Forged in Fire Read online

  • • •

  Stardate 9014.6 (Gregorian date: January 6, 2290)

  U.S.S. Excelsior

  Sarek sat silently at the conference table in the observation lounge, accompanied only by Commanders Sulu and Cutler. Right on schedule, the junior ambassador delivered his daily report via the subspace bands.

  Like Sulu and Cutler, Sarek listened attentively, saying nothing during the youthful Trill’s harrowing tale of capture by and escape from the assassin of Korvat; of the unexpected destruction of the I.K.S. Gal’tagh; and of the launch of a mysterious cloaked shuttlepod from the perpetrator’s ship — an act that appeared to have been carried out without the freebooter’s knowledge by a rogue element within his own crew.

  About halfway through this recitation, Sarek had become convinced that his decision not to put an early and decisive stop to Dax’s Klingon sojourn might one day rank among the bigger mistakes of his lengthy diplomatic career.

  He decided that the time had come to put that error right.

  • • •

  I.K.S. Klothos

  At first, Dax was certain that he must have misunderstood the ambassador’s words. After all, it wouldn’t have been the first time that random interference had garbled a signal making a near-instantaneous transit of the parsecs-deep ocean of night that separated him from Excelsior.

  “I said you are ordered to return immediately to Excelsior for a detailed debriefing,” said the dour Vulcan, who sat at a conference table beside Excelsior’s acting captain and first officer, both of whom watched Dax in silence. “The situation you have just described is far too volatile.”

  Dax turned toward Kor, who sat in his command chair, flanked by Kang and Koloth while a complement of six junior officers paused in their duties, plainly curious as to how Dax was going to handle this not-insignificant setback. In order to allay any lingering fears his hosts might have had that his mission in Klingon space might involve espionage, Dax had agreed early on to deliver his daily reports to Ambassador Sarek and Commander Sulu in the presence of either Kor, Kang, or Koloth.

  Now all three of the Klingon captains were studying him with barely restrained amusement.

  Sarek is going to make me look like a weakling in front of people who respect strength above all else, Dax thought. As well as discipline and the chain of command.

  He knew he was between a rock and a hard place here, and would have to move very carefully to avoid being squashed flat.

  “Respectfully, Mister Ambassador,” Dax said, “I believe I should remain aboard the Klothos precisely because the situation here is so volatile.”

  Unfortunately, Sarek remained true to precedent and showed no willingness to give ground. “There has already been too much death and injury on this mission. The dangers you are facing would be better assigned to more . . . experienced personnel.”

  Though he knew it would do no good to display anger to a Vulcan, he was suddenly finding it almost unbearably difficult to avoid doing just that. “Ambassador Sarek, after the past five days, who else in the entire Federation Diplomatic Corps has as much practical experience dealing directly with Klingons as I do?”

  Across the gulf of light-years, the Vulcan’s gaze held Dax’s fast, like a pair of tractor beams. Silence stretched.

  “I do not relish the prospect of having to explain to the Trill government your death in some remote part of Klingon space,” Sarek said at length, pointedly evading Dax’s question.

  “That is my decision, Mister Ambassador.”

  “But my responsibility. And need I remind you that your career is no less at risk than is your safety?”

  Dax knew he had to concede the ambassador’s last point. On the other hand, he had doubtless placed his career in jeopardy the moment he’d disregarded Starfleet’s general order to stay out of Klingon space in the first place.

  “I will arrange your transportation back to Federation space, Curzon Dax,” Kor said, startling Dax out of his reverie. He turned toward the Klingon captain, who was regarding him with an air of cool appraisal. Kang and Koloth did likewise as silence enfolded the room, disturbed only by the persistent chirping and humming of the control center’s various banks of consoles and instruments.

  They’ll think me a coward and a weakling if I leave before we’ve finished our business with the albino, Dax thought. I might hold on to my safety by doing as I’m told. Maybe I’ll even get to keep my career.

