Forged in Fire Page 41

  Although she instinctively jerked away from him, she showed no immediate sign of having noticed his subtle invasion of her body.

  “Apologies, ma’am,” Veret said, stepping toward the young woman while doing his best to appear interested only in helping her maintain her suddenly compromised balance. “Are you all right?”

  He met the young woman’s indignant scowl with a calculated look of purest innocence that seemed to disarm whatever angry response seemed about to spring to her lips before she evidently thought better of it.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” she said, pausing to straighten her jacket before she continued toward the café’s restrooms.

  As she withdrew, apparently none the wiser about the death sentence he had just surreptitiously administered to her, he worked hard to suppress an unseemly urge to leap into the air in triumph.

  Veret glanced momentarily toward the small table at which the young woman had been seated, where the brown-haired, middle-aged Starfleeter sat staring daggers at him while his two remaining drinking companions continued chatting amiably. The assassin breathed a silent prayer for the blessings of the gods of his homeworld, whom he implored to ensure that his deed remained undetected for at least a short while longer — at least until he made his escape from this place.

  He moved toward the exit with as much quiet nonchalance as he could muster. The fuse has been lit, he thought.

  He could only wonder precisely how much delay the albino had programmed into the genetic time bomb he had just planted.

  • • •

  The enormity of what Veret had just done didn’t really strike him until after he’d lifted off in his small shuttle and was well on his way back to the high orbit where the freebooter Chu’ Hegh’TlhoS awaited, her large, boxy cargo modules arranged beneath a farrago of cobbled-together solar collectors and Bussard intakes along a slightly curving central spine that somehow made the renovated freighter resemble an angry hive-insect preparing to strike.

  As his small, battered shuttle made its approach to dock with the Chu’ Hegh’TlhoS’s complexly textured underbelly, Veret considered the irony of the name of his employer’s vessel, which wasn’t the first to bear the name. It took a good deal of daring to operate a ship bearing any Klingon name even on the fringes of Federation space, let alone in the vicinity of Earth itself, the very heart of the Federation. And to choose a Klingon name for multiple successive ships — especially the root-name Hegh’TlhoS, which translated, essentially, to “dead, almost” or “not quite dead” — was to tempt the fates into becoming downright malicious.

  But such matters did not concern him now nearly as much as far more fundamental questions, such as what he had allowed his life to become.

  I steal and kill for a man I hate, Veret accused himself as the Chu’ Hegh’TlhoS’s docking clamps engaged with a jolting clang! that reverberated through the shuttle. And I do it because I fear him.

  He knew he couldn’t endure the guilt that tore at what remained of his soul for much longer. He felt he was swiftly coming to a crossroads. As he ascended the sealed gangway that connected the shuttle’s dorsal surface to the belly of the Chu’ Hegh’TlhoS, he wondered when his contempt for himself would become stronger than his craven instincts for self-preservation.

  If only I could be as strong as the woman who ran from him three years ago, Veret thought, despairing because he knew he would probably rationalize the intolerable yet again. By tomorrow, he would make peace with his remaining shreds of conscience, if only temporarily. And he would resume his usual pattern of quiet scheming, secretly skimming the albino’s profits whenever the pirate chieftain wasn’t looking, and deluding himself into believing that he would one day leave this life behind. . . .

  Moving silently, as befitted a professional thief — and now assassin — Veret wended his way past several Andorian, Tellarite, Denobulan, and Balduk crew members, some of whom busied themselves pursuing shipboard maintenance, and others who seemed to laze, apparently assuming that they were out of the captain’s immediate view. Veret knew better; the albino’s prying eyes were everywhere on board this vessel.

  Stepping sideways through a narrow corridor, Veret entered the small but richly appointed captain’s suite that the albino had made his permanent home. The pasty-white humanoid sat in semidarkness behind a heavy desk made of dark, polished Romulan sherawood, probably taken in a long-forgotten pirate raid decades ago.

  “I have carried out your instructions, Captain Qagh,” Veret said, swallowing hard.

