Hell's Heart

by John Jackson Miller

  Potok had objected vehemently to the charges; he and the loyalists had simply sought to impose order on the transition as the House of Kruge worked out its succession. But nobles who knew no honor could see none in Potok protecting Kruge’s assets. Instead, they accused Potok of being in the pay of the Romulans or the Federation, or both.

  During the broadcasts, Potok and his confederates had neither mentioned Korgh nor the Phantom Wing. Korgh understood why. The general was honorable. He and his associates would never give up an ally to save themselves, much less hand the squadron to the nobles. Gamaral had been characterized as no more than a random faraway world chosen for a final stand. In the end, no argument could win a game that was rigged. Potok, his colleagues, and their families had received a fate worse than death:

  Discommendation.

  The general and three hundred surviving followers and relatives were stripped of title, rank, and name. Korgh had never heard of such a mass discommendation before—or a sentencing on such unproven charges. It was intolerably unjust. And yet, Potok had accepted the ruling. Banished, unable to call themselves Klingons, Potok and his companions had left Qo’noS in shame.

  On Gamaral, Korgh felt shame too. The Klingons had not collectively turned their backs on him, but as the only sentient in a star system, he had a unique perspective on abandonment. After hearing of Potok’s fate, there had followed a week during which Korgh drank every drop of bloodwine the engineers had hidden in the factory. It seemed the thing to do. There was no sense hoping Potok’s people would return to Gamaral to find him: they were out of the game. Out of everything.

  No one would ever come. And now, as the night breeze blew, Korgh contemplated the dagger and whether he deserved to use it. He had wanted to fight valiantly; he truly had. He had done what Kruge asked of him. He had rebelled in an attempt to claim his rightful legacy. Instead, the only reward was in his hand, sharp and glinting in the light from the moon.

  He thought about what lay beyond. Sto-Vo-Kor, the eternal home for heroes, would not take him; there was no doubt about that. It was all he could hope that Gre’thor, the final destination for the dishonored, would reject him as well. Was there some other place?

  I waste time, Korgh thought, turning the dagger’s point toward his chest. Let it be—

  Through the trees came a low whine, followed by a rustling sound. Korgh tensed. There were no stalking creatures on Gamaral, he knew; it had to be something else. Then came another whine, off to the right of the first one. He saw the lights this time, the effect of a transporter beam. He heard voices speaking Klingon.

  It couldn’t be Potok’s people—and no other Klingons had any reason to come here. It could only be the nobles or their hired guns. Someone, somewhere, had revealed Korgh’s involvement in the uprising to the family. They had stolen his legacy, and now they had come to root him out.

  His anger rose. Korgh turned the dagger around in his hand to point outward. The new arrivals would find that Gamaral had at least one predator.

  Nineteen

  Korgh crept from boulder to tree. He had worked his way higher on the mountainside, heading for a point above where the trespassers had gathered. There were half a dozen or more, all Klingons, clustered outside the alcove that allowed access to Mount Qel’pec. They held portable lights, but all were directed at the opening. He edged closer to where the ground bulged, just over the cavern entrance.

  He yelled as he leaped, announcing his presence as a warrior should. His boots struck the face of the intruder in the rear of the pack, and both tumbled off the trail and into the darkness. His victim’s body cushioning his fall, Korgh recovered quickly and buried his dagger in the trespasser’s neck. Shouts came from above, and lights flashed in his direction. It was a fatal mistake for those who held them, as Korgh drew his disruptor and fired at those illuminating him.

  Three dead. Korgh ran, scaling the meters back up to the landing outside the cavern. His opponents dashed for the cover the cave entrance offered. Shots were fired wildly from within. Korgh sought refuge to the right of the aperture. He had the fiends trapped. He knew they would not be able to get past the bio-scanner and gain entrance to the facility. But neither could he make a frontal assault. He longed for a grenade to root the interlopers out.

  Finally, the disruptor blasts from within stopped. A female Klingon voice called out. “Who are you? This place belongs to Commander Kruge!”

  “I know that,” Korgh shouted. “Which of Kruge’s idiot cousins do you serve? J’borr? Kiv’ota?”