  But in the eyes of these three men, I will never have any honor. And if he’d learned one thing about the Klingon Empire over the last several eventful days, it was that honor was the true coin of the realm here.

  Considering the rickety condition of the narrow bridge he’d just begun to build between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, Dax knew that only one valid option was available to him.

  “Thank you, Captain Kor,” he said. “But I don’t wish to leave the Klothos while so much of our mutual business remains unfinished.”

  “Very well,” Kor said, nodding. The expressions of all three Klingon commanders remained neutral, but Dax thought he saw a faint glint of approval somewhere in the depths of each man’s stony gaze.

  Dax turned back toward the forward viewer, from which Sarek and the two Starfleet officers regarded him with a far less sanguine mien. He addressed the three of them and hoped he wasn’t about to deliver his final farewell.

  “Live long and prosper, Ambassador. Commander. Captain.”

  Dax then made a quick slashing gesture in the direction of the bekk who was running the comm station; the junior officer responded immediately by cutting off the channel.

  Now the mreker scat’s finally hit the ventilator, Dax thought, and idly wondered whether the Klingon commanders might consider letting him use them as references for future employment. . . .

  • • •

  U.S.S. Excelsior

  The monitor atop the conference table went abruptly dark for a moment before resuming its default display of the UFP logo.

  “Well, I can’t say that exactly surprises me,” Cutler said, turning toward Sarek. “Your junior ambassador has been something of a loose cannon since this mission began.”

  Sulu was forced to agree, though he really couldn’t fault the young Trill’s instincts — even if he couldn’t endorse them officially.

  Sarek nodded, his expression a study in Vulcan stoicism. “You have no idea. In all my life, I have had only one student who was more difficult.”

  As much as the ambassador’s remark intrigued him, Sulu did his best to stay focused on the business at hand. “I may be able to justify bending Starfleet’s order against entering Klingon space long enough to drag your brash young protégé back here,” he said as he rose to his feet, followed a moment later by the ambassador and Cutler. “After all, the launch of that cloaked shuttle from the albino’s ship could certainly be interpreted as a clear and present danger to worlds on our side of the Klingon border.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Sarek said as he finished smoothing his ornate diplomatic robes and folded his hands before him. “But that will not be necessary. Such overreactions are generally counterproductive. Besides, Mister Dax’s instincts are generally correct.”

  “Even when they’ve led him to defy a superior’s orders, and maybe even violate interstellar law in the process?” Cutler asked as Sarek led the way toward the observation deck’s exit.

  Sarek paused in the open doorway for a moment to consider her strident but undoubtedly rhetorical question. “Under such unalterably unfavorable circumstances as these, we can only hope that Mister Dax’s judgment proves to be particularly reliable.

  “And, of course, we must wait.”

  And waiting, Sulu thought as he followed the Vulcan out into the corridor, has got to be the most damned difficult thing of all.

  THIRTY

  Early 2290 (the Year of Kahless 915,

  late in the month of Doqath)

  I.K.S. Klothos

  Curzon Dax could almost
feel both Tobin and Torias looking over his shoulder while he worked on calibrating the new sensor configurations. He was thankful, at least, that his two most technical-minded predecessors-in-symbiosis hadn’t whispered encouragements into his ear as he’d imagined Emony had done a few hours earlier. When this is finally all over and I’m safely back home on Trill, maybe I’d better have a long talk with Doctor Dareel, he thought. Accessing the memories of previous hosts was one thing; hearing them talk to him like phantoms perched on his shoulder was something else entirely.

  He had spent the past five hours toiling nonstop alongside Chief Engineer Q’Lujj to refine the search for whatever vestiges of the albino’s warp trail might remain detectable to the sensor equipment available to them. Thanks to narrow-band subspace bursts, Excelsior’s considerable computer resources had assisted greatly with the signal-processing chores.

  Dax had been tasked with helping Q’Lujj increase the sensitivity of the combined sensor capacity of both of the remaining Klingon warships. The crews had accomplished this largely by increasing the distance between the Klothos and the QaD, whose respective navigational officers were now keeping station nearly one tenth of a parsec apart while maintaining real-time subspace network links between the computers and sensors of both vessels, as well as with those of distant Excelsior.

