by David Mack
Bilok looked at Elazol. “Covert options?”
“Pointless,” Elazol said. “The Lacaam’i would just elect another of their own, probably Ilokar. He’d have us at war with the rest of the quadrant within an hour of his inauguration.”
Bilok let out a heavy sigh. He had hoped that this crisis might be handled internally, that there might be some means of averting a war without compromising Tezwa’s sovereignty. But as the inevitably brutal Klingon reprisal drew closer, he knew his only hope for saving his people was to enlist the Federation’s aid in deposing Kinchawn—even if it meant surrendering Tezwa indefinitely to foreign control.
He dreaded asking Koll Azernal for help. The irascible Zakdorn was certain to excoriate him for misjudging Kinchawn’s resolve. Had the Enterprise not escaped the prime minister’s ambush, Bilok wouldn’t dare ask the Federation for anything. If the Starfleet ship had been destroyed, he and many of his allies in the Assembly would, in all likelihood, be engaged in a desperate search for clandestine transport off-world. Of course, if Azernal refused his request for help, flight was an option he was still willing to consider.
The three ministers awaited his decision. “I’m going to explore one last option,” he said finally. “If it’s to succeed, all of our trinae allies need to stand ready for my order.”
“To do what?” Dasana asked in a nervous voice that implied she already knew the answer.
Bilok’s browfeathers furrowed as he suggested the unspeakable: “To take back the Assembly by force.”
Chapter 9
I.K.S. Taj
RIKER LED THE STARFLEET search-and-rescue team through the narrow passages of the crippled battle cruiser I.K.S. Taj. So far he’d seen five decks of tragically repetitive carnage and wreckage, including several compartments of dead Klingon ground troops. The lightless corridors were thick with smoke from plasma fires that had just been extinguished. The air was tinged with the stomach-turning odor of death. Through the soles of his boots he felt the squelched fires’ residual heat radiating from the deck. He stepped carefully over another charred corpse and aimed the beam from his palm beacon ahead of him.
The intersection in front of him was strewn with Klingon bodies. He stopped and scanned them with his tricorder, but, as he feared, there were no life signs. Stepping closer, he saw the damage the fire had wrought to their bodies, their hair gone, their flesh reduced to brittle paper-white husks. He noted the engineering equipment still clutched in their hands, and realized they had probably been working to repair the fire-suppression system when they had been killed.
He looked back and shielded his eyes from the glare of Lieutenant Jim Peart’s palm beacon. Peart was one of the few recent transfers to the Enterprise whose service record hadn’t been marred by bad reviews or questionable evaluations. In fact, the wiry-but-tough young officer had quickly earned the trust of Security Chief Vale. On her recommendation, Riker had promoted him to deputy chief of security.
“Peart, take a team down to engineering,” Riker said. “I’ll check out the bridge with Heaton and Davila.”
“Aye, sir,” Peart said, then turned on his heel and swept his light across the rest of the search party. “Kuchuk, Cruzen, continue searching this deck,” he said. “Tomoko, Goodnough, you’re with me.” The two fresh-faced female engineers followed Peart down the intersection toward the aft emergency hatch to the engine room.
Riker motioned to Heaton and Davila, who stayed close behind him, tricorders out and searching for survivors. Riker relied on his memory of the standard K’Vort-class cruiser interior layout as he worked his way toward the forward ladder. During his second year aboard the Enterprise, he’d participated briefly in the Klingon-Federation Officer Exchange Program. He had served as Captain Kargan’s executive officer on the K’Vort-class I.K.S. Pagh, an experience that taught him as much about the Klingons’ thinking as it did about their cuisine. One lesson he had vowed never to forget was that although gagh is eaten live, it is not swallowed live. The point is to kill the feisty worms between one’s teeth and savor their salty blood as a delicacy. To ingest live gagh is to intentionally give oneself an intestinal parasite—a fact he’d learned only a week after his return to the Enterprise, when Dr. Pulaski diagnosed his stomach cramps as an unexpected souvenir of his tour of duty on the Pagh. Only in hindsight did he realize that was the reason his Klingon shipmates had laughed as they’d watched him unwittingly make a fool of himself swallowing a bowl of the live worms.
