I.K.S. Gorkon Book Three

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

Finally, Toq gave up. The young man was proud to be a Klingon, and numbered the day that Ambassador Worf—then a Starfleet lieutenant—found the compound on Carraya where he was raised and took him, and several others, away to live in the empire as one of the greatest of his life. Before Worf came, Carraya was a haven where Klingons and Romulans lived in peace away from “the war,” an event whose specifics were never stated, but was spoken of in whispers as a horrible state of affairs to be avoided at all costs. It was Worf who revealed the truth: that Carraya was a prison camp set up after a Romulan attack on the Klingon planet Khitomer. The Klingon prisoners were not allowed to die, but could not return in disgrace to the empire. A Romulan centurion named Tokath—one of the officers on the scene at Khitomer—quit his military post to oversee the prison camp. Against all odds, Klingon and Romulan lived in harmony; Tokath even took a Klingon woman to be his wife, and they had a daughter, Ba’el.

  But the Klingons knew nothing of their heritage, of their birthright, of their stories—until Worf came and gave that to them. He taught Toq how to hunt, told all of them stories of Kahless, and finally, eventually, was permitted to leave along with all who would go with him. Toq was the first to accept the offer. He came alive for the first time when Worf took him on the hunt, and he had no regrets about leaving Carraya behind him.

  However, there were some elements of Klingon life that mystified him—their resistance to proper medical treatment, for one, and Toq was eternally grateful to be serving on the same ship as B’Oraq, who had done more to advance Klingon medicine than anyone in empire history—and one such element was Klingon intolerance for anyone or anything that was not Klingon. He wondered what would happen if any of his crewmates met Ba’el, and how they would react to her pointed ears.

  “Sir, I have something else to say.” Kallo’s statement dragged Toq out of his reverie.

  “Yes?”

  “While we were—interred at the Elabrej’s home, I was able to determine the frequencies that the news reports broadcast on. I have adjusted my hand scanner to jam them, so the Elabrej will not have any visual records of our attack. They will no longer be able to use us for propaganda purposes.”

  Again, Toq had to resist the urge to strangle the ensign. “Why did you not mention this sooner?”

  Looking abashed, Kallo said, “I—”

  “Never mind.” Toq waved her off. I’ll deal with her more firmly if and when we’re back on the Gorkon. Right now, we need all the able-bodied warriors we can get—even the irritating ones.

  Klaris called over from a few meters away. “Sir! We have found the entrance! As they predicted, it is sealed.”

  What had grabbed Toq’s attention when he saw the specifications of the government sphere was a tube that extended out to the ocean. Few of the separatists even knew its true purpose—only Sanchit, Bantrak, and Viralas were aware of its history. “It was used during the days before the hegemony was incorporated,” Sanchit had said, “when the Elabrej Union was the largest power on the planet. Battles were fought under the sea then.”

  “My grandsire told me of those days,” Bantrak had said. “It was obscene—actually going underwater in conveyances that were held together with rusted bolts.”

  Viralas had added, “We left behind such barbarity when the Elabrej unified the world.”

  “Conquered the world, you mean,” Sanchit had said.

  Toq had been forced to interrupt this reminiscing. “What is that tube?”

  “It allowed the military’s underwater conveyances ingress and egress to the government sphere.”

  “Does anyone use them now?”

  Viralas’s upper legs started vibrating so much that Toq couldn’t look at him. “Why would they? The very idea is—”

  “Obscene, yes, so you said. Why do you people have such an aversion to water?”

  “Are you mad?” All of Viralas’s arms vibrated then. “The ocean provides nothing. Its water cannot be drunk, it cannot be breathed, and nothing grows in it. All the ocean provides is death.”

  Now Toq looked down into the water that he and the others were about to dive into. It was green and brackish. Stepping closer to it, Toq could smell the filth. No wonder Viralas thought of the ocean as a dead place—they have polluted it so much….

  Klaris walked up to him and Kallo. “Disruptors have been retuned to fire underwater. That sealed tunnel entrance won’t stand for long.”

