Forged in Fire Read online

  “And yours almost left me an orphan,” Sulu said, his body tensing as for combat, although his bat’leth still dangled uselessly from the back of his suit.

  “My apologies for my poor aim, Commander,” Qagh said. “My intention wasn’t to cause you lingering emotional pain. It was to kill every last living thing in that lab compound.”

  “So,” the Klingon named Kor said to the human. “Your family honor is at stake here as well.”

  “I’m here to bring a criminal to justice,” Sulu replied. “Not to carry out a vendetta.”

  It was clear that neither of the Klingons believed him. Kor grinned unpleasantly and took an uneven limping step forward. Pointing toward Qagh with one of the gleaming tips of his bat’leth, he said, “I hope that doesn’t mean you expect him to agree to just come with you quietly, Commander.”

  “No,” Sulu said. “I don’t suppose he will.”

  “Regardless,” Kor said, twirling his blade as he took a step back, “Koloth and I most certainly do not intend merely to arrest this man.”

  “Indeed,” the Klingon named Koloth said to the human as he mirrored Kor’s gesture, making room for Sulu and Qagh to engage one another without hindrance. “So make sure you leave some for us when you’re finished. Remember, I have a crew and a ship to avenge.”

  Qagh watched as the human drew his bat’leth. His movements were slow and tentative, bordering on awkward, as though his previous experience with Klingon blades was very limited. He had not yet even raised his weapon into a proper defensive posture.

  Recognizing a clear opportunity to whittle down the odds against him very quickly — while obtaining some measure of revenge of his own against the little human ghost who had nearly ended his life more than forty years ago — Qagh suddenly spun, aiming his bat’leth’s right edge straight at the human’s stunned-looking face.

  THIRTY-SIX

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

  Doqath; Gregorian date: January 12, 2290)

  Qul Tuq

  Though the albino’s sudden move caught him by surprise, Sulu managed to get his bat’leth up between his face and his assailant just in time to block the blow, redirecting it slightly to his left. Sparks leaped from the blades as they made contact, and the surprising power behind the assault forced Sulu backward, nearly toppling him over completely.

  “Revenge delayed tastes all the sweeter for being aged,” the albino said, grinning as he regained his own temporarily skewed balance. He twirled his blade slowly as he began very deliberately circling Sulu, his booted feet moving in a surprisingly graceful grapevine motion for someone so sickly-looking.

  Raising his own blade into a defensive position, Sulu crouched, turning in a slow, tight circle in response to the albino’s relentless movements. As he revolved to keep his flank away from the albino, he saw that Kor and Koloth continued to stand motionless on opposite sides of the cavern-like room, like a jury formulating a dispassionate evaluation of his performance. Or perhaps they were merely waiting for him to ask for their assistance.

  Something in their dour expressions, however, told him that they would think less of him — and by extension the Federation as well — if they decided he was expecting rescue.

  Meeting the albino’s hard stare squarely, he said, “Just what makes you think you’re entitled to revenge?”

  The joyously psychotic expression on the brigand’s chalky face collapsed into something that Sulu found even more dangerous-looking. “You denied me information that I needed very badly when you sabotaged that lab, Commander. Life-sustaining medicine, in effect. I came very close to dying because of it.”

  “You seem to have survived well enough without whatever you thought you might find in my mother’s lab. And I definitely would have died, along with my family, if I hadn’t overheard your plans in time to do something about them.”

  The albino swung his blade as though it were an ax, telegraphing the maneuver sufficiently to allow Sulu to sidestep the blow while countering with a two-handed parry and riposte of his own.

  A lengthy series of similar parries and ripostes followed before the two fighters separated once more, catching their breaths as they studied and reevaluated one another. However thin and weak the albino might seem, Sulu understood viscerally that he couldn’t afford to underestimate this man.

  “It sounds almost as though you feel entitled to some measure of vengeance, Commander,” the albino said as the two bat’leth wielders resumed their slow and wary mutual circling.