He’d had few opportunities to visit Klingon vessels since then, but every time he stepped aboard one of their ships he could still taste the bitter skin of the gagh and remember his revulsion as the worms wriggled down his throat. Today was no different. Despite its scouring by fire, the interior of the cruiser was as pungent as Riker expected it to be.
He climbed the access ladder to the command deck. Heaton and Davila kept pace behind him. The sound of their boots on the metal ladder rungs reverberated off the unadorned duranium bulkheads. Riker pulled himself over the top, then helped Heaton by holding her tool kit while she got back to her feet. While waiting for Davila to join them, he tried opening the door. It was jammed.
“Give me a hand,” Riker said to Davila as the security guard cleared the ladder tube. Davila stepped over next to Riker and grabbed the right-side door. Riker wedged his fingers into the narrow crack between the doors and planted his foot to pull the left door open. “Pull,” he said. The door’s rough metal edges cut into Riker’s fingers as he strained against it. His triceps burned from the effort. After a few seconds of wondering whether he’d have to phaser the door open, he heard the scrape of metal on metal as the door slid open.
The bridge was a tomb. The pilot and the weapons officers were slumped over their consoles. A gray-haired warrior lay on the deck in front of the aft disruptor controls. The captain listed to the left in her chair, her arm dangling so low that her talonlike fingernails scraped the metal deck grating. Only one red bridge light, the one directly above her seat, was still lit. The rest of the bridge was illuminated by the overlapping beams from the search party’s palm lights.
Heaton gestured with her tricorder toward the Klingon captain. “She’s alive.” She rechecked her readings. “Barely.”
Riker walked over to the dying Klingon woman. As he stepped in front of her, he realized that he knew her. Her name was Vekma. Fourteen years ago, she had been a junior officer aboard the Pagh during his brief tour of duty; now she was a captain. He added her name to the growing list of his former shipmates who had preceded him to a captaincy. “Captain Vekma,” he said. “Can you hear me?”
She opened one eye. The capillaries around her pupil had hemorrhaged, turning the white of her eye blood-magenta. She struggled to focus. She coughed out half a mouthful of blood, which mingled with a column of saliva that dangled from her chin. After a moment he saw her look of recognition.
“Riker,” she said in a rasping voice. He nodded. “Captain Logaar?” she said, asking about her fleet commander’s fate.
He decided the less he said about the slain Klingon fleet captain, the better. He shook his head. “He didn’t make it.”
“Betrayed,” she said, then groaned with pain.
“Yes,” he said. “We don’t know why they fired.”
“Not them,” she said, struggling to force out the words. “Picard. Denied me…death in battle. Cheated me.”
Riker felt his face go hot with shame. It would have been easier to let her blame Picard, but he felt compelled to confess the truth. “It wasn’t Picard,” he said. “I towed your ship out of orbit.”
“PetaQ!” she cried, hurling the Klingon expletive at Riker like a d’k tahg. “Robbed me of Sto-Vo-Kor!” Her dangling hand shot up and clutched his throat. On the edge of his vision he saw Davila reach for his phaser. He waved the security officer back as Vekma tightened her grip. “Damn you,” she said. “A curse on your House!” She labored to draw one last lungful of air, then spit at him. He winced as the
spittle struck his face. Her final breath gurgled out of her, and she went limp. Her hand relaxed its grip and fell away from his throat. He massaged his bruised neck muscles and gasped for air.
His combadge chirped as he stood and sleeved the sputum from his face. “Peart to Riker,” the deputy chief of security said over the com. “All dead in engineering, sir.”
“Acknowledged. Riker out.” He looked around the bridge and felt ashamed. He of all people should have known better than to deprive a Klingon ship and crew of a glorious end in combat. But in the heightened stress of the moment, he’d exercised his Starfleet training, obeyed the carefully nurtured instinct to pull an allied ship out of danger. He knew that if the Klingon fleet learned that the Taj had been treated this way, it would bring dishonor not only to Vekma, but to all those members of her crew who had died in battle over Tezwa. But now the deed was done; the Taj had been rescued, and its disgrace was now all but ensured.
