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  “I want to investigate the murders, too, Captain,” Dax said, folding his arms. “But I think I can do a more thorough job of it here, assisting directly on Qo’noS. Or wherever else in Klingon space the albino’s trail might lead us.”

  “And for however long the Federation Diplomatic Corps will put up with it?” Sulu asked with a frown.

  Dax responded with a smile, though Sulu could see the burning, almost fanatical intensity beneath it. “I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it, Captain. Kang’s son was also my godson — Kang and Mara named him after me — so I have to do whatever I can to avenge him.”

  Sulu was having some trouble believing what he was hearing. “You’re a public servant of the United Federation of Planets, Ambassador. Not a vigilante.”

  Dax stared at Sulu silently for a moment through angry, narrowed eyes. Then he turned toward Kang, as though dismissing Sulu from the conversation.

  “I will swear the blood oath with the three of you,” Dax declared flatly.

  “The blood oath is a sacred rite,” Koloth said, apparently as taken aback as Sulu. “And it is reserved only for Klingons.”

  Kang displayed his white, sharpened teeth. “But Curzon Dax has proved many times over that within his breast beats a heart as stout as that of any Klingon.”

  “I would welcome you into the blood oath as well,” Kor said, grinning like a warrior relishing the prospect of a coming battle. Which, of course, was exactly what he was.

  Koloth nodded. “Very well. I will accept him into the blood oath. None of the four of us will rest until we have found and slain the albino, and eaten his heart.”

  Kang turned toward Sulu, addressing him directly. “I would extend the blood oath to you as well, Hikaru Sulu. After all, the albino has also attacked your progeny, albeit unsuccessfully.”

  Four pairs of eyes were upon him, pinning him where he stood as surely as a converging array of tractor beams. The silence between the five men stretched awkwardly.

  “I’m a Starfleet captain,” Sulu said at length. “I can’t undertake a mission of vengeance. But I can put all the resources of Excelsior behind an effort to bring Qagh to justice, under the precepts of Federation and interstellar law.”

  Sulu watched three pairs of eyes, each of them shadowed by overhanging brow ridges, looking askance at him. Dax merely watched him in silence.

  “Your decision might have been different had Qagh actually succeeded in slaying your daughter,” Kang said, his voice tinged with commingled grief and disappointment.

  “Maybe,” Sulu said. He knew the urge to exact revenge intimately enough, and understood its allure as well as any man; it was his own real, firsthand knowledge of how simple it would have been just to have gutted the albino after their bat’leth duel on the Qul Tuq moon that persuaded him that vengeance wasn’t the path he wanted to follow.

  That long-ago day on Ganjitsu notwithstanding.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I would swear a vendetta against the albino if he’d actually managed to kill Demora. But — and I mean no disrespect to any of you when I say this — I think you’re all wrong in wanting this.”

  At least I hope you’re wrong, he thought.

  “If the three of you don’t mind,” Dax said to the Klingons, “I’d like a moment in private to say goodbye to Captain Sulu.”

  Kang nodded, and the three Klingons obligingly withdrew, moving with graceful solemnity back toward little DaqS’s funerary vault, beside which Mara still stood. Dax began walking in the opposite direction, and Sulu walked alongside him, matching the slightly taller man’s stride easily.

  “Do you really intend to go through with this?” Sulu asked.

  Dax nodded. “Yes, Captain. I really do.”

  Sulu recognized the resolute quality in the other man’s voice. Past experience with Dax had already demonstrated that he wasn’t going to succeed in dissuading him. The conversation paused, although the pair continued walking at a leisurely pace across the rock-strewn hardpan.

  “I have to tell you how disappointed I am,” Sulu said at length.

  “You could always drag me back with you to Excelsior.”

  “No,” Sulu said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t risk offending our Klingon hosts that way.”

  Dax grinned. “You just might have a better understanding of diplomacy than I do, Captain.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Sulu said. “But I think I have a pretty good idea why you feel such anger toward Qagh, even though you weren’t actually attacked.”

