STAR TREK: DS9 - The Left Hand of Destiny, Book One Page 14

  Well, if he was lucky, that was the answer.

  Probably not, though.

  Somewhere to the south, another bomb strike whumped into the ground and the walls and roof of his small office shuddered Flecks of paint peeled off the ceiling and pelted the top of the desk. Padds containing his contracts! bills of lading! invoices!—all were getting rattled. He wasn’t certain what was going on up there, but he was pretty sure that a squadron of Klingon fighters was shelling the frinx out of three kellicams of landfill that his company was supposed to be mining. Pharh knew he should care, but he didn’t really. Not about the landfill, not about the mining, not about the bombing. Well ... maybe about the bombing. If one of those things went a few kilometers astray—which, no doubt, they did, what with Klingons not being the most fastidious species in the galaxy—Pharh would be a puff of smoke blowing in an oily breeze.

  Beginning with the assumption that he would survive [155] till morning, Pharh wondered who he should complain to. Assuming there was Klingon government to appeal to, should he talk to them? He had a feeling that despite their much-vaunted honor Klingons were not averse to pointing fingers when it came to financial settlement. The term “rebel scum” would be used, but he didn’t know exactly how that would sound in Klingon. Any other planet, and the term “act of god (or gods)” would come up, but the stupid Klingons didn’t have gods, or, at least, none that they would own up to, so that wouldn’t work.

  The next shell hit so close that Pharh was almost bounced out from under his desk. His sensitive ears rang from the sudden dip, then painful increase in air pressure. Eyes pressed shut, he shook his head back and forth in an attempt to clear his sinuses and he felt something splat against his hands and arm. He opened his eyes and watched as a large drop of blood dripped onto his sleeve. Oh, great, he thought. Pharh didn’t have the usual Ferengi response to blood. He had been exposed to too much of his own over the years, partly because of all the companionable roughhousing he had enjoyed as a lad (later revealed to be savage beatings), and partly because of the fact that he had always been susceptible to nosebleeds when he was exposed to loud sounds.

  He tipped his head back and pinched the bridge of his nose. What else could he do? Perhaps pray. Unlike the stupid, godless Klingons, Ferengi had lots of gods, one for every occasion, since it paid to diversify. Was there a Ferengi god that would do in the current situation? Pharh paused to review the candidates. Caq the Chairman of the Celestial Board? No, he required a minimum latinum balance to return calls and Pharh didn’t come [156] close to qualifying. Smark, He of the Quick and Painless Audit? No. That would not be at all appropriate and might invite the wrong kind of attention. Ma’Acy of the Ledger Domain? That would be a bad idea and, besides, there was always so much math involved if you wanted to invoke him correctly.

  The ground shuddered again, even closer this time, and something large fell off the roof and squelched down into the compost heap in the alley behind the building. Pharh began to be truly worried. If his luck didn’t improve soon, he might be closing out his account with Quirm the Revenuer. But how much worse could his luck get? he reasoned.

  So, naturally, a piece of ceiling crashed into his communication terminal, instigating a feedback loop that played the last transmitted message. Pharh wouldn’t have heard the message if a bomb had been hitting at that moment, but, as destiny would have it, it came during one of those pregnant lulls that soldiers talk about that seem like they must be invented, but do, in fact, happen.

  It was his mother. The first thing she did was to tell him how much the call was costing. The second thing she did was to tell him he was an idiot and how dare he force them to spend all this money scouring the quadrant for him? Pharh knew this was nonsense since all his mother had to do was check with the Hall of Commerce and find out where he was filing his P-and-L statements. The third thing she did was let his father speak to him, but, as Pharh guessed, he had little to say. It was a common expression in Pharh’s family that his father was a man of few words. Pharh had been in his mid-teens before he had figured out that they meant he didn’t know many.

  [157] Had they even noticed they were yelling at a machine?

