“Aye, sir,” the lieutenant promised, heading for the door.
As soon as he had left the room, Roaas said, “Captain, I’ve got Councilor ak Mousal for you. And Captain Kromm on another channel.”
“Patch them both through, Commander,” Adams said, looking at Spock. “Conference call.”
“Aye, sir.”
The screen on the desk flickered to life again. This time, the screen was split in half; the seemingly impatient Klingon was on the left, while the supreme Renao Onferin’s appeared on the right.
“Councilor?” Adams began. “You asked to speak to me.”
Ak Mousal nodded. “Captain, I can already report some investigation results. Our authorities have picked up the Kranaal pilot who was supposed to guide your away team through Konuhbi. Keeper ak Bahail assures us—and I’d like to emphasize, he comes across as very believable—that he has been ambushed on the landing area of a Cemoudan chemical plant by unidentified attackers.”
Captain Kromm laughed, jeeringly.
The Renao ignored the Klingon and continued with his report. “In his statement to my officials, he claims that they stunned him and dragged him away. Forensics are searching his Kranaal as we speak. When the Keeper came to, he had been abandoned in a desert outside of town with his small transport vessel. He doesn’t know anything about the fate of his passengers.”
“And we’re supposed to believe that, eh?” the Klingon asked.
“You may question the Keeper yourself if you wish, Captain,” ak Mousal replied. “I’m sure he will answer you just as openly and honestly as he did my officers.”
“The pilot had been removed from the scene,” Spock said quietly, “in order to ensure unrestricted access for the perpetrators. They needed to reach the targets of their endeavor—the away team.”
Adams nodded. “I agree. They’re not after their own people, but after us strangers.” He addressed Kromm and ak Mousal. “Thank you for the information, Councilor. Please let us know immediately, if new details surface.”
The Renao promised to do so and terminated the connection.
“You’re making a mistake,” Kromm said. His image covered the entire screen now. “You’re standing idly by, when you should be laying waste to the whole of Onferin. You mustn’t leave a stone standing until our people return!”
“You underestimate me, Captain Kromm,” Adams said, looking at the ambassador.
Spock nodded silently. He also knew that an attack on Onferin wouldn’t do anyone any good.
“I’m already one step ahead,” Adams continued, facing Kromm. He thought about Lieutenant ak Namur, hoping for a miracle.
31
NOVEMBER 15, 2385
Somewhere on Onferin
Lenissa awoke, surrounded by darkness. Her head hurt, her chest was in pain, her tongue felt swollen and without sensation, and apparently someone had tied her legs together and her arms behind her back. Once she realized that she had been bound, she understood why she couldn’t see anything. Someone had pulled a sack over her head. We have been abducted, she realized. It’s got to be the fanatics from the Purifying Flame.
That realization was equally comforting and horrifying. The former because she could have wound up dead. The latter because she might be soon.
Her survival training took over. She had been trained for situations like this by Starfleet Security. First, she needed to find out more about her situation.
She tried to avoid any obvious movements and strained her ears to listen into the darkness. Male voices reached her ears, but they were very quiet, so it stood to reason that her kidnappers weren’t nearby. Cautiously, she fumbled about behind her back. The ground felt hard and cold: stone covered with some rubble. Considering the slight echo of the voices and the nature of the ground, she surmised that they were either in the ruins of a very large house or inside a mining tunnel or cave.
She tried to focus on the voices but she couldn’t understand a word. This was only partly due to the fact that the men spoke quietly. Lenissa also didn’t understand their language. Obviously her combadge had been removed so she couldn’t rely on the universal translator. She assumed that they had also taken her tricorder and her phaser. At least she still wore her uniform, which gave her some hope.
She needed to find out whether she was being guarded, and where the others from her away team were. Groaning quietly, she moved a little, as if she had just woken up.
A rough voice answered. Again, she didn’t understand a word. But she realized after a while that the voice spoke Klingon. “Mokbar?” she asked.
“Grakk?”
“Mokbar, Commander,” someone with a strong accent answered. “Kirk? Zh’Thiin?”