  “We Trill are a famously reticent and enigmatic people, Captain,” Dax said with a grim smile. “But I have no objection to hearing your speculations.”

  Sulu studied the younger man’s spot-framed features as they walked, and noted that he was seeing the same paradoxically young-old face that Dax’s diplomatic negotiating partners saw from across conference tables. Or was this merely the face of a master card player?

  And was there a difference?

  “All right,” Sulu said. “You’re angry because you actually have lost your children to Qagh.”

  Dax frowned. “As I already said, Captain: Curzon has no children.” Once again, he spoke of himself in the third person.

  “All right,” Sulu said with a shrug. “So you don’t. And that’s because you don’t want to risk bringing any children into the world, thanks to the albino’s parting retroviral attack five years ago. The albino has brought you to the end of the line, at least genetically speaking. He’s robbed you of children, which is the same thing he’s done to Kang and Kor and Koloth. Only in your case he’s done it preemptively.”

  Dax seemed to listen intently as Sulu delivered his psychoanalysis. Then he stopped walking, as did Sulu.

  “I suppose all of that makes sense, Captain,” Dax said. “But only from a strictly human perspective.”

  “Really?” Sulu said, folding his arms. “What have I missed about Trill psychology?”

  “Quite a lot, actually. For starters, there’s a great deal that you don’t understand about Trill society in general.”

  In view of the well-known Trill penchant for secrecy, Sulu had no doubt that Dax was absolutely right about that. “Then I’d be pleased if you would enlighten me, Ambassador.”

  Dax responded with a faintly mischievous smile. “Let me just say that my decision to swear the blood oath was purely a matter of honor, friendship, and loyalty — in the manner that the Klingons understand it.”

  “You just accused me of misunderstanding your people,” Sulu said. “So why do you think you can understand Klingon culture the way the Klingons understand it?”

  Dax spread his hands. “I suppose there’s no way to settle that question without the intervention of a telepath. But I do know that shared adversity has created an extremely strong bond between me and those three warriors, not to mention the society that produced them. And those bonds have only deepened during the five years since the albino attacked the Korvat conference.”

  “All right,” Sulu said, holding up a placating hand. “Of course, I’m not sure that participating in a revenge scheme out of some noble principle is really any better than doing the same thing for an entirely selfish reason. And you can’t convince me that you don’t have one, since Qagh has denied you the only immortality that any mortal being can expect to achieve: children.”

  Dax looked at Sulu appraisingly, as though trying to decide how much of the renowned Trill reticence he could afford to set aside in order to explain himself. “Children don’t represent the only form of immortality available, Captain,” he said finally. “At least not among the Trill.”

  Sulu listened in rapt fascination as Curzon Dax finally began to explain why.

  • • •

  “But what about your symbiont?” Sulu asked a short while later. “Hasn’t it . . . hasn’t Dax been infected with the virus?”

  The enigmatic young-old diplomat shook his head. “Over the past five years, I’ve undergone p
retty thorough batteries of tests designed to settle that very question. As far as Doctor Dareel and the other Trill physicians who’ve examined me can tell, the albino’s virus is simply incompatible with symbiont physiology.”

  Sulu nodded, understanding. “You’re saying that Dax can’t pass the virus along to a future host because it never contracted the disease in the first place.”

  “Exactly, Captain. So even if Curzon never manages to purge this damned virus from his body — even if Curzon Dax ends up having no chance whatsoever at fatherhood, or even marriage — Trill symbiosis will still give both partners more immortality than most people will ever experience, with or without children.”

  Sulu nodded, still trying to digest the Trill’s surprising revelations. He felt as though he had just taken a long drink from a fire hose.

  “Do the Klingons know about this?” he asked.

  “They’ve known for the past five years,” Dax said, nodding. “I hadn’t intended to tell them, but circumstances demanded it. Regardless, I have always trusted their discretion. Just as I trust yours, Captain.”