  Flanked by a pair of armed underlings, an Orion male named Jek and a Klingon female called B’Lor, Qagh leaned back in his chair, his dark brown leather tunic making a stark contrast with skin and hair that were both the color of old dry bones. He looked somewhat sicklier than usual, though Veret’s report had buoyed the brigand leader’s spirits visibly.

  “That is very good news indeed,” said the albino. “You ought to be rewarded properly.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Veret, keeping his mien carefully neutral. Cure the disease with which you have afflicted me, he thought. Turn me loose. End this.

  “But it has just come to my attention that you have been rewarding yourself,” Qagh said. “Out of my profits.”

  He raised a chalk-white hand that had hitherto been invisible beneath the desk. His bony fingers gripped the handle of a military-issue Klingon disruptor pistol. Veret saw a flash of fear in the eyes of both Jek and B’Lor, followed almost immediately by relief as both of them realized that they weren’t the focus of Qagh’s wrath.

  At least for now.

  When the weapon fired, Veret was surprised that he felt liberated rather than frightened.

  EPILOGUE WA’

  2295 (the Year of Kahless 921,

  early in the month of Soo’jen)

  Qo’noS

  Sulu stood in solemn silence as the gathering around the burial vault of young DaqS began to break up and drift away, quickly leaving Kang and his wife Mara standing bereft and alone before the metal-plated stone monolith.

  In response to Sulu’s warning that they get their children to a safe place, Koloth and Kor had walked to the periphery of the gathering, standing at opposite sides of it; Sulu watched both men in turn as they spoke urgently into their handheld communications devices, initiating conversations that Sulu was too far away to overhear.

  But Sulu knew they were checking on the status of their own young children, to prevent their suffering the same horrible fate that had already befallen little DaqS, whom Kang had come here today to bury.

  Curzon Dax, who was standing beside Sulu, had evidently been making essentially the same observations. “For once I’m glad I haven’t had children yet,” the Trill diplomat said with a world-weary sadness that should have taken far longer than just the past five years to acquire. “Of course, that retrovirus the albino exposed us all to puts having children right at the top of my own personal ‘worst ideas’ list.”

  Sulu nodded, feeling fortunate that his daughter Demora had been born nearly two decades before the advent of the albino’s tailored, weaponized retroviruses.

  Of course, he was already bitterly aware that there was no shortage of other means by which the albino might strike at him through his only child. He wondered how much time remained before Demora succumbed to the disease that had stricken her an hour or so ago aboard the Enterprise, light-years away.

  His communicator beeped as if on cue; he snatched the device from his belt and flipped open the antenna grid.

  “Sulu here.”

  “Captain, I have an incoming communication from the Enterprise,” said Commander Rand, Excelsior’s communications officer.

  Cold fingers of dread clutched at Sulu’s guts as he excused himself and moved several long paces away from Dax.

  “Thank you, Janice,” he said. “Pipe it down here, please.”

  After a brief pause, the familiar voice of the Enterprise-B’s current captain, the son of a man who had nearly seen Sul
u cashiered from Starfleet service immediately after the albino affair, issued from the communicator. “It’s John, Hikaru.”

  “Do you have news about Demora?” Please, God. Let her live.

  “I do,” Harriman said.

  Though there was nowhere to sit on the rugged plain Kang had selected for the burial site, Sulu did his best to brace himself for the worst.

  Don’t. Let. Her. Die.

  “Fortunately, it’s good news,” Harriman continued. “Doctor Michaels reports that the worst of Demora’s illness seems to have passed already. The convulsive symptoms have stopped, and she’s conscious. I imagine she’ll need some time in sickbay to recover, but she already seems to be on her way to a complete recovery.”

  His fingers suddenly numb, Sulu nearly allowed his communicator to fall to the rocky ground. He wanted to shout his joy and relief to Qo’noS’s dark, meteor-striated night sky, but refrained in deference to the solemnity of the rituals that had just been performed here.

  “Hikaru?”

