Forged in Fire Page 17

  He stifled a groan as Nej wiped away some of the blood in an attempt to apply a pressure bandage. “Sorry,” the physician said, wincing empathetically as he saw the pain on Qagh’s face.

  “That’s fine,” Qagh said. “Help me get to the main control room. I need to find out if anyone survived down there. And finish what I started now that the shields are down in the conference complex.”

  Qagh allowed Nej to put an arm around his shoulder, and they made their way together along the freighter’s narrow, winding corridors. At the control room door, the albino disentangled his arm and steadied himself against the adjacent wall. Although renewed waves of pain lanced through his wounded side, he ignored it and straightened his posture, unwilling to appear weak before his men, his chronic ailments notwithstanding.

  The door slid open, and Qagh entered the command deck. “Give me a status report!” he barked at the four crewmen working the controls.

  “We withheld firing until we were certain that Doctor Nej had exhausted all of his options in attempting to beam you back aboard,” Messebs, the helmsman, said.

  Qagh wondered how much longer Messebs would have held his fire had the rematerialization process taken even longer, then dismissed the issue as unimportant, at least for now. After all, Messebs’s blood carried one of Qagh’s designer viruses, as did the rest of the crew. Therefore the helmsman would have been powerfully motivated not to jeopardize his only source of the counteragents that prevented that virus from taking its lethal course. Such was the stuff of loyalty.

  “How much damage did my bombs do?” Qagh asked Messebs and moved toward the centrally mounted command chair. He carefully controlled his facial muscles so as to avoid wincing visibly.

  “According to our scans,” said Koro, the Orion who was working an adjacent console, “both the Federation and Klingon contingents took several casualties, but we’re reading the life signs of many survivors as well, in addition to some transporter traffic between the planet’s surface and the Federation starship. The explosives seem to have caused severe structural damage to the conference chambers.”

  Qagh cursed under his breath. He had been hoping for far more extensive losses among both the Klingon and Federation diplomatic teams. “Lock our disruptors on the main conference chambers. Fire at will and finish them off.”

  Koro gulped audibly. “Sir, the facility’s shields went back up about two tups ago. We can lock onto other targets on the surface, but the conference site itself is too well protected for us to do any real damage to it from orbit. At least, not without revealing our location to the Klingon patrol ships and Excelsior.”

  Grinding his back teeth, the albino considered his dwindling set of options. The fact that his bombs had not succeeded in completely destroying the conference chamber and its adjacent buildings was frustrating, to put it mildly. Both Qagh and his crew were keenly aware that a Klingon-Federation peace treaty — and its concomitant introduction of widespread law and order — would ultimately destroy their livelihood, or at least drive them out of the sectors in which they had been carrying out the bulk of their activities for years.

  Worse, without the raids on scientific facilities that Qagh sprinkled judiciously among his more traditional pirating operations — such as the assault on a Mempa system facility that he planned to execute shortly after concluding his business on Korvat — he might lose access to the biomedical resources and other emerging technologies that had always enabled him, however precariously, to maintain his grip on life itself.

  “Have any of the other ships scanned us yet?” he asked, his mind reeling.

  Koro shook his head. “They’re definitely scanning the space immediately surrounding the planet, but our cloak continues to evade their sensors, at least so far as I can tell. As far as we know, they have not yet detected us in any fashion.”

  An idea suddenly blazed very brightly in Qagh’s brain. “Get us into position between the Federation ship and the four Klingon vessels,” he said, leaning forward and ignoring the sticky wetness along the margins of the pressure bandage at his side. “One-tenth impulse power. Make sure we don’t show up on their scans.”

  Messebs gave him a questioning look, but nodded and returned his full attention to the controls before him.

  Whoever survived below will be returning to the ships above, Qagh thought. They will have to lower their shields to do that, and since we’ve given them no reason to believe that we’re still here, they probably won’t wait much longer to make themselves vulnerable. Then I can finish the job that I started on Korvat. He knew that his nascent plan might appear foolhardy. But he also understood that no victory could be won without risk.

