Forged in Fire Read online

Have I gone too far? Dax asked himself as he shifted his attention back to Kang. The whole affair had lasted less than a minute, but felt like an eternity.

  And then a brilliant flash of light and a loud noise obliterated Dax’s vision.

  Even as the explosion from within the Korvat conference chamber rocked the air, throwing Dax and the others off their feet, Dax heard screams and several more explosions originating from somewhere else nearby.

  Through barely focused eyes, he saw what appeared to be Koloth toppling forward onto one of Excelsior’s officers, a young man who sported a small but bright red circular tattoo between his eyes. The back of Koloth’s hair was burning, and as Dax breathed in, a lungful of acrid smoke and heated air told him that more than just the Klingon was afire.

  Panic overtaking him, Dax grasped the one lucid thought swirling through his mind.

  We’ve just been bombed.

  PART II:

  INTO THE FIRE

  When all else is lost, the future still remains.

  — Christian Nestell Bovee (1820–1904)

  FOURTEEN

  Stardate 9000.9 (Late 2289)

  Korvat

  Hikaru Sulu could smell his own singed hair for what seemed an eternity before he felt the prickly sensation of first-degree burns on the back of his neck. He heard far-off moaning and faint screams as he struggled to get his feet back underneath him, and saw several unconscious Excelsior security personnel and Klingons lying sprawled all around him. Others were picking themselves up, cradling their injured limbs. Smoke and embers floated through the air.

  What the hell just happened? Sulu thought groggily, but even as he turned to take in the devastation all around him, he knew. Through what was left of the conference room doors, he could see the conflagration that raged inside. We were attacked. Despite all of our precautions.

  A Klingon warrior pushed past him to run into the center of the chamber, and in that instant, Sulu saw other movement inside the room. Rescue them, a frantic voice inside his mind screamed at him, making itself louder than anything else he was hearing. He moved to reenter the chamber and flipped open the communicator that had miraculously stayed attached to the belt on his dress uniform.

  “Sulu to Excelsior! We have an emergency! The conference has been bombed!” He couldn’t hear anything in response, and he could tell that his hearing had been badly compromised. As two Klingons began dragging bodies out of the hall, Sulu fumbled along the wall for one of the fire extinguishers he had seen earlier in the day. As he drew nearer to where the devices should have been, the lingering smoke and ash thickened. He tripped over a body and went down on one knee.

  Through the hazy air, he could see that the body was that of Dr. Klass, her jacket melted away over her shoulder, and her right arm smoldering. He couldn’t tell whether she was unconscious or dead, but he struggled back to his feet and began dragging her back toward the doorway.

  Another body knocked into him, and he whirled to see Cutler, her uniform and hair disheveled, her face streaked with soot. She began yelling something at him, but he couldn’t understand her. She stopped yelling and began to cough violently, then sprinted away, moving farther into the smoke-filled chamber.

  Sulu felt a hand on his arm, and he turned to see Lieutenant Lojur, the Halkan navigator who had chosen to work with the security detail despite his people’s pacifistic tendencies. Lojur said something incomprehensible, then stooped to pick up Dr. Klass and began carrying her outside. Satisfied that he could do no more for Klass than Lojur was already doing, Sulu turned back toward the conference tables. The initial conflagration appeared already to have burned itself out, probably already having consumed most of the oxygen necessary to sustain it. But the air remained thick with smoke and redolent of charred furniture and flesh.

  As he neared the shattered, burned-out remains of the conference table, he saw a familiar figure swaddled in ceremonial robes, struggling to rise from a pile of smoking debris. Sarek! Sulu was immediately at his side, but was distressed to see green blood seeping from between the Vulcan’s fingers, which were pressed to the side of his neck. Sulu ducked under the ambassador’s other arm and began helping him toward the exit. Keeping an eye on the floor, Sulu saw the mangled torso of Sarek’s assistant, Dostara, lying in a pool of scorched green blood, clearly beyond all help. Lieutenant Commander Lahra, her face frozen in a mask of wide-eyed surprise, her neck bent almost at a right angle to the rest her body, lay unmoving on the floor nearby.