  “I’m here, John. I’d like to talk to her as soon as possible.” And I promise not to let so much time pass until the next time I speak with her.

  “I’ll have to defer to Doctor Michaels on that one, Hikaru,” Harriman said, and then dropped off the channel, presumably to look into Sulu’s request.

  Sulu stood waiting patiently while he watched Kor and Koloth, both of whom were still animatedly engaged in their own distant conversations. He hoped for their sakes that whatever news they were receiving involved outcomes that resembled Demora’s more than they did that of poor DaqS.

  A croaking, scratchy voice that Sulu scarcely recognized emerged from the communicator. “Hello, Dad.”

  “Demora?”

  “I suppose I’ve sounded better. Thirsty.” She paused, and Sulu heard sloshing sounds that made him imagine a camel sucking down water liters at a time after a weeklong ride across the Gobi. “Doctor Michaels says I must have picked up a virus somewhere.”

  “Sounds like some virus,” Sulu said. He was beginning to hope he could chalk up his earlier suspicions about the albino to paranoia.

  Another voice chimed in on the line, this one belonging to a man that Sulu imagined as middle-aged and gray-haired. “Rod Michaels here, Captain Sulu. I’ve already done some following up on what you suggested to Captain Harriman. It looks like the bug that put our helmsman on the temporarily disabled list really was artificially engineered — apparently by an expert.”

  Of course, just because you’re paranoid, Sulu reminded himself, doesn’t mean that somebody really isn’t out to get you.

  Or your children.

  “It’s a retrovirus,” Dr. Michaels continued. “It’s difficult to detect, perhaps impossible to screen out even with bio-filters, and extremely virulent. Fortunately, there seems to be no danger of its spreading.”

  “Any idea where Demora picked it up, Doctor? Or when?”

  “It’s hard to say, Captain. The Enterprise has gotten around quite a bit over the past two years. As for when the initial infection occurred, that could have happened at any time since Lieutenant Sulu came aboard, or perhaps even earlier, since I don’t know the organism’s precise incubation period. All I can say for certain now is that your daughter seems to possess a great deal of natural immunity to it.”

  “Do you have any clue yet where this bug might have come from?”

  “Nothing conclusive yet. But Nurse Thompson and I have done a quick cross-check using the medical files your CMO sent. My compliments to Doctor Chapel on her research skills, by the way.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell her, Doctor,” Sulu said, beginning to grow impatient. “What did you find?”

  “As far as I can tell, this retrovirus is closely related to the pathogen that James Kirk encountered nearly thirty years ago on the planet Omega IV.”

  It’s also the same one that the albino based most of his retroviral bioweapons on, Sulu thought. As well as the one that’s been in my blood ever since I visited Omega IV.

  The original retrovirus, which had killed the entire crew of the U.S.S. Exeter in a manner not too different from the way young DaqS had died, had to be allowed to build up to significant concentrations in the blood of each Enterprise crew member who had contracted it on the surface of Omega IV. Without the immunization conferred by this pathogenic buildup, the entire Enterprise crew would have died horribly within a few hours of retrieving the landing party, transformed into small piles of lifeless crystals, as had happened to the Exeter’s crew.

  Sulu realized with a start that he was beginning to understand something else he had never before considered: because the original Omega IV virus was actually a retrovirus, it was capable of subtly altering the genes of anyone who’d been exposed to it — including those of one Hikaru Sulu.

  Recombinant genetics, one generation removed, had evidently given Demora Sulu a certain level of immunity to the virus.

  Young DaqS, whose Klingon genetics contained a very different pallet of strengths and weaknesses than those of humanity, apparently had not been so fortunate.

  “Captain Sulu?” Dr. Michaels said. “Are you still there?”

  “Sorry, Doctor. I’m still . . . processing all of this.”

  Demora’s voice returned, sounding significantly less parched, but also more worried, than before. “You warned me about this when I was still at the Academy. I guess when nothing happened right away . . . I must have let my guard down.”

