Forged in Fire Page 18

“Commander Sulu has lost much as well,” Dax continued. “He has even lost the captain of his ship to whoever committed this act of wanton murder and sabotage, as well as other members of his crew. But he is not running away from this battle. Rather, he is offering to help you to win the greatest honor available to you — the chance to track down and stop the person responsible for this cowardly sabotage.”

  A long period passed, perhaps an entire minute during which no one spoke.

  “We will return to our ships and accept your help,” Koloth said finally, giving a sidelong glance toward the other two captains. “And we will have our vengeance.”

  Despite the horrors of the day, Sulu thought he felt a small, astonished smile coming to his lips. Dax had reasoned with the Klingons.

  And they had listened.

  SEVENTEEN

  Stardate 9001.0 (New Year’s Day, 2290)

  U.S.S. Excelsior

  I’ve wanted this ever since the first time I laid eyes on this ship, Sulu thought as he stood in the bridge’s raised center, staring contemplatively at the sleek, blue-padded, ergonomic chair that dominated it. But not like this.

  Never like this.

  “Have a seat, Hikaru.” Janice Rand, speaking so quietly that her voice was nearly lost amid the low background hum of the various bridge instruments, had sneaked up on him somehow. She now stood directly behind the empty center seat, as though she had just materialized there. “It’s where you belong now.”

  Though it was immediately in front of him, the command chair had suddenly taken on the aspect of an impossibly distant mountain peak. And he knew that he had been scaling that mountain, in some fashion or other, for his entire Starfleet career.

  The summit he had worked so hard to reach belonged to him now — unless and until Starfleet Command told him differently.

  Very slowly, and with a deference that bordered on reverence, he sat.

  Of course, this wasn’t the first time he had occupied Excelsior’s center seat; as the ship’s executive officer, he had logged quite a few hours here during Captain Styles’s absences from the bridge. But this was very different.

  “How does it feel?” Rand asked quietly.

  Sulu swiveled the chair slowly, taking in most of the bridge in a single sweeping glance as he moved. The officers who toiled attentively at their various stations appeared neither to be eavesdropping on his conversation with Rand nor to be even aware of it.

  “Ask me again later, Janice,” he said. “After things settle down around here.” It occurred to him that his abrupt transition from exec to commanding officer might have been easier to manage had Lawrence H. Styles been someone he’d actually liked.

  “By the way, Captain,” Rand said, “Happy New Year.”

  He studied her quizzically for a moment, as though she had just sprouted a second head that sang Gilbert and Sullivan. Then a quick downward glance at the chronometer in the arm of his chair confirmed that she hadn’t delivered a bizarre non sequitur. Back in San Francisco, his birthplace and the home of Starfleet Headquarters, the midnight hour had just struck, ringing in the Gregorian year 2290.

  Being addressed as “Captain,” however — a courtesy that tradition accorded any senior officer in overall command, regardless of actual rank — would probably take a little longer to get used to.

  Sulu smiled gently. “Ganjitsu,” he said, using the Japanese word for “New Year’s Day,” which never failed to make him think of the namesake border world where he and his parents had lived for a few short years during his childhood.

  Before he could satisfy Rand’s quizzical look with an explanation, the portside turbolift doors hissed open behind him. He turned in time to see Cutler step onto the bridge.

  “Situation report, Commander,” he said to her as she approached; the simple positive act of getting down to business immediately seemed to be the best therapy he could ask for right now.

  Rand retreated quietly to her starboard aft communications station as Excelsior’s de facto executive officer took up a position facing Sulu from the command chair’s starboard side.

  Cutler nodded. “I’ve just come back from sickbay, so that’s as good a place as any to start. Doctor Chapel is running things while Doctor Klass is injured, but she has her hands full down there.”

  “How is Doctor Klass?”

  Cutler sighed. “She took a good deal of blunt force trauma from the blast. She’s in a coma.”