  During another brief lull, Pharh heard the soft inrush and explosive burst that meant his father had inhaled, then sighed. The twin sounds encompassed worlds, systems, galaxies. They said how ungrateful, what a disappointment, what a poor excuse for a son Pharh was. They said that he had better give up this ridiculous adventure, admit that he was fooling no one (except perhaps himself) and get his lobes home and back into his cupboard at the office just as fast as a cheap transport (that would be coming out of his pay) would carry him or he was out of the family forever. It was just about the most eloquent thing Pharh’s father had ever not said.

  Though he knew that he was talking to himself, Pharh began to form a reply in his mind, but, more significantly, before that reply was complete, he felt his lips begin to move. A well-worn psychic alarm system warned him that he was about to say something he was going to regret. Alas, the alarm system was not so well made that it would prevent him from saying it. An image formed in his mind of a wide and deep dry riverbed and there in the middle of it was himself, Pharh. He could feel the cracked mud rumble under his feet as the torrent of capitulation headed toward him. It would sweep him away, out into the great, wide ocean where he would drown, soggy and unmourned. He could feel the dreaded words—“I’m sorry”—rising in his throat. It wasn’t the right thing to do. It wasn’t the brave thing to do, but rightness and bravery were not especially notable features in Pharh’s mental landscape, though sometimes, on a good day, he could almost see them [158] across the wilderness from atop the tiny little knob of rebelliousness that he lived on.

  Some sick sixth sense told him that this might be his last chance to escape, to go be someone other than the person his mother and father expected him to be, but that same sense told him he probably wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t going to be able to get away. He felt the first word—“I’m ...”—begin to come out.

  But sometimes Fate takes a hand. Sometimes Fate diverts the river, plucks the almost-a-hero from the stream, makes the almost-a-fool shut his mouth before it’s too late. Sometimes, the bomb falls on the wrong place at the right time and occasionally Fate sounds like a click even when it’s really a boom.

  The blasts from the bombing finally collapsed the ceiling. Heavy chunks of plasteel dropped smack into the companel, rendering Pharh’s last connection with Ferenginar null and void, eradicating any evidence that his parents had ever contacted him. He would never know the rest of what his parents said, nor would he be able to return their call in a timely fashion. They would cut off any ties he might have to the family business.

  And he didn’t even have to call an accountant to initiate the dreaded “D” word: divestiture.

  Pain-racked, Martok hung on the fringe of consciousness. Enemies beset him, but he could not lift his head. A weapon pressed into his side, but was it his own or an attacker’s? He could not say, nor could he move his arms to defend or attack. Sound swirled all around him, loud shouts and thumps of battle, but no light. And he was cold. Martok had never minded the cold. You couldn’t grow up in Ketha and mind the cold. During [159] the winter months, the wind would howl down from the north and claw at you, shredding clothing, stripping away heat. But now he was cold, dammit.

  Above him—no, against his back—a sharp weight shifted and the pressure lessened. He heard a familiar voice. Maapek was calling to someone: “Here! I’ve found him!” More voices. Sounds of scrabbling and things being shifted. Dust in his nose and eye.

  More voices: “Help. Carefully. Watch that.” The weight lessened even more. Martok realized that he had been buried. He must have been in the rabble from the Great Hall all this time and now they were finding him. They would lift him out and see that he was not dead and that no one could kill the chancellor, not even a bomb from the sky, and he would rally the Defense Force and they wou
ld go take Morjod’s head. ...

  Light. Wetness on the back of his head. Hands gripped his arms and legs. “Stop,” a voice called. “Let me check him first or you might injure him more.” Martok heard a beeping sound, a tricorder. They were checking him for injuries. Martok gritted his teeth, anger flaring, and pushed himself up from the ground. Muscles fluttered, and he felt the wet thickness in his chest move again, but he held himself up, kept himself from collapsing forward. He didn’t recognize the warrior who was checking him with the tricorder—another young recruit, he guessed—but grabbed the device with one hand and covered it.