  Besides, he would have already achieved partial success even if he decided to slink quietly away now. I’ve already disrupted the peace talks, he thought. If I succeed in inflicting even further damage, then that may be enough to create enmity between the Federation and the Klingon Empire that will last for generations.

  A brief time later, as the Hegh’TlhoS maneuvered closer to her prey, Qagh saw something — or at least he thought he saw something — that made his heart race.

  “Magnify the image of the nearest Klingon vessel,” he said.

  The image on the screen was unmistakable. Along the flat dorsal section of the closest Klingon battle cruiser’s secondary hull was graven the very familiar pictographic markings designating the specific Great House that the vessel represented, in addition to the ubiquitous red-and-black trefoil insignia that proclaimed her more general loyalty to the Klingon Empire’s military hierarchy. The House-related markings were a perfect match with those on the iron baby-blanket clasp that he’d kept hidden for years in his quarters, the only tangible remnant of his personal family heritage.

  That ship is allied with the House of Ngoj, Qagh thought. A House whose fortunes have finally begun to improve, it would seem.

  A House whose holdings rightfully ought to be mine.

  If he had needed any more justification to carry out a follow-up attack, then it had just been delivered to him, and gift-wrapped to boot. This fight, he thought, has just become personal.

  SIXTEEN

  Stardate 9000.9 (Late 2289)

  U.S.S. Excelsior

  “We’ve mopped up down here about as much as we’re able to,” Commander Sulu said, wiping soot from his face. “But Commander Cutler and the science teams will continue sifting through the ashes for forensic evidence. Have your scans shown any further transporter traces?”

  Lieutenant Commander Rand shook her head, staring at the forward viewscreen on Excelsior’s bridge. “None, Commander. We thought we caught a faint glimmer of one less than an hour ago, but it was so scattered and diffuse that it could have just been random ionization in the upper atmosphere.”

  Sulu frowned. “In the atmosphere? Not on the surface?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rand said, nodding.

  Sulu turned to speak loudly to a nearby group of Klingons. Rand couldn’t see their faces, only parts of their heavily armored leather garb. “We may be safe in assuming we’re up against a cloaked ship in orbit, rather than just attackers on the surface,” she heard him say.

  “Have you found any evidence of this?” one of the Klingons said.

  “Nothing definitive,” said Sulu. “But it might be wise to tell your ships to raise their shields just the same.”

  Rand didn’t need to wait for Sulu to give her the same command. She leaned forward in the captain’s chair, tension gripping her. “Raise shields!” she said to Lieutenant Heather Keith, the helmsman on duty.

  “Aye, sir,” Keith responded smartly as she pressed a sequence of buttons on the console in front of her.

  “Commander, a ship has just decloaked between us and the Klingons,” Lieutenant Valtane shouted from his science station. “They’re opening fire!”

  “On-screen!” Rand barked.

  Sulu’s surprised face was replaced by a view of the space immediately surrounding Excelsior, as well
as the five other ships that now shared it with her. Until moments ago, Kor’s ship, the I.K.S. Klothos, had been the closest to them, then Ambassador Kamarag’s diplomatic ship, the I.K.S. Mev’Luh. But now, a smaller ship had maneuvered between Excelsior and the contingent of Klingon vessels.

  In the instant or so before the interloper fired what was apparently its second salvo, Rand tried and failed to identify the hostile ship’s configuration. It had a scavenged appearance, as though it had been assembled from several vessels of disparate design. Nevertheless, it looked quick and dangerous.

  “Come about!” she ordered, immediately understanding that she had but one option. “Target the attacking ship. Full phasers.”

  Even as Keith and the other bridge personnel scrambled to obey her commands, she saw three — no, five — plasma flares shoot out of the small ship in rapid succession. Two of them ripped into the aft end of the Klothos, which appeared to have been turning toward its attacker.

