Shadows of the Indignant

by Dave Galanter

  Curly huffed out a sharp breath and then used Kirk’s proximity against him to land a kidney punch. Kirk almost doubled over as pain exploded across his back and he let out a grunt, but he recovered quickly and angled away, giving himself a few meters of distance and a little time to catch his breath.

  Slowly Curly drew closer, jabbing out but intentionally not connecting. Finally he lunged forward and connected his left fist with Kirk’s brow, opening a cut that dribbled hot blood down his right cheek.

  Kirk dodged the next blow and threw his weight into a punch that landed squarely on Curly’s jaw. As expected, he didn’t collapse into a pile of jelly and instead dug his fist into Kirk’s face in return. He tried to do it again, but Kirk ducked and punched Curly in the neck which got him gagging and stepping back.

  Heaving in large gulps that Curly only wished he could take in, Kirk swung his leg wide and behind the larger man, bringing him to the hard steel deck with a thud.

  “Had enough?” Kirk asked, dabbing at the blood over his eye with the knuckle of his right thumb.

  Curly nodded and leaned against the wall but didn’t pull himself up. “You a Fed?” he rasped. “You don’t fight like a Fed—like you’d need a phaser to win.”

  “I’m not a Fed.” Kirk said.

  The man nodded. “Then you want to go see Fizzy.”

  “Who?” The adrenaline of the fight was beginning to wane and the pain from Kirk’s bruised knuckles, cut brow, and tender kidney was ebbing forward. “I thought your boss wasn’t going to help me.” He chuckled a bit, and tasted a little blood in his mouth. “For a minute I thought he wanted you to kill me.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to make any more credits,” Curly said, finally catching his breath, “but I do.”

  “Who’s Fizzy?”

  “My price first, and it depends on how often your shipments will be, and how big they are.” Using the wall to balance himself, Curly rose slowly. Kirk gave him his hand to help him up the rest of the way. “The more I have to work on making records change or disappear, the more it costs you, because the more I have to hide not just from the authorities, but from Mazari. And then there’s Fizzy.”

  “You’ll get ten percent of our net,” Kirk said.

  “Do I have to hit you again?”

  “What do you want?” Kirk asked, lips pursing in mock frustration.

  Without hesitation, Curly said, “Forty percent.”

  Kirk shook his head. “I’ll give you fifteen. That’s it.”

  After a moment of thought—probably not his strong suit—Curly partially agreed. “We’ll see. It might go up later.”

  “Who’s Fizzy?” Kirk asked again.

  Curly cleaned the dust off his back and pants. “Full name is something orFizda, or something. But we call her Fizzy because it’s easier. She’s Mestikan.”

  Kirk blinked. “A Payav? Here?”

  “A what? Yeah. Payav. That’s what they call themselves.” The man nodded to himself as if to remember that was significant. “She’s the station liaison to their Customs. One of their own.”

  Looking at Curly skeptically, Kirk took a gentle step toward the main gangway with him, feeling tender. “And you know for a fact that she’d help us.”

  “For the right price, she’d give you the tattoos off her back.”

  “And where do we find her?”

  “She’s here a few times a week, but just left and won’t be here again for another two days.”

  “She goes back and forth to Mestiko?”

  “God only knows why.”

  “There’s credits to be made there,” Kirk said, staying in character. “We’ll renegotiate depending on how much your friend Fizzy wants.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Kirk blew on the swelling knuckles of his right hand. “Yeah, we will.”

  As McCoy closed the wound over Kirk’s right brow, the admiral filled him in on the deal Mazari’s man had made.

  “You think that’s legitimate?” McCoy asked.

  Kirk shrugged and his brows moved up in a “who knows?” expression. “Greed is a universal concept.”

  “Name me a greedy Vulcan,” McCoy said, then added under his breath, “And stop moving your eyebrows.”

  “They have a greed for knowledge and peace,” Kirk offered.

  McCoy rolled his eyes. “That’s one way to define greed, I guess.” He took Kirk’s right hand and began to reduce the swelling and bruising with a device that would heal the underlying tissue at an accelerated rate. It would feel a little stiff for the next day or so, but there was no need to explain that to Kirk—he’d been the recipient of this particular treatment more than once. “So we wait for this Fizzy person to come back?” McCoy asked.