  “Starfleet officers aren’t big fans of vengeance,” Sulu said, though he doubted such lofty pronouncements would succeed in fooling anybody here. He couldn’t deny his struggle to remain calm as a steady and irrepressible tide of anger rose within him. This was, after all, the raider who had violated his family home four decades ago; this was the pirate who would have casually murdered him, or orphaned him by killing his parents without so much as a second thought.

  “I had no idea that you Earthers were such determinedly virtuous folk, Commander,” the other man said, smirking. “Maintaining that air of Federation superiority must be exhausting.”

  Sulu’s eyes narrowed involuntarily. “At least I have no regrets. What I did that day in that lab I’d do again in a heartbeat.”

  “I don’t doubt that a bit,” the albino said with a wide but humorless grin. “Especially now that you are in a position to inflict a good deal more damage than you could have done all those long years ago. But tell me, Earther, honestly: Can you really be content with merely arresting me?”

  Though he wanted nothing at the moment more than to plunge the tip of his blade straight into the albino’s leather-clad chest, Sulu merely kept his blade steady, raised, and ready as the two men continued moving like a pair of co-orbiting planets, partners in a stately dance of death.

  “Because of what you did at Korvat,” Sulu said at length, “my duty is to bring you in alive — unless you choose to make that impossible for me.”

  That damnable grin only grew wider. “And what of my alleged actions on your precious border world?”

  Sulu spun his blade once, though he never broke eye contact with his adversary as he returned the weapon to what amounted to a standard en garde position. “Let’s just say I feel privileged to finally have the chance to do what I couldn’t do when I was eleven years old.”

  Then he lunged forward, swinging the half-moon-shaped blade upward and down, like a scythe turned on its side. Despite being surprised and slightly off balance, the albino saved himself with a clumsy parry sixte.

  Still more sparks flew as the blades collided loudly, again and again. Sulu feinted and jabbed, nicking the albino twice on the arm and lower torso before the pirate’s blade bit into Sulu’s upper right arm, just below the shoulder. The pressure suit absorbed so much of the blow’s force that Sulu didn’t think he’d actually suffered a cut. On the other hand, he might not have been hit at all but for the relatively bulky, movement-hampering garment.

  The albino clearly regarded this as an opportunity to go in for the kill, but Sulu once again redirected the other man’s charge. Their blades locked together briefly before the pirate took a single long and eminently sensible backward step.

  “You handle the bat’leth better than I would have thought possible,” the albino said, sounding winded. “At least for an Earther.”

  Sulu had to admit that he had been thinking much the same thing about his opponent. He paused for a moment to catch his breath, though he remained alert for any sudden movements on the other man’s part. “I had a good teacher,” he said, trying to waste as little breath as possible as he nodded toward Koloth.

  Koloth had indeed shown Sulu some of the fundamental Mok’bara combat forms when their paths had last crossed more than two years earlier, including some crash instruction in basic bat’leth handling. But that hadn’t been Sulu’s first exposure to the ancient Klingon weapon; he had first encountered the crescent-shaped warrior’
s blade more than twenty years earlier, amid a pile of Klingon swords that lay discarded aboard the Enterprise immediately after the Beta XII-A entity had been driven from the ship.

  But other than during his most recent previous encounter with Koloth — and the occasional polishings he gave the bat’leth he’d kept as a souvenir for the past two decades — Sulu hadn’t actually trained all that much with Klingon blades. But he had always made a point of maintaining the skills that had won him the Inner Planets all-around fencing championship during his Starfleet Academy days, albeit with standard Earth weapons. And he knew that his current opponent, however ferocious and determined he might be, was a good deal older, lighter, and less robust than he was.

  The albino charged again, roaring as he feinted low with his blade before turning completely around and aiming the opposite tip of his bat’leth straight at Sulu’s temple. Sulu twisted and dodged the blade, which literally whistled past his ear. Continuing his motion, he turned and stepped inside his opponent’s reach, forcing the albino to back up in haste.