  “Judith’s a strong woman,” Sulu said, for his own benefit as much as for the morale of the crew. “She’ll pull through.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Cutler’s brow furrowed deeply. “Unfortunately, despite the help of Doctor Hurghom — that’s Captain Kor’s chief medical officer — the trauma teams haven’t been able to stabilize Ambassador Kamarag yet. He’s still in pretty touch-and-go shape, and Chapel says he can’t be moved.”

  “Kor and Kang and Koloth might not want to accept that,” Sulu said.

  “That’s their prerogative, I suppose,” Cutler said. “But judging from what I’ve seen so far, even the toughest Klingon might want to think twice before getting between Doctor Chapel and her patients.”

  “What about the rest of the Klingon delegation?” Sulu wanted to know.

  “Lower-ambassador Kishlat is in essentially the same condition as Kamarag. Chapel and Hurghom are keeping him alive, but he’s sustained such extensive injuries that Hurghom tells me that he’ll probably take his own life if he ever regains consciousness.”

  “What?” Sulu asked, perplexed.

  “Evidently it’s a warrior thing, at least according to Ambassador Dax.”

  “What about Ambassador Sarek?”

  “He’s doing better, but not by much. He’s stable at least, but he’s been burned very badly. The fire scorched his lungs and vocal chords as well.”

  Sulu nodded gravely. “What’s the mortality report so far?”

  Cutler shook her head. “Since the bombing, we’ve lost three more of the Klingons who were down at the conference, plus another one of our guards. This is in addition to Captain Styles, Chief Engineer Lahra, and two other Excelsior security personnel. Plus Joqel, the two Klingon diplomatic aides, and Sarek’s own aide, Dostara.”

  Sulu felt as if a tremendous weight were crushing him — the weight of a command he had long anticipated and for which he nevertheless still felt unaccountably unprepared. Of course, even with Styles’s death, he was keenly aware that his command of Excelsior might end the moment he set foot on a Federation starbase. Or perhaps sooner, if he didn’t immediately take every action necessary to clean up the disaster that the Korvat peace talks had become.

  Cutler continued making her report in crisp, businesslike tones. “Lieutenant Commander Henry is leading the engineering teams in assisting the Klingon escort ships with their repairs. The teams have all been deployed, and the work should be substantially complete in another eighteen to twenty-four hours, depending on variables related to Klingon technology. And behavior.”

  “Good,” Sulu said. He felt enormous empathy for Tim Henry, whose situation was very much like his own; Henry had been forced to take over Excelsior’s engineering department immediately after Chief Engineer Lahra’s death down on Korvat.

  He leaned forward, staring ahead at the viewer, which displayed the planet’s ocher, pockmarked face, bisected by the terminator that divided night from day. “Commander Rand, please open a channel to our team down on the surface.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Rand said.

  It suddenly occurred to Sulu that Cutler had yet to address him that way — as “Captain.” For the sake of discipline within Excelsior’s newly revised chain of command, he hoped that wasn’t going to become a problem, though he suspected that was probably too much to hope for. After all, she had already all but accused him of having a hand in Captain Styles’s death. She’s mourning her captain, he reminded himself, cutting her some slack. Cutler was in shock, though Sulu doubted she’d admit it under any circumstances.<
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  A resonant basso voice boomed over the intercom. “Ensign Akaar, Captain.”

  “Has your team found anything new down there, Ensign?” Sulu wanted to know.

  “We have discovered how the attacker got his weapons into the building,” said the young Capellan security officer. Over the comm speakers, he sounded much more authoritative than his twenty-two years should have made possible.

  “I thought we already knew that,” Sulu said. “Didn’t you already find traces of a small cloaking device?”

  “That is how the weapons were hidden, Captain,” Akaar said. “But not the saboteur or saboteurs. We have found the residue of a biomimetic compound on some of the wreckage. We believe our bomber used it to disguise himself.”

  “But everyone in the Klingon party had to have undergone identity scans,” Sulu said. “Even with a really good cosmetic disguise, a saboteur couldn’t have gotten in.”