  “Good. Are the troops prepared?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Then let us waste no more time. There are Klingons imprisoned in the government sphere, and I am loath to leave them there.” The Klingons on Carraya were there only in order to spare their families the dishonor of their being captured—which meant a lifetime of those families believing them to be dead. If Toq could spare Captain Wirrk and the others that, he would.

  Toq’s plan was simplicity itself—dive into the water near the tube, and infiltrate the government sphere from there. Long-abandoned as it was, security there was minimal, and even if they were detected, it would take the military time to investigate—time Toq had no intention of giving them.

  Weighed down enough by their armor to counteract the sea’s buoyancy, the Klingons were able to sink through the brackish waters. Toq found himself relying more on his own hand scanner than on his eyes, as he could barely see the nose in front of his face in the slime-caked depths. Using the solid rock of the coastline as their guide, he and the others pushed their way downward. Toq found he had to navigate by touch more than sight, as he could barely see the faceted rock out of which, a dozen meters down, the access tube had been carved.

  Based on the specifications he’d seen, combined with his own knowledge of the considerable Klingon capacity to hold one’s breath, Toq had faith that they would reach the entrance before any of them suffered any of the effects of oxygen deprivation or carbondioxide buildup. Sanchit had also assured him that there were no natural predators in the water. Swimming in this polluted filth, Toq understood why: Nothing living could survive, much less thrive, in this. This entire planet set Toq’s hunter’s instincts on edge as a violation of the natural order of things. He knew that the empire had its moments of ecological irresponsibility in its history—most spectacularly, the operation on Praxis that led to that moon’s destruction—but nothing on this scale. Klingons were too good at hunting to ever upset the balance that allowed the hunt to continue.

  However, the Elabrej had not learned that lesson, to the point that Toq was starting to come around to their phobia of the sea. So entrenched was the pollution in the waters through which they swam that the swimming itself was slower going, and required far more effort for far less reward than anticipated. Movements that should have brought Toq down at least two meters only advanced him one.

  Spots formed in front of Toq’s eyes as the carbon dioxide accumulated in his cells. His arms felt like lead as they pinwheeled through the thick liquid. His hand scanner told him that the tube entrance was still several meters away.

  I will not give in to this. I am a Klingon warrior, and I will not die in the filthy sea of an alien planet!

  Then, just as the spots threatened to overcome his vision completely, he caught site of the entrance. Like every other piece of architecture on this planet, the entrance was circular, in this case a perfectly round piece of metal wedged in the midst of the stone. It had no features, no handles, no controls, nothing.

  So leaden did Toq’s body feel that he did not trust himself to swivel his head to ascertain who of the others had actually made it. Instead, he focused all of his dwindling energy on pulling his disruptor out of its holster, gripping it in his right hand, and firing it. He did not want to even waste energy taking aim, figuring the target was large enough.

  To his great relief, several other disruptor beams followed his in slicing through the water. A damp smokiness competed with the odors of the garbage in Toq’s nose as the weapons fire burned through the muck.

  Seconds later,
Toq felt himself pulled toward the tube, as the water dutifully obeyed the law of physics that stated that an object moved from an area of greater concentration to an area of lesser concentration. The disruptor fire had blown the covering to the tube apart.

  Letting his body go limp, he let the water carry him. As planned, the destruction of the entrance would result in the tube’s being flooded. Also as planned, his armored uniform protected him as he was tossed against the curved walls. The onrush of water bounced him all around, only occasionally allowing his head to rise above the water.

  Those occasions, however, were enough. The air in the tube was stale and musty and tinged with dust and mold, but it was the sweetest air Toq had ever breathed. Despite his precarious situation, he felt the fatigue drain from his limbs as he was thrown through the tube.

  Just another few seconds…

  Sanchit’s words came back to him in the eternally long seconds after being thrust into the tube: “We don’t know what they might have done to the tube. Yes, it’s supposed to empty into a large hangar area, but for all we know, they sealed it off. They probably sealed off the main entrance as well. Even if you get in the sea entrance, there may be a large wall at the end of the access tube—against which you’ll be smashed like so much flotsam.”