  “Yes. And in the meantime we go through the motions of setting up contacts and business here.”

  “Now I see,” McCoy said, closing up the med-kid and also indicating it with a gesture, “why you wanted me along.”

  Kirk raised his hands. “What were the chances someone wasn’t going to hit me at some point?”

  “Including me?”

  The admiral smiled. “What about ‘do no harm’?”

  “You worried I could take you in a fight?”

  Kirk chuckled. “Probably not.”

  “You know,” McCoy said, “the longer we stick around, the more likely it is someone will make us.”

  “Make us? Suddenly you’re from Sigma Iotia II?” Kirk flexed both hands, feeling McCoy’s handiwork, and then rubbed his jaw.

  “It seems to fit.”

  “Does, doesn’t it?” Kirk tapped the tip of his chin with a finger and mouthed the words “still stiff.”

  McCoy replied with a tap on the man’s shoulder and silently mouthed “live with it.” There was actually a medical reason to not do more to his jaw, but why bother telling Kirk that?

  “My point is, ‘Jim Temple’?” McCoy asked as he stowed the med-kit in one of the storage bins near the galley of their small ship. “Kirk meaning church, isn’t Temple just about too clever by half?”

  “I based yours on your father’s name.”

  “I noticed that,” McCoy said, and did have to admit that he liked that touch. He had been very close to his father, and Kirk knew that. “Jim, we wait for this Fizzy person, and then what?”

  Kirk pulled out his small hand phaser, checked its setting, then placed it back in the hip pocket of his dark brown pants. “Then we find out who we need to talk to on Mestiko who deals in illegal shipments.”

  “You don’t want to just arrest her or something?”

  The admiral shook his head. “I want the whole route. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Are you sure anything is going on? I mean, what shipping route doesn’t have some way to transport contraband?”

  Kirk seemed to think on that for a moment, perhaps weighing just what it was that were in those shipping irregularities. McCoy wondered as well. There was always something special about Mestiko for Kirk, McCoy knew. Something about some promise he made to Raya elMora for some damn fool thing that wasn’t even his responsibility.

  “I don’t know,” Kirk admitted, finally. “I need to run this to ground.”

  “You, personally?” McCoy shook his head and thrust himself down casually into one of the banquette seats near the small galley. “You sure this isn’t about you riding in on your white horse to save Mestiko for Raya elMora?”

  Kirk was now absently looking through the galley cupboards for God-knows-what. “It has nothing to do with Raya. It has to do with—”

  “Guilt for something that wasn’t your fault.”

  “Responsibility and guilt are two different emotions. A starship captain can feel one without feeling the other.”

  “He can also feel both,” McCoy offered. “But you aren’t a starship captain anymore.”

  “For someone who didn’t want me to take that promotion, you certainly delight in reminding me of it.” Finding some packets of mixed nu
ts, Kirk took one for himself and tossed one to McCoy. “I should think you’d be glad I’m out from behind that desk you hate so much.”

  McCoy opened the bag and fished around the various alien nuts for a good, old-fashioned peanut. “Not if it gets you killed, and me with you,” he said.

  “Just like old times.”

  “This,” McCoy said, indicating the ship around them, “isn’t a starship.”

  “She has some tricks up her sleeves, I promise.” Kirk poured a handful of the mixed nuts from the packet into his hand, brought the hand to his mouth and downed them all.

  McCoy’s lips pressed into a frown. “Well, with you picking up bruises and lacerations like they were daisies, she’ll need them.”