Riker resigned himself to living with the knowledge that he’d probably just forfeited the honor of hundreds of valiant Klingon warriors. He tapped his combadge. “Riker to Enterprise,” he said. “We’ve finished our sweep of the Taj.” The bitter news stuck in his throat: “No survivors.”
Chapter 10
U.S.S. Enterprise-E
THE PARADE OF WOUNDED had been nonstop since Troi had arrived in sickbay. Normally, her purview was the healing of emotional wounds and psychological trauma, not the mending of flesh. But in a dire crisis, she had enough emergency medical training to be called upon for help with triage.
She pressed her palm against a woman’s open abdominal wound. The Vulcan engineer’s copper-based green blood was warm and sticky. She had been impaled by a bulkhead fragment that had been turned into flying shrapnel by a ruptured electroplasma conduit. “I need some help here,” Troi said, raising her voice to be heard above the anguished groans of the wounded. Sighing, Dr. Tropp stepped over to Troi. He removed the jagged chunk of metal from the Vulcan’s torso, sprayed a temporary bandage over the gash, then abruptly left Troi to assess other patients, who waited, with varying degrees of equanimity, in the corridor.
Sickbay was packed from wall to wall. Every bed was filled with victims of the Tezwans’ surprise artillery attack and casualties of Riker’s rescue of her and the captain. There were cuts, burns, blunt-force traumas, broken bones. At times like this she was grateful for the rigorous training that Starfleet demanded of all its personnel, officers and enlisted crew alike. A less disciplined group of people might succumb to panic or paralyzing fear in such a crisis. Most of the Enterprise crew remained relatively calm; even the injured were, for the most part, able to control their emotional responses.
Sometimes, of course, there were exceptions. Part of Troi’s value to a triage team was her ability to ferret out emotionally disturbed patients before they endangered themselves or others. If not for the remarkable self-control of the majority of the patients, she wouldn’t have risked using her empathic senses so freely in a combat-triage center. Thankfully, she hadn’t had any reason to sedate or restrain any patients today.
She credited much of the crew’s stoicism to their having been tempered by bitter experience during the Dominion War. But seeing how matter-of-factly the crew responded to violence and injury worried her for different reasons. Had the crew become too jaded? In their effort to defend themselves from emotional trauma, had they suppressed their emotions to the point where they might lack empathy for the pain of others? Such pathologies might not be diagnosable until years after the war’s end, but Troi was certain they would manifest eventually.
The only member of the crew about whom she was genuinely worried was herself. From being marched at gunpoint out of the rage-poisoned Tezwan Assembly to standing on a blood-slicked floor crowded with burned and broken shipmates, the past few hours had inflicted a relentless emotional assault on her already troubled mind. She wanted to withdraw, even if for just a short while, to restore her equilibrium—but she knew that her quarters would offer little solace once Riker returned.
Though he could suppress the bitter turmoil that churned in his subconscious mind, she found his agony impossible to ignore. His anger and despair over the murder of his father haunted her even more acutely than it plagued him. Troi didn’t want to add guilt to her fiancé’s anguish by telling him that, to her, he was a living grief transmitter. So she kept her feelings hidden from the one person to whom she wished she could turn for comfort, in the hope that he could heal his heart soon enough to help her soothe her own.
The com chirped. “Picard to Dr. Crusher.”
The red-haired chief medical officer looked up from her medical tricorder. “Crusher here.”
“Commander Riker informs me there are no survivors aboard the Taj,” Picard said. “Do you have a casualty report yet?”
“We’ve confirmed three dead in engineering,” Crusher said. “We’re looking at more than a hundred fifty wounded. I’ll have a final list to Commander Riker within the hour.”
“Understood. Picard out.”
Crusher issued a list of medical instructions to a team of nurses and medical residents who followed close behind her, then stepped aside and placed a hand on Troi’s arm. “Are you all right?” she said. “You look a little shell-shocked.”
“I’m fine,” Troi lied.
“We have everything under control,” Crusher said. “Why don’t you go get some rest?” Troi started to protest, but her best friend gave her a gentle push toward the door. “Go, we’ll call if we need you.” Before she could say no, Troi found herself standing in the corridor.