  More Klingons rushed into the chamber, then nearly bowled Sulu and Sarek over as they tried to make their way back toward the exit. A moment later Sulu noticed that several other Klingon guards that had been in the hall earlier were hurriedly transporting a body out with them, moving with grace and discipline despite their many burns, bleeding wounds, and melted armor.

  He recognized the body they carried as that of Ambassador Kamarag. He doesn’t look good, Sulu thought grimly. Nobody who was inside looks good.

  In the outer hallway, Sulu saw the smoke-distorted curtain of a transporter beam herald the arrival of a medical team from Excelsior. He recognized Dr. Harburg and Nurse Edwards among them, and, of course, Dr. Chapel. “Christine, take care of Sarek,” he yelled, his voice sounding too loud as it resonated inside his own head; he had no clue how loud it sounded to the team, especially given the chaos that still swirled all around.

  Ensign Leonard James Akaar, the Capellan junior security officer, entered the chamber alongside Sulu even as the Klingons removed still more bodies. Sulu recognized among them Joqel, a moderately inclined Klingon politician whom Sarek had hoped to sway. With Joqel now missing a third of his face, Sulu doubted that he was even alive any longer, much less capable of conducting any diplomacy.

  Akaar grabbed Sulu’s arm, steering him toward the right, where the Excelsior staff had been stationed while the delegates were meeting. Sulu saw Cutler there, bent over a body, apparently trying to perform CPR on it. That’s not especially useful when there’s so little breathable air in the room, Sulu thought.

  Then, as Akaar lifted another nearby limp body as though it weighed little more than a rag doll, Sulu saw the face of the person Cutler was working so desperately to save. Captain Styles was barely recognizable. His hair was mostly burned off, his face charred and blackened. Sulu quickly knelt, feeling at the side of Styles’s neck for any sign of life. His hand encountered a jelly-like wetness instead of firm flesh.

  Cutler looked up, made eye contact with Sulu, and immediately began to yell in his face. He couldn’t quite make out all the words, but it was clear that she was distraught and angry — almost venomous — from the way she was screaming at him.

  “Let’s get the captain out of here,” he shouted back.

  She punched him in the side of the face then, hard. He heard a pop, and then a rush of sounds filled his head. “— your fault, you bastard!”

  He saw that Cutler was about to wind her arm up for another blow, and quickly drove his palm upward under her chin. Cutler fell backward, her legs kicking out from under her as she thudded onto the debris-strewn floor beside where Styles lay.

  “Let me help you, sir,” he heard a voice say. He looked up to see the bearded Lieutenant Eric Braun squatting near Captain Styles’s head. Another movement drew Sulu’s eye to his left side, where he saw an Andorian crouching to grab the captain’s legs. A moment later, and they had hoisted Excelsior’s grievously injured — dead? — commanding officer up and were ferrying him quickly toward the conference room door.

  Sulu stood and moved over to Cutler, who was now sitting on the floor, looking disoriented. Extending his hand toward her, he shouted, “Meredith, we’ve got to find out what happened. And how it happened.”

  She glared up at him, her eyes twin orbs of incongruous whiteness in the soot-darkened air. “You’re blaming me?”

  Sulu reextended his hand, emphatically. “There’s no blame to be placed at the moment. But there’s plenty of chaos to get under control. We do
n’t know if more attacks are coming.”

  Cutler grasped his hand and pulled herself up without saying anything further. Together, along with the Klingons and Starfleet security, they quickly continued to survey the chamber for more survivors . . . or more casualties.

  • • •

  The death toll from the attack was high. Two diplomatic aides and Joqel were dead on the Klingon side, while both Captain Styles and Dostara had died from the injuries they’d received in the explosion. Sulu was barely cognizant of the fact that he was now in command of Excelsior— or at least would be when he returned to the ship.