  “Your people’s secret will be safe with me as well, Ambassador,” Sulu said. “I owe you at least that much for all you’ve done in trying to bring Qagh to justice.”

  “Which doesn’t really amount to a whole lot, Captain. The albino is still out there, somewhere. And I’m sure that all of us who’ve sworn the blood oath against him would gladly accept your help should you change your mind about joining us.”

  Sulu thought of Ganjitsu. And the dead woman in the spaceport bar.

  And Captain Styles.

  But he knew that the road to revenge led to some very dark, very nasty places. And he thought it a pity that such a long-lived being as Curzon Dax had not yet accumulated sufficient wisdom to understand that.

  “No,” Sulu said, hoping that his emphatic tone had closed down the topic once and for all. “I’m not going to kill for revenge. But I won’t make that decision for you. I won’t pretend to be happy about it, though. I still wish you’d reconsider this.”

  Dax studied him silently, as though disappointed in Sulu’s disappointment. At length, the Trill said, “It might be better if you’d just wish me luck instead. I’ll find my own transportation home from here, Captain.”

  And with that, the no longer quite so enigmatic Trill turned and strode purposefully toward Kang, Mara, Koloth, and Kor, all of whom stood motionless some thirty meters away beneath the angry, meteor-streaked night sky of Qo’noS. The tangle of long shadows they cast in the pale light of dead, fragmentary Praxis transformed them into monuments to vengeance.

  Right or wrong, he’s got to make his own way, Sulu thought, hoping that Curzon Dax wasn’t about to reap a bitter harvest of destruction.

  With a sigh and a shake of his head, he pulled out his communicator and flipped its grid open.

  “Sulu to Excelsior. One to beam up.”

  EPILOGUE CHA’

  2363 (the Year of Kahless 989,

  in the middle of the month of Maktag)

  Dayos IV

  That the busy spaceport inn was run-down and in general disrepair came as no surprise to Kang. In fact, it mirrored the way he felt as it occurred to him — and not for the first time — that he was becoming far too old and far too weary to continue coming to such places.

  But that was no matter; while breath remained in his body and his seven-decade-old blood oath remained unfulfilled, he would continue his search for the albino, following up on every conceivable lead. Such was the only comfort he could offer the unquiet ghosts of DaqS and two other dead children.

  Today the trail had led him to the Dayos system’s fourth planet, a cold, thin-aired, and only marginally habitable world located on the ragged fringes of Klingon space. Though its glory days now lay decades behind it, thanks largely to the increased law and order brought about by the Klingon-Federation alliance, the planet still served as a spaceport hub, making more than a dozen other border locales and nonaligned worlds alike mutually accessible to small, hard-to-track short-range craft.

  Like the vast majority of worlds of its ilk, Dayos IV served a clientele that out of necessity worked in the shadows, just slightly beyond the scan resolution of the few overworked Klingon Defense Force units charged with tamping down the most egregious criminality in the border region; everyone here was from somewhere else, and no one passing through this frigid clime was at all eager to discuss either his next destination or his reasons for going there.

  As he doffed his thermal overcoverings, crossed the worn carpet in the entry foyer, and started across the surprisingly bustling casino, Kang was struck by how closely this place resembled so many other seedy border-world hostelries he had seen during the many decades he’d spent on the ever-elusive albino’s trail. With its extremely heterogeneous mix of species, which included Orions, Tagrans, Bolians, Rigelians, and four-armed Terrellians — in addition to Kriosians, Trafalmadorians, and several other assorted jeghpu’wI’ races from various Klingon subject worlds, as well as a number of proudly brow-ridged Klingons — this inn wouldn’t have been at all out of place on Galdonterre.

  Galdonterre, the last place where Kang, Koloth, and Kor had faced the albino in pitched battle, on a day now some three decades past. Galdonterre, where the albino had somehow escaped the righteous vengeance of three Klingon warriors yet again. Kang’s soul still burned with the heat of a bat’leth being beaten flat in the forge whenever he recalled how close he and his brethren-in-arms had come that day to quenching the blood oath’s insatiable fires with the ichor of the cowardly childslayer.