  After Q’Lujj finally threw the switch on this hastily improvised system — Dax had dubbed the process “tandem parallax triangulation” — Dax found the initial results both surprising and satisfying.

  “That’s a warp trail,” Dax said, using his right index finger to trace the orange-outlined frequency profile as it appeared on the monitor at the engine-room station he was running next to Q’Lujj’s console. “It’s faint, but it’s definitely there. And it matches the albino’s engine profile out to six decimal places.”

  Q’Lujj grunted a brusque acknowledgment as he squinted at the data that scrolled across his own station’s displays. “But there’s still no sign of the cloaked auxiliary vessel that his people launched,” he said.

  Leave it to Q’Lujj to focus on the uninvited insects instead of the picnic, Dax thought. Then again, maybe that’s one of the qualities that makes him such a competent engineer.

  Dax entered the command that transferred the new heading data forward to the Klothos’s command center, then looked up again at his perpetually scowling colleague.

  “I think we might get an opportunity to ask the albino about that in person soon enough,” he said.

  • • •

  Because the Klothos was significantly faster than the still-damaged QaD, Kang had remained aboard her along with Kor and Koloth, just in case an opportunity to confront the albino arose too quickly to afford the QaD— and her captain — a sufficiently fair chance at making the kill.

  When Kang reached the Klothos’s command deck just prior to the climax of the chase, he was unsurprised to see that Koloth and Dax had already joined Kor there. Kang noted, also without much surprise, that Koloth was his usual cold, distant self, staring quietly into the central viewer’s image of the vast but steadily diminishing volume of star-strewn blackness that lay between the Klothos and her prey; though Koloth had lost much on this voyage, he had never been given to demonstrations of emotion — sometimes even when his own knife was striking at his enemy’s heart.

  Kang was momentarily taken aback, however, by the easy camaraderie that seemed to have developed between Kor and the young Trill diplomat. It was difficult to imagine a more mismatched pair becoming friends, although Kang himself could not deny the increasing degree of trust he himself was feeling for Dax. Kang’s surprise passed, however, when he considered what Kor and Dax had in common, despite the all-but-unbridgeable gulf of mutual alienness that still separated them.

  Both these men have become used to carrying burdensome secrets, Kang thought. Secrets that only now are beginning to see the light of day.

  With Kor, those secrets had proved to be vexing and troublesome things, and not merely for Kor himself. Dax’s secrets differed, at least, in that they had concealed an extensive storehouse of remembered knowledge that had made the young Trill useful far beyond his apparent years. Perhaps decades, or even whole lifetimes, of stored experience.

  No longer able to contain his curiosity about such things, Kang approached Dax and gestured toward the young man’s belly.

  “Tell me, Dax. What is the exact nature of your joined existence?”

  The Trill seemed unsurprised by the question. “I was beginning to wonder when one of you would ask me that question straight out.”

  “After all we’ve been through together so far, you can hardly blame us for being curious,” Koloth said.

  Kor grunted in agreement. “Especially when you have become privy to so much that had once been secret — even among us Klingons.”

  The half-dozen or so control-center personnel who were present busied themselves going about their various tasks, all of them studiously ignoring the conversation in their midst, in accordance with long-standing Klingon traditions regarding the affairs of one’s social betters.

  Dax nodded to Kor, conceding his point. “All right. But you have to understand that my — Curzon’s — symbiosis is only about five years old, so I’m still finding my way as a joined Trill. But it goes essentially like this: the Trill diplomat you know as Curzon Dax is a combination of the man you see standing before you — Curzon Antrani — and an extremely long-lived symbiotic organism called Dax. The Dax symbiont is sentient and vermiform, and carries within it the memories of all who have preceded me as the creature’s host. After the Curzon part of me is dead, my memories will in turn live on in the symbiont’s next host.”