  “We serve Kruge!”

  “Kruge is dead.”

  “Common knowledge! This place remains his. It is no place for the likes of—” The female voice stopped. Korgh’s brow furrowed. There was chatter within the cavern—heated discussion.

  Then, after a moment, the woman inside spoke again in a calmer voice. “Korgh?”

  There was no sense in hiding who he was. “I am Korgh, son of Torav. I run this facility for Kruge.” He straightened, feeling pride return for the first time in weeks. “I am his heir!”

  “I serve Kruge as well,” the woman said. “I am Odrok!”

  Odrok? Korgh’s mind flashed back on the face of someone he had met twice before. She had been Kruge’s top engineer before the Twenty were recruited; he hadn’t seen her in years.

  She appeared now, carefully stepping from the cave, backlit by one of the portable lights. “It is you,” she said as her eyes adjusted. The thirtyish Klingon woman reminded Korgh of his late mother: a face frozen in a permanent scowl. She had his mother’s nasal voice too. “We thought you were a scavenger, here to loot.” Companions cautiously joined her from behind, gawking at where the light bearers had been disintegrated. “But what have you done, Korgh?” Odrok said. “These are the Twenty!”

  “Not so many now,” Korgh said, indifferent. Knowing their identities only confirmed that they deserved death. The cha’maH had abandoned their posts—or worse. “What have you done, Odrok?” He lunged forward and grabbed at her arm. “Where are my birds-of-prey?”

  “I was doing as Kruge commanded—”

  “Kruge is dead—and he gave command of this facility to me, not you.” He pointed his disruptor in Odrok’s face. “How do you even know about it? You haven’t even been around. You are a traitor!”

  “I am loyal, Korgh!” Odrok spoke passionately. “I have been away on another assignment for Kruge—looking in on the works of another house’s engineers.”

  “You, a spy?”

  “An obedient follower, committed to her house’s lord.”

  Korgh lowered his weapon slightly. Yes, he could see Kruge employing industrial espionage; the commander worried about the other houses. And Odrok, connected to the House of Kruge only by a cousin’s marriage, would have been a good choice for the mission. But he could not understand why she was here. His eyes narrowed. “Kruge told you about this place, yes?”

  She nodded. “That, and more.”

  “Do you know where my starships are?”

  “Your—?” Odrok, apparently thinking better of questioning him, stopped before finishing her sentence. “I can take you to them. But we have to do something first, and quickly. It’s why we came back.” She looked at his disruptor and up at him plaintively. “It would go much faster with your cooperation.”

  “It is you who will cooperate with me—if I do not kill you after I hear your story. Start talking, and I will decide.”

  PHANTOM WING VESSEL CHU’CHARQ

  ORBITING AESIS

  “Odrok! This is Kruge. You will go to Mount Qel’pec on Gamaral and convey what is there to Aesis. Maintain absolute secrecy . . .”

  Korgh had no doubt that the months-old message Odrok had played for him was from Kruge. It felt good to hear his mentor’s voice again, but the feeling was doubly tinged with regret. Over Kruge’s passing—but also over how similar Odrok’s me
ssage was to the one he had received.

  It was clear. Korgh was not the only person Kruge had given secret directives to. Rationally, that made sense; running a large and important house required the aid of many, and Kruge liked to limit what his various minions knew. But Korgh hadn’t thought of himself as just another minion.

  It felt like getting slighted from beyond the grave.

  One thing was for sure: standing now on the bridge of Chu’charq, one of the Phantom Wing vessels, he had no doubt that Odrok had followed the commander’s orders precisely. Aesis, the star outside, was a blotchy mess of a blue dwarf, throwing off smears of plasma around its midsection. Eleven other birds-of-prey, all ships of the Phantom Wing, orbited within the halo of particles. The vessels were barely detectible by Korgh’s naked eye as he looked out the port; even uncloaked as the starships now were, no one could have found them unless they knew where to look.

