Forged in Fire Read online

  “Because I need you to keep things secure here until I report back,” Sulu said sharply. “And because the albino is mine.”

  “Sir —”

  Sulu was finally beginning to look truly angry. “I’m finished discussing it, Commander. The matter is decided. Understood?”

  She paused, her jaw muscles flexing like those of a sabre bear before it strikes.

  “Completely, sir,” she said, and glowered off into the middle distance.

  “I am coming with you,” Kor declared, his face a mask of utter ferocity despite the smoothness of his brows.

  Sulu studied Kor for a lengthy, silent moment, as though contemplating asking him why he seemed so determined to press on in his pursuit of the albino.

  “As will I,” Koloth said, lifting his bat’leth toward the corridor’s low, conduit-festooned ceiling as he interrupted whatever question might have been about to spring to the human’s lips.

  “I shall come as well,” Kang said. Focusing past the excruciating pain that lanced his torso, he steeled himself to rise, first pushing himself up onto one knee, then rising haltingly and getting both feet beneath him.

  He immediately toppled back to the deck, his cheeks and neck baking in abject shame at having proven himself so weak in the presence of aliens. He was grateful, at least, that both Dax and Sulu had proved themselves sufficiently knowledgeable about Klingon culture to refrain from shaming him by offering to help him stand.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Kang,” Sulu said. “Except to visit my medics.”

  “I’ll go down to the moon in Kang’s place,” Dax said, raising his bat’leth in a smart Klingon military salute. “Just try and keep me away.”

  Sulu stepped toward the young Trill and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “As a matter of fact, Mister Dax, I will.”

  “Excuse me?” Dax said, looking crestfallen.

  Sulu remained resolute. “You’re a diplomat, not a warrior. And the mission ahead will have nothing whatsoever to do with diplomacy.”

  Sulu turned back toward Kang. “I will go in Kang’s place,” he said, his dark gaze locked with Kang’s, though he was obviously addressing everyone in the corridor.

  Kang sighed in resignation and wondered if the loss of blood he had suffered had made him somehow more tractable or had simply weakened him past the point of uselessness. He decided that it didn’t matter, since he knew that in his current injured state he could only be a liability to whoever was going to lead the next direct confrontation with the albino.

  He picked his bat’leth up off the deck plates and handed it up to Sulu. “You may borrow it,” he said. “So long as you do me the honor of bringing it back stained with the blood of your captain’s killer.”

  Sulu stood holding the ichor-splotched blade in both hands, saying nothing.

  But the silent, cold fire that Kang saw blazing in the depths of the human’s eyes spoke as loudly as the war trumpets of mighty Kahless.

  THIRTY-FIVE

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

  Doqath; Gregorian date: January 12, 2290)

  Shuttlecraft Von Steuben

  For a fleeting moment, or perhaps even a little bit longer, Sulu regretted his decades-old decision to transfer out of astrophysics and onto the arduous career track of starship command. He hadn’t come quite this close to succumbing to motion sickness since entering advanced flight training at Starfleet Academy.

  He did his best to ignore his distress, focusing his attention instead upon the instruments arrayed about him in the Von Steuben’s relentlessly unsteady cockpit. Narrowing his concentration like a laser being channeled through a rubidium crystal, he guided the shuttlecraft steadily downward through the moon’s dense atmosphere, continually adjusting the small vessel’s attitude, pitch, and yaw.

  “It’s just our luck that this little moon has almost as thick an atmosphere as Venus,” Sulu said as he continued compensating for turbulent convection currents and buffeting wind shear effects, both of which seemed to be conspiring at the moment to tear the Von Steuben to tiny, suborbital pieces.

  “Venus?” Kor said, adjusting the bandages on his knee and around his ribs while Koloth stared into the indistinct gray nothingness of the high-pressure carbon dioxide atmosphere that was visible through the shuttle’s wide forward windows.

  “Venus is Earth’s nearest neighboring planet,” Sulu said wryly. “You’d probably love it there.”