  “Don’t,” he granted. “If I can’t stand, then leave me here.” Around him, he heard voices respond, some in surprise, some in approval. He coughed again, choked wetly, then brought up a gritty gob. No, he thought. Not the Great Temple. Ketha. The base. We were hiding. Collecting data. Making a plan. ... Martok got his legs [160] underneath him and rocked back onto his haunches. “How long?” he asked.

  Maapek sat on the ground beside him, his forehead covered in a dirty, bloodstained bandage. “Three hours, General,” Maapek said. “It will be morning soon.”

  Confused, Martok asked, “Three hours?! And we’re still here? Why didn’t you move? What if there are infantry, cleanup patrols ... ?”

  Maapek shook his head and tried to sound decisive when he said, “We stayed to find you, General.”

  Dust and small rocks tumbled down off his shoulders and slid down the back of his chancellor’s cloak. “Where is Worf?” he asked. Then, “What is our status?” Maapek wouldn’t meet his eye and instead glanced over at Tamal, who was crouched against a rock, propping herself up with a disrupter rifle. She looked back at Maapek, then turned her head to stare at Jaroun, who, miraculously, appeared unhurt.

  “The ambassador is-unconscious,” Jaroun reported. “We found him a short time ago, and the medic is tending to his injuries.”

  Martok looked at the young warrior who had been checking him with the tricorder, and goaded him. “Go,” the general said. “Help Worf. We need him alive.” Martok turned back to Jaroun. “What else?”

  “I ... We ...” Jaroun faltered. “There is not much to tell, Chancellor. The ships found us. You ordered everyone to the basement where they had found the door to the vault or escape tunnel or whatever it was. No one had time to explore it. I was outside, guiding others in when the building was hit. The ceiling collapsed, but the walls tumbled away from the stairwell. Those who were with me ...” He looked around him, showing Martok [161] the ones he meant. “We suddenly saw the sky above us. And the others, those who had made it into the vault ...” Martok watched as Jaroun’s face went dark, like a winter sky before a heavy snow, and then he shrugged. Shrugged. He had been such a proud man, so unsullied by confusion. And I have brought him to this. “We tried to dig them out, but soon it became clear that there was no point. No life signs, no communications, no ...”

  Martok took a tentative step toward Jaroun with every intention of laying a reassuring hand on his shoulder, but Jaroun stepped to the side even as the general reached out to him. Looking around, Martok tried to ascertain whether anyone had seen what had happened and decided from the way none of the warriors would meet his eye that they had all seen. Is this a mutiny? he wondered, and then realized it was nothing so overt. It’s exhaustion. It’s shock and disillusionment. And why not? What have we accomplished? Not even bothering to try to answer his own question, Martok limped past Jaroun and to the crumbling stairs and began to climb. Adding to his humiliation, his legs were so unsteady that he had to grip the metal rail to keep his balance. Keep walking, old man, he thought. And don’t look back. There are demons—and worse—behind you. Disturbingly, he could not name the demons and neither did he know their faces, but he had no doubt that they were there.

  Halfway up the stairs, the smell hit him. When he had been a boy, it had been his job to gather the household trash and throw it into a large stone oven in the yard behind their house. Every week or so, his father would ignite the rubbish with his igniter and the young Martok would sit and watch it burn down to a pile of ash, the [162] black-gray smoke rolling over him, filling his senses. He used to imagine that he was standing on a cliff overlooking a great battlefield and this was how victory would smell. Only much later did he learn the truth: Victory and defeat smell the same. They reek of oil and fear and cooked meat.