  Chapter Four

  The next thirty hours or so were relatively quiet. McCoy had kept to their small ship and Kirk was keeping himself busy chatting with the locals. He’d learned much about the activity of the station and the kinds of goods that saw port before moving on. Most of it was boring. He’d also made sure to drop some hints about what he was really after. He asked some questions that a few people seemed to feel uncomfortable about answering. He feigned apology at bothering them and moved on, but by now there were more people who were suspicious of him, and while McCoy might think that was a bad thing, Kirk knew it was not. One of the maintenance workers who fixed incoming vessels as needed, for instance, bristled at the suggestion that she might have seen wares that originated from the Klingons. A clerk in the inspections office had a similar reaction, and he was none too subtle about not wanting to speak to Kirk anymore. Part of that may have been because Kirk was a stranger to them, and was asking a lot of questions. But thinking that did him little good, so he preferred to think something else was happening.

  The hard part was that having sown the seeds of suspicion with these and a few others, there was little else to do but wait, and he hated waiting. In his job both on the Enterprise and now at Starfleet Command there was far too much waiting, for his tastes. At least on this mission there was a chance of some excitement, and there’d already been some. He’d not have admitted it to McCoy—and probably need not—but Kirk had enjoyed his tussle with Mazari’s lieutenant. He chuckled to himself, because he still didn’t know the man’s name and only thought of him as Curly.

  Kirk rubbed his still stiff jaw in remembrance of the event. It was by no means the first workout he’d had since giving up his captaincy, but it was the first real excitement in months. There was a big difference between hitting the bag at the gym and hitting a real person who hits back and isn’t pulling punches. Just as there was a large chasm between logging desk-hours and star-hours, not that any of this mission would be logged, but—there was just a difference. Rank was important and as an admiral he could do much more than a captain… and yet so much less.

  Having checked with Mestiko’s embassy to the Federation, Kirk learned that “Fizzy” was actually Humal elFizda, and was indeed the Payav’s customs officer for Indalo Station. She traveled frequently between Mestiko and the station, usually on the same transports that brought goods to Mestiko and then returned for resupply. Kirk knew one of two things was true: either elFizda knew about any shipping irregularities and was ignoring them, or someone was going to great trouble to make sure she didn’t know about them. And it would take some great trouble. The Indalo Station dockmaster and people like Mazari might very well overlook this or that, or look the other way easily for a little graft. But elFizda’s sole purpose was to make sure things that Kirk believed were happening wouldn’t happen. And they were. He was sure they were.

  When it came time for elFizda’s arrival, Kirk wanted to nonchalantly be at that particular part of the station. A hairless, tattooed, quad-thumbed Payav would be hard to miss anywhere, but he was curious to size her up, maybe even find a moment to bump into her and meet her. He wasn’t sure exactly, but he couldn’t just sit and wait any longer in any case.

  As soon as Kirk and McCoy had made their way out of their own docking area and into the main gangway that connected the other docks and also held various eateries and other shops, Kirk saw Curly standing with two other men. Curly nodded toward Kirk, said something to his cohorts, and all three walked straight for them.

  “Yellow alert,” Kirk said to McCoy under his breath.

  McCoy looked around for a moment and then found Curly and the others when they were almost upon him. “How about we abandon ship?”

  “Steady, Bones.”

  “Temple,” Curly called when they were but a few meters apart. “Let’s talk.”

  “Talk,” Kirk said. “I’m listening.”

  Curly smirked the smirk that comes with superior numbers. “I thought it over,” he said, “and I’ve decided it’s time your business is finished here.”

  “You don’t like our deal?” Kirk asked, keeping his hands in plain sight but unable to keep them from becoming tight fists he was sure to keep to his sides.

  “I don’t like you. You ask too many questions, and Mazari was right—you reek of authority. And around here, authority is bad.”

  “You an authority on that?” Kirk asked snidely, and it wouldn’t have taken much to get him to hit Curly again, but the busy gangway of the station wasn’t the place—station security was close by—and it also wouldn’t have done much other than satisfy Kirk’s personal gratification.

  There began a short staring match where Kirk and Curly and his two muscular friends all sized one another up. And Kirk could tell it was making McCoy palpably nervous.

  “It’s a shame we couldn’t do business,” Kirk said, finally. “Someone will take me up on the offer, however.” He moved to the left, not pushing his way past Curly, exactly, but pivoting in another direction.