  The cloud deck beneath the shuttlecraft suddenly parted, revealing the atmosphere-distorted vista of rilled, rocky landscape that lay only a handful of kilometers below. Lit in subdued sepia tones accented by the faint but angry amber glow of some of the orange rocks, the slate-gray ground rushed up to greet them with alarming speed, until Sulu leveled off the shuttle’s descent. Sulu’s stomach found its horizon just as the shuttlecraft did.

  “There!” Koloth said, pointing toward the sensor-generated images being displayed on the console just beneath the forward windows.

  It took Sulu another few minutes to confirm visually what the passive sensors had discovered: the fact that there was indeed another ship on the ground, a mere two kilometers or so distant and yet difficult to see because of the distorting effects of the moon’s dense, heavy atmosphere.

  The albino’s auxiliary vessel had reached the surface and was still in one piece.

  “Do you detect any life signs aboard that ship?” Koloth wanted to know.

  More than a little curious about that himself, Sulu had already begun consulting the passive scanning equipment, since active scans were still proving less than reliable in spite of the partial shielding from Qul Tuq that the second planet’s magnetic field provided.

  A moment later he shook his head, both disappointed and frustrated. “There are no life signs aboard the albino’s ship. I am reading something underground, though. Faint humanoid bio-signs, refined metals . . . and a great deal of nitrogen and oxygen as well.”

  “They must have taken refuge in a prearranged safe house,” Kor said.

  Sulu frowned, incredulous. “A safe house? In a place like this?”

  “The perfect hiding place for one such as the albino,” said Kor. “Who would think of looking for him in a system such as this? And who would want to chase him here?”

  “Maybe somebody who doesn’t mind strolling right into a trap,” Sulu said as he landed the shuttle just out of sight of the albino’s vessel.

  And certainly nobody who most people would consider sane.

  • • •

  The fact that nobody had reacted as yet to the presence of the Von Steuben struck Sulu as strange. As he took turns with Kor and Koloth in donning pressure suits — someone, after all, had to keep an eye out for any sudden attack while the other two members of the team were suiting up and preparing to leave the shuttlecraft — he found the continued quiescence of both the albino’s auxiliary craft and his safe house increasingly disturbing.

  It was the silence of the grave — or the quiet that concealed a carefully baited trap. Or maybe both, unless we’re damned careful.

  “Damn this suit to Gre’thor!” Koloth grumbled as he awkwardly pulled the garment over the cartilaginous ridges that ran from his forehead all the way down the torso he had stripped of its armored Klingon military tunic in order to fit into standard Starfleet-issue EVA garb. For obvious reasons, Koloth had more trouble getting his helmet in place than did either of his two smooth-headed compatriots.

  Nevertheless, within ten minutes of landing, Sulu and the two Klingon captains made their way onto the rugged terrain just outside the main airlock of the shuttlecraft, whose systems were now in the able hands of the ship’s computer. Sulu could only marvel at the delicacy with which both Kor and Koloth handled the handsome, razor-sharp curved bat’leth blades all three of them had brought along in anticipation of the showdown that they all knew was coming. Each Klingon wore his blade slung across the back of his pressure suit, somehow managing to avoid sl
icing the garment open. Moving with extreme caution and deliberation — which wasn’t easy, given the oppressive crush of the moon’s atmospheric pressure — Sulu followed suit.

  As the outer airlock door closed, Sulu watched the shuttle’s markings — specifically the letters that spelled out the name Von Steuben— as they rippled in the thick, poisonous air. He couldn’t tell for certain if the paint on the hull was beginning to succumb to the moon’s harsh and hot reducing atmosphere, though the effect made him briefly contemplate rechristening Excelsior’s entire complement of shuttlecraft, a task which was every new captain’s prerogative. When and if Starfleet Command made him Excelsior’s permanent commander, he just couldn’t see maintaining the late Lawrence Styles’s penchant for naming his auxiliary craft after military figures, even seminal ones like General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who had written the field manuals for George Washington’s Revolutionary War–era army, or Admiral Hyman Rickover, who had pioneered the same nation’s nuclear submarine fleet nearly two centuries later. He’d always thought that Starfleet shuttlecraft should be named after explorers, scientists, and diplomats.

