then another just to hear her grunt in pain. With a sweep of his boot, he put her gun out of her reach and then took aim with his stolen disruptor.
The Klingon stared up at him, furious and defiant. Her brutal, sneering arrogance once more ignited the fires inside Seryl’s heart, the deep hatred that he had nurtured since his childhood—and suddenly he remembered what it was he was here to do, what it really meant. The purity of that was exhilarating.
“You have no idea who we are, do you?” he spat. “You don’t know who I am, where I am from, what you have done to us.” Seryl’s voice became a shout. “You don’t even know. You underestimate us. You always have!”
There was a flicker of confusion on the bekk’s face, and he knew he was right. All she saw was a humanoid, an alien, something beneath the notice of her precious Empire, with all its talk of honor and glory and greatness. In that moment Seryl wanted nothing more than to burn it all down.
“We did it,” he told her, through gritted teeth. “Your station, your ships, your brothers and sisters.” He jerked his head at the sky. “We did that.”
This time his words found meaning for the Klingon, and she tried to leap at him; but Seryl fired a second shot that burned a hole in her chest and made her scream echo through the hiss of the rain.
He kicked her body over the edge of the ridgeline and went back to the shuttle, making Cadik as comfortable as he could on the sleeping pallet before firing up the thrusters and bringing the craft to flight-ready mode. They couldn’t stay here now: sooner or later, the ground patrol would be declared overdue and their crewmates would come looking.
Seryl took the shuttle up and hugged the tree line, speeding away over the surface of Gion, watchful for any sign that he had been detected by the picket ship.
He was approaching the moon’s night side, the ocean planet beyond rising to fill the canopy, when the computer signaled the arrival of an encrypted communication stream.
“Kallisti,” he said aloud. The alien word felt strange
on his lips. In return, the message wrote itself across a screen in front of him, the encoded symbols transforming into Valtian script. Federation cruiser has crossed the border, it read. Arrival imminent. Commence attack.
His old eyes full of renewed purpose, Seryl nodded to himself and turned the shuttle to climb out of Gion’s shadow and into open space.
Down on the surface, in a gully half filled with dead leaves and gore-choked rainwater, Bekk T’Agga, daughter of Kelmok, turned over and sucked in a breath that cut her insides like razors. Through her one unblinded eye, she saw the ruin of her own torso, and in her nostrils there was the stink of rotting plant matter mingled with the metallic tang of her own blood.
Something bronze glittered in the mud beyond the reach of her arms: her communicator, torn from her belt as she tumbled down the hillside. From here T’Agga couldn’t tell if it was still in an operational condition, but the Klingon Empire built things to last. Their machines were as hardy as their warriors.
Some of the people who had perished on Utility Platform loS pagh loS had been friends of Bekk T’Agga; soldiers she played games of grinnak with at the end of a duty shift. If the treacherous, spot-skinned petaQ had told the truth about his involvement in the Da’Kel bombing, then she owed it to them to see he did not escape unpunished.
It took all of her effort to move even the smallest increment toward the communicator, and T’Agga could feel things inside her coming apart, breaking, leaking. It would take a while to reach the device, but she would do it, even though the attempt would likely kill her. One word of warning would be all that was needed. One word.
Gritting her bloodstained teeth, she tried again, and split the air with a howl of effort.
U.S.S. Excelsior NCC-2000
Da’Kel System
Mempa Sector, Klingon Empire
“Damn,” said Sulu, leaning forward in his command chair. “It looks like a war zone out there.”
“Aye, sir,” said Commander Aikyn, turning his tattoo-lined face from the science console. “A killing field.”
Miller nodded slowly in grim agreement. Excelsior’s bridge crew were silent, the view on the main screen moving slowly as it tried to encompass the aftermath of the destruction wrought over Da’Kel III.
A massive shoal of wreckage had settled into the orbital path that had once been occupied by the utility platform. It was a shaggy, ragged-edged cloud of metals and polymers, shards of hull and decking tumbling in slow motion, some of them catching the light from the distant Da’Kel star. Other, larger fragments drifted like icebergs among the morass. Miller saw flickers of energy dancing around the ends of severed power conduits, and slicks of dusty matter that could have been frozen breathing gasses. Now and then he picked out a recognizable shape—a warp nacelle or a support strut—and once or twice he thought he saw what could have been a body. Deep in the debris, something like lightning crackled, sending random discharges out across the span of the remains.
He glanced at the Rigelian. “Plasma discharge,” explained Aikyn, his tone bleak. “It seems some of the ships that were wrecked during the detonation are still partly intact and their systems were not shut down.”
“It’s not just a hazard to navigation out there,” said Sulu. “Those derelicts . . . They may still have functioning warp cores.”
Miller nodded again. There was a ready danger here: the aftereffect of the subspace blast could easily have disrupted the functions of the warp systems of the ships it didn’t immediately destroy. There was no telling what might come of that—anything from an uncontrolled release of antimatter to the spontaneous formation of a spatial anomaly. The work of picking up the pieces at Da’Kel would be laborious, dangerous, and time-consuming.
The commander thought about the crew of the Bode and wondered what they had experienced in those fleeting final seconds. For their sake, he thought, I hope it was quick.
Finally, Sulu sat back. “Mister Lojur, reduce magnification,” he told the Halkan officer at the conn. “Take us in, slow and steady.”