  Many more had been injured, among them Dr. Klass, Ambassador Sarek, and Ambassador Kamarag. Surprisingly, the other Klingons had agreed to allow Dr. Chapel to beam Kamarag to Excelsior’s sickbay along with the other injured; being firmly indoctrinated into the Klingon ethos that granted survival only to the strong, the Korvat colony possessed substandard medical facilities, and those aboard the Klingon battle cruisers in orbit above Korvat were probably not much better equipped to handle so many burn and trauma victims.

  Those that were left on Korvat now were completely on edge and quite literally shell-shocked. Both the Klingon and Federation security teams were searching the complex with every scanning device available to find traces of the weaponry — or the saboteurs — that had caused the explosions.

  The detonation in the main meeting hall was not the only destruction that had been visited on the conference complex, as the security teams had soon found out; there had been a number of smaller explosions throughout the sprawling building, including several in the adjacent chambers that had been converted into private meeting rooms and temporary quarters. Several more dead security personnel had been found as well, far away from any of the blasts.

  “How did the bombs get through all of our security protocols, Commander?” Sulu asked Cutler, even as Kor, Koloth, and Kang glowered behind him.

  Cutler shifted uneasily from foot to foot, staring down at the tricorder in her hands. “We don’t know, sir. So far, we’ve found multiple chemical traces, all consistent with standard explosive materials, as well as the remnants of a device that might have been a small cloaking mechanism.”

  “Were any bioagents released?” Sulu asked. He saw Koloth give him a startled look.

  Cutler’s expression was more withering than startled. “No, sir. As far as I can determine, this was not a biological attack, but purely an act of conventional terrorism, or at least sabotage and murder.”

  “So, the one who threatened us might not be the one responsible for this after all,” Kor said to Koloth.

  Cutler’s veiled slight immediately forgotten, Sulu whirled around. “What are you saying? You knew there was the possibility of an attack?”

  Koloth squared his shoulders. “In some sectors of the Empire, there is always the possibility of an attack. But we had received a warning that somebody might strike at this conference with biochemical weapons.”

  Sulu thought he could feel the blood vessels in his forehead constrict as his blood pressure rose. “You knew about this and didn’t tell us?”

  Kang stepped forward menacingly. “You apparently knew about a similar threat and didn’t tell us,” he said. “But we are not surprised by your apparent foreknowledge, given all the extra precautions you took with security.” He grimaced, looking around. “Not that it did any good.”

  Outside of the attacks themselves, Sulu wasn’t sure what to be angrier about: Cutler’s insubordinate attitude or the fact that the Klingons had played the same game with the Federation representatives that Styles had played with the Klingons.

  “If the saboteur had an accomplice working among you Earthers, the odds are that it would be this Trill,” Kang said, pointing toward Dax, who was standing a few feet away.

  “How do you figure?” Sulu asked, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice.

  “He conveniently left the room just before the blast,” Kor said. “He may even have triggered it remotely.”

  Dax stepped toward the Klingons, drawing himself to his full stature, which was still considerably less than Kang’s. “There were three others who left the room when I did. Three others who’ve demonstrated that they don’t care for the idea of peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. It seems just as likely that they could be responsible for this attack.”

  “Take care, whelp,” Koloth growled. “You overstep your bounds at your peril. Remember, your senior ambassador isn’t here to protect you now.”

  “So, finally the d’akturak shows some real emotion,” Dax said, moving closer to Koloth. “I thought you were made entirely of ice. But I don’t need Sarek to protect me. I can fight my own battles if necessary, or bring peace — if such a thing is even possible.”

  Sulu held up his hands. “Gentlemen! May I remind you all that both sides have taken losses in this attack. Neither the Federation nor the Empire is unscathed. So we have to put our differences aside and go after whoever really is responsible for the bombing.”

  Sulu watched as the three Klingons and Dax regarded him silently for an instant or two, and he thought he felt at least a little bit of the tension between them begin to wane.

  “Commander, we have new information,” Cutler said from behind Sulu. During the confrontation between the three warriors and Dax, Sulu had nearly forgotten the presence of his own personal nemesis.

