Forged in Fire Read online

  “Are any of our people still down on the surface?” Qagh wanted to know.

  “The last of them just came back aboard a few tups ago,” said someone else, a smooth-headed female Klingon named Yoqala.

  “Should we arm weapons, sir?” said the navigator.

  “Ready them, but do not arm them,” Qagh said. He activated the intercom on the arm of his chair, slamming the button with the palm of his hand. “Technician Thraq, are you certain that you repaired all the plasma leaks from the damage we took at Korvat?”

  “Yes, sir,” Thraq’s voice came back after a delay of a few lups. The shouts and clatterings of workers in the engine room were audible in the background.

  “Triple check everything,” Qagh ordered. That has to be how they tracked us, he thought. Despite all the precautions they had taken, one tiny mistake had evidently brought these lumbering but dangerous sabre bears sniffing at his doorstep. But that was not an unfamiliar feeling; although he retained no memory, other than through the tales of long-dead Ganik, of his near death in the frozen wastes of Qo’noS as an infant, Qagh knew he had survived the violence of both weather and predators then— as well as every attack since, from without or within — and he had no doubt that he would do so again now.

  “Give me a closer view of the Klingon ships,” Qagh said to one of the bridge technicians, a fierce Rigelian woman named Gnara who could best almost any warrior in combat despite the loss of one of her eyes.

  A moment or two later, the image on the center screen changed, showing the three incoming ships at a higher magnification. The lead ship’s hull bore the same markings that Qagh had seen above Korvat: the emblem of the cursed House of Ngoj.

  His eyes narrowed, and a smile crept across his face. He knew that someone would likely be pursuing him after Korvat, no matter how well his people had hidden their tracks. He had thought that more damage had been done to this particular trio of battle cruisers, but with the exception of some plasma-fire scorches on the hulls, they seemed to be in perfect working order. That, of course, can be remedied, he thought, almost chuckling aloud.

  “Activate the emitters on Mempa,” Qagh said, his voice low. The trap they had set below would buy him time to finish assembling the ingredients necessary to bring the House of Ngoj to its knees.

  Along with all the Federation-lovers on Qo’noS.

  • • •

  I.K.S. Klothos, near Mempa II

  “Still no sign of the albino’s ship, Captain,” said one of Kor’s bridge officers, a young male bekk who had transferred aboard only recently. “But we are showing life signs on the surface of Mempa II. It’s a sparsely populated world notable mostly for its isolated science outposts.”

  And, no doubt, for its sad lack of proper police or military protection, Dax thought, hoping the Klothos would arrive in time to rectify that deficit.

  Dax watched Kor stalk over to the bekk’s station. “What kind of life signs are you reading?”

  “Mostly Mempan, at least in the towns and villages,” the bekk said. “But their primary research facility shows no Mempan life signs at all. Instead I’m reading a few Klingons, a dozen or more Orions, and a handful of others.”

  At his adopted station on the Klothos’s bridge, Dax studied the readings. “We’re getting some odd interference, Captain Kor, but I can verify those sensor readings. It’s got to be the albino and his raiders.” He felt silly using the word “albino” as if it were the Klingon saboteur’s actual name, but absent any more definitive nomenclature, it would have to do.

  A portion of the forward viewscreen flickered to a different picture: the scowling face of Koloth. “Are you reading the life signs down on the planet?” he asked gruffly, his long mustachios moving back and forth like twin scythes.

  “Of course we are, Koloth,” Kor said. “But what we aren’t reading are any signs of his ship.”

  “It’s got to be cloaked,” Koloth said. “No doubt they know we are here and will attempt either to flee or to engage us again in battle.”

  Kor shook his head. “They won’t attack. They know that we’re expecting it now.”

  “But we can trap them on the planet,” Dax said, looking up from his console. “They probably can’t beam up — much less attack — without de-cloaking first. And if we send out a series of nucleonic pulses at the right frequencies, we might be able to jam their transporter.” He looked back toward Kor for permission.

  “Do it,” Kor said, a slight grin edging onto his scowl.

