I.K.S. Gorkon Book Three

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  “To Twelfth Company. And you know what they all have in common? They were all transfers from the Kreltek. Something’s going on here, and I do not like it.”

  Shaking her head, Wol said, “It’s probably just some foolishness from on high, as usual. I long ago learned not to try to decipher the motivations of officers.”

  Gozak conceded the point. “Perhaps. But I still do not like it.”

  The final three leaders came in then. One of them, Ch’drak of the sixteenth, took the empty seat to Wol’s left. Ch’drak had made his disdain for Wol clear at San-Tarah, and now he gave Wol a sneer, as if to say that she did not belong in this meeting.

  Wol was not entirely sure that Ch’drak would be wrong in that assessment.

  With everyone present, Toq moved to the viewscreen inset into the wall. When he activated it, Wol saw a schematic of a series of spherical structures. Half-spherical, really, she mused, unless there is a portion of them underground that completes the circle. At present, it looked as if someone had sunk several ball bearings halfway into the ground.

  Toq said, “You will all be joining a battle group under my command to the Elabrej homeworld, which we are orbiting under cloak. So far, we have gone undetected by the Elabrej military forces, most of which are amassed outside the system, and are about to be engaged by a fleet of Defense Force vessels.”

  Klaris then said, “You are probably all wondering why we are not joining that battle.”

  Gozak muttered only loud enough for Wol to hear: “Because this ship only fights other Klingons.”

  Wol noted Gozak’s words.

  “It is because we have a mission that is of equal import,” Klaris said. “Eight Klingons, crew of the I.K.S. Kravokh, have been captured and not allowed to die. We will rescue them from the ignominy of imprisonment. They are being held in this complex, which is located on the Elabrej homeworld. Unfortunately, we do not know where.” Klaris said this last with an under-tone of irritation and a look at Toq.

  The first officer seemed unconcerned. “The structure is proof against our sensors. Since it appears to be the center of the Elabrej government, this is not surprising. However, we have another method of locating the prisoners.” With those words, he looked at Trant.

  Stepping forward, the bekk said, “I am not what I appear to be. I serve Imperial Intelligence, as does one of the prisoners on the planet.”

  Wol felt bile rise bitterly in her throat. “What?”

  Klaris was apparently as shocked as everyone else—only Lokor and Toq seemed unsurprised by this revelation—as he cried, “That is why this petaQ is here?”

  “Mind your tone, QaS DevwI’,” Trant said.

  Lokor, who had been standing leaning against the bulkhead with his arms folded, now unfolded his arms and stepped between Klaris and Trant. “Mind yours, Bekk. Your allegiance to I.I. notwithstanding, you are a soldier on this ship, and you will comport yourself appropriately or you will be put to death.”

  Trant bared his teeth. “That would be unwise, Lieutenant.”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  Wol’s fists were clenched with rage. She wanted Lokor to make good on his threat, as she wanted very much for Trant to die a painful death—and she had no doubt that Lokor would suffer no negative consequences.

  Toq snapped, “Both of you, stand down! There are Klingons being held prisoner on that planet, and we will do whatever is necessary to liberate them—I will not have the mission compromised! Am I clear?”

  “Perfectly.” Lokor again leaned against the bulkhead, his arms folded.

  “Thank you for leashing your targ, Commander,” Trant said with a sneer. “Now—”

  Now it was Toq who put himself in front of Trant. “I was speaking about both of you, Bekk.”

  “I am not a bekk, boy, I am an agent—”

  Toq raised his arm as if to strike, but held back. Wol thought that wise; I.I. agents were exempt from challenges.

  “An agent of I.I. you may be,” Toq said, “but until we are told otherwise by the High Council—who have already denied your petition to take command of this ship—you are still crew, as Lokor said. You will behave as such.” He finally lowered his arm. “Speak to me with disrespect again, and your life will be forfeit.”

  Wol grinned at that. Typical of I.I. to try to take command away from those who have actually earned it.

  Toq turned his back on Trant. “It was because of Trant that we even know that Klingons were taken prisoner, and it was he who confirmed the Kravokh’s destruction. It is unlikely that we will be able to take the building, as scans reveal dozens of security measures, as well as several platoons of armed guards.”