  He turned and saw that Lieutenant Braun had returned with a handheld security scanner, which he was showing to Cutler.

  “Well, what is it?” Sulu asked, perhaps a bit more impatiently than he had intended.

  “The other bombs also disabled the building’s deflector shield and transporter inhibitors,” Braun said. “And we’ve detected a recent transporter trace, indicating that someone may have been beamed out of the building immediately following the detonations.”

  Cutler swallowed. “You mean to tell me we’ve been unshielded for the last ten minutes? And that anybody, or anything, could be beamed down among us, not just from Excelsior or the Klingon vessels?”

  “I think so,” Braun said, looking uncomfortable.

  Sulu felt something inside him bend almost to the breaking point. “Commander Cutler, get every available person to work restoring the conference center’s shield generators. Now!” As Cutler and Braun hastened to carry out his orders, Sulu flipped open his communicator.

  “Sulu to Excelsior.”

  “Rand here, Commander.”

  “We’ve discovered that shields are down for the entire complex. I’m ordering an emergency evacuation, giving priority to all the injured and the VIPs.”

  “Understood, Commander.”

  “Once that’s finished, I’ll need you to beam down some portable shield generators and related components immediately. Commander Cutler will give you the specifics. We’ll need a few volunteers to get this place’s defenses back online.”

  As the three Klingons contacted their own ships, presumably to relay similar orders to their own respective crews, Sulu felt a chill of realization abruptly turn his spine to ice.

  Whoever had attacked them — and he remained certain even without any overt signs of bioterrorism that the albino was the one responsible — apparently could finish what he’d begun at any moment. Why hasn’t he done it yet? And what’s his next move going to be?

  Sulu couldn’t even begin to guess at the answers. All he could do was hope that his own people and the Klingons could complete the emergency evacuation and raise the Korvat complex’s defenses before a second attack completed the job that the first one had started.

  FIFTEEN

  Stardate 9000.9 (Late 2289)

  The freebooter ship Hegh’TlhoS, near Korvat

  Qagh felt his weight return as his atoms were finally reassembled on the transporter platform. With no support, however — and thanks to his injury — he pitched forward toward the deck. Only the quick intervention of Dr. Nej, who had operated the controls during the beam
-up, prevented him from toppling face-first into the operator’s console.

  “Are you all right?” Nej said, concern creasing his face as he helped Qagh settle himself into a seated position on the platform’s edge.

  “I was injured when I set off the last charge,” the albino said, wincing at the pain in his side. “And it seemed as if something went wrong with the matter stream during the transport process.”

  Nej paled slightly. “I’m afraid that it did. Something was interfering with the signal and the mirror relays you set up to allow your beam-out while maintaining our cloak.”

  “How long was I hung up in transit?”

  “For nearly twelve tups, sir.”

  Qagh nodded numbly. The fact that he had reassembled at all after such a considerable length of time was probably a miracle in itself. That, combined with the fact that his mission to personally sabotage the Korvat peace talks — including setting off the bombs while he was still on-site, in order to defeat any effort on Starfleet’s part to jam an incoming “detonate” signal — had gone mostly without a hitch, told him that he was riding the ragged edge of his luck.

  That, of course, was nothing new for a man whose very existence had for decades depended upon frequent and repeated medical miracles.

  “You’re bleeding,” Nej said as he reached for one of the emergency medical kits that were stowed in one of the wall cubbies.

  The albino looked down to see the bloodstains soiling his right side. He gingerly pulled his shredded Klingon military tunic away from the wound. His disguise had allowed him to do his work on the planet below undetected for most of the past three days. It had only been near the end of that time, when one of the Klingon guards had apparently spotted him in his peripheral vision, that he had been caught. The resulting hand-to-hand combat had been swift and brutal, leaving Qagh not only with his facial disguise torn off but also with a deep wound in his side, scant moments before he had succeeded in both dispatching the guard and detonating the final bomb.