Forged in Fire Read online

  The deck shuddered, and thunder reverberated through the vessel’s walls. Either our reinforcements have just arrived, Dax thought, or else this ship just got hulled by a meteoroid. The stillness of the air in the corridor convinced him that the former possibility was far likelier than the latter.

  Taking immediate advantage of the distraction, Kang stepped straight into the melee, hacking the nearest of the pirates down before anyone else could raise a weapon. Dax readied his blade as the remaining brigands surged forward in pairs. He turned as he deflected the downward slice of a curved sword that whistled just millimeters past his ear; as he turned he saw that the albino and the scientist were both retreating rapidly down the corridor behind them.

  “They’re getting away!” Dax cried as he and Kang continued transacting the urgent business of survival. Although the Klingon captain had scored first blood, the initiative was inexorably shifting to the pirates, driven by the relative weight of their numbers.

  As Dax and Kang steadily fell back down the corridor under the advancing onslaught, it occurred to the Trill that they both might very well die here, and in fairly short order. And if more armed men hemmed them in from the other end of the corridor, their deaths would be all but certain.

  After backing alongside Kang around a bend in the corridor, Dax felt a mixture of puzzlement and relief when the advancing pirates abruptly ceased their two-by-two forward motion. The men in the middle ranks appeared suddenly distracted by something just around the corner and behind them. Tempered steel struck tempered steel just out of Dax’s sight, and men screamed in rage and pain.

  Kang bared his teeth, all thought of falling back now apparently forgotten. He surged forward again, gutting an Orion and head-butting a strong-browed Klingon into unconsciousness before stepping over their bodies to rejoin whatever remained of the retreating melee. His hopes buoyed, Dax followed, bat’leth in hand.

  Around the corner he found Kang, Kor, and Koloth holding their ichor-stained blades and standing triumphantly over a jumbled heap of silent, blood-smeared bodies; some of these were breathing, while others already lay as still as the grave. The sheer savagery of the tableau before him caused Dax to shudder.

  And, to his somewhat shamed surprise, to exult.

  “Thank you for leaving some for us,” Kor said with a predator’s feral grin.

  • • •

  Stardate 9027.2 (Gregorian date: January 12, 2290)

  U.S.S. Excelsior

  Despite Dr. Chapel’s stern directive that he get at least six hours of sleep during Excelsior’s unauthorized journey to the Qul Tuq magnetar, Sulu remained wide awake in his quarters. Having given up rest as a lost cause at least four hours earlier, he rose from his disheveled bed and stood beside the bureau in his quarters, where he exchanged his rumpled uniform for fresher attire.

  As he started to don a clean undershirt, a familiar metallic gleam in the bureau mirror caught his attention. Holding the shirt, he turned toward the reflection’s source.

  On the wall, mounted between a pair of Sulu’s most prized target pistols, a bat’leth hung like a silver-horned moon. The blade was the only tangible trace he possessed of the Beta XII-A entity, the noncorporeal creature that had forced humans and Klingons into bloody combat in order to generate the hatred that nourished it. The nightmarish apparition that had used the thoughts of Kang and his crew to forge this blade still drifted into Sulu’s dreams on occasion.

  Lately, however, another ghost from the past had taken the Beta XII-A creature’s place. It was a ghost that Sulu knew he needed to bury, once and for all.

  Sulu pulled the shirt over his head, threw on a fresh maroon uniform jacket, and crossed to the companel on his desk. “Sulu to bridge,” he said. “Update our ETA at the Qul Tuq magnetar.”

  He was answered by the familiar flat tones of Lieutenant Lojur, the Halkan navigator, who was very possibly the only person aboard Excelsior who got less sleep than either Sulu or Commander Cutler. “We’re only minutes from establishing orbit around the second planet, Captain. That planet remains our best guess as to the current location of both the Klothos and the hostile vessel.”

  “Can’t you confirm their whereabouts at this range?”

  “Not with all the magnetic activity coming from Qul Tuq, sir. But we should have better luck after we establish orbit around the planet. With or without sensors, we can still use our eyes.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” Sulu said as he fastened his jacket’s shoulder clasp.