  As Dax hurriedly entered the specifications of his idea into his console and relayed the data to the other ships to enable all three vessels to work in tandem to trap the pirates on the planet, Kang’s image appeared in another portion of the forward viewscreen.

  “Before springing our trap, the three of us should beam down to the surface with our best warriors, so that we may cut this abomination down decisively,” Kang said.

  “Agreed,” Koloth said quickly. “My warriors are assembling now for a N’yengoren stealth ground attack.”

  As he monitored the engineering team’s progress in preparing the ships’ deflectors to throw a “net” of synchronized nucleonic pulses across much of the planet, Dax paused to send a brief summons down to Dr. Hurghom in the medical bay. He felt his heart pounding. He wondered if his symbiont’s nervous system was as on-edge as that of its humanoid host. At least he had heard nothing from the imagined ghosts of his symbiont’s past lives in the last few days, a fact that he could only find encouraging.

  Minutes later, the aft portion of the Klothos’s bridge was filled with armed Klingons, each carrying disruptors, each of them with a bat’leth strapped to his broad back. Kang, Koloth, and Kor began to strategize their attack on the albino and his soon-to-be trapped raiders.

  Dax rose from his station and stepped toward Kor. “I will need some weapons as well,” he said.

  Kor looked at him strangely. “You? You plan to accompany us?”

  “It is a matter of honor,” Dax said, playing the highest card he knew of in the Klingon cultural deck.

  “But not a matter of your honor, Curzon Dax,” Kang said, glowering from the main viewer. “We have allowed you to accompany us this far as a courtesy, but you may show cowardice below. We cannot afford to risk that.”

  Dax glared at Kang. “Cowardice? How dare you? I have shown you nothing but strength and courage.”

  “Hunh,” Koloth said, half-grunting, half-laughing. “You feared taking the Excelsior doctor’s vaccine, even though she was on your own side. What kind of bravery is that?”

  I knew that was going to come back to haunt me, Dax thought. He hadn’t wished to explain that he had hesitated only until he was certain that the drug wouldn’t damage the symbiont that dwelled inside him. On further study of the vaccine’s effects, he had allowed himself to be injected. Still, a small part of him wondered whether the recent sudden dormancy of some of Curzon Dax’s unusually talkative predecessors might, in fact, have been vaccine-related.

  But that was a small worry compared to what lay before him now. Dax knew he needed to prove himself to these warriors if he was going to maintain and build upon the fragile trust that he had already built with them. I’m treading on dangerous ground here, he thought, wishing that this once, he could directly interrogate a few of the previous Daxes for a little sage, clear-eyed advice.

  “Captain Koloth, do not mistake caution for cowardice,” he said, putting enough steel in his voice to demonstrate his sincerity. “If any of you doubt my nerve or my abilities,” he said, gesturing toward the small landing party of warriors, “I will cross my bat’leth with yours without hesitation. And we shall see who emerges with honor.”

  It seemed for a moment as if the entire bridge had gone silent, until Kang began to laugh. The others soon joined him.

  Dax wasn’t sure whether they were laughing at his impudent challenge or at his earnestness, but he kept his stance rigid and his jaw set like day-old thermoconcrete.

 
“Very well, Curzon Dax,” Kang said. “If no one else objects, I will allow the strangest ambassador in the galaxy to join our company of warriors. If this man of peace is so eager to fight, then who are any of us to deny him?”

  “Issue him weapons,” Kor said begrudgingly, addressing a member of the bridge crew who was not outfitted for assault-team duty. The man hurried to comply.

  “There’s one other thing we need to do,” Dax said, as he saw Dr. Hurghom enter the bridge. “A final precaution before we disembark.”

  The Klingons regarded him with narrowed eyes, but Dax returned only a devilish grin.

  • • •

  Curzon Dax had never much enjoyed using transporters, which more often than not tended to stress the Dax symbiont. The Klingon version of the device proved to be no exception.

