Forged in Fire Page 13

  To Sulu’s mind, scholarly assumptions concerning a hostile power about which the Federation knew so very little wasn’t much of a foundation on which to build a future of galactic peace. He couldn’t help but feel relieved at the knowledge that it would be Sarek’s experienced hand, rather than that of some green academic, guiding the Federation’s side of the forthcoming discussions at Korvat. The Klingons would eat this guy alive inside of five minutes without Sarek to back him up, Sulu thought as he regarded Dax in silence.

  “We are prepared to give you a tour of the ship before we schedule the first diplomatic briefing session,” Styles said to the diplomats. “And, of course, we have made our best VIP quarters ready for all three of you.”

  “There are actually four of us, Captain,” Sarek said solemnly. “We shall therefore require one additional set of quarters.”

  “Of course, Mister Ambassador,” said Styles. “Commander Sulu will see to it immediately.”

  Sulu’s brow furrowed as he studied the Vulcan’s craggy face. “Pardon me for asking, Mister Ambassador, but isn’t the fourth member of your party the Lady Amanda?” Sulu knew that it was the ambassador’s longstanding custom to bring his wife with him whenever and wherever he traveled, just as it was Amanda’s custom never to leave the ambassador’s side unless the separation was unavoidable.

  Sarek regarded Sulu coolly, raising his right eyebrow long enough to make him think that he might have asked an impertinent question. Then the iron-haired Vulcan shook his head gently, his gaunt features retaining their typical Vulcan impassivity, but in a way that Sulu found reassuring thanks to his long familiarity with the mannerisms of the ambassador’s younger son.

  “She who is my wife has not accompanied me on this mission,” Sarek said.

  “I hope she’s well, Mister Ambassador,” Sulu said.

  Sarek nodded. “Although the passage of the years exacts a greater toll from humans than from Vulcans, the Lady Amanda’s health remains undiminished. To ensure that nothing changes this, however, I insisted that she return to Vulcan and remain there for the duration of the Korvat conference.”

  Sulu nodded mutely, feeling simultaneously vindicated and apprehensive in the face of this clear evidence that Sarek had indeed taken his warning seriously. He was also impressed by Sarek’s resolve; from what he knew of the strong-willed Lady Amanda, the ambassador must have had the devil’s own time convincing her to let him face a possible terrorist attack without keeping her at his side.

  “Well, then,” Styles said, glancing down at the small chronometer built into the shaft of his swagger stick, “when do we get to meet the fourth member of your party?”

  Dax shook his head and made a gentle tsk sound. “The Klingons certainly won’t put up with this sort of tardiness,” he said quietly, shaking his head.

  Sulu suppressed a smile. This kid has really got to learn to lighten up a bit.

  Looking back toward the shuttle and raising his voice slightly, Sarek asked, “Doctor, will you be joining us?”

  A moment later a figure emerged from the small ship, and Sulu was surprised to see yet another familiar face among Sarek’s staff.

  “Sorry, folks,” the brown-haired woman said as she closed a medical tricorder and slung it over her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to keep everyone waiting.”

  Sarek turned back toward Styles. “Doctor Christine Chapel is our diplomatic party’s physician, on temporary loan from Starfleet. She’ll need to be billeted on your ship as well.”

  “Of course,” Styles said agreeably, then turned to regard Sulu with an inscrutable stare. “Commander Sulu, I believe you’re already acquainted with the doctor. I’ll put you in charge of seeing to her accommodations, as well as setting her up with whatever workspace she may need.”

  Sulu grinned. “It’ll be a pleasure, sir,” he said, and meant it.

  • • •

  After Sulu and Cutler had shown Sarek, Dax, and Dostara to their VIP suites on deck five, near the junior officers’ quarters — Rebovich and Orsini had taken charge of the party’s luggage, with the help of two other members of the honor guard — Sulu showed Dr. Chapel to a nearby set of unoccupied rooms reserved for visiting diplomatic luminaries.