  “I doubt that cosmetic disguises were the only tools the bomber had at his disposal, Captain,” Akaar said. “We have also found organic traces in the bombs’ remnants, which may explain why they were not detected by our earlier security scans. We have found nothing else so far, but we shall continue searching for whatever other forensic data the rubble will yield for as long as possible.”

  “Good work, Ensign. Carry on. Excelsior out.”

  “Biomimetic materials, miniature cloaks, organic bombs . . . our saboteur seems to be awfully proficient in the sciences,” Sulu said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Or at least in technology.”

  “And it’s all pretty cutting edge stuff, too,” Valtane said from the bridge’s main science console, sounding almost impressed. “Whoever did this broke several Federation laws just by assembling the tools of his trade, let alone carrying out the actual attack. Who knows what sort of biotechnology Klingon scientists are developing, though, or whether they try to control trafficking in materials like this the way we do?”

  An idea suddenly occurred to Sulu. “Would any DNA traces be left in the biomimetic compound?”

  “We’re already searching for DNA strands,” Valtane said. “Unfortunately, whatever nucleic acids might remain in the residue have been pretty thoroughly torn apart by the heat released by the detonating bombs. But if we do find enough to replicate into measurable quantities with a polymerase chain reaction, we should be able to tell a lot more about our mysterious attackers. At the very least, we’ll know their species. And we might even learn a lot more than that.”

  “How soon before we have an answer?” Sulu asked.

  Valtane looked glum. “It might take a while, sir.”

  Sulu turned toward Cutler, who was watching him with a hard-to-read expression that Sulu decided was one of quiet appraisal. He decided then that the best way to keep her in line was to keep her engaged — not to mention busy.

  “Commander Cutler, I want you to continue overseeing the forensic investigation and report directly to me on its progress. And keep looking for any sort of warp trail that the attacker’s ship might have left when it fled. We can use that to pinpoint the vessel’s present location, which is more than likely somewhere in Klingon territory.”

  She scowled. “Aye, sir. But we’re under orders not to pursue the hostiles into Klingon space.”

  “Yes, we are, Commander,” Sulu said, allowing a sly smile to play across his lips. “Admiral Harriman cut those orders himself. But old ‘Blackjack’ never said a thing about helping the Klingons chase the bad guys while we stay right here at Korvat.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, nodding. “But how can we help the Klingons find the trail if we’re not able to follow where it leads ourselves?”

  “If I’m not mistaken, Commander, we’ve recently taken aboard several palletloads of highly advanced scientific matériel. Am I right?”

  Her scowl deepened. “If you’re talking about the equipment for our upcoming survey of gaseous planetary anomalies in the Beta Quadrant, you already know the answer. You supervised its arrival and storage yourself when you were the exec.”

  He nodded. “So I did. And now, as acting captain, I want to get some use out of the stuff a little earlier than originally planned — before whatever’s left of the bomber’s trail goes completely cold.”

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?” Cutler said.

  He spread his hands in a by-all-means gesture. “You wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t, Commander.”

  Her eyes widened somewhat in surprise; since Captain Styles had never been one to encourage his senior staff to bring alternative points of view to his attention, she must have found Sulu’s determined openness a bit off-putting.

  “Excelsior’s new sensors were designed to detect very specific types of gaseous phenomena,” she said. “They were never intended for use in ship-to-ship track-and-chase situations like this one.”

  “Granted. But the new sensors are an order of magnitude more sensitive than anything else we have. And that makes them way more powerful than anything the Klingons might be carrying. Even a cloaked ship will leave some sort of particle trail, particularly at warp. Those new sensors are our best hope of finding it.”

  “They’ll have to be completely recalibrated,” Cutler said, sounding both doubtful and unhappy. “And then recalibrated again to restore their original settings before the Beta Quadrant survey begins.”

  He offered her a smile that he intended as equal parts encouragement and warning. “I can’t think of anybody better qualified for the job, Commander. Get on it, and report back to me the moment it’s done. We’ve got a terrorist to track down.”