  Another voice cut in. “Captain, we’ve been running these engines too hot for too long,” said Lieutenant Commander Tim Henry, Excelsior’s acting chief engineer. “We’ve got to give them some downtime, sir. And soon.”

  Sulu couldn’t help but agree — he could feel the almost pained throbbing of the ship’s warp drive as it permeated the bridge deck plates, and that had been one of the factors that had conspired to scuttle Dr. Chapel’s “get some goddamned sleep” order — but he also knew he couldn’t afford to slow down. Not while the Klothos, and by extension Federation-Klingon détente, was in mortal jeopardy. And certainly not when he had finally come so close to catching the man who had threatened his family and killed his captain.

  “The engines will get all the downtime they need and more,” Sulu said. “Once we get where we’re going.”

  “Henry’s right, sir,” said Commander Cutler. “Excelsior can’t take much more of this — not with the extra demands we’re having to make on our shield generators the closer we get to the Qul Tuq magnetar.”

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have an alternative to riding the shields hard,” Sulu said. “Not if we want to avoid shipwide system failures.” He seriously doubted that either Kor’s battle cruiser or the albino’s battered freighter could do better, which made Excelsior’s alacrity even more critical.

  “Understood, Captain,” Henry said in grumbling acquiescence.

  “Will we be able to use the transporters?” Sulu wanted to know.

  “I wouldn’t recommend it, sir,” Henry said. “Even with the shields reinforced against the worst effects of the magnetar. It looks like we won’t be able to count on our hand phasers either.”

  Sulu glanced across the room at the glass display case where he stored his small collection of ancient Earth firearms, as well as his supplies of target-shooting ammunition.

  He grinned as he decided that the lack of hand phasers didn’t have to be an insuperable problem.

  “We’d better ready a pair of shuttlecraft,” Sulu said. “The Klothos is almost certainly going to need both medics and engineers. Commander Cutler, I want you to assemble the appropriate teams and put them aboard the Shuttlecraft Rickover.”

  “Aye, sir,” Cutler said.

  “As soon as you’ve done that, meet me in the hangar deck with a security team. In the meantime, I’ll start prepping the shuttlecraft Von Steuben for immediate launch.”

  “Sir?”

  Sulu modulated his voice into a tone that brooked no further discussion. “The minute we locate the albino’s ship, Commander, we’re going to board her.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Early 2290 (the Year of Kahless 915, late in the month of

  Doqath; Gregorian date: January 12, 2290)

  The freebooter ship Hegh’TlhoS

  Still exulting on the adrenaline rush of a battle well-ended, Dax reminded himself not to get cocky.

  But that decision came only after five more armed and angry pirates appeared in the corridor, once again halting Dax and the three Klingon captains in their pursuit of the fleeing albino. Before Dax could react, Kor and Kang surged forward, both Klingons dispatching a brigand apiece with deft thrusts of their slick and glistening blades.

  One of the three surviving pirates swept the tip of his long weapon, a slender metal pole that Dax had at first mistaken for a sword, across Kor’s armored side. Kor roared in fury and pain, and the air was at once sickeningly redolent with burnt leather and scorched flesh as he stepped ba
ckward, narrowly avoiding what could easily have been a killing blow. One of the remaining defenders turned to flee. The last man, an Orion, drew a thin, finely serrated knife and threw it with startling precision.

  The flying blade buried itself deep into Kor’s left knee.

  The knife thrower looked as surprised as Dax felt when Kor calmly extracted the blade and threw it back, making up for any lack of finesse with sheer rage-fueled force.

  The pirate crashed lifeless to the deck, the haft of his own knife protruding from his throat, and Dax wondered whether he’d had time to realize what had hit him before he died.

  Although neither Kang nor Koloth seemed to pay any attention to their colleague’s injuries, Dax rushed to Kor’s side to offer assistance. Kor angrily waved Dax away, raising his bat’leth, perhaps as much in warning as to demonstrate that he didn’t intend to allow his injuries to slow down the chase.