  Trant added, “I can lead a detail to the prisoners’ location after we beam down.”

  Klaris spoke up. “Why not now?”

  “Excuse me?” Trant asked.

  “Why not tell us where they are now?”

  “The homing beacon has a limited range. It is only effective at a qelI’qam or so.”

  Wol then asked, “Why can’t we take the government complex?”

  Lokor said, “The losses we would suffer would be too great for the minimal gain. We do not even know that the governmental body is in this location. They might well have been removed to a safer locale.”

  “However,” Toq said, “the eighteenth through thirtieth can keep the forces guarding the complex busy long enough for the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth to penetrate the complex and liberate the prisoners. When you have completed that task, you must return to the beam-down point so the Gorkon can transport you out. The complex is made of an unknown alloy—we cannot be sure that the transporter will penetrate it. We have, however, detected an area in between two of the spheres that make up the complex where a beam containing a dozen patterns can go without risk.”

  Trant added, “These creatures do not have transporter technology. Indeed, they barely have accomplished faster-than-light travel. They have powerful ship-based weapons, but no defensive measures worth mentioning.”

  “Aside,” Klaris said snidely, “from this unknown alloy that we cannot transport through.”

  Ignoring the QaS DevwI’s words, Trant said, “They will be easy targets.”

  Wol didn’t like the sound of this. “Sir, I assume that the fifteenth was included in this mission because Trant is part of the squad?”

  Lokor nodded. “Among other reasons, Leader.”

  “Then I must ask—who will be leading the team who rescues the prisoners?”

  Trant said, “I will” at the same time that Lokor said, “You, Leader Wol.”

  That angered Trant, who stepped to the wardroom table and slammed a fist onto it. “This is my mission, Lieutenant! I will not—”

  Lokor unfolded his arms. He stared at Trant with his pitiless brown eyes. Anyone else, Wol mused, would have unsheathed his d’k tahg. Lokor, however, did not need to.

  Trant said nothing.

  Toq spent the next several minutes going over the specific battle plan, which Wol paid only partial attention to. The information was also being downloaded to padds that they would bring with them. Her attention was focused on Trant, who stood fuming, and Wol realized something. I do not wish to go into battle with him.

  However, what Toq and Lokor had said to Trant applied to her as well: She was crew, and would do as she was told.

  When Toq was through with the briefing, he had one last thing to say. “The truth of Trant’s status must remain a secret. Only the people in this room and Captain Klag are aware of it, and it must remain that way.”

  “No.” Wol was surprised at the sound of her own voice. What are you doing? she asked herself, but after a second she realized that this had to be the way.

  In a deep, dangerous voice, Toq asked, “What did you say, Leader?”

  “I said no, sir. I will not go into battle with a wam serpent in my midst. The soldiers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth—” She looked quickly at Ch’drak to her left and
then across the table at Zabyk, the leader of the seventeenth. “—cannot be asked to fight alongside an I.I. agent without their knowledge.”

  “The decision has been made, Leader,” Toq said in a tone that made it clear that further discussion would result in her death.

  Wol, however, did not care. She would rather die than lie to her people for this bloodworm’s sake. “Good soldiers died to uphold Captain Klag’s honor at San-Tarah. General Talak cast aside the captain’s good word for the sake of expediency. Is the honor of the troops less worthy of defense? Are you now to become that which we all fought so hard against?”

  The room grew silent. Wol felt all eyes on her, but her own gaze was locked with Toq’s. His job as first officer was to stand for the crew, and if he did not do so now, then Wol would do everything in her power to make the crew aware of it before they killed her.

  However, she did not expect that to happen. She had served on this vessel long enough to have taken the measure of its command crew.

  “Leader Wol is correct,” Toq finally said. “Those who must go into battle with Trant may be informed—but only them, and only after the mission has commenced. Is that clear, Leader?”

  “Perfectly.” Wol was not concerned. The moment she, Ch’drak, and Zabyk told their troops, word would get around the ship quickly enough.