  “These new starships are flying luxury hotels,” Chapel said as she looked around the spacious but sparsely furnished central room, obviously impressed. She set her two small bags atop the otherwise bare central coffee table, which stood between a pair of low sofas.

  “That’s not what the junior officers tell me,” Sulu said, smiling.

  “Lucky them. Now let’s get out of here and go for a walk before I get an attack of agoraphobia from all this wide-open space.”

  Sulu led the way back out into the empty but comparatively narrow corridor, and the two old friends immediately fell into step beside each other for a peripatetic conversation.

  “So, how have you been doing, Christine?” Sulu said.

  She shrugged. “I can’t complain too much, Hikaru. Well, I could, but I suspect you have your own gripes to be concerned with. Besides, most of mine are about achy joints from getting older, not . . .” She paused long enough to glance up and down the corridor to make sure her next remarks weren’t overheard. “Not about pains in the ass brought on by a CO’s ego,” she added quietly.

  Sulu let out a short, low laugh. “You noticed it that quickly?” he said, sotto voce.

  Chapel responded with a laugh of her own. “Between your secret communiqué with Sarek and the peculiar attitude that Captain Styles seemed to be exhibiting toward you back there . . . yeah, I noticed it. Besides, I’ve worked with Styles before, during some of Excelsior’s transwarp tests. And I’m familiar with the history between Styles and the Enterprise crew.”

  Sulu nodded as he led the way toward one of the turbo-lifts. “We’re both going to have to try not to let that prejudice us.”

  She sighed. “Agreed.”

  “Styles is my CO now. And that means I have to defend him, God help me.”

  “Sorry, Hikaru. I didn’t mean to put you into an awkward position.”

  He chuckled as he realized he had seldom felt anything but awkward since he’d assumed his current posting. “That ship has already sailed, so to speak.”

  They stepped into the turbolift, and the doors closed around them. “Deck seven,” Sulu told the computer before it had a chance to prompt him.

  “So what’s our first destination?” Chapel asked.

  “Unless you have an objection, I’d like to give you a rain check on the tour of the ship,” he said. “I’d like you to meet our CMO right away. And there’s another thing you really need to see sooner instead of later.”

  “Like I care about who’s got the widest corridors or the biggest nacelles,” Chapel said, waving her hand to one side. The lines around the sides of her eyes crinkled pleasantly as she smiled. “Give me some new medical equipment to test-drive and some new bug to diagnose, and I’ll be much happier. Plus, you’ve got to get me schooled up about all the intrigue around here, so I can brief the diplomats.”

  The turbolift doors opened, and they stepped out onto one of deck seven’s gently curving corridors. “Sickbay is this way,” he said, gesturing to the right. “Doctor Klass will bring you up to speed on everything.”

  Chapel put a hand on Sulu’s shoulder, stopping him, an expression of surprise and delight on her face. “Judith Klass? Goddess, I wonder if she’ll remember me. I took one of her courses at Starfleet Medical, ages ago.”

  “She’ll probably be a lot happier to see you if you go easy on the ‘ages ago’ part,” Sulu said, grinning. It felt good to be around his old friend again.

  Moments later, they entered sickbay. Klass was bent over a neutronoscope, peering into it intently. “Be right with you,” she said. “If you’re wounded, please try not to bleed on the carpet.” Klass straightened and looked up, then did a mild double-take as she recognized her newly arrived colleague. “Well, as I live and breathe. Christine Chapel.
It’s been years!”

  Chapel held out her hand for Klass to shake. “More than I want to try to count. I wasn’t sure if you’d even remember me.”

  “Ah ha,” Klass said, engulfing Chapel in a quick bear hug before releasing her and turning toward Sulu. “Doctor Chapel was a brilliant student, although she sometimes let herself get a little too distracted by some of the male interns for her own good. She once managed to laser-splice one of her fingers to a cadaver we were practicing on.”

  Sulu saw Chapel’s face redden slightly. “It was nothing that a protoplaser and a dermal regenerator couldn’t fix,” she said in good-natured tones. Sulu quietly shuddered at the whole idea.