  “My wounds will only make our victory taste sweeter,” Kor said as the quartet continued along the same corridor down which the albino had fled.

  Then the ship rocked again, jerking nearly hard enough to knock Dax off his feet. The Klingons glowered, but continued undeterred, passing Dax.

  So much for being treated as an equal, he thought as he tried to force down a thoroughly undiplomatic surge of resentment.

  Dax hastened to catch up, and wondered whether the sound and tumult they’d all just heard signified victory, or something else entirely.

  A moment later, when the group turned a corner and found themselves facing no less than a dozen more armed men, he was fairly certain that he’d found his answer.

  • • •

  Shuttlecraft Von Steuben

  “I’ll handle the hard-dock maneuver myself,” Sulu said, staring through the shuttlecraft Von Steuben’s forward windows. The battered freighter steadily increased in apparent size as the shuttle slowly matched distance and velocity with it.

  Although the Qul Tuq magnetar had effectively neutralized sensor scans as a tactical asset, it hadn’t been difficult for both Excelsior and the Von Steuben to confirm visually that the albino’s freighter was indeed located near the second planet of the system — as was Captain Kor’s battle cruiser, whose medical and repair needs were already being addressed by the hand-picked crew of the shuttlecraft Rickover.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather delegate the docking job to me?” said Cutler, who tended the copilot’s station beside him. Sulu could hear metallic clicks and ratcheting sounds as the security team seated behind her in the central crew compartment completed their final weapons checks in preparation for boarding the hostile vessel.

  “Sure as gravity,” Sulu said as his fingers danced across the flight control console. Since the proximity of the magnetar still ruled out any use of Excelsior’s transporters, this method — using orbital mechanics techniques as old as the Gemini missions conducted more than three centuries ago, at the dawn of Earth’s First Space Age — was the safest and most expedient option for boarding the albino’s ship. Having spent as many years as he had with his own hand directly on the tiller, Sulu wasn’t about to delegate this task to anyone.

  As the details of the freighter’s scorched and beat-up hull became steadily more visible in the dim reflected glow of the second planet and its moons, Sulu noticed the two old-style breach pods that were attached, barnacle-like, to the vessel’s pockmarked skin. He concluded that the Klingons must have already succeeded in getting themselves aboard, or had at least made a good attempt.

  Let’s hope my fellow captains are keeping Qagh too busy right now to look out the window and notice that more company is coming, Sulu thought as he began making his final approach.

  A moment later the two hulls came into contact rather abruptly, with a resounding force that brought to mind asteroid impacts. The interior of the Von Steuben reverberated like a bell.

  After taking a moment to study the environmental panels — probably to make certain that the craft wasn’t venting atmosphere — Cutler turned toward Sulu with a grin.

  “Remember, I did offer to drive,” she said.

  Sulu considered quoting the old saw about any landing that a pilot could walk away from being a good one, but instead looked down again to check the docking control readout. As he’d hoped, the shuttlecraft’s expanding-and-contracting iris aperture had established a sufficiently tight fit with the freighter’s outer airlock to allow the boarding party to get safely inside without the use of environmental suits — once their explosives had blown open the exterior hatch.

  “You can drive the next time we board a pirate ship,” Sulu said, then turned his attention to the security team.

  • • •

  The wound in his head was bleeding freely, obscuring Kang’s vision and staining what little of it that remained with livid, pinkish-purple hues.

  Today is a good day to die, he reminded himself as his attacker drove him inexorably backward, and finally tripped him. Kang felt the deck plates flex beneath him as he crashed flat onto his back. He raised his bat’leth, only to feel it wrenched from his grasp by a blunt, forceful impact. The blade clattered to the deck a short distance away.

  The petaQ must have kicked me, he thought, struggling to rise even though he knew full well that he couldn’t see well enough to stave off a well-placed killing blow.

  He heard frantic shouts then, as well as the urgent crash of opposed metal blades, the latter generating a breeze that caused the congealing blood on his temple to spatter. From elsewhere in the freighter he heard several sharp reports, like the sounds made by the explosives used to blow open sealed hatches during shipboard emergencies. He took a moment to wipe a sleeve across his eyes, clearing his vision somewhat.