  To Rand’s horror, the other three blasts hit the Mev’Luh, which was already burning in one spot almost directly amidships, apparently as a result of the attacking ship’s opening salvo. More explosions raged along the diplomatic vessel’s hull, the escaping atmosphere igniting, then quickly extinguishing and forming clouds of fine ice crystals in the cold vacuum of space.

  “Firing,” Schulman called out from tactical.

  Rand saw two sapphire-blue phaser blasts lance out toward the small raider, which had already begun rolling out of the way at a near-ninety-degree angle, barely evading the beams. Shit, they’re fast, she thought.

  On the viewer, the other two Klingon battle cruisers — Kang’s I.K.S. QaD and Koloth’s I.K.S. Gal’tagh— were both coming about, their weapons tubes glowing menacingly as they launched photon torpedoes toward the swiftly careening enemy ship. Unfortunately, their weapons proved no better at striking their target than Excelsior’s phasers had been.

  The small ship rolled again, turning tightly so that it was headed directly toward the Gal’tagh, from which it couldn’t have been more than a few dozen meters distant.

  As the much larger Klothos seemed to wallow helplessly, Rand could see what the little raider was trying to do. “They’re cutting toward Captain Koloth’s ship,” she shouted. “We have to catch them in a crossfire before they maneuver the Klingons into firing on each other.”

  “Locking phasers,” Schulman said.

  “Fire,” Rand ordered.

  But even as four phaser blasts from Excelsior arced toward the aggressor, the smaller ship sent what appeared to be a wide-scattered salvo from some sort of plasma weapon toward both the QaD and the Gal’tagh.

  Two of the blasts from Excelsior caught the aggressor ship on her port side, resulting in an explosion on the aft section of its hull; Rand hoped she’d scored a hit on the raider’s propulsion system.

  Unfortunately, in trying to evade the plasma charges, the Gal’tagh flew directly into the path of the Klothos, on an apparent collision course. Rand imagined she could almost hear the scrape of duranium on duranium as the two vessels passed with scarcely any space between them, their shields interacting to form a brilliant if momentary aurora as the hostile vessel unloaded a potent salvo of weapons fire inside its opponent’s shield perimeter. The ventral portion of the Klothos’s starboard nacelle spun away a split second later, her right disruptor cannon shattering incandescently into the void.

  The QaD was not quite as lucky, having caught an entire plasma blast near its aft side, where Rand imagined its deflector-shield generators were situated.

  Now they’re a sitting duck, Rand thought. Then she saw that the attacking ship was once again abruptly changing direction, trailing hull debris and molecular flames after having avoided a mutually fatal collision by the narrowest of margins.

  “Target them again,” she said. “Cripple them if you can. I want to find out who we’re dealing with.”

  “They’re headed directly for the Mev’Luh, Commander,” Keith said, the alarm in her voice as audible as a Red Alert klaxon.

  Why would they risk doing that? Rand asked herself. After all, the diplomatic ship was already in flames.

  Then something else occurred to her. She’s a diplomatic ship. A symbol of what the Korvat conference represents. And she’s right in our line of fire.

  “Hold your fire!” she shouted. If the attacker thought it could manipulate Excelsior into making him a martyr and destroying the Mev’Luh in the process, they’d not planned very well at all.

  “They’re still heading straight for the Mev’Luh, sir,” Valtane said with an urgency Rand rarely heard coming from the sedate junior science officer. “But they’ve powered down their weapons!”

  On the screen, Rand saw the attacker moving inexorably closer and closer to the burning hulk of the Mev’Luh. Turn away, she thought, feeling helpless as she gripped the arms of the command chair. Turn away!

  But the raider didn’t turn away. An instant later the viewscreen emitted a momentarily blinding brilliance as a huge explosion tore through the space where the Mev’Luh had been.

  Rand saw spots before her eyes and tried to blink them away even as the viewscreen automatically damped down the excess light. “Status?”

  “They put all their power into propulsion and forward shields just before impact, Commander,” Valtane said. “Even if we’d opened fire we wouldn’t have been able to avert the collision.”

