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To the Shore Leave gang
There is an ancient human legend: The peoples of their world came together to build a vast tower reaching to heaven, but their god, fearing their potential to achieve whatever they imagined, cursed them with the inability to understand one another’s speech and scattered them across the Earth. . . .
The reason humanity has now conquered the heavens is that they finally stopped blaming their god for their own fear of what they could achieve together.
—Anlenthoris ch’Vhendreni, 2161 Babel Conference
2163
Prologue
October 19, 2163
Klingon privateer Sud Qav, Kandari Sector
“A LORILLIAN FREIGHTER,” Vhelis announced with a feral grin. “Sensors say it carries refined metals—probably duranium!”
Captain Lokog grunted acknowledgment as he studied the hemicylindrical vessel on the viewscreen. “Tell me about Lorillians.” He had come across a few at raIjul wa’maH and other local trade outposts over the years, but they had never seemed worthy of his notice.
“A weakling race,” Vhelis told him from the sensor station. “They were jeghpu’wI’ of the Vulcans, more or less.” Lokog nodded, aware that the Vulcans would have used a less honest label for their conquered subjects—even before one of those subject races, humans, had managed to overthrow Vulcan rule, take over their empire, and absorb the Andorians and Tellarites into it. Though the humans also hid their conquests behind pusillanimous labels like “Federation” and “democracy.”
“Has the Federation absorbed the Lorillians?” he asked Vhelis.
“Not yet,” she answered. “They trade, and they talk, but that is all.”
That must be why the freighter was unescorted. “Armaments?”
“Low-yield particle cannons. Nothing more.”
Kalun, the gunner, laughed. “Easy pickings!”
“Assume nothing!” Lokog told the younger Klingon. “Fortunes can turn foul at any time. Never lower your guard.” Seeing that Kalun was suitably chastened, he turned to the helmsman. “Attack vector.”
“Luq, HoD!”
“Ready weapons,” Lokog ordered Kalun. “Disable their engines and life support.”
“Yajchu’!” the gunner barked.
Lokog looked around at his bridge crew. Their fierce, battle-hungry expressions made an absurd contrast with their smooth, infantile foreheads, the brows of weakling races like Vulcans or humans. How he hated the sight of them.
Almost as much as he hated the sight of his own face.
Even after nine years, it shamed him. If only he had unloaded his cargo at the Qe’tran colony and moved on, instead of stopping to avail himself of the local pleasure slaves. By that quirk of fate, he had fallen prey to the virus that had stripped the planet’s Klingon inhabitants of their warriors’ pride, the cranial ridges that declared their houses and heritage. He had been left half a Klingon, a QuchHa’—and forbidden from returning to his ship lest he infect the rest of his crew. He had lost his dignity along with his possessions and standing, all through no fault of his own. His dreams of getting out of the privateer life, maybe buying his way into a minor title and starting a house of his own, had been forever shattered. True, some of the nobles who had succumbed to the same plague had managed to cling to their standing, but a commoner like Lokog had no chance of advancement now that his weakness was written across his very brow.
In the years since, as he’d struggled to acquire a new ship and crew and resume his raiding activities in alien space, he’d come to realize he may have been better off where he was. Most QuchHa’ in the Defense Force had been reassigned to segregated crews and sent to patrol the borders, given the chance to redeem their shame in battle with the Empire’s enemies—or, more bluntly, to die as cannon fodder since the Empire had no other place for them. But there were those who plotted rebellion, convinced that the only way the QuchHa’ could survive was by seizing the High Council from the HemQuch majority. And there were HemQuch factions who saw the plague as proof of the current leaders’ weakness and plotted their own takeovers. The Council had fought off coup attempts from both directions in the past few years, and the Empire teetered on the brink of civil war. All in all, Lokog found it preferable to stay in unclaimed space, beyond the crush of the Empire’s racial politics.
Not that he feared battle, Lokog insisted to himself. It was more a matter of choosing a battlefield where one could concentrate on one’s chosen prey without having to worry about getting caught up in someone else’s fight.
And the Kandari Sector, as Vulcan charts labeled this region, was a good place for it. This was the raIjulngan’s zone of influence, and their trade commission was notoriously broad-minded about the ways their trading partners obtained their goods or conducted business. Granted, they were uncomfortably close to the territory of the upstart Federation. But the Andorian fleet that formed the bulk of its military strength was saddled with patrolling its borders, much like the QuchHa’ crews back in the Empire, and only explorers and traders traveled this far outside them. The raIjulngan traded actively with the Federation and had sought their help half a year ago with the Mute crisis; but they had their own extensive mercantile empire and showed no inclination to be absorbed into another state, so Lokog had no cause to worry about the Federation Starfleet poking its extremities into his private pursuits. Indeed, the raIjul wa’maH outpost would be the ideal place to sell the Lorillians’ cargo once Lokog had completed his more forceful transaction here. If any Lorillians survived the attack, he might even be able to pick up a little extra profit at the Orion slave market there.
“We’ve been detected,” Vhelis reported in sharp, clipped syllables. “Target emitting distress signal.”