  And that was all that mattered. While everything Wol said was true, the honor of the fifteenth and the rest of the troops on the Gorkon was only part of her motivation for pushing Toq the way she did—the biggest part, certainly, but still only part.

  Trant betrayed her, and betrayed the fifteenth. Officers may have had to kowtow to the whims of creatures such as Trant, but the troops had no such compunction. Once word got out of Trant’s true identity, Wol had every faith that, should the I.I. agent survive the mission to liberate the prisoners, he would still be dead within a day.

  When the meeting adjourned, the leaders were instructed to gather their squads. As they departed the wardroom, Ch’drak walked alongside Wol. “Well argued, Leader. You have served us all well.”

  Before Wol had a chance to react to this unexpected praise, Ch’drak walked ahead. She allowed herself a smile. Ch’drak was the leader of the top-ranking squad in Second Company, and had the mission been limited to that company, he would have been leading the rescue instead of her. Obviously, defending the troops’ honor earned back some respect. Good. I would prefer to have more allies on this ship, especially given what Kagak told us.

  Chapter Six

  G’joth’s reaction to the revelation that Trant was an I.I. agent was predictable: He unsheathed his d’k tahg and asked Wol, “Is there any good reason why I should not kill this lying petaQ right now?”

  “Several, actually,” Wol said. “We need him to complete our mission.”

  They stood in transporter room twenty-three. Fifteenth Squad was assembled there, awaiting orders from the bridge. Right now, they were in a holding pattern until the Gorkon could safely decloak for the three seconds needed to beam eighty-three warriors to the surface. Commander Toq, Ensign Kallo, QaS DevwI’ Klaris, and Sixteenth through Thirtieth Squads were in fifteen of the other thirty-four six-person transporter rooms on the Gorkon. Wol revealed Trant’s true colors here, since silence would be of critical import for their part of the mission.

  “I’m not convinced that’s a good enough reason.”

  “Captain Wirrk and the other prisoners must be free,” Kagak said. “Even if it means working with this lying toDSaH.”

  “Perhaps.” G’joth put his blade away. “But there will be a reckoning, Trant.”

  “There is something I do not understand,” Goran said.

  Wol thought, perhaps unfairly, that that was true of many things. Goran was as good a warrior as anyone could ask for, but thinking was not his strong suit. “What is that, Goran?”

  “I thought that Maris was the I.I. agent.”

  Blinking, Wol turned to Trant. She had forgotten that Maris died under suspicion of being with I.I.—in fact, he had used an I.I. transmitter to betray the Gorkon to General Talak’s troops at San-Tarah.

  Trant merely stood placidly. “Maris is not your concern.”

  “Maris died under my command,” Wol snapped. “That makes his death my very specific concern, Trant.” She stared at Trant. Unlike most people at her station, Wol knew something about how Imperial Intelligence worked, from her days as the highborn daughter of a noble House, before Eral, daughter of B’E-takk, was forced to become the Houseless commoner Wol. One of the things she knew was that undercover agents always worked alone. “Maris wasn’t I.I., was he? I.I. would never be so clumsy—nor would they work against Captain Klag. The Order of the Bat’leth’s return to its original mandate came directly from Martok—I.I. would support that.”

  “You know much about how we work, Leader.” Trant bared his teeth. “One would almost think you were the scion of a noble House—or, rather, a formerly noble House.”

  Wol felt her blood run cold. He knows. Damn his crest, he knows who I am.

  “What are you talking about, Trant?” G’joth asked.

  “Oh, nothing you need concern yourself with, G’joth.” Trant sounded entirely too smug.

  But Wol refused to show her true emotions. “You know what I think, Trant? I think Maris stole your I.I. transmitter and you killed him to cover it up.” Now it was her turn to bare her teeth. “In truth, I was hoping that you would either die on this mission or, failing that, die on this ship, but now I don’t think I want that to happen. Because nothing that could happen to you on this ship or on Elabrej can possibly compare to what will happen to you when I.I. finds out how badly you failed. And they will find out. I will make sure of it.”

  Now Trant laughed derisively. “You? Once, perhaps, you would have had the ability to do me harm, but now you are nothing—a commoner woman who has attained pitifully minor status on a ship of almost three thousand.”

