by David Stern
“Just taking a break,” Boyce said.
“Of course, of course. But you should—”
Someone cried out. A girl. The sound came from behind him.
Boyce turned and saw, down a short stretch of hallway directly opposite the entrance to the wing, three doors. One directly opposite him, closed, with the control pad next to the door blinking red. One to the left and one to the right.
“Who’s down there?” Boyce asked. “More patients?”
“No,” Petri said quickly. “Or, rather, yes but not victims of the accident. Attack.”
The cry came again—from the door on the right.
“Mind if I take a look?” he asked.
“Please, Dr. Boyce.” Petri laid a hand on his arm. “Those patients are not your concern.”
“When I became a doctor,” Boyce said, “I took a vow. A little something called the Hippocratic Oath.”
“I am familiar with your oath,” Petri said. “But—respectfully—you should focus—”
“Dr. Boyce!”
Collins burst into the hall, concern etched all over his face. He saw Boyce and sighed.
“Doctor, please. Next time, let me know where you’re going.”
Boyce frowned. Rules. Regulations. He’d joined Starfleet to help out, but this … he was a little old for this.
“Where I’m going?” He pointed toward the open door. “Right in there.”
And before either of them—Petri or Collins—could say a word, he strode off purposefully down the hall and into the treatment room the cries had been coming from.
It was a single-patient room. Dimly lit. A single diagnostic cot, hooked to a standard analysis screen at the right-hand side of the bed.
Lying on that cot was a girl, an Orion female barely out of her teens. She was dressed in a simple hospital shift. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She was unconscious—at least, that’s what he thought, until she opened her eyes and looked at him.
“You are Philip Boyce,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Dr. Boyce.”
“Yes. How do you know my name?”
“Your work on Argelius.” She managed a small smile. “It is very well known.”
“Apparently so.” At least among these Orions, it was. He wondered why.
“What’s your name?” he asked, moving around the bed toward the diagnostic screen. He sensed, as much as saw, Petri enter the room, Collins a step behind him.
“Deleen.”
“Deleen.” He smiled at her and studied the analysis screen quickly. Her temperature was up. Her blood pressure was dangerously high. And if he was reading the screen right, her pain receptors were registering off the scale.
She must be in agony.
“How are you feeling, Deleen?” he asked.
“Dr. Boyce,” Petri said. “Please. This is not your place.”
Boyce turned and glared at the man. Not his place. He was a doctor. Where else was he supposed to be?
“I’m here to help,” he said, turning back to Deleen. “Tell me how you feel.”
“Fine,” she said quickly. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Boyce frowned. What was going on? Why didn’t anyone want him to treat the girl?
He looked down at her again and noticed something he hadn’t seen before. The veins on her arm were swollen, darkened in color, emerald green against the lime of her skin.
He’d never seen anything like that before.
“Dr. Boyce,” Petri said, “I must insist—”
“I’d like to see this patient’s history.”
“What?”
“Her medical history. Can I access it from this screen, or—”
At that instant, Boyce’s eyes fell on a wall of dimly lit machinery behind the cot, on the wall farthest from the door. There, he thought, and took a single step forward.
And stopped dead in his tracks.
There was recessed lighting in the ceiling, a dim blue cone of illumination that shone down on the wall of machinery. Boyce stared at the piece of equipment directly in front of him for a good three or four seconds before he was able to find his voice again.
“This is a LeKarz sequencer.” He ran a hand over the machine; it felt brand-new to him, the metal and glass substrate underneath his palm smooth to the touch. It looked brand-new as well, the surface free of scratches or blemishes or any sort of dings.
“Yes,” Petri said.
“You have a LeKarz sequencer.”
“We use it to assist in diagnosing certain genetic abnormalities.”
Boyce nodded, staring at the machine. Of course they did. That’s what the LeKarz was for; it was the most sophisticated genetic-sequencing unit in the galaxy. Incredible machine, incredibly difficult to manufacture. As far as he knew, there were no more than a dozen of them in the galaxy. The Vulcans had been begging for one for years. How in the world the Orions had gotten hold of technology like this, technology Starfleet was notoriously stingy with—
Jaya. Starbase 18.
“We have one.” He recalled the last time the two of them had talked, a few weeks earlier, when Boyce had learned that his mission would carry him in her general direction and that there was a possibility Enterprise might make a stop at 55-Hamilton.
He had been incredulous then. “A LeKarz.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Starbase 18 was a standard Federation outpost, part diplomatic mission, part military base. The medical center was there to treat those personnel assigned to 55-Hamilton. Why would they need—why would they have—a LeKarz sequencer?
“Dr. Boyce?” Collins’s voice snapped him out of his reverie. “Is something wrong?”
He stared at the LeKarz.
Yes, he thought to himself, there is something wrong. Something very, very wrong indeed.
“No. Everything’s fine.” He turned, rearranging his features into a smile. “A LeKarz sequencer. Well. Doesn’t matter how you got it, I suppose, it’s just a godsend that you have it. You’re using it diagnostically, I assume, which makes good sense.”
“As I said,” Petri replied.
“Of course. As you said. You did say that, didn’t you?”