The screen snapped back to a standard display, and once more Miller saw the shapes of the two D-18 destroyers at the far port and starboard edges of the image. The Klingon ships had flanked them all the way in from the Neutral Zone, never leaving their side as the Excelsior crossed Imperial space. The ships reminded Miller of Terran cranes: their secondary hulls were tall, almost like battlements capped by warp nacelles, with slender necks that terminated in slab-sided command pods. Not once in the journey had either ship done anything as obvious as place a weapons lock on the Starfleet vessel, but Miller didn’t doubt that their gunnery crews were still ready to fire on them at a moment’s notice.
For all the agreements and treaties of the Khitomer Accords, this was still enemy territory, and Miller could never forget that. Despite what his personnel files might state, this wasn’t his first time in Klingon space, and he remembered all the others in full and often unpleasant detail.
Sulu turned in his chair, toward the communications officer. “Mister Roose. Alert all decks, all department heads. I want us ready to render any and all support possible for the recovery effort. The sooner this mess is cleared up, the sooner we can get back to the work of the treaty.”
Miller eyed him. “You think the Klingons will just go back to the way things were?”
“They have to, Commander,” replied the captain. “As horrific as this attack was, it doesn’t mean the fallout from Praxis has stopped in the meantime. The Federation made a commitment to stand by the Empire, and we have to keep to that.”
“No matter if the Klingons like it or not,” Aikyn added, his tone dry.
Roose raised his hand to the earpiece he wore. “Sir. We’re being hailed. It’s the I.K.S. No’Tahr.”
“General Igdar’s flagship,” said Aikyn. “At last someone speaks to us.” The escorts had maintained radio silence all through their journey to Da’Kel.
“Show me,” ordered Sulu, and the screen shifted to show a D-10 heavy cruiser approaching from a high polar orbit. “Riskadh-class,” noted the captain, sizing up the alien vessel. “Formidable.”
“We’re not going to be starting a fight with him, are we, sir?” asked Miller, half joking.
Sulu, was poker-faced as he replied, “The day is young, Commander.” He nodded to Roose. “Open a channel.”
The bridge’s viewscreen became a smoky, red-lit window into the dark, metallic recesses of the No’Tahr’s command pod. Unlike Starfleet ships, where the commanding officer sat in the center of the space with his crew arranged around him, a Klingon bridge put its captain at the very fore, metaphorically leading from the front. On a podium, in a chair that was closer to a throne in aspect, General Igdar of the Imperial Defense Force glared out at them with the same expression on his face he might have shown to something he was scraping from his boots.
“I am Captain Hikaru Sulu of the Starship Excelsior,” said the captain. He indicated the others. “This is Commander Aikyn and Commander Miller.”
The Klingon officer was decked in heavy armor of archaic design, the plate crossed with a bronze sash laden with medals and honor-marks. He had a craggy face that seemed cut from granite, and Miller’s first thought was of an ex-boxer he’d known as a youth, a man who was all broken nose and dense muscle. Igdar’s hair was sparse, but he had a broad, spade-shaped beard that was almost oil-black.
The general made a show of surveying every face on the bridge before ending with Sulu. “Captain,” he began. “We meet again.”
Sulu’s eyes narrowed. “Again?” he said. “Forgive me, General, but I do not recall—”
“The K’oyun System,” Igdar retorted. “An engagement in the asteroid belt. I was the first officer of the warship Barka.”
“Indeed?”
Aikyn worked a console, pulling up a log file. “K’oyun is the Klingon designation for the Q-Theta System, sir. There was a border skirmish in 2268 . . . You were serving at the helm of the Enterprise at the time.”<
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“Ah. Of course.” Sulu nodded smoothly. “I remember it now.”
“Your commander, Kirk . . . ” Igdar gave an unpleasant smile. “He was a sorcerer, that one. A rare enemy. He died well, yes?”
Miller saw Sulu’s manner stiffen a little. “He did. Saving lives.”
“Oh.” Igdar seemed disappointed—then in the next breath he was indifferent. “I will have my second officer transmit a set of orbital coordinates to your vessel. From there you may hold station and monitor the recovery efforts.”
“With all due respect,” Sulu replied, “Excelsior stands ready to assist you, General. In addition, we have information that may be of use in your investigations.”
“Your assistance is not required,” said Igdar. “You may observe.”
“General, if I may?” Commander Aikyn spoke up. “This vessel has high-acuity sensor grids, numerous transporter stations, fabricator facilities, a fully stocked infirmary, and a crew trained in disaster recovery operations. We can undertake any salvage and rescue tasks available.”
“You may observe,” Igdar repeated, his manner growing colder. “And rest assured that the Klingon Empire has everything in hand.”
“You’re willing to dismiss us so quickly?” said Sulu. “There could be lives out there, sir . . . Klingon lives we could help you to save. And we may be able to bring this matter to a conclusion far quicker.”
The general’s mask of false civility finally cracked and fell away: Miller saw his features shift from showing offhand arrogance to the actual irritation bubbling away beneath. “Help us? And while you do so, what else will you be doing, human? Looking over our shoulders, interfering, and judging us as we work to find the honorless taHqeq who caused this atrocity?” He snorted with derision. “I have enough to do without being wet nurse to a Federation starship!”
Star Trek: TOS: Cast no Shadow Page 11