Lokog grinned. “Let them bleat. No one here will come to their aid.”
U.S.S. Pioneer NCC-63
Approaching HD 19632 system, Kandari Sector
“All right,” Tobin Dax said, spreading the Xiangqi pieces facedown on the mess hall table. “Now mix them around some.”
Across from the diminutive, balding chief engineer, Lieutenant Valeria Williams obliged, scrambling the wooden disks. There were fourteen in all, one of each of the seven different types for each color.
“Look at one,” Doctor Dax went on. “Don’t show it to me, but remember it.”
Lieutenant Commander Travis Mayweather watched over the armory officer’s gray-clad shoulder as she lifted one far enough to get a look at it. Mayweather had played Crewman Chen’s favorite game enough times to recognize the characters on the Chinese chessmen; this was a red xiàng or elephant piece. “Got it,” said the auburn-haired Williams, who’d gotten fairly good at the game herself.
“All right.” Dax displayed his empty hands, then began stacking the wooden disks with his left. After putting two other pieces atop Val’s, the chief engineer moved that hand away to stack another three while his right hand rested upon the first stack, which he then placed atop the one in his left. After adding two more pieces to the stack, he pushed it over to Lieutenant Samuel Kirk, who sat at Williams’s right, clad in the cobalt blue of the science department. Along with Mayweather in his command greens, the group represented all four ship
board departments, though Doctor Dax wore a civilian suit rather than the red-brown tunic of a Starfleet engineer. “Now, ah, cut it anywhere you want. Don’t let me see.” The Trill, who looked like a human in his thirties aside from the leopard-like spots adorning his temples and neck, studiously looked away as the younger blond historian took off the top five pieces, put them on the table, then placed the other three on top of them, squaring off the stack. “Now you, Commander,” Dax said to Mayweather. Kirk pushed the stack gently toward the first officer, careful not to tip it.
Mayweather was tempted to pull a trick of his own at this point. He was intrigued, for he’d never seen anyone perform magic with Xiangqi pieces before. It combined the moves of coin magic with the selection and location tricks of card magic, an innovative twist. Dax had explained that the Xiangqi pieces were similar to gaming tiles that his people used for sleight of hand, so he’d found it easy enough to adapt the techniques. But Travis had learned some card and coin tricks in his youth, growing up on the low-warp cargo ship Horizon, where hobbies had been essential to pass the abundant time between planetfalls. Dax’s hand positions had tipped Mayweather off to how the trick worked and where the red elephant really was. He could sabotage the illusion easily enough when he made his cut, giving away the trick and embarrassing the performer.
But no. There was a time, a place, and a right kind of target for practical jokes. Tobin Dax, while a capable and reliable engineer, was almost pathologically shy. He’d been part of the crew for six months, but had only recently grown comfortable enough to socialize like this, and still tended to hide behind his magic in the belief that it was the only thing that made him interesting. There was a point that could be made by sabotaging his illusion; if nothing else, Mayweather felt the Trill was too caught up in the mechanics of the tricks at the expense of his patter, impairing his ability to hold—and deceive—an audience. Still, public embarrassment would do more harm than good, undermining what little social confidence he’d gained. Besides, Mayweather wasn’t just another crew member anymore; he was Pioneer’s first officer, responsible for the morale and performance of the crew.
So he simply did the cut as instructed, splitting the stack right in the middle, and obliged when Dax said, “Now place it in the center of the table.” Mayweather deposited it amid the remaining six pieces scattered across the tabletop.
Dax looked at Williams. “Now, ah, Val . . . can you guess where your tile is?”
“Easy,” Williams said. Her eagle eye hadn’t left the stack, and she’d followed both cuts. She grabbed the top two pieces in her hands and lifted them. “It’s right here.”
But when she turned them over, the piece she revealed was a black pào, or cannon. “No way. I know I counted right.” She flipped over the whole stack and spread out the pieces. The red elephant was nowhere in sight. “I don’t get it. I had my eye on that stack the whole time.”
“Ah, but what you forget,” Dax said, his words more confident than his tone, “is that the elephant always moves two points diagonally.” He gestured toward a stray piece in roughly the indicated position, keeping his hand well away from it. Val flipped it over to find the red elephant, just where Travis had known it would be.
Mayweather and Kirk laughed and applauded, while Williams just stared, trying to figure out what she’d missed. “Good one, Tobin,” Kirk said. “I like how you worked the piece’s specific move into the reveal.”
“Thank you,” Dax said, eyes focused on his hands as they rearranged the pieces.
“But didn’t you say the Trill game tokens were more like playing cards?” The engineer nodded. “So that final touch was something you added just for this.”
“I guess so. It seemed like a good idea.”
“Hey, don’t sell yourself short,” Mayweather told him. “You’re more creative than you think.”
“I just want to try that again,” Williams said. “I know you switched the pieces somewhere. I just need to figure out where.”
Kirk stroked her upper arm gently, right above the Pioneer mission patch on her right sleeve. “Relax, Val. They’re not Klingon snipers.”