He was talking too fast, Boyce realized. Saying too much. Babbling. Slow down. Calm down. Don’t let them see anything’s wrong.
“Mr. Collins?”
“Sir?”
Boyce turned away from the machine and slung the tricorder around in front of him. “Weren’t we supposed to check back in with the captain about now?”
Collins frowned. “About now, yes, sir.”
They actually had another fifteen minutes or so by Boyce’s count, but Collins, as he had hoped, followed his lead.
“You can handle the check-in, if you would. Tell the captain we’re just about wrapping things up here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell him I’m just looking at a few more patients.” He smiled at Petri. “Oh, and tell him they have a LeKarz.” He tried to say the word as casually as he could. LeKarz. “Tell him to let Mr. Spock know about it, for sure. There were some interesting plant samples from Rhinos V we picked up. He might want to use the machine briefly—that would be all right, if our science officer used the machine, wouldn’t it?”
He addressed the latter to Petri, who was eyeing him suspiciously. That didn’t matter. Collins had his communicator out. The second Spock heard that word, LeKarz, the second he found out the Orions had one, he would know there was something wrong, would know that—
Raised voices came from outside the room. A second later, the door burst open.
Gurgis walked in. His head barely cleared the top of the doorframe.
“What is happening here?” he demanded.
Petri stepped forward. “The doctor was examining Deleen. But I told him—”
Gurgis shook his head. “This is not permitted.”
“That’s exactly what I said.” Petri nodded. “We are leaving now. There is no need�
�”
“You.” Gurgis spoke to Collins, pointing a finger straight at the communicator. “Usage of that device is not permitted. You will put it down immediately.”
Collins didn’t answer. He didn’t put the communicator away, either.
“Put it down,” Gurgis said again, and took a step forward.
Collins drew his phaser. “Doctor,” he said, “if you would come stand by me—”
Gurgis moved, lunged forward, much faster than Boyce would have thought possible for someone of his size.
Collins fired, phaser set on stun. The beam caught Gurgis mid-leap and slammed into him. A wall of energy, equivalent to the force of a falling piano, struck the Orion in the chest.
It barely slowed him down.
Collins went to fire again, but it was too late.
Gurgis slammed into him, slammed him into the wall, grabbed him by the neck with one hand, and then lifted.
Collins gasped. The Orion smiled and tightened his grip. Boyce heard something snap. The security guard’s eyes rolled back in his head.
Gurgis released his grip, and Collins fell to the floor.
So did the communicator.
Boyce, whose own communicator was in his medikit, inaccessible, dove for it. He got his hand on it and stood—
And stopped breathing.
Gurgis had his hand around his throat. He lifted Boyce off the ground.
Boyce gasped. Someone screamed.
Petri’s face appeared in Boyce’s rapidly diminishing field of vision.
“Put him down, you idiot!” the doctor yelled. “The tallith—”
Something hit Petri’s face: Gurgis’s hand. Boyce saw blood, red blood, just like human blood.
Then he saw nothing.
SIX
His studies in preparatory school had, of course, included some xenobiology, so Spock had on more than one occasion visited Solkar’s archives, but paradoxically enough, it was only now, some hundreds of light-years away from his home city of Shi’Kahr, from Vulcan, that he was truly able to appreciate the wealth of information the great explorer had gathered. The Solkar archives were a storehouse of not just physical artifacts but oral histories, data stored in all forms imaginable, history captured at the moment of its creation and brought to Vulcan by Solkar and his successors.
Spock had discovered the initial mention of a “tallit” in a series of semimythological narratives collected by Solkar himself, while the explorer was serving what was apparently a fairly painless six months term of captivity at the hands of Orion pirates. These narratives, recited mainly by the leader of his captors, a Captain Ugaro, formed a classic story cycle, akin to that found in pre-Awakening Vulcan mythology, the human tale of the Odyssey, the Klingon cycle of Kahless—a tale of subjugation, exodus, and triumphant return. The “tallit” was a more important figure in this cycle than Spock had initially realized, was in fact one of its major heroes, referred to in multiple sections of the narrative by his given name of K’rgon, rather than his title.
Ugaro’s narratives were colorful in the extreme; not only that, the language was reflective of an entirely different technological era. Spock found it fascinating. After reading transcripts of three of the narratives, he decided he wanted to hear the pirate’s voice for himself.
He was at his station on the bridge now, doing just that, listening to Ugaro—dead more than a thousand years now—recite the glories of even more distant, more dead times.
“… which K’rgon soon added to his conquests as well. And those systems—those peoples—those warriors—were glad to join him. The Orions of the Second Empire were a force to be reckoned with, sir. The most fearsome warriors ever to grace the quadrant, then or now.”
“And yet no trace of this Second Empire exists?” Another voice—calmer, more measured (Solkar’s, Spock assumed)—sounded in his ear as well.
“The evidence is out there, sir,” Ugaro said. “I myself have seen relics, on Stannos IV, in a Dunbarri merchant’s private museum. Pieces of the Orion fighters, K’rgon’s seal still visible on the hulls.”
“Ships from that era?” Solkar asked.