  “The other funny thing I remember about you was the minidresses. You adored them — well, I would have, too, if I ever had legs like yours — but you were always railing on about how they were sexist, and that if the women were expected to wear them, then the men should at least have to wear shorts.”

  “That’s true,” Chapel said. “Still is. You don’t see nearly as many skirts around these days, but I’d still appreciate seeing a nice pair of male legs in uniform once in a while.”

  Klass sighed heavily. “Well, maybe someday. Meanwhile, welcome aboard Excelsior. Has our XO told you much about what’s been occupying most of my attention down here lately?”

  “We weren’t able to talk freely before,” Sulu said. “Besides, I thought the evidence would be more compelling if Christine could see it up close.”

  “Well, come this way then, and let’s get you filled in,” Klass said, gesturing toward one of the medical lab’s rear workspaces.

  • • •

  “There,” Chapel said, pointing to a small portion of the image displayed on the large bioscreen. “It’s Augment DNA. See the extra strands here and here? If you look at the composite breakdown, you’ll find those same strands in the Augment sequences.”

  “Well, we could if it wasn’t classified information,” Klass said, peering closely at Chapel.

  The look was one that Chapel remembered well, and which abruptly took her all the way back to her undergraduate years at Starfleet Medical. It wasn’t a negative look per se, but rather one of careful scrutiny, as if saying, “Do you really know what you’re doing?”

  “As you may recall, we had a run-in with the actual, honest-to-God Khan Noonien Singh and his crew of Augments,” Chapel said, gesturing toward Sulu. “When I was the Enterprise’s head nurse, Leonard McCoy and I gained quite a bit of knowledge about the Augment DNA resequencing. Then Starfleet put a clamp on all of it. But they couldn’t exactly erase it from our memories.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that not only is this viral DNA a potential bioterrorist weapon, it may also be linked to Earth’s Eugenics Wars?” Sulu looked nonplussed as the implications hit home.

  “Not exactly,” Chapel said, shaking her head. “But possibly. It could be that the virus was cultured at some point inside a person who possessed Augment DNA sequences, which then simply piggybacked onto the virus as it was further bioengineered for its main purpose. We know that the Klingons experimented with viruses containing Augment DNA sequences over a century ago and its effects are still with them today.”

  Klass looked thoughtful. “You’re talking about the smooth-headed Klingons. My research indicates that the ‘smooth’ trait was caused by a genetic mish-mash of Augment genes that got picked up by a Levodian flu retrovirus sometime in the twenty-second century. Or maybe it was done deliberately. Regardless, it was deadly. It decimated at least one Klingon colony, and set the ‘smooth-headed’ mutation in the genomes of the survivors and their descendants.”

  “And here we have a genetically engineered retrovirus that has both Levodian flu and Augment genes thrown into the mix,” Sulu said slowly, the gravity of his words hitting all of them. “Could the albino be planning to unleash a similar disease in the Klingon Empire? Or in Federation space?”

  Both notions chilled Chapel to the marrow. On the cusp of the peace talks between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, a single rogue genetic engineer fixated on terror could threaten everything. It didn’t matter that most such DNA manipulations were unlawful under Federation statutes — and likely under Klingon law as well — because it wasn’t the process that was the threat now, it was the results, and one man’s decision to pursue them.

  “We’d better get that briefing scheduled,” Chapel said. “We’re just about to jump out of the frying pan. . . .”

  ELEVEN

  2269 (the Year of Kahless 895,

  early in the month of Xan’lahr)

  Koloth realized only very slowly that he was awake. Whether or not he was actually still alive, however, seemed to be an open question.

  This certainly isn’t the way I imagined Sto-Vo-Kor, he thought as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. Neither did the place bear much resemblance to the Barge of the Dead, or its fearsome final destination of Gre’thor, the eternal home to all lost, damned souls deemed unworthy of admittance to the glorious perpetual battleground reserved for the fallen heroes of Qo’noS.