  “I still don’t know for sure that this virus has anything to do with the albino’s threat, Demora,” he said. “And besides, you can’t be expected to stay on Red Alert every minute of every day.”

  She chuckled at that. “Tell that to my CO, Dad. But first . . . is there anything else you can tell us about this virus?”

  Sulu was still puzzling that out. He knew that young DaqS had been conceived after Qagh had exposed Kang to one of his tailored retroviruses; therefore that virus could have caused the child’s death. The sons of Koloth and Kor had also been born only recently as well, which made them similarly vulnerable to inheriting a horrible, genetically preprogrammed death. Demora, however, could not have received the albino’s tailored virus the same way DaqS or the other Klingon children had.

  Therefore one of Qagh’s people must have gotten close to her, exposing her to this pathogen sometime after the pirate had vowed to wreak vengeance against the children of his sworn enemies. The chalk-white ghost that still sometimes haunted his dreams had somehow managed to infect his only daughter with a genetic time bomb, and only a lucky and relatively recent fluke in the Sulu family DNA had prevented its detonation.

  “Dad? You still there?”

  “I’m here, Demora. Don’t worry. I’m just happy that you’re making such a good recovery. Listen, I’ll call you again a little later. Sulu out.” With that he flipped the communicator’s grid closed and replaced the device on his belt. This still could all be just a coincidence, he told himself, even though he had never believed in coincidences.

  He noticed only then that Dax was approaching him, followed by Kor, Koloth, and, finally, Kang. The uniformly grim expressions on the faces of both Kor and Koloth, who must have just finished calling their families on the small transceivers they still carried, made it plain that they, too, had absorbed some most unwelcome news.

  Dax leaned toward Sulu. “Please tell me that what I think has just happened hasn’t really just happened,” the Trill said quietly, his voice pitched only for Sulu’s ears.

  Sulu said nothing. As the three Klingon captains came to a stop directly in front of him and Dax, Sulu knew what Kor and Koloth were going to say before either of them had even opened their mouths.

  “Rynar, my firstborn son, now lies dead!” Kor said, his eyes burning with restrained fury. “From a cause very like the one that claimed the life of young DaqS — a disease that affected no one else in the House.”

  He was a target, Sulu thought, horrified. And the disease was a weapon
aimed only at him.

  “The same fate has just befallen my son as well,” Koloth rumbled icily, conjuring images of snow-covered mountains beneath which brooded smoldering volcanoes. “He was my firstborn — and hardly more than an infant.”

  The five men settled into a pensive silence, broken only by the occasional mournful sounds of distant nocturnal predators. Sabre bear, perhaps, or targ.

  “So we no longer have to wonder when the albino will finally make good on his parting threat,” Dax said, shattering the quiet. “He’s already struck his most hated enemies in the most vulnerable place imaginable.”

  “He also appears to have just made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of my daughter, who now serves aboard the Enterprise,” Sulu said.

  “His reach is long,” Kang said. Turning toward Dax, he added, “Though he appears not yet to have reached you, Curzon Dax.”

  Dax nodded. “Only because Curzon Dax has no children.”

  Though Sulu thought it odd that the Trill diplomat had just referred to himself in the third person, none of the Klingons appeared to have noticed it.

  “We must find the albino,” Koloth said, eliciting grim affirmative nods from Kang and Koloth, as well as from Dax.

  “I will cut out his beating heart and eat it while we force him to watch,” Kang declared, generating still more nods.

  “He has been seen recently doing business on several Klingon worlds,” said Kor. “Galdonterre, Donatu V, Forcas III, and the Dorala system, among other places. Never the less, it will be a difficult hunt.”

  “It’s a big Empire,” Dax agreed, speaking with all the earnestness of youth. “But I will help the three of you search it any way I can.”

  Sulu frowned at the young Trill, whose tactical recklessness sometimes overrode his better diplomatic judgment. “Dax and I need to get back to Excelsior,” he said, addressing the ambassador as much as the Klingons. “We’ll conduct a full investigation into these attacks, using every resource at our disposal.”