  Gamaral, on the other side of the Empire from Aesis, was a quiet place for construction—but it was remote, and had always been a little too near territory the Federation was colonizing for Kruge’s tastes. The commander, who had never intended for the completed vessels to remain there, had ordered Odrok to go to Gamaral and relocate whatever starships were finished. Korgh thought back to months earlier, when he had left Mount Qel’pec to tell Kruge the squadron was completed. Had he waited even a week, he would have been present when Odrok first arrived. He would have gladly helped her. Or, rather, he would have supervised.

  In fact, Odrok had used an emergency procedure that Korgh had earlier developed with his engineers: a method for moving a dozen birds-of-prey with only twenty people. Skeleton crews of five each had moved four ships at a time to Aesis, parking three in orbit with all officers returning to Gamaral aboard the fourth. After four trips under silent running, the entire Phantom Wing was relocated. And then, following Kruge’s orders, Odrok’s people had waited at Aesis.

  And waited, and waited. When Odrok and the Twenty finally learned of Kruge’s demise, they had struggled with what to do. They had learned of General Potok’s movement only after it was far too late to do anything. The Twenty’s loyalty did lean toward Kruge’s military allies, but without leadership they weren’t about to go flying off to support anyone.

  Odrok had won the day with her demand that Kruge’s orders be honored, even in death. Their lord had decreed that no one in his or any competing family should learn about the Phantom Wing. That meant returning to Mount Qel’pec to destroy the facility. That task had brought Odrok and Chu’charq to Gamaral a final time. Kruge had given Odrok a bypass code to enter the mountain, but only Korgh could command the computer to trigger the explosive charges that would bring the ceiling down. Korgh did so, delighted to leave the mountain forever. He then left with the engineers for Aesis on Chu’charq, with Odrok wisely yielding Korgh command.

  Chu’charq, like all the ships of the Phantom Wing squadron, had been named for a kind of predatory beast. Korgh had thought that at least one should be named in honor of Kruge himself, given his mentor’s record of conquests, but there would be time to think about that later. He had plenty to consider now that he had people to command again. It had relieved Korgh that he had finally found someone who answered to him.

  “Why,” he asked as he sat in the command chair, “did Kruge not contact me to move the birds-of-prey?”

  Odrok looked over at him from the engineer’s station. “You said yourself, sir, that you were already warping away from Gamaral to see him. And I believe he wanted me involved regardless.”

  “You say he gave you no information about why he wanted you to move the squadron here?”

  “You have heard the recording. All Kruge said was that we would be making modifications to the Phantom Wing vessels.”

  Korgh scratched his beard. It was short again, since his hermit days on Gamaral had ended. “This location is nearer the Mutara Nebula. Could he have wanted to use the ships to test the Genesis torpedo?”

  “I don’t know. He did not say.”

  “Think! Could it be anything else?”

  “Yes. I had just sent him a report on technologies I had discovered during my . . . my reconnaissance of other houses. Some are quite surprising—and several would have been of use aboard birds-of-prey.”

  Korgh raised an eyebrow. “I want to see that report.”

  Odrok nodded. “I disposed of it as he ordered, but my initial notes remain. We can recompile it and transfer it to your station’s data system.”

  “Good.” He looked about and saw that Odrok’s companions were following her example, treating Korgh as in charge. The cha’maH were outside familial politics; they still honored Kruge’s wishes, and that meant continuing to mind Korgh. It probably helped that he had killed a few of them back on Gamaral.

  While the engineers worked on getting his report, Korgh sat back in the command chair and again regarded the star Aesis and the ships orbiting it. It all made sense to Korgh at last. Mount Qel’pec had spoken to Kruge’s desire for security; it was a home for the Twenty, but it had also been their place of quarantine, preventing any leaks.

  But Kruge was always thinking about the next technological step—and that required mobility. As backward as humans were, even their ancients had the military concept of the flying camp: a unit behind friendly lines that went wherever it was needed. Korgh believed that was what Kruge intended the Phantom Wing to be: mobile design and testing labs that Kruge could park anywhere on short notice. Mount Qel’pec was a hard target, vulnerable to infiltration or destruction. But by placing the Twenty—and all his future geniuses—aboard the Phantom Wing, Kruge had devised the perfect secret laboratory. And because there were twelve different ships, it would have been possible to segregate and shuffle personnel from ship to ship so that no one person knew too much.