  His head poked out from the water long enough to see that the tube emptied out into a larger room. That’s the hangar, and they haven’t sealed it!

  With glee, Toq felt himself be dumped into the larger area, which was also circular, but a massive sphere. The water was still flowing in, but not accumulating so much. Toq found himself quickly able to tread water. He caught sight of several troops, and Klaris—no sign of Kallo yet.

  “Sound off!” Klaris cried.

  Within a few minutes, only one warrior did not respond: Kallo. All the troops were accounted for.

  Then a small head burst through the water, gasping loudly for breath: Kallo.

  The QaS DevwI’ turned to Toq. “All present and accounted for, Commander.”

  Toq grinned. After all that, his entire detail survived. He started to appreciate Klingon arrogance just a bit more.

  “Let’s move.”

  Once, Jeyri had been a highly decorated defensor. He swore a vow to defend the hegemony against its enemies. Now, facing the impossibly tall leader of the aliens, with the strange growth where his forelegs should have been, he found himself frightened for the first time in his life.

  It wasn’t until after he met Vor Viralas and Mal Sanchit that Jeyri had realized that the hegemony’s enemies were the people in charge of it. It wasn’t until they showed him the parts of the large cities never seen on the news broadcasts, or the economic forecasts done not by those on the oligarchs’ payroll but by independent experts whose findings were quickly silenced by the oligarchy, that Jeyri realized that the best way to fulfill his vow was to join the separatists.

  Naturally, it was the end of his military career. But the years of training the defensors had given him proved useful. For one thing, it was with the military that he learned of the Tenth Moon and its magnetic field that made it hard to scan—and also impossible to live on. The defense base that had been constructed on the moon had to be abandoned when all the personnel assigned there suffered brain damage from prolonged exposure to the fields.

  But the separatists had a physician who was sympathetic to their cause who provided them with an antidote to the exposure. This physician refused to publish her findings, concerned that the government would simply abuse her research.

  So Jeyri had set up a base here from which he coordinated the tasks that Vor Viralas or Mal Sanchit or Yer Bantrak or the other separatists needed him and his handpicked team of soldiers to complete.

  When he saw that a conveyance crash-landed in the grasslands, he immediately set out to investigate. If it was the Elabrej military, he and his people would capture as many as possible and interrogate them. If it was the aliens who were now fighting the hegemony, he would learn what he could and pledge to aid them.

  He had been taken to their leader, who sat in a strange, squared-off room inside his conveyance. Jeyri found the construction of the aliens’ conveyance to be maddening—so many angles and flat surfaces. It violated Jeyri’s sense of order, as if whoever built the conveyance threw various flat pieces of metal together and hoped for the best. Jeyri couldn’t imagine how anyone could survive in such harsh environs.

  The leader, who called himself Captain Klag, stood tall over Jeyri. Near the door to the room, another of the aliens stood; he was named Lieutenant Rodek. The alien who brought him here, Leader Kylag, was nowhere to be found. An alien named Lieutenant Lokor had brought Jeyri here, and then was told by Captain Klag to oversee Jeyri’s people.

  Jeyri had no idea how it was that he could understand what the aliens said, and vice versa.

  “Give me one reason, Jeyri of the Elabrej, why I should not kill you and all your followers for attacking my troops.”

  Jeyri let out a puff of air. “Your soldier—Leader Kylag—asked the same thing. I will tell you what I told him: We are not your enemy. We are the strong forelegs of the separatist movement that has been trying to bring down the oligarchy that rules the hegemony, and it is my wish that we join forces with you against our common foe.”

  “ ‘Strong forelegs’? What does that mean, precisely?”

  Since these aliens didn’t seem to have forelegs, it was, Jeyri thought, a reasonable question. “It means we commit the acts the separatists require of us. We obtain medical supplies for those who need it but cannot afford it, we release political prisoners from their incarceration, we liberate currency from the undeserving Vor strata and give it to needy non-stratad, we—”

  “And you do it from this moon?” Captain Klag asked.

  Jeyri waved his midlegs in annoyance at being interrupted. “Yes.”