“Zh’Thiin.”
“Ah.”
Lenissa cursed herself inwardly. Right now she wished she had spent more time at the Academy on voluntary language courses. Her Klingon was limited to a handful of phrases and orders such as, “surrender,” or, “drop your weapon.” She knew these sentences in about twenty languages—just in case. None of these were particularly helpful in this situation.
She heard a quiet grunt from a woman, and a body next to her shifted. “Kirk?” Lenissa asked.
“Yes, I’m here,” the chief engineer answered. She uttered a curse that would have made a Pakled garbage freighter pilot blush. “What is this?”
“We’ve been abducted,” Lenissa said. “Probably by the Purifying Flame. Right now, we don’t seem to be guarded though, or our guard would have made himself known by now.”
Mokbar said something, and then he growled into his beard.
To Lenissa’s surprise, Kirk answered him.
“You speak Klingon?” the Andorian woman asked.
“A little. When I was a child, my parents and I used to live on a space station near the Klingon border. There was a merchant there who had his mind set on teaching all children Klingon culture.”
“And? What is Mokbar saying?” Lenissa asked.
“We should try to escape.”
“My sentiments exactly.” She tried to get to her knees, which wasn’t easy with her legs bound. “Let’s see if I can pull this hood off my head.” The young Andorian woman leaned forward, shaking her head, and she finally managed to get the sack off. When she looked around, she found her assumptions confirmed. Their accommodation looked very much like an old mining tunnel. Dim, reddish light shone from the main tunnel into the small cave where they were being held captive. Lenissa saw her three companions. Kirk and Mokbar were still fighting against their hoods, while Grakk was still unconscious. In addition, the entrance to their chamber was sealed by a shimmering energy field.
Kirk, who was next to her, finally managed to remove her hood. Squinting and with disheveled hair she examined her surroundings. She leaned closer to the wall. “I think this is a tekasite mine. Unpurified tekasite is not reactive, right?”
“That’s what the Cemoudan foreman claimed,” said Lenissa. “But who knows whether we can trust him. We were abducted from the landing area in front of his plant, after all. And someone must have informed our kidnappers of our whereabouts.”
Mokbar cursed because the sack’s seam had caught his hair and wouldn’t budge.
“Keep still,” Kirk said to him, and repeated the order in Klingon. She tried to help him, and their joint efforts managed to free the Bortas’s engineer as well.
“Now we need to get rid of our bonds.” Jenna Kirk tugged on hers.
“That won’t do any good. The ropes are made from reinforced synthetic fiber. Not even our big warrior over there will be able to tear them apart.” Lenissa nodded toward Grakk, who lay motionless on the floor. “But I might have an idea.” She shifted toward Kirk, turning until her feet were close to the engineer’s hands. “Try to reach into my right boot. I believe the kidnappers have missed the knife I’m carrying in there.”
“You’re carrying a knife in your boot?” Kirk sounded half incredulous, half amused. “Were you part of a ga
ng on Andor during your childhood?”
The young Andorian woman’s antennae bent belligerently forward, but the human woman couldn’t see that. “I just don’t want to be unarmed, that’s all.”
They were lucky. The short knife was still stuck in its secret holster in Lenissa’s bootleg. Cautiously, Kirk pulled it out and handed it to the security chief who cut through her wrist ropes. Once that was done, it didn’t take long to untie the others as well. Kirk headed straight for the entrance to take a closer look at the energy field. The Klingon engineer knelt next to his comrade, trying to wake him. When he pulled the sack off Grakk’s head, he growled.
Lenissa went to Mokbar’s side. She also saw the reason why Grakk hadn’t moved. His tricipital lobe was broken in several places, and he sported a large bruise on his left temple. He didn’t budge when Mokbar spoke to him and shook him. Lenissa searched for his pulse and checked his breathing. With a grim expression, she shook her head. “He’s dead,” she announced. The Klingon probably had been wounded during the fight—perhaps suffering an unfortunate fall—and their kidnappers had either been unable or unwilling to treat him. Now, he had died from his injury, which might have been treated in sickbay aboard the Prometheus. Even the Bortas sickbay might have been able to help him. “Barbarians,” she hissed quietly.