  He was sitting, stripped to the waist, on the edge of a narrow, threadbare cot in what appeared to be an austere but brightly illuminated infirmary room. Or perhaps it was a science lab, judging from the presence of what appeared to be several large pieces of scanning equipment, as well as several other roughly man-sized devices that might or might not have had medical applications; Koloth had never spent enough time in places such as this to learn to make such subtle distinctions.

  Then he noticed the telltale blue glow of a planar force field that completely covered the threshold of an otherwise open hatchway. This aperture led off to an anteroom that lay just beyond the most distant of the bulky pieces of lab equipment.

  He understood at once that this was neither an infirmary nor a lab, at least so far as he was concerned. For him, for whatever reason, this place was a prison. He digested this new knowledge stoically and without surprise; despite the fever that had felled him, he could recall having opened fire on the three Klingon vessels that had been attempting to waylay the ’OghwI’.

  Koloth rose to his feet, gratified to note that they were steady beneath him. Likewise, all traces of his earlier vertigo had vanished. The pounding in his head and the fever, both parting gifts of the disease-ridden yIH, were conspicuously absent as well.

  My crew, he thought as he came more fully awake. Had they fared as well as he had?

  A flash of motion to his left caused him to tense into a combat crouch. He felt ridiculous an instant later when he realized that he had merely seen his own face reflected in the dull metal surface of one of the room’s enigmatic machines.

  But it was a face that bore an aspect he had never seen before. Wondering if some curvature in the metal was distorting his reflection, he approached to take a closer look.

  Koloth scowled into the image of his own surprise-stricken face, which had somehow become attached to a high, magnificently textured HemQuch forehead that might have made Kahless himself proud.

  He probed the front of his skull with both hands, felt the texture for himself. This was no optical illusion. And it was no artificial, surgically installed prosthetic device; he could feel his own warm, living flesh beneath his hands. His chest and shoulders likewise had changed, bulging with the characteristic ridges that were the birthright of all Klingons.

  Joy warred with terror. What has happened to me?

  “Captain Koloth?” said a voice, startling him out of his reverie.

  He turned toward the room’s force field–protected entrance. Just on its other side stood a pair of Klingon men, both several decades Koloth’s senior. They wore nondescript civilian work clothes rather than military uniforms, and both lacked the commanding bearing of a blooded warrior. But both men possessed the alert eyes of a hunting targ, prompting Koloth to tag them immediately as academics of some sort, probably physicians or research scientists.

  But although the two
men clearly shared similar occupations and social standing, they also possessed another superficial but instantly noticeable characteristic that contrasted them sharply with one another: the man on the right had a highly ridged forehead like Koloth’s own, which marked him as the product of a family line that had escaped exposure to both the First Qu’Vat Plague of the previous century, and to the unhappy genetic side effects associated with its cure. The other, slightly taller man was a QuchHa’, whose forehead was as baby-smooth as Koloth’s own had been prior to his exposure to the yIH illness.

  “Captain Koloth?” repeated the academic who stood on the right, the proud-browed man who had first called his name.

  Deciding that this man had to be the one in charge, Koloth said, “I am Koloth. And I would know who has asked.”

  The ridge-headed HemQuch man nodded and said, “Of course. I am Doctor Nej. This is my associate, Doctor Hurghom.”

  Koloth approached the energy field–protected entrance, coming to a stop just short of it. “NuqneH. I have heard those names before.”

  Koloth noted with interest that both men seemed a bit discomfited to hear that.

  “That is no doubt because of our past association with the House of Ngoj,” said the taller, smooth-headed scientist, the man Dr. Nej had identified as Dr. Hurghom.

  “No doubt,” Koloth said, nodding. Of course. Though it had occurred decades ago, the fall of the House of Ngoj, whose smooth-headed members had falsely passed themselves off as HemQuch in order to hang onto the perquisites of power in the High Council, had been publicized far and wide. Even now, despite the many social gains the less favored QuchHa’ had made during recent years, the Ngoj scandal still served as a cautionary tale explicating the dangers of trying to function above one’s station.

  “It is also not at all relevant,” Dr. Nej said, sounding nettled.