  Except, Korgh thought, for whomever Kruge would have appointed to command the flotilla. That would have been me, Korgh told himself—and he had reason to believe that. Hadn’t Kruge put him in charge of Mount Qel’pec? Would Kruge have really trusted Odrok, who was no warrior, with the task? It was laughable.

  At the same time, Korgh realized, he rarely knew Kruge’s mind. He hadn’t known of Genesis, of Odrok’s orders, or of any plans for the Phantom Wing’s future. Korgh had only learned Kruge had a lover, Valkris, after accidentally overhearing a conversation; even then, the commander’s tone betrayed no affection.

  His mentor strove to be the perfect Klingon warrior, armored against all weakness; Korgh saw Kruge’s reticence as strength. Korgh would carry himself the same way now. He was Kruge’s heir, public profession of adoption or not; he led the true House of Kruge.

  But he only had the rump remains. His few engineers were neither trained nor enough to take one ship of the Phantom Wing into battle. He needed real crews, experienced in battle, if he wished to achieve his aims. Korgh had already figured out a solution for that.

  He could hardly wait to get started. “Hurry with that report, Odrok. We have an army to find.”

  Twenty

  U.S.S. ENTERPRISE-A

  OUTSIDE THE BRIAR PATCH

  Advancing knowledge, Spock knew, required going places that logical beings might otherwise avoid. Bacteria that caused illnesses certainly thrived in sewers, but a few that cured diseases had been found there, too. Benevolent and intelligent species had been discovered on planets with the most poisonous atmospheres. Such things would go forever unnoticed by the squeamish or fearful. A truly enlightened researcher took the necessary physical precautions and put personal preferences aside.

  Then there was Leonard McCoy, Enterprise’s chief medical officer, who had just stepped out of the turbolift near Spock’s science station. Laying eyes on the bloody blotch of a nebula filling the main viewscreen, he declared, “Ugh! I’ve seen prettier wounds.”

  Seated, Spock looked coolly up at McCoy. The Vulcan thought to remark about how
McCoy’s decades of surgical experience should have inoculated him against squeamishness, but instead he took a different tack. “The nebula is not here for your aesthetic enjoyment, Doctor. It simply is.”

  “And it is ugly.” McCoy walked onto the bridge, his wince never going away as he looked at the imagery from outside. “It looks like it came out of the egg backwards.”

  Spock experienced it entirely differently. Red and orange gases fought for dominance, nearly smothering the glow from the infant stars within. But he knew—from inference, and from Enterprise’s sensors—what those gases were composed of and why they refracted the light in the peculiar way they did. Certainly, conditions within the nebula were inhospitable—but to the trained mind, that made it all the more likely to contain undiscovered secrets.

  “It is called the Briar Patch,” Spock said. “Named by Arik Soong. The Klingons call it Klach D’Kel Brakt. Kor fought a battle here with the Romulans over a decade ago.”

  “I can’t imagine either side wanted it,” McCoy said. The other set of turbolift doors opened, and the doctor turned to see James T. Kirk striding onto the bridge. McCoy gestured to the main viewscreen. “Look what you’ve brought us to.”

  Kirk glanced at it for only a second. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Status, Mister Sulu.”

  “Holding outside the nebular boundary,” Hikaru Sulu said from the helm position, eyes fixed forward. “To the extent there is one.”

  “You don’t intend to go in there?” McCoy asked the captain.

  “Why not? Other people have.” Kirk rounded his chair and sat down. “But this is still a new ship. I’d hate to ruin the paint job.”

  This Enterprise was still new, just awarded Kirk and crew weeks earlier following their successful rescue of Earth from an alien probe that had wanted, of all things, to talk to whales. It could no longer really be called a shakedown cruise, given the several adventures that had already transpired. One of them had brought them to this region, right on the border of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants on the outskirts of Federation space—where Starfleet had asked Enterprise to deploy probes to gather information that would assist navigation.