  But now isn’t the time to think about shuttle names, he told himself as the three men carefully picked their way over a low, rocky rise and carefully traversed a boulder-strewn defile toward the albino’s ship, handheld phaser and disruptors as ready as their blades, despite the fact that the interactions of planetary and solar magnetic fields had rendered them essentially useless as anything other than crude grenades.

  Which was precisely how the trio had planned to use them against the albino’s parked ship, since the defenses built into the Von Steuben seemed to be in roughly the same operating condition as the landing party’s energy weapons.

  Sulu moved gingerly as he tried to adjust to the slightly higher than Earth-normal gravity that prevailed on this ultradense moon. The weight of the long, curved blade on his back felt alien, yet somehow reassuring. He hoped his years of foil and saber training would serve him in good stead if he actually had to use the thing in combat.

  As they reached the albino’s ship, Sulu noticed that something didn’t look quite right on the port side of her hull.

  “Get away from that ship!” he shouted, allowing instinct to take over.

  A moment later, all the furies of Hell came streaming forth in a gale of hot death.

  • • •

  Thanks to the round of injections Nej had given him during the harried flight to the Qul Tuq safe house, Qagh was feeling stronger than he had in months. The burning and swelling at the injection point on his right bicep had begun to recede, but was easy to ignore in any case.

  When he felt the vibrations rumbling beneath the safe house’s polished stone floor, he felt even better still.

  “They would seem to have taken the bait,” Nej said.

  “That decoy ship was one of your better ideas, Doctor,” said the albino, smiling broadly. “If our pursuers noticed we launched more than one shuttle, they must have thought they were seeing a sensor ghost caused by Qul Tuq.”

  The floor rumbled again a few moments later, this time accompanied by a change in air pressure that was extreme enough to make Qagh’s ears pop.

  Someone had forced one of the airlocks open from the outside.

  “Bring in the men,” he said, wondering if they would stand and fight or try to bolt; they were all presently engaged in the business of either maintaining or loading the small vessel, after all. Without Qagh’s voice codes, however, anyone who tried to flee in the shuttle wouldn’t get very far. “And prepare the large pyrotechnics to cover our exit. But go about it quietly, so our . . . guests don’t panic unnecessarily.”

  Nej had turned so pale that Qagh thought he was looking into a mirror. Then the physician nodded mutely and disappeared through the stone chamber’s rear door.

  Qagh walked toward the bare granite desk, behind which he kept several edged weapons hanging from one of the rough-hewn walls. The polished blades gleamed in the light of several softly glowing fixtures that were bolted directly into the rock of the ceiling.

  A pity that simple disruptors won’t work properly in this hellhole, he thought as he took down the half-moon-shaped bat’leth from the pegs that held it on display between a pair of ornate long swords.

  He heard a soft, barely audible footfall behind him, and knew instantly that it had not been caused by any of his men; his own people knew better than to try to sneak up on him, especially when he held such a keen, well-balanced piece of metal in his hands.

  “Turn around slowly.” The voice behind him was smooth and deep.

  And angry.

  Keeping his blade flat across his chest, Qagh did as he was bid. After all, he would have to stall for only another few moments before help came.

  A single glance at the bedraggled men who confronted him confirmed that he might indeed have little to fear, despite the fact that the intruders outnumbered him three to one. Not only were the pressure suits they wore scorched and battered, each of these men seemed to be dependent upon the same simple edged weapons that he, Qagh, carried. At any rate, if any of them had possessed a weapon capable of striking him down from across the room — a chemical projectile pistol, say, or even a throwing knife — then they would be fools not to have used it already, when his back was turned. He lifted his blade.