  But unlike that long-gone day on Galdonterre, Kang had come to Dayos IV alone. He had told none of his blood-oath comrades of his meeting here today, since he felt it would require a degree of finesse that neither Koloth nor Kor still possessed in sufficient measure after the passage of so many bitter years of fruitless questing. Koloth was far too angry, and Kor was far too drunk, not to scare off the woman whom Kang had come here to meet. And Curzon Dax, whose Federation diplomatic duties had long ago greatly curtailed the degree to which he could contribute to the search for the albino, was now too old and sick to participate in the hunt.

  Entering the randomly furnished restaurant that was attached to the casino like a prefab afterthought, Kang took a seat at the agreed-upon corner booth, which was empty. A haughty-looking Orion waitress approached, and he ordered her to fetch a flagon of bloodwine. He hoped that he would have some real reason to raise his HIvje’ in celebration before he had drunk his fill.

  And he hoped, of course, that he hadn’t just walked straight into one of the albino’s cowardly traps.

  The hard-eyed green waitress returned soon enough with his drink, which she’d poured into a battered pewter mug that reminded him of a piece of hull metal that had barely survived a fiery atmospheric reentry. As he drank, Kang quietly swept his dark, hooded eyes across the sparsely peopled, dimly illuminated room, in which a Tellarite and an Orion conducted a desultory conversation at one of the tables, a pair of identical Miradorn dined at another, and a razor-toothed Pahkwa-thanh devoured a bloody haunch of some large, unidentifiable creature with a ferocious gusto that made Kang smile in vicarious enjoyment.

  Kang noticed something moving to his left side, and turned in time to see a woman approach his booth. Despite the room’s weak illumination, he sized her up quickly. She was tall and slender, but also careworn, her strong face subtly grooved by worry lines, like channels etched by a stream into stone over time. Her clothing was old and threadbare, but she wore it with a defiant, almost regal pride.

  “You are Kang?” the woman said as she reached his table.

  Kang nodded and gestured toward the couch on the opposite side of the booth. “Please, sit.”

  Though she showed some obvious hesitation, she nevertheless complied. Her fearful yet resolute manner made him willing to believe that she posed no danger to him.

  “What name shall I call you by?” Kang said,
unsure as yet to which species she belonged. “You did not identify yourself in your message.”

  She looked furtively from side to side, as if to make certain she had not been followed. “I am Ylda,” she said.

  “And you say you are a former spouse of Qagh,” Kang said. “The albino.”

  A look of revulsion crossed her face. “Believe me, I would make no such claim were it not true. He took me unwillingly from my family years ago. Then he discarded me as though I were garbage.” Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears.

  “This happened recently?”

  She nodded miserably. “Just before I contacted you.”

  “Then you must know how I might find him,” Kang said, his hopes of soon settling the blood oath rekindling.

  Very quietly, she said, “No.”

  Her flat refusal took Kang aback. “You are hardly in a position to bargain with me, Ylda.”

  “I am not . . .bargaining, Kang. If I betray Qagh to you, you will just attempt to kill him.”

  “I thought I had already made that more than plain,” Kang growled, his anger becoming roused.

  “But he is likely to survive any such attack, just as he has done many times in the past,” Ylda said, shrinking back into the worn upholstery. “And then he will come after me, to punish my betrayal.”

  His rage slowly intensifying, Kang favored her with a deeply toxic scowl. “If I choose to force you to give him up, there is little you can do to stop me.”

  She nodded, her expression taking on a slack, fatalistic character. “I understand. I ask only that you refrain from crippling me. After you are done, I will heal. And perhaps Qagh will spare me once he sees the scars and bruises you inflicted before I revealed his whereabouts to you.”

  Kang’s mounting fury was beginning to give way to bemusement. “You expected me to torture the truth out of you, yet you still sought me out. Why?”