Mokbar opened the dead man’s eyes, looking into them deeply, before throwing his head back and looking up to the ceiling.
“No!” Kirk gasped. She lunged across the room to throw Mokbar down to the ground, silencing him with a hand across his mouth. She hissed something in Klingon.
He snarled something back at her harshly, shaking her off.
Pleading, the engineer repeated her words.
The Klingon growled and turned away.
“What was that all about?” Lenissa wanted to know.
“He wanted to perform Heghtay for his fallen comrade,” Kirk explained, “the Klingon death ritual. That involves shouting a warning to the Black Fleet that a new Klingon warrior is on his way to join them—something we really don’t need right now.”
“How did you change his mind?”
“By telling him that he can shout as much as he likes, when his shouting doesn’t endanger us.”
Lenissa’s expression was grim. “Do you think our kidnappers intend to kill us?”
“I don’t know. But…” Outside in the tunnel, the noise increased. Kirk fell silent, putting a finger against her lips. She scurried along the rock wall until she stood next to the entrance, so she couldn’t be seen from the tunnel. Lenissa joined her. Mokbar stood across the room from both women, facing the entrance.
I really hope they deactivate the energy field before realizing that they can’t see us any longer, the young Andorian woman thought. The grip of her right hand tightened around the hilt of her knife.
A prisoner’s first duty is the attempt to escape, her instructor had told them at the Academy. Don’t you ever just resign to your fate in the hope that someone will come to rescue you. The probability that you’ll be dead by the time your colleagues find you is high.
Lenissa heard the sound of chairs being shifted and bottles being opened. Apparently, there was some kind of lunch room next door. Her shoulders slumped. It didn’t seem as if their kidnappers had any intention of looking in on them any time soon. She noticed that Kirk tilted her head slightly forward as if she was intently listening in. “Do you understand them as well?” the security chief whispered.
Jenna Kirk nodded. “Jassat taught me Renao—and I taught him Federation Standard,” she answered quietly. “That was one of our favorite pastimes four years ago before he went to the Academy.”
“You’re a true linguist, Commander,” Lenissa said admiringly.
Kirk shrugged. “Anyone can use universal translators. Now please, be quiet.” She gestured at Mokbar that he should keep silent as well. They listened in tense silence. Kirk grimaced. She moved her mouth silently as she tried to comprehend what their kidnappers were saying.
“What are they talking about?” Lenissa whispered. Her antennae moved restlessly on top of her head, trying to catch as much sensory input as possible. But all she sensed right now was the energy shield’s electrical field that locked them in.
“They’re discussing what to do with us,” Kirk reported under her breath. “One of them suggests using us as leverage. They want to blackmail Prometheus and Bortas into leaving, by threatening them with our deaths.”
“Captain Adams will never go along with that,” Lenissa said. “Neither would Kromm. Besides, what good would it do? Even if the ships withdrew, nobody could keep the Prometheus or the Bortas from returning as soon as we were back aboard.” Or dead.
“It sounds as if they’re trying to bide their time. His comrades are also skeptical, but the man believes they only need a few more days to finish the ships.”
“Ships? What kind of ships?”
“No idea, they didn’t say.”
Lenissa remembered the attacks on both Starbase 91 and the fleet base on Cestus III. Would the extremists modify even more Romulan Scorpions, transforming them into suicide bombers? They couldn’t let that happen. “That plan won’t work,” she said. “Captain Adams will never yield to the demands of terrorists.”
“That’s what one of the guys out there reckons as well.” Kirk hesitated and her eyes widened.
“What?” the young Andorian woman prompted. “Keep translating, Jenna. What’s he saying?”
Jenna Kirk turned to face her. Her expression showed that she didn’t like what she had just heard. “He suggests making an example of us.” She swallowed. “He wants to throw us into purifying flames.”
32
NOVEMBER 15, 2385
I.K.S. Bortas
“Captain?”