“Most definitely. Two of them, K’ud fighters. Exactly like I told you. Small ships—the wing of K’rgon’s attack force. In battle—”
Spock paused the recording, suddenly realizing something.
K’rgon. Karkon. Karkon’s Wing.
“Number One,” he said.
She turned in her chair. “Mr. Spock.”
“I have information to convey to you,” Spock began, “which I believe relevant—”
The console behind him chirped.
“We’re being hailed, Commander,” Garrison said.
“The Orions?”
“No, sir, the Hexar. ”
“ Hexar ?” Number One frowned, exchanging glances with Spock. “Where did they come from?”
The Vulcan spun back to his console. “One moment.” He brought up a sector map, superimposed rough outlines of Borderland, Federation, and Klingon territory on top of it. Added Enterprise, a blinking yellow dot, and Hexar, a blinking red one.
“Ah,” he said.
“Facts, please,” Number One prompted.
“Of course.” He put the sector map up on the main viewscreen. “If you will direct your attention—”
“Yes,” Number One interrupted. “I see.”
“See what?” asked Lieutenant Hardin, from the weapons console.
“The Adelson cloud,” Spock said.
“The Adelson cloud?” Hardin asked.
“The extremely large nebula. There, in the lower lefthand quadrant of the screen.”
“Okay,” Hardin said. “I see it. And?”
“ Hexar was hiding in it.”
“Inside the nebula?”
“Precisely, Lieutenant. Or we would have detected their presence sooner.”
Number One shook her head. “That’s not good. Not good at all.”
“I concur,” Spock said.
Hardin frowned. “Why is that not good?”
“Favorite Klingon tactic: assemble your fleet inside a nebula,” Number One said. “That’s what they did at Gorengar, too.”
“You think there are more ships hiding in there?”
“Most certainly,” Spock said. “The Klingons are no doubt matching our strategy. Forming an attack force.”
Hardin’s eyes glinted. She punched a button on the console. “Bridge to torpedo control. Prepare—”
“Belay that,” Number One snapped.
“Sir?” Hardin asked.
“We’re not at war yet, Lieutenant.” The commander gestured to Garrison. “Let’s talk first. See what they want.”
“The prudent course is to raise shields,” Hardin said. “At the least. If we—”
“Do nothing without my express order, Lieutenant.” Number One arranged herself in the command chair.
Hardin nodded, tightening her lips, as the sector map vanished from the main viewscreen and the transmission from Hexar appeared.
But the figure that came onscreen was not, to Spock’s surprise, Kritos.
Instead, a much older Klingon—one of the oldest Spock had ever seen, massive, heavily bearded, wearing Imperial armor of a type and color the Vulcan had previously come across only in historical databases and museum displays—occupied the command chair.
“Federation vessel, I am General K’Zon. You have crossed into the Borderland and are in clear violation of Gorengar. Withdraw immediately, or face the consequences.”
Number One’s face remained impassive.
“General. I am first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise . Your sensors are in error. By any reading of the sector map, we are in Federation territory.”
K’Zon snorted. “I refer to your shuttlecraft, which our sensors witnessed journey into Klingon territory.”
“The Borderland is neutral territory, General. And the shuttlecraft was responding to a medical emergency. As per terms of Gorengar.”
&n
bsp; “You have now been warned, Enterprise. This happens once, and once only. Klingons do not battle with words.” K’Zon snapped his fingers, and the screen went dark.
“Charming.” Chief Pitcairn shook his head. “Never thought I’d say this, but I actually miss Kritos.”
“Anyone know this K’Zon? Who he is?” Number One asked.
“No,” Spock said.
“No,” Hardin chimed in.
“Checking records now,” Colt said from her station on the far side of the bridge.
“So what happened to Kritos?” Garrison asked.
“I assume that question is rhetorical.” Number One rose from the command chair.
“Of course it is,” Spock said. “Obviously, he has been replaced. A common enough occurrence in the Empire. And yet the timing invites speculation.”
Number One nodded, clasping her hands behind her back as she stared up at the main viewscreen, which now displayed the immediate starfield again. “Indeed.”
“The timing …” Hardin said. “You mean this close to the attack on Starbase Eighteen?”
“Precisely,” Spock said.
“The High Command replaced Kritos, because they wanted us to know they did not approve of the action,” Number One said.
“That is one possibility,” Spock said. “It assumes Hexar ’s involvement in the attack.”
“Which we have no evidence of.”
“Kritos is the senior officer in this sector.”
“You mean he was.” Number One turned to Colt. “Yeoman?”
“Data on General K’Zon coming through now,” Colt replied. “Ranking descendant of one of the Great Houses of the Empire. Significant combat experience, fought the Dourami at Kados V, the Andorians at Pelar, nicknamed …” Colt’s voice trailed off; she shook her head. “The Butcher of Pelar. The translation’s not exact, but—”
“One can infer meaning from the approximation,” Number One said. “Thank you, Yeoman.”
“Putting someone like K’Zon in command … that doesn’t seem to me like they’re interested in mending fences,” Hardin said.
“Unless they wish to negotiate from a position of strength,” Spock pointed out.
“Multiple scenarios,” Number One said. “Multiple possibilities. In any case, Kritos is gone.”