  Koloth sneered faintly as he considered Dax’s explanation, as though repelled by the idea of a joined creature. Kor, on the other hand, looked unabashedly fascinated.

  Kang wasn’t quite certain how he himself felt about the notion, though he certainly couldn’t deny the respect he felt for Dax’s many obvious talents, regardless of the means by which they might have been obtained.

  He wondered briefly how much of that respect Dax’s Federation deserved to receive; he decided that the answer to this question would depend greatly upon Curzon Dax’s actions during the forthcoming battle with the albino.

  Kor mirrored Kang’s gesture toward Dax’s abdomen. “So just how many others are in there right now?” he said.

  “Six, including Curzon,” Dax said quickly, then hesitated as an odd expression crossed his features, as if for a brief instant he doubted his own answer. For that fleeting moment, the young diplomat appeared as callow and inexperienced as Kang had first mistook him to be back on Korvat.

  “Are you unwell, Curzon Dax?” Kor said.

  The Trill looked bemused. “I’m fine. Just a little vertigo, I think.”

  Kor scowled good-naturedly. “The creature within you, no doubt. Perhaps it sees Koloth’s ugliness through your eyes.”

  “Hab SoSlI’ Quch,” Koloth muttered, and punctuated his response with a rude hand gesture.

  Had Koloth’s utterance come from a member of Kor’s crew, a lethal duel with d’k tahgs would have been required, by custom if not by specific Klingon Defense Force regulations. But since all three Klingon captains were at least theoretically social equals, Kor merely threw his head back and laughed.

  “Yes, Koloth,” Kor said around a deep chortle. “My mother does indeed have a smooth forehead. And yet she is still not as ugly as you.”

  Kang and Dax joined in Kor’s laughter roughly simultaneously. Koloth might as well have been one of the many scowling, silent statues that stood as sentinels in the Hall of Heroes back on Qo’noS.

  A flashing amber light on the helm console suddenly caught Kang’s eye. Further questioning of Dax would have to wait until a more propitious time.

  “Is the target vessel within the reach of our long-range sensors?” Kor said as all trace of hilarity abruptly vanished from the room, like a warship disappearing behin
d its cloak.

  “It should be by now, Captain,” said one of Kor’s junior officers. She was a female bekk whose impressively sharpened teeth and highly textured HemQuch forehead made her appear capable of successfully taking on any three of her male QuchHa’ counterparts. “But the ship still appears to be running under cloak. Our only means of detection remains the vessel’s warp trail, as imaged over the long-range network we’ve established with the QaD and the yuQjIjDIvI’ vessel.”

  “Has the target detected us yet?” Koloth asked.

  “Our own cloak remains engaged. The target vessel has made no evasive maneuvers nor changed its speed or heading in over a kilaan,” the bekk said. “Assuming we aren’t detected, we will enter weapons range in a mere thirty tups, perhaps sooner.”

  “Very good,” Kor said. “Advise me immediately of any changes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I heard the name of the albino’s vessel when we were aboard her,” Kang said, staring hard into the impenetrable black void displayed on the forward viewer as though he might compel the freebooter’s ship to appear by sheer force of will. “It was called the Hegh’TlhoS.”

  “ ‘Dead’?” Dax said, sounding tentative as he attempted to translate the tlhIngan word roots of the proper name into the language the Earthers called Federation Standard.

  “Hegh’TlhoS means ‘almost dead,’ ” Kor said. “ ‘Almost, but not quite.’ ”

  “I like Dax’s definition better,” Kang said.

  Koloth released an icy smile. “Then let us make it so.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Stardate 9017.3 (Early 2290)

  U.S.S. Excelsior

  Back in San Francisco, the city where he was born, it was 4:17 A.M. But Hikaru Sulu wasn’t at all certain what time it was in the corridors of power on Qo’noS. Moments ago, Janice Rand had called him urgently from the bridge, interrupting his fitful slumber. Now Sulu was hurriedly pulling on his uniform jacket, hoping to make himself relatively presentable to his VIP caller.