Kromm grunted irritably and kept walking. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to his underlings. He’d done enough talking during the long and—in his eyes—useless briefing with Adams, the diplomats, and the red-skinned chieftains of Onferin. They were still none the wiser about the fate of his kidnapped crew, further warehouses and industrial plants on the planet had been searched for explosives and stolen Romulan goods to no avail, and worst of all… Qo’noS was still the target of ruthless terrorists. So what exactly should he talk about with his underlings? His anger? About the incompetence of Starfleet and their spineless sympathizers? Their inability to put their foot down and get things sorted? Martok himself had charged him with the mission Lembatta Cluster! It was his chance to gain glory and respect—deserved respect, not this pretense of him being the “hero of the Ning’tao” when he hadn’t even been on board when the Klingon warship achieved her feat.
But the Federation were far too polite to assert themselves. Even when faced with the enemy they refused to clench their fists; instead, they relied on the oh-so-mighty power of diplomacy. No wonder they had stumbled from one existence-threatening crisis into another in recent years. Some time soon, Kromm assumed, someone would pull the floor out from under their feet. When that happened, he vowed as he stomped toward the bridge through the Bortas’s corridors, he would watch, raise a large jug of bloodwine, and laugh.
“Captain?”
Kromm stopped. He had clenched his fists without noticing; a gesture of triumph, following his fantasies. Furiously, he punched the corridor wall.
“What?” he barked at the lieutenant who was following him stubbornly.
Klarn was an officer of ambiguous character. Sometimes, his actions were of remarkable unscrupulousness, on other days he was as obnoxious as a klongat that was keen to mate. Now that his captain had finally turned around to face him, he visibly winced.
“Sir, I… we… there’s something, you should know.”
Kromm took one step toward Klarn. He knew that his rage was directed at Adams, Rozhenko, Spock, and the Renao. Klarn was merely the target, not the source. But that didn’t make any difference right now. “I don’t like to be disturbed while I’m thinking. Furthermore
, I don’t like it when someone follows me around like a Ferengi would follow a customer with a bursting purse.” He had lowered his voice menacingly to no more than a hiss. “But least of all, I dislike being disturbed without receiving any coherent information. What exactly should I know, Lieutenant?”
Klarn swallowed hard. His eyes flickered around, and his hands trembled. He leaned forward, also lowering his voice.
“Not here, sir. Let’s go down to deck twenty-four.”
That was enough. Kromm jerked his d’k tahg from its sheath on his belt. Dim light reflected on the broad blade of the warrior weapon as he grabbed Klarn by the scruff of his neck, pressing the weapon against his throat.
“I’m not in the mood to repeat myself, Lieutenant,” Kromm said, enjoying his furious heartbeat and the rush of blood in his ears. At last. Finally, he could let off some of the steam that the Federation had caused with their inaction. “And I believe that I have made myself perfectly clear.”
Klarn licked his lips nervously. Again, he looked around to all sides, but they were alone in the corridor. No one would help him. And why should they?
“So, are you going to tell me why you believe you should badger me with your unbearable presence, or should my weapon draw blood?” Kromm laughed quietly. “I assure you, it would give me great pleasure. Today more than ever. Officers are replaceable, Klarn.”
“Sir, I…” Klarn swallowed again. “I can’t tell you out here in the corridor. It’s about security!”
“In that case, talk to Rooth,” the captain said, not lowering his weapon.
Klarn shook his head tentatively.
“No, sir. The security chief wouldn’t be a good choice in this case.”
The d’k tahg brushed against Klarn’s twitching neck.
“Do you doubt the competence of my staff, Lieutenant?” Kromm asked menacingly. “You’re part of that staff yourself—a fact that I’m very much regretting right now. Do you think that Rooth is a warrior without honor?” In his heart of heart he wished for that to be true. It would give him another reason to end Klarn’s pitiful existence right here, right now. It would only require a decisive move of his wrist. His blade would do the rest. Oh, how he was longing for blood…
Star Trek Prometheus -Fire with Fire Page 26