  “My decoy vessel contained a rather large cargo of explosives,” Qagh said. “But you seem to have reasoned that out in time to avoid taking the brunt of it. How?” He forced his voice to remain even, keeping it almost at a monotone; he hoped his guests would find that unnerving — at least until reinforcements arrived.

  Unfortunately, the three intruders seemed to be anything but unnerved. Two of them removed their carbon-splotched helmets, drew their bat’leths, and began approaching from the sides, like a pair of carnivorous, heavy-breathing bregit closing in for the kill. He immediately recognized his kinsman Captain Kor, who was walking with a pronounced limp, as well as Captain Koloth, though he had to admit to feeling some surprise at their having managed to find him again so soon.

  The third man doffed his helmet, revealing unfamiliar human features. Unlike his fellows, his bat’leth remained hanging from the back of his pressure suit.

  “I pay very close attention to ship markings,” the human said in the same deep voice that had ordered Qagh to turn around. “It’s been a hobby of mine ever since I was a boy living on the Klingon border. To this day, I tend to notice small discrepancies — which is a great help in spotting decoys and traps.”

  This is very bad, Qagh thought, a membrane-thin film of perspiration beginning to dew his forehead. As strong as he felt right now, he knew he was no match for an armed human accompanied by two extremely angry armed Klingons.

  Where in the Nine Hells are my men? Qagh thought, panic slowly rising within his soul like the tide-stirred magmas that roiled beneath the surface of this moon. Perhaps someone among his crew had broken his voice codes in the shuttle’s computer and had seized this opportunity to get rid of him. If he survived this, he would have to institute yet another disloyalty purge, posthaste.

  “Stop!” the human shouted.

  Qagh suddenly recognized this man as one of the Starfleet officers who had attended the Korvat meeting.

  The Klingons paused in their tracks, though they both regarded the human as though he’d just gone utterly mad.

  “He’s mine,” the human said. “I recognize him.”

  Perplexity widened Qagh’s eyes. “You recognize me? And how might that be possible?” Although he knew that everyone now in the room had also been present inside the Korvat conference hall, Qagh remained confident that no one could have seen through the biomimetic disguise he’d been wearing at the time.

  The human raised a soot-smeared glove and thrust an accusing forefinger directly at Qagh. “It’s been over forty years since the last time I caught a glimpse of you,” he said. “But you never forget the face of the man who tried to murde
r your whole family.”

  “Your . . . family.” Try as Qagh might, he could muster no recollection of an encounter with this human prior to the Korvat meeting. “My friend, I have killed lots of families throughout my life,” he said, hoping to provoke the younger man into losing the struggle he was obviously having with his emotions.

  The human’s eyes suddenly grew colder than a pair of outbound comets. “It happened on a border world where I lived for a while as a child. The human colonists called the place Ganjitsu. Does that little detail jog your memory?”

  Keep stalling him, Qagh thought. “Never heard of it.”

  “Then I suppose you also don’t remember the agronomy lab you raided, either. I was only eleven years old then, but I managed to fry all the computers in the entire compound before you and your crew were able to make off with anything. Then you and your pirates went back to your ship and lifted off — and then blew the whole place up from orbit.”

  Qagh remembered.

  He recalled slapping the Jade Lady’s fire-control button with a shaking, sweat-slicked palm. He remembered how angry he had been, how thwarted he had felt. His frustration with a universe filled with happenstances that seemed collectively bent on his destruction.

  And he remembered how very close to death he had come that day — all because someone had sabotaged the computers in that border-world lab before melting away into the shadows like some intangible, cowardly ghost.

  “So that was you,” Qagh said quietly.

  “Hikaru Sulu,” the human said. “Commander in Starfleet. Now acting captain of the Federation Starship Excelsior.”

  “Commander Sulu,” Qagh said. “Your interference might well have killed me that day.” He stepped out in front of his desk, stopping when he came to within a tall man’s body length from the human and his Klingon escorts. He held the bat’leth before him, hands tightly fastened to the leather grips wound about the handles on either side.