  “Whose terror are we talking about, sir?” she said very quietly, obviously aiming her words at his ears alone. He could almost hear Captain Styles whispering in his ear, Perhaps you’re a bit too personally involved.

  Sulu’s jaw clenched involuntarily. He had no intention of discussing his motivations, particularly here on the bridge.

  “Your objection is noted, Commander. Now get the hell off the bridge and get to work.”

  • • •

  Moving her fingers with the deliberate delicacy of a surgeon, Meredith Cutler slowly traced the tip of the microlaser along the hair-thin duotronic circuit patterns on the tiny sensor components that lay on the worktable before her. She labored in silence in the quietly thrumming engine room alongside acting chief engineer Tim Henry, who was similarly occupied, no doubt drawing upon his considerable expertise in nanotechnology to modify and recalibrate the internal configurations of Excelsior’s precision scanner array.

  Then something cold and merciless gripped Cutler’s heart for perhaps the hundredth time since the bombs had detonated on Korvat. She set the circuit board and microlaser down and tried to regain control of her breathing.

  “Is something wrong, Meredith?” Henry said, setting his own work aside, at least for the moment. His deep frown of concern told her that she was doing a damned poor job of keeping her emotions reined in.

  “It’s nothing, Tim,” she lied, forcing a smile onto her face and shaking her head. “It’s just that this wasn’t quite the way I thought we’d ring in the New Year.”

  He sighed and nodded, offering her a thin but sympathetic smile of his own. Then he cast his gaze back down upon his labors, and retreated to the quiet stronghold of his own thoughts.

  Despite her bland denials, Cutler knew there was no getting around it. He’s dead because of me, she thought as she resumed her work, finishing the first of her circuit recalibrations. If not for me, the captain would still be alive.

  It was a struggle to remain focused on her task — enabling Excelsior to locate and follow an impossibly diffuse warp trail that might or might not even exist — rather than on the certain knowledge that failure would not only enable the Korvat bomber to escape justice entirely, but might also even prevent the resumption of the nascent and interrupted Federation-Klingon peace talks.

  The odds of Commander Sulu’s blue-sky plan meeting with success seemed as
remote as the uncaring stars themselves. But failure would make the death of Captain Lawrence H. Styles count for absolutely nothing.

  That was something she simply couldn’t accept.

  Because I’d be responsible for that as well.

  • • •

  Cutler’s almost contrite admission, which arrived nearly six hours later, just might have been the sweetest sound to reach Sulu’s ears since he’d first come aboard Excelsior.

  “You were right, sir,” she said, punching up a stellar map on one of the bridge’s aft displays. “There’s definitely a warp trail that corresponds to the hostile ship, leading straight from Korvat and deep into the Mempa sector of Klingon space.”

  Sulu thanked her without succumbing to the temptation to gloat. Then he turned his chair forward so that he faced the helm/navigation consoles.

  “Lieutenant Lojur, plot the most efficient intercept course and bundle it with Commander Cutler’s new data set. Forward the resulting astronavigational matrix to Captains Kang, Koloth, and Kor immediately. They’ll be eager to put it to use as soon as they can get their ships under way.”

  “Aye, Captain,” said the Halkan navigator, the traditional red clan tattoo in the center of his forehead crumpling slightly as he concentrated on the task before him.

  “You want to catch him very badly,” Cutler said quietly, not asking a question. Her observation startled Sulu with its simple honesty — as did the total absence of rancor behind her words.

  “More than I’ve wanted anything for a long, long time,” he said, deciding that she deserved an equally unvarnished answer.

  She leaned toward him so as not to broadcast her next words across the entire bridge. “You can’t really believe that this . . . albino could really be the same man who attacked your family forty years ago.”

  He fixed her with a hard stare. “You know better?”

  “All I know is that you may have allowed some very old ghosts from your past to cloud your judgment today,” she said, not flinching from his gaze in the least. “Your white whale. Sir.”