  Wol said nothing. She didn’t have to. Her own connections were gone, it was true, but Lokor’s were just fine. Lokor was one of the few on the Gorkon who knew Wol’s true bloodline, and he would therefore believe her deductions as to the real fate of Bekk Maris.

  However, she forced her face to appear crestfallen. Let him believe he has beaten me.

  “Leader,” Kagak asked, “what is he talking about?”

  “He is simply spinning more lies.” Wol hoped she sounded at least a little convincing. “It is what his kind does.”

  And yet he does not lie. I shamed Toq into allowing me to tell the truth about Trant to my squad, yet I, too, keep secrets from them. I told Krevor on San-Tarah, but that was when I knew she was on her way to Sto-Vo-Kor. Truly, am I no better than Trant?

  She resolved then and there that, should she survive this mission, she would tell the fifteenth all about Eral, daughter of B’Etakk, of the now-defunct House of Varnak, and what happened to her. They deserved to know.

  Klaris’s voice then sounded over the speakers. “Prepare for insertion.”

  Without another word, all five of them stepped onto the transporter pad and pulled out their hand disruptors, save for Trant, who removed a device from his belt that Wol presumed was a locator of some sort.

  “Soldiers of the fifteenth,” Wol said, “Qapla’!”

  Goran, G’joth, and Kagak all said, “Qapla’!” in perfect unison.

  Trant, predictably, said nothing.

  The dark walls of the transporter room faded into a red haze, then coalesced into a brightly lit corridor with walls that curved upward. Based on Toq’s briefing, they were beaming into a tube that linked two of the spherical structures. Apparently, Elabrej architecture had few corners.

  When the red haze completely disappeared, Wol felt lighter; this world had a much lower gravity than Qo’noS. Looking around, she saw that the rest of the fifteenth had materialized with her, along with Ch’drak, Zabyk, and their two squads. The tube they stood in was not very high. Goran’s head was rubbing u
p against the tube’s highest point, and the remaining eleven of them could have reached up and touched the top.

  Wol turned to Trant with a questioning gaze.

  The I.I. agent was staring at the display on his locator. Then he pointed toward one end of the corridor.

  Turning to Ch’drak and Zabyk, Wol pointed at herself and held up one finger, then at Ch’drak, then two fingers, then Zabyk, then three fingers, and finally at Goran, followed by four fingers. Both leaders nodded in understanding—the fifteenth would take the lead, following where Trant’s locator took them, with the sixteenth in the middle, followed by the seventeenth, but with Goran’s massive form bringing up the rear.

  Quickly arranging themselves as Wol ordered, they moved as one toward the door at the end of the corridor where Trant had pointed.

  The door at the end did not open at their approach, nor did it have any visible handles. It did, however, have a panel. Since this was a government complex with no doubt heightened security, Wol suspected that simply blowing the panel to pieces would be unwise. For all they knew, their beaming in had triggered an alarm somewhere. But in case it hadn’t, stealth was called for here.

  Remembering the makeup of the sixteenth, she looked at Ch’drak, then at the panel. The leader nodded, and gave Bekk Yojagh a look. Yojagh holstered his disruptor and jogged forward, pulling out a toolkit that he kept where most warriors carried their d’k tahg s. Wol recalled a conversation in the mess hall shortly after the Gorkon entered the Kavrot Sector when one of the engineers asked Yojagh why someone with his considerable technical skills didn’t transfer to engineering. Yojagh’s response was: “But then I don’t get to shoot things.”

  Prying the cover off the panel, Yojagh took only ten seconds to get the door open.

  It slid aside to reveal some of the most revolting creatures Wol had ever seen.

  They stood slightly shorter than the average Klingon, though only slightly. It seemed, at first, that they were even smaller than they actually were by virtue of the fact that they didn’t have heads. The Elabrej apparently had one big torso, four arms, and two legs. That torso had several features on it that no doubt corresponded to sight, smell, sound, etc., but she would never have presumed to guess which was which. She also realized after a moment that all the creatures’ limbs could be used in locomotion, as some traveled on four, and others on the top ones that she had initially identified as arms.