She was unmoved by his gesture of affection. “But if I’m not good enough to see through a simple trick, how can I spot a Klingon sniper when—”
The intercom hailed. “Commander Mayweather, Lieutenant Williams, report to the bridge. Alpha shift, report to stations.” The clipped British tones were unmistakably Captain Reed’s. Typically, he was early for his duty shift.
Mayweather rose and walked to the panel by the mess-hall door, activating the intercom. “Mayweather here. What’s going on, Captain?”
“We’ve picked up a distress signal from a Lorillian freighter. They’re under attack by Klingons.”
“On our way,” Mayweather said, and Williams was on his heels as he headed out.
Dax followed them into the corridor. “Wonderful,” he moaned. “You just had to tempt fate, didn’t you, Lieutenant?”
• • •
The distress signal originated more than two light-years from Pioneer’s position, roughly along the trade route between Beta Rigel and the Xarantine trade colony on Zeta Fornacis VI. Even at the Intrepid-class starship’s maximum of warp 5.6, it took more than an hour to reach the coordinates. Ensign Grev’s attempts to hail the Lorillian freighter produced only static in reply.
“This is taking too long, Captain,” Valeria Williams muttered to Malcolm Reed as he paced by her tactical station forty minutes into the journey. “A freighter like that couldn’t have held off a Klingon ship, even a privateer, for that long.”
Reed gave a grim scoff. “ ‘Privateer.’ To be a privateer, you need letters of marque authorizing you to attack a declared enemy in wartime.”
The short-haired lieutenant replied with a gallows smirk. “Don’t Klingons pretty much consider themselves at war with everyone?”
“They can call it whatever they like, Lieutenant. But these are pirates, pure and simple.”
Williams grimaced. “And with transporters, it wouldn’t take an hour to beam the cargo over. Sir, what are the odds we’ll be able to accomplish anything when we get there?”
“I understand your frustration, Val.” Reed spoke reassuringly—something he’d been gradually learning to do as a necessary part of command, but that he still found easier with Williams, who shared his background as an armory officer, than with the rest of the crew. “But one can hardly ignore a distress signal. We can only hope there will be someone left to help.”
She held his eyes. “Yes, sir.”
But when they finally neutralized warp at the signal’s coordinates, the signs were not promising. “The Klingon ship’s long gone,” Williams reported solemnly. “But there is an ion trail, sir.”
“Let’s see if we’re needed here before we go haring off,” Reed said from the command chair. “Rey, any biosigns?”
At the science station on Reed’s left, Lieutenant Reynaldo Sangupta replied with unwonted solemnity. “I’m not reading any, sir. The ship is a mess—engines shot, holds blown, half the living space open to vacuum.”
“Captain, recommend we pursue the Klingons,” Williams said.
“Not just yet, sir,” Sangupta interposed, studying a readout on his console. “We need to take a closer look.”
“What have you got?” asked Travis Mayweather, who stood at Reed’s flank.
“Some of the compartments are flooded with methylacetylene gas. It’s toxic to most humanoids, and it’ll suffocate you if it displaces the oxygen, but Lorillians have a weird biochemistry. There might still be survivors with biosigns too faint to read from here.”
Reed nodded. “All right. Find an intact docking port if you can. Travis—prepare a boarding party.”
• • •
Sangupta’s instincts had been sound. Mayweather’s party found seven corpses, all victims of the Klingons’ disruptor bombardment, and Sangupta’s sensor scans picked up two more bodies drifting in space nearby. B
ut the remaining five members of the freighter crew were found in the methylacetylene-flooded engine bay, their biosigns barely registering but present—though one died before Doctor Liao was able to stabilize him.
Now the rest were in Pioneer’s sickbay, where Malcolm Reed and Val Williams spoke to the chief engineer, a middle-aged woman named Dashec. The sandy-haired Lorillian, distinguishable from human only by a vertical cleft between her brows and by the subtle nuances of body language and scent that an experienced space traveler like Reed had learned to pick up on, was weak but deeply relieved by the survival of most of her engine crew—particularly since the three included her “breeding partner,” as she called him, plus their adolescent daughter and a cousin of some sort. It seemed Lorillian freighter crews were much like the “Space Boomer” communities from which Therese Liao and Travis Mayweather hailed, living on low-warp ships crewed largely by families. Still, several of the dead had been family as well, and Dashec pleaded fiercely with Reed to hunt down the Klingons and deal with them once and for all. “I’m afraid this isn’t a warship,” he told her with as much sympathy as he could. “But we’ll do what we can for you.” It didn’t satisfy her. Liao gave her captain a hooded look and advised that the engineer needed rest.
Once they were out in the corridor, Williams made a fist and struck it against her palm. “Those Klingon bastards. We can still hunt them down, sir.”
“And do what? We’re outside our jurisdiction. This is Rigelian space.”
“Barely, sir. You know the Rigelians. They’re as happy to do business with pirates and slavers as their victims.”
“Still, they’re the closest thing to a rightful authority in this sector. We’ll gather what evidence we can, advise them to be on the lookout for the stolen duranium. If nothing else, maybe the Lorillian government will put pressure on them to act. They’re one of Rigel’s biggest trading partners.”
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