  At the top of the stairs Martok stopped to catch his breath. The thermocrete floor was cracked and pitted, and three of the four walls of the large room where they had camped were gone. The sun was a dim orange ball to the east, shrouded behind the leaden sky. A light breeze swept whorls of ebony ash across the concrete, but except for the soft whisper of the wind there was no sound. Much to Martok’s chagrin, he recognized that he had taken for granted the sharp cries of birds and the humming insects that must have been all around them. Now they were gone. The mounds of refuse had been leveled. Last night, Martok had stood atop one and stared out at the lights, knowing that some were hearth fires. They were gone now, along with the hearths, along with the homes. Curls of greasy smoke wound up into the black sky, and to Martok they might as well have been the bars of a cage. As a child, he had known that despite its appearance, Ketha teemed with life.

  Not now. Not here, anyway. His enemies had done their job well and erased the site of Martok’s childhood. What else are they going to take from me today? he wondered. A gulf opened up inside him and a memory rose, unbidden, to his mind. Sirella had called him to tell him that their then fourteen-year-old daughter Lazhna had been attacked. Only a long time later, after he had heard the rest of the story and learned that Lazhna had crippled two grown men for daring to try to corner her [163] in an alley, did Martok admit the truth to himself. In the few moments between his wife’s sentences, Martok had imagined every possible form of violation and realized precisely how vulnerable he truly was.

  And now it had happened to him again. Someone has taken something from me, he thought, and I do not know who or how or why. The rage, the confusion, the shock, all of these mingled together to form a brew so potent that Martok felt his senses begin to grow dull. It would be so simple to just allow himself to sink into numbness, to lose his outrage, but he would not, could not. He heard the groans and low moans all around him. For my people, I must embrace my fury.

  Jaroun came up behind him and cleared his throat. “Chancellor ...” he said.

  “Don’t call me that,” Martok said. “I’m not the chancellor. Not anymore. Maybe I never was.” He turned and looked at Jaroun and commanded, “Take what you have. Save as many of them as you can.”

  Jaroun was confused. “Save who?”

  Martok gestured back at the collapsed building, then swept his arm around to encompass the burning landscape. “Anyone you can,” he barked. “All of them.” The general then turned away and stalked down the low hill without saying another word. Heavy black smoke swirled around him as he moved, making his eye sting and his flesh prickle. At the bottom of the hill, he spied a shallow puddle of burning oil. As he approached it, Martok first shrugged one shoulder out of the heavy chancellor’s cloak, and then the other, until it was dragging along the ground, loosely held with one finger. As he stepped over the puddle, Martok released the cloak and let it fall. He thought he would feel lighter when he [164] let it go, but it was not true. Despite that, he began to walk faster. Sirella, he thought. I’m coming. He had a lot of ground to cover.

  Behind him, the heavy cloak almost smothered the blaze, but one tiny lick of flame at the edge of the puddle guttered, flickered, then began to grow.

  PART TWO

  “We are not accorded the luxury of choosing the women we fall in love with. Do you think Sirella is anything like the woman I thought that I’d marry? She is a prideful, arrogant, mercurial woman who shares my bed far too infrequently for my taste. And yet ... I love her deeply. We Klingons often tout our prowess in battle, our desire for glory and honor above all else ...
but how hollow is the sound of victory without someone to share it with. Honor gives little comfort to a man alone in his home ... and in his heart.”

  10

  “WHEN WELL HE COME?”

  “Soon,” she said, her voice low and seductive. “He will be here soon. Do not be impatient. Impatience leads to carelessness.” Her words relaxed him like fingers stroking his furrowed brow, and Morjod’s neck muscles unknotted. Transfixed, he watched her graceful hands punctuate her words with delicate gestures as if she conducted an orchestra or wove a conjuror’s spell. He looked up from the stack of reports sliding off his desk and watched his lady as she slowly walked around the perimeter of the room. As long as he could remember, this had calmed him. She walked soundlessly, her austere black fur robes concealing her in the shadows until she stood beside the row of tall, narrow windows and her tall, thin frame cast an indistinct shadow across Morjod’s desk. Pushing aside the tightly woven braids that wreathed her face, she cocked an ear closer to the glass.

  The emperor’s—