  If there really was a collision, Rand thought. Given the tactics she’d already seen the hostile using, she wasn’t ready to dismiss the possibility that he had simply staged another near collision before opening fire once again and activating a cloaking device. “Begin full sensor sweeps,” she said aloud as she rose to her feet. “I want to make sure the attacker didn’t get away under the cover of that explosion.”

  “I’m reading debris from the Mev’Luh,” Schulman said. “But I can’t find any sign of the attacker’s vessel so far.”

  “See if you can find any weapons or propulsion signatures in the debris field.” Rand knew that her second order was probably useless, but she had no choice other than to try it.

  “Sensors show plasma weapons fire,” Valtane said.

  Rand nodded somberly. Damn. I was really hoping the bastard would at least do us the favor of blowing himself up. “Not exactly standard issue for the Klingon military, or their diplomatic corps,” she said aloud.

  Ensign Ramiro Marquez spoke up from the back of the bridge. “Commander Rand, Commander Sulu wants a status report.”

  Rand sighed heavily before sinking back into the command chair. Today had not been a terribly good day. “Put him on the screen,” she said, squaring her shoulders.

  When she saw the fiercely angry expressions of the three Klingon captains who were standing around Sulu, she realized just how much of an understatement “not terribly good” really was.

  • • •

  “You must go after them!” Kor shouted, his deep voice reverberating throughout Excelsior’s conference room.

  Sulu had begun to regret the return of his hearing. Gritting his teeth, he said, “I want to, Kor, but your government might see that as another incursion into Klingon territory. And my superiors would have some very strong words to say about it as well.” Admiral Harriman had already shared a few choice ones with him on the topic via subspace radio.

  “Yours is the only military vessel in this system that is undamaged and running at full capacity,” Koloth said angrily. “It is your duty to avenge this wrong.”

  “My duty right now is to take care of the injured personnel — from my side and yours — from the Korvat conference,” Sulu said. “I will place Excelsior’s entire engineering department at your disposal to help your crews repair your ships. Then you can pursue the attacker without risking war.”

  All three of the Klingon escort ships had been badly damaged in the fight against the small, weapons-heavy ship, while Ambassador Kamarag’s diplomatic vessel, the I.K.S. Mev’Luh, had been com
pletely destroyed. Luckily, Excelsior’s science teams had managed to find a trail left by the attacking ship, beginning some fourteen light-minutes away from the explosion, leading away from the Korvat system on a northerly outbound trajectory. Apparently the raider’s once-working cloaking device was no longer operational, but the vessel had sped off quickly regardless — its warp capability apparently unharmed — on a heading that would take it deeper into Klingon territory.

  “We do not need the assistance of cowards who are afraid to make a move without permission,” Kang said dismissively. “If you cannot be a warrior even when attacked, then you are useless, even to your own craven Federation.”

  Curzon Dax, who was filling in as head of the Federation negotiating team while Ambassador Sarek remained critically injured, chose that moment to stand up. “Ylmev!” he barked, crying, “Stop!” in what could only have been tlhIngan. At least that was what Sulu hoped the young Trill had just said as all three Klingon captains turned to regard the junior ambassador with angry, smoldering eyes.

  “You ask the commander to dishonor his ship and his crew by disobeying his superiors?” Dax asked with an admirable touch of bluster. “To risk war with the Empire over an attack by a third party? A war that could bring shame on all of your Houses if begun for the wrong reasons? Consider instead how much more honor you could all accrue by allowing Commander Sulu to assist you in repairing your vessels so that you may capture the attacker yourselves.”

  Sulu was pleased to see that Dax’s words seemed to be getting through to the Klingons. At least they don’t look as if they want to break him in half anymore, he thought. He had considered Dax a bit reckless just before the explosion in the Korvat conference chamber, but now it seemed as though the young man was beginning to build a very narrow but almost serviceable bridge of trust.

  But would that bridge bear the weight of one Trill diplomat and three Klingon captains?