  Curly’s arm came up and blocked Kirk’s way. “Yeah? Well Fizzy’s not comin’ around here anymore, so you don’t have business with her, either.” McCoy backed up a bit, anticipating the worst, and Kirk looked down at the other man’s arm that was pressed against his chest.

  “You’re in my way, mister,” Kirk said, and realized that if anything was giving away his more military tone it would be in his anger.

  Curly smiled, and it had about as much warmth as the dark side of Mercury. “See, I didn’t say our business was finished here, Mr. Temple, I said yours was.”

  Kirk looked from Curly’s arm to his face and to the other two men who flanked him. One was large enough to be directly related to Phobos, and the other was smaller, thinner, but looked just as mean. Again, Kirk had to remind himself that this was all he wanted—to have his suspicions confirmed that there was something about Mestiko’s shipping concerns that people didn’t want asked about.

  “So you did,” Kirk said, managing a weak smile. “Come on, Doc. Looks like we’ve overstayed our welcome.”

  “I noticed,” McCoy replied, and it was obvious to Kirk that he was doing his best to cover the nerves in his tone.

  “Gentlemen,” Kirk said, as he turned on his heel and began in the direction of their ship. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  Kirk didn’t look back as they walked, but McCoy obviously had because when they were about halfway toward their docking port he whispered to Kirk that the three men were following.

  “Makes sense,” Kirk whispered back.

  “Why?”

  “Because they didn’t want to kill us with a lot of witnesses and scanners recording it.”

  “Oh,” McCoy said. “Wouldn’t this be a good time to have a plan?”

  “Working on it,” Kirk said. “Give me a minute.”

  Something happened overnight to change Curly’s opinion of his business relationship with Kirk. It may have been that Kirk was asking questions that made people suspicious, but that would lead Curly to want to cut the deal, not Kirk’s throat, unless there was a lot more at stake.

  McCoy glanced back, and now it was evident even to Kirk that the three were following closely. Without the din of people from the main gangway, three extra
footfalls traveled easily up the corridor.

  “You know, they might think I’m easier to kill and take me first, right?”

  “That’s how I’d do it,” Kirk deadpanned. “Just in case,” he added with a whisper, “get your phaser ready. If we can avoid using them, I’d like to.”

  McCoy nodded and using a slow but steady movement reached into his pocket for his small phaser, which he palmed. “I’m assuming this means you have a plan.”

  “Yes,” Kirk said. “Be ready.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “On my mark… run as fast as you can to our ship, and get it warmed up and ready to depart.”

  “Wait,” McCoy said. “You plan is for me to run? While you do what?”

  “I’m going to distract them,” Kirk said and tapped McCoy on the arm as he turned to face Curly. “Now go. That’s an order.”

  McCoy ran forward as Kirk stopped and waited for Curly to pull closer. The hallway was just big enough for his two thugs-in-arms to spread out and encircle Kirk so that he couldn’t make the mad dash McCoy had made. So far, so good.

  “You game for a rematch?” Kirk asked Curly. “Or do you really feel you need this help? Maybe alone you’re not man enough to fight me.”

  Curly almost snarled, but didn’t take the bait. “I don’t need to prove anything to you. But I will enjoy watching them tear you apart.” He nodded to the thinner one who was now behind Kirk and to his right. Kirk turned a bit to keep Skinny in his periphery and saw a glint of steel drop into his palm from up his sleeve. A hidden knife was impossible to detect—in use—and a phaser would be instantly detected. That was why Kirk himself was hesitant to use his own. Unless, of course, it came down to using one or losing his life.

  Skinny had a knife in his hand, Curly said he was content to sit this one out—and Kirk doubted that—and big old Phobos was likely to use his mass to crush Kirk to death. Somewhere in the back of his mind he heard McCoy saying, “This is your asinine plan?”

  Kirk quickly shrugged out of his jacket and dangled the center of it between himself and Skinny. The coat was leather and could somewhat deflect a dagger blade, but that wasn’t the purpose. When Skinny lunged forward Kirk wrapped the man’s entire hand, knife and all, within the bulk of the jacket. He pulled Skinny down, to his knee, kicking him hard in the face—hard enough that Skinny was down for the count.