  “Why do you do these things?”

  “I—” Jeyri hesitated. “I am not sure I can convey to you the entire recent history of the Elabrej Hegemony, Captain Klag. Suffice it to say that the oligarchy that rules us is decadent and corrupt. They exploit our people for their gain and give the people nothing in return for their hard work save poverty and sickness. And now they are using the discovery of your people as an excuse to divert more resources to the military and away from the people—and also as a tool to use against our movement.”

  Captain Klag did not speak for the better part of an engret. Then: “What weapons do you employ in your movement?”

  “Several dozen small conveyances that are invisible to our scanning technology. They can be seen, but the naked eye is of little use in the vastness of the sky.”

  The features on Captain Klag’s growth changed shape. “That is certainly true.”

  “We also have several military-issue hand weapons that we use to defend ourselves when it becomes necessary.”

  Captain Klag folded his midlegs in front of his torso. “Your—conveyances do not have weaponry?”

  “No.”

  “And you do not strike at military targets?”

  This question confused Jeyri. “We do not strike targets—if we did that, we might murder some of our fellow hegemons. Our goal is not to kill, but to effect change.”

  “Change does not come easily, Jeyri, and if you are not willing to make sacrifices, then your entire cause is pointless.” Captain Klag went to the other side of the desk in the office. Jeyri found it impossible to determine what the alien was thinking, as his body language was impenetrable. His legs barely ever moved. “You say your object is to remove your government? Then you need to hurt your government. Helping those whom the government does not help is an honorable task, but it will not accomplish your goal. Your military is fighting a war against us, and they have done significant damage to two of our vessels that we know of. As long as we are trapped on this planet, we cannot contact our fleet to see if they are winning or not.”

  “I wish I could say,” Jeyri said truthfully. “Since host
ilities with your people began, we have lost all contact with the First World.”

  “A pity.” Captain Klag rested his arms on his desk. “My point, Jeyri, is that you are fighting a war as well, but you are fighting it very poorly.”

  Jeyri waved his forelegs in anger. “We have succeeded in every mission!”

  “Yes, you have won battles—tiny, inconsequential battles! You claim to be warriors, leading the charge against your hegemony, but you have no taste for warfare!”

  Revulsed, Jeyri said, “What you suggest would mean possibly killing some of our kind.”

  “Of course it would—that’s what happens in a war. If you do not have the stomachs for that, Jeyri, then I suggest you remain on this moon until you die of old age—weak and infirm—because if you do not do what it truly takes, then you will not win the day. There will be no glory—there will be no victory.”

  Jeyri was unable to keep the contempt out of his voice. “Do not presume to speak to me of victory, alien.”

  Captain Klag’s growth levered backward, and a strange sound emitted from it. Then he said, “Very amusing, Jeyri. You attack my troops, you then beg me to ally with you, and you speak to me of being presumptuous?”

  His forelegs waving in contriteness, Jeyri said, “My apologies, Captain Klag, but—”

  “But nothing.” Captain Klag rose from behind the desk. “I will make you an offer, Jeyri. My—conveyance, as you call it, is under repair and will not be spaceworthy for several days. My mission is to help the Klingon Empire defeat the Elabrej Hegemony. I will work with you separatists in order to accomplish that goal—which will give us both what we want.”

  Jeyri liked the sound of that—but not the implications. “You wish to use our resources to murder innocent hegemons.” He deliberately did not phrase it as a question.

  “We will endeavor only to strike military targets, but yes, some innocents may die. Does that sicken you?”

  “Yes,” Jeyri said honestly.

  “It sickens me as well. I prefer to face an honorable foe—battle should be done between warriors. But the universe is not so permissive, and the reality is that your hegemony has attacked my empire. I am sworn to defend my empire, and I will do so by whatever means are necessary. You say your government is corrupt, that your oligarchs are destroying your people. Those same oligarchs have ordered the death of my people, and imprisoned others against their will. If you will not do what is necessary, then I will instruct Lieutenant Lokor to lead the thousand or so troops at my disposal to your headquarters and take what we need in order to accomplish our goal.”