  The tingling, disturbingly vertiginous sensation that always accompanied the transition from energy back into matter passed with merciful quickness, however. Dax suddenly noticed that Kang, Koloth, and Kor had already begun leading their dozen or so armed warriors across the scrubby plain toward the cluster of low buildings that lay some twenty meters ahead. Their disruptor pistols raised and ready, they cast long shadows as they advanced through the light of the waning afternoon. Once he’d satisfied himself that his body — and the symbiont within it — had rematerialized intact, Dax hastened to catch up to the rest of the assault team.

  But the transporter had been only a minor source of anxiety compared to whatever unknown they might face next. Raising his tricorder, he scanned the building for life signs and tried not to think about what he’d do if the team encountered something inside the building that the Klingons weren’t prepared to handle.

  “No sign of anything alive inside the building,” he said after pausing for a moment to study the device’s display. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing in there that’s capable of killing us all where we stand.

  “Perhaps the albino and his troops managed to slip away in spite of your nucleonic pulses,” Kor said after Dax followed him cautiously but quickly around a corner.

  Dax shrugged. “Or maybe the nucleonic pulses are throwing off my tricorder readings.”

  “Perhaps,” Kang said. “Or perhaps the albino has simply used false life signatures to lure us into a trap.”

  Koloth pointed toward the lab complex. “There is only one way to discover the truth with certainty.”

  With or without a tricorder, it was impossible not to notice the heavy metal door that had been melted to slag amid the rubble of one of the low exterior walls. The charred wreckage had fallen inward, making it obvious that someone had used extreme force to get inside the structure rather than to create an exit.

  Moving deliberately but as quickly as he dared, Dax followed the three Klingon commanders and their assault team through the ruined entrance. After spending a few minutes transiting through darkened interior corridors that were empty but for a pair of dead, disruptor-charred humanoids — security guards, perhaps? — the landing party came to a large central chamber in which the lights were still functioning. The door to the white-tiled chamber that lay beyond had also been blasted away by some sort of particle-beam weapon, a deed that Dax’s tricorder revealed had been done about as recently as the destruction of the outer entrance and the murder of the two guards in the hallway.

  Dax surmised from the remains of their apparel that the alien bodies that lay on the room’s floor belonged to Mempan genetics researchers. He checked for life signs even though the corpses seemed to be in only slightly better shape than the exterior door.

  “Dead,” he said a moment later. “Every last one of them.”

  “This must have been a laboratory or research center of sorts,” Koloth said.

  Kor kicked aside a stray chair, making no attempt to conceal his frustration. “When did this happen?” he wanted to know.

  Dax shook his head. “Maybe a few hours ago. A couple of kilaans at the most, since whatever passes for local law enforcement doesn’t seem to know what’s happened here yet.”

  “I doubt the place could have been this empty when the killings took place,” Kang said, gesturing with his weapon toward a nearby series of bare metal tables and empty shelves.

  Koloth nodded, his manner as calm and icy as Kor’s was livid. “Whoever did this appears to have helped himself to whatever was here. Empty shelves would hardly have been worth the effort.”

  After muttering a low but pungent Klingon curse, Kor ordered the troopers to secure the rest of the complex. The men immediately dispersed to carry out Kor’s instructions.

  “This was our last lead,” Kor said, now fairly vibrating with restrained fury. “Our quarry has escaped us without leaving another trail for us to follow.”

  “If the Council would allow Excelsior to come here, her sensors might prove that not to be quite true,” Dax said as he began scanning the room with his tricorder.

  “Perhaps,” Kor snarled. “But that doesn’t help us much in the here and now, does it? We don’t even know precisely what was taken from this place!”

  Dax’s tricorder, which he had left in scanning mode, chose that moment to beep. The Trill looked down on its primary display.

  He was pleasantly surprised. His spirit lifting as though borne aloft on antigravs, Dax looked up from the device in his hand. Regarding the three Klingon captains with a wide grin, he recalled an expression that Emony had picked up long ago, during a gymnastics competition on Earth:

  It ain’t over till it’s over.

  Dax raised his tricorder so that it faced the nearest wall. Holding the instrument before him, he walked toward an innocuous-looking ODN jack that was set into a recess in one of the metal tables.