  Sulu suddenly dropped one end of his blade, then pulled the other end up with both hands, sweeping the albino’s feet out from under him without doing any real damage. The brigand landed flat on his back with a sickening thud that the stone floor deadened only slightly. Sulu planted his left foot firmly on the albino’s right wrist to prevent him from raising his blade. He brought his whole weight down on the other man, forcing his hand open so that the blade clattered uselessly to the floor.

  Kicking the other bat’leth just out of reach, Sulu placed the tip of his own blade against the albino’s pale throat.

  “You are under arrest in the name of the United Federation of Planets.”

  The pirate only glared up at him, supine and helpless, yet still insolent. Contemptuous. Unrepentant.

  Murdering bastard.

  Kor and Koloth approached then, startling Sulu slightly; during the last few moments, his perspective on the universe had so narrowed that he and the albino had effectively become its only occupants.

  “Why not simply slay him now, and have done with it?” Kor said as he moved a few paces closer. His eyes blazed with battle fervor even though his limping gait showed him to be in less-than-optimal condition for combat.

  “That would be rather convenient for you, would it not, Kor?” Koloth said, looking as though he might kill the albino himself at any moment.

  “We’re taking him into custody,” Sulu said, puzzled by Koloth’s remark. It had been Koloth, not Kor, who had lost an entire ship and crew to one of the pirate’s sneak attacks. So how would killing this man be “convenient” for Kor rather than Koloth? He recalled Kor’s earlier comment that “family honor” formed at least part of his reason for chasing the albino. Had Koloth just made another oblique reference to that?

  Staring into the albino’s hate-filled visage, Sulu could not help graphically recalling all the havoc that this man had caused on Ganjitsu, as he had doubtless also done in myriad other places before and since — including Korvat, where he’d assassinated a Starfleet captain. And he had yet to be brought to book for that crime.

  How easy it would be to just end this here and now, Sulu thought as he held his blade at the throat of the man who now lay winded, wounded, and helpless at his feet. The man who had so callously slain Excelsior’s original commanding officer.

  The man who had, in essence, forever changed Sulu’s destiny, once long ago on Ganjitsu, and once again much more recently on Korvat.

  He wondered if Kor might not be right.

  No. I’m not killing anyone in cold blood, he thought, disgusted with himself as the moment of temptation rose, peaked, and then passed.

  Mostly.

  “Your experiments in biogenic weapons are finished,” he said to the man he was now trying very hard to think of as a prisoner in Starfleet custody, and therefore under Starfleet protection.

  “You really think so?” the albino said, and then reached clumsily for Sulu’s blade.

  Sulu pushed the bat’leth harder against the albino’s throat, causing the prisoner to gasp and let his pasty hands drop away from the weapon.

  “I know so,” Sulu said. “Whatever contraband you were carrying on that freighter of yours has been either captured or destroyed. Along with most of your peop—”

  Sulu heard loud footfalls coming from the rear of the chamber. He looked past the albino in time to see eight or more large, grim-faced people enter, most of them smooth-headed Klingon males, with a pair of hulking green Orions and a tall, lithe Klingon woman thrown in for good measure. The pirates were all dressed in a motley array of mostly dark, paramilitary clothing. To a person, their belts were adorned with edged weapons of all sorts, ranging from daggers to swords of various descriptions.

  But clutched in their hands were large, dangerous-looking alien pistols that might have been Klingon projectile weapons.

  Sulu had brought one of his own old firearms along with him, but it had taken some damage when the albino’s explosive trap had detonated; he didn’t want to risk firing it, even if he could have gotten it free of the storage pocket in his suit’s right thigh before being shot dead for his trouble.

  The albino spoke in eerily calm tones. “Unlike your particle-beam weapons, Commander, these firearms are immune to electromagnetic interference. And I have far fewer compunctions about firing them down here than aboard my ship.”

  Sulu’s back teeth ground together.