  Blinking in incredulity, Kang saw Commander Sulu standing over him, a bloody bat’leth in his hand as he regarded the huge male Orion corpse that lay sprawled across the deck, apparently quite dead even though it still clutched a wicked-looking short sword in its large, lifeless hands. Still struggling to focus his blood-spattered eyes, Kang belatedly realized that the bat’leth that had killed the Orion was Kang’s own weapon; Sulu had evidently picked it up from the deck after the Orion had kicked it from his grasp.

  Sulu knelt beside Kang, who struggled to a sitting position, hoping all the while he wasn’t allowing the human to see how much pain the movement was causing him.

  “Are you all right?” Sulu said, laying the bat’leth down at Kang’s side.

  “Never better, Commander.” Kang grinned as he wrapped his fingers around the blade’s blood-slicked grips. “In fact, I have rarely felt so very much alive.”

  Sulu’s female second-in-command, flanked by a pair of youthful Starfleet officers, bounded toward Sulu from around a corner. All of them carried unfamiliar-looking metal pistols that exuded a pungent chemical odor.

  “What manner of weapons are those?” Kang said, pointing toward the pistols. He noticed that a similar gun was tucked into Sulu’s belt. “They do not appear to be of Starfleet issue.”

  Sulu favored him with a chuckle and an incongruous smile. “You’re right. But they’ll get the job done once you learn to deal with recoil and the possibility of projectile-caused hull breaches.”

  “Indeed,” Kang said, impressed. “Such a weapon would make a fine addition to my own collection.”

  “We can discuss that later,” Sulu said, grinning. “For now, let’s just say that this vessel has just been secured by Mister Smith, Mister Wesson, and Mister Colt and leave it at that.”

  The human captain turned toward his officers. “Report.”

  “The control room remains secure, Captain,” said Commander Cutler, Sulu’s executive officer. “As well as the engine compartment. We’ve captured several more hostiles in the past few minutes, in addition to seizing a large quantity of what appears to be bioweapons contraband. The rest of the security detachment is continuing to search for anyone else who may still be aboard and trying to evade capture.”

  “Most
of the hostiles had already been killed or otherwise pacified before we came aboard,” said the younger male officer. “Someone seems to have beaten us to them.”

  Kang chuckled, though the motion sent a jolt of agony through his rib cage. “Someone indeed.”

  As if on cue, footfalls sounded from down the corridor somewhere behind Kang, and Sulu and his officers tensed, pointing their weapons toward the source of the noise. Painfully, Kang turned his head in time to see Kor, Koloth, and Dax approaching, all of them looking distressed but relatively uninjured, if one discounted Kor’s blood-soaked knee and his rather pronounced limp.

  Dax beamed at the human captain. “What’s that Terran expression, Commander?” he said. “ ‘Fancy meeting you here’?”

  But Sulu now appeared to have little patience for frivolities. “Have you found the albino?” he asked bluntly.

  “We did,” Koloth said. “But the coward turned and ran from us shortly before you arrived.”

  Sulu’s expression took on a grim intensity that Kang had never seen before on a human face. “Damn. I was just up on the control deck. One of the consoles recorded the launch of a pair of small auxiliary vessels only a few minutes ago.”

  “Headed where?” Kor wanted to know.

  “Judging from the recorded launch trajectory alone, I’d have to put my money on the second planet’s big inner moon,” Sulu said.

  Dax nodded. “It has a substantial atmosphere,” he said. “I suppose it would make a good hiding place.”

  “Then that’s where we’re going,” Sulu said.

  “Sir, assuming that the launch records weren’t faked to throw us off,” Cutler said, “I still have to point out that you have no way to know what might be waiting for you down there.”

  Sulu nodded soberly. “Granted. But the most efficient way to resolve either question is to go down to the moon’s surface and start scouring the place.”

  “In my opinion, it’s too risky,” Cutler said. “Not to mention the fact that you are far too personally involved in this to be objective, in my opinion. Why not send me and part of the security team instead?”