She looked back into sickbay at the crowd of patients, the surgical-emergency cases and the walking wounded, and wished there were more she could do to help them. But as the door closed, she knew that her role in their recoveries would begin tomorrow, when it would fall to her to heal the wounds that lay beyond the reach of the scalpel and the hypospray.
Chapter 11
Earth
AZERNAL WAS OF THE OPINION that Martok always looked angry, even when he was in a good mood. Tonight, however, the Klingon chancellor was the epitome of rage. He had roused Azernal and President Zife in the wee hours of the Paris morning to verbally eviscerate them from across the light-years, on a secure subspace channel. Azernal reduced the volume on his monitor, which showed Martok and Zife on opposite sides. Martok was glowing with fury under the red-tinted lights in the High Council chamber on Qo’noS, while Zife’s blue face looked ghostly pale in the sterile glow of his own monitor.
“Six thousand warriors!” Martok said. “Murdered in cold blood! I supported your mission for peace. Now it’s your turn to stand with us—and help us take revenge!”
Azernal was still reviewing the details of the tragedy. Reports were only now being relayed from the Enterprise back to Starfleet Command, which was maintaining an open and secure data channel to the president’s office. He concluded, to his horror, that Bilok had seriously misjudged Prime Minister Kinchawn. The wily Zakdorn silently berated himself for not having trusted his first instincts; he had suspected from the outset that Kinchawn was dangerous, unstable, unreliable. Then he saw the casualty reports. Martok wasn’t exaggerating. Azernal’s jaw fell open as he saw that this one political misjudgment had metastasized into a fatal catastrophe for thousands of Klingon soldiers.
Zife, who sounded only semicoherent, spoke before Azernal could suggest any talking points with which to placate Martok. “Revenge isn’t really a policy the Federation supports,” Zife blathered. As Azernal expected, the offhand remark further incensed the Klingon ex-general.
“My soldiers died escorting your flagship, and I will avenge them, with or without you!” Martok’s tone changed from a roar to a growl. “And I’ll remember this the next time I’m asked to risk Klingon blood for the Federation.”
During Martok’s furious harangue, Azernal transmitted a private text message to Zife. The president glanced at the message, then looked back at Martok. “If
the Klingon Empire chooses to retaliate against Tezwa, the Federation cannot participate. The Eminiar Amendment of our charter prohibits us from engaging in the wholesale destruction of worlds, even during wartime.”
“I don’t want to destroy them,” Martok said. “I plan to conquer them! To plant my flag and make those yItaghpu’kneel before the Empire!”
Azernal was relieved that, for once, Zife had phrased a statement exactly as he had written it for him. By provoking Martok into a denial, he’d gained a clearer picture of the Klingons’ strategy. Unfortunately, Azernal realized Martok’s plan would be a tragedy for the Klingons.
If Martok insisted on invading Tezwa no matter the cost, the end result would be massive casualties and the loss of so many ships that the Klingon Empire would be left all but defenseless in the Archanis sector.
The Federation, itself stretched too far in the wake of the Dominion War, would be unable to prop up a Klingon Empire so gravely weakened. Equally serious, a crippled Klingon Empire would be an ineffectual ally against such aggressive potential foes as the Romulan Star Empire, the Tholian Assembly, a regrouped Dominion, or the Borg.
Azernal, for his own part, had another reason to view Martok’s response as the worst possible outcome. Had the Klingons chosen to vaporize Tezwa from space, Azernal would have genuinely lamented the appalling slaughter of innocents, but he also would have been relieved; such an assault would eradicate any evidence that the Federation had designed and manufactured the artillery that just butchered thousands of Klingon soldiers.
Instead, Martok had opted to launch a costly invasion and long-term occupation that would subjugate the planet under the trefoil aegis of the Klingon Empire—an outcome certain to expose the Federation’s role in causing the conflict.
The moment the Klingons learned that their ally the United Federation of Planets had recruited and cultivated this bloodthirsty juggernaut on their border, it wouldn’t matter that Zife and Azernal’s intentions had been good. Tezwa had been designed as a deadly trap, into which a desperate and retreating Starfleet could have led a Dominion attack fleet to its doom. But that wasn’t what the Klingons would see.