  “Follow me, gentlemen,” he said.

  • • •

  The freebooter ship Hegh’TlhoS

  “The Klingon landing party is inside the complex, Captain,” said Gnara, the one-eyed Rigelian who manned one of the sensor stations. “And they’re all concentrated into a fairly small area.”

  A rare feeling of delight tugged at the edges of Qagh’s face. There would probably be no better time than now to spring his trap.

  “You may transmit the ‘go’ signal now, Gnara,” he said, grinning.

  The Rigelian woman nodded, then keyed in a brief command string with her two huge hands. The console responded by displaying several blinking orange lights, and issuing an unmelodious buzzing sound.

  Her single frustration-narrowed eye focused tightly upon Qagh. “The signal isn’t getting through. The Klingon ships seem to be blanketing the vicinity of the Mempa lab with interference of some sort.”

  Qagh growled quietly. “What about simply snatching the Klingons up from the surface with the transporter?”

  Gnara shook her head somberly. “Not unless something changes those EM interference patterns.”

  “We could simply leave the Mempa system undetected,” said Yoqala.

  Certainly, we could, Qagh thought. Only to allow my kinsman to chase us to our next planetfall. And the next. And the next.

  The albino bared his teeth and addressed his entire command-deck crew in his most dangerous tone. “Find a way around that interference. Now!”

  • • •

  Stardate 9011.8 (Early 2290)

  U.S.S. Excelsior

  “Looks like our culprit got sloppy this time, Captain,” Dax said, his image dominating the bridge’s main viewer. “He evidently took all the computer workstations with him when he raided the Mempa lab, but he missed the ODN data backup system built into the structure of the lab itself. That’s how we got our hands on the manifest of materials the lab was working with just prior to the raid.”

  Seated in Excelsior’s command chair, Sulu nodded as he stared at a datapad that displayed the very list Dax was describing. Most of the lab’s contents seemed unremarkable, except for two item categories that Dax had flagged for particular attention.

  Foremost among the noteworthy materials plundere
d from the lab was a series of retroviral vaccines — just as Dr. Chapel had predicted.

  And then there was a large quantity of isomiotic hypos, which could not be constructed without access to substances that were customarily kept under tight control, both in the Federation and, presumably, in the Klingon Empire as well.

  Damn, he thought, struggling to put down a nearly overwhelming sense of rising helplessness. The albino got away with this stuff. And there’s nothing we can do about it while we’re stuck here at Korvat, other than keep lists.

  “I’m sorry we weren’t able to give you more than the after-the-fact police reports,” Dax said, sounding more than a little frustrated himself.

  Sulu set the datapad down on the arm of his command chair and looked across the light-years into the young diplomat’s bright, alert eyes. “I know you’re doing everything you can, Mister Dax.”

  “Which is precious little,” the Trill said with a sad shake of his head. “Since we can’t reestablish the trail without bringing Excelsior closer to us, we’re back to trying to anticipate the albino’s next target. In spite of everything we’ve learned about him and his medical condition, he’s been fairly unpredictable.”

  Sulu nodded, recalling the volatile nature of the man who had nearly murdered him and his family on Ganjitsu four decades ago. “Unpredictable” was a fitting descriptor of the desperate, mercurial soul who even now sometimes came calling in his dreams.

  It occurred to him then that there might be an easier way to anticipate the raider’s next destination than by cataloguing and analyzing his medical weaknesses.

  After Dax signed off, Sulu touched the comm channel on the right arm of his chair. “Commander Sulu to Doctor Chapel and Commander Cutler. I need to see both of you immediately.”

  • • •

  Raising his steaming teacup carefully to his lips, Sulu stared through the panoramic window of deck three’s observation lounge, which was located just aft of the main bridge module. The graceful sweep of Excelsior’s warp-drive nacelles, illuminated by the starship’s running lights, tapered away into the distance, framing the dark limb of Korvat between them. Millions of stationary stars, jewels mounted in the eternal night, filled the vastness that lay beyond.