  “Drop your swords!” shouted one of the Orions, his pistol leveled straight at Sulu’s head in a two-handed grip. Like the Orion, the rest of the pirates stood in similar combat crouches, the barrels of each of their weapons trained squarely upon either Sulu, Koloth, or Kor. Across the six meters or so that now separated Sulu and his teammates from the most distant of the guns, there was precious little chance that any of the shooters would miss his or her chosen target.

  Neither Sulu nor Koloth nor Kor laid down their weapons. The albino favored all three men with a smile fashioned from pure, distilled malevolence.

  “These weapons fire lead projectiles propelled by explosive chemical reactions,” he said. “Needless to say, they’re every bit as lethal as military-issue disruptors. And, at the present moment, they are considerably more dangerous than any of your bat’leths.”

  Sulu scowled in puzzlement over the albino’s pedantic explanation of his weaponry. Then he remembered that the pirate had fled his own ship before Sulu’s party, carrying essentially the same sort of firearms, boarded his freighter.

  He launched two auxiliary craft when he left his ship, Sulu reminded himself, silently cursing himself for letting himself get caught with his pants down. He blew one of them up just to try to kill us, and he doesn’t seem all that torn up about having lost his freighter and its contents. Maybe he’s got a much larger and better-resourced criminal organization than any of us gave him credit for.

  Sulu was willing to believe the latter notion at least as much as the former, since it certainly helped explain how the albino had managed to keep himself alive for so many long, desperate years, in spite of a chronic life-threatening medical condition.

  He also thought he wasn’t likely to be alive much longer to wonder about it if he and his comrades continued defying the orders of the albino’s rescuers.

  Sulu gazed at his two Klingon companions. “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees,” Kor snarled, his blade raised defiantly in his gauntleted fingers. Koloth stood in silence, holding his weapon at the ready as well.

  It’ll be a very bad day for détente if either of these guys gets killed on my watch, Sulu thought, imagining the Klingon government posthumously blaming him for the incident — and then taking out its ire on the Federation, thereby undoing decades of the arduous ongoing diplomatic work that had been accomplished by Sarek, Kamarag, Curzon Dax, and others.

  “Is it better to be summarily shot in the skull?” Sulu said, addressing both Kor and Koloth. “Or is it bett
er to live to fight another day?”

  If our host plans to offer us that option, he thought before letting his bat’leth fall to the stone floor with a slightly echoing clatter.

  The blades of Kor and Koloth remained in their hands, as firmly attached to each man as were their own limbs.

  “Drop your swords! Now!” the other Orion shouted, his pistol leveled straight at Kor, as other gun barrels chose either Kor, Koloth, or Sulu as targets, seemingly at random.

  Covered by the remainder of the pirate rescue party, the second Orion male approached and helped the albino get his feet beneath him again. Another one of the brigand’s people — the tall Klingon woman, Sulu noted — knelt briefly, scooped up the albino’s fallen blade, and handed it to him.

  “Let these estimable Klingon warriors keep their precious bat’leths,” the albino said to his people as the standoff continued unresolved, growing steadily more tense as the seconds stretched and lengthened. “After all, if you were to shoot them down where they stand right now, they’d need to keep their cutlery in their hands to be allowed into Sto-Vo-Kor. We wouldn’t want our guests to die as anything other than honored heroes, now, would we?”

  “What would the likes of you know about such things as honor?” Kor said.

  The albino chuckled as he walked directly toward Sulu. Apparently still addressing Kor, he said, “Cousin, whether you like it or not, the likes of me are the likes of you.”

  Cousin?

  But Sulu had to put aside his bewilderment when the albino suddenly swung his bat’leth toward him, stopping short of landing a blow, yet pressing one of the weapon’s razor-sharp edges hard against his cheek. Kor and Koloth both seemed about to spring into action in response, but they held themselves back nevertheless, perhaps persuaded by the half-dozen or so handheld projectile weapons that were still aimed straight at them. Or by the keen metal edge that pressed within a few centimeters of Sulu’s carotid artery, which was accessible just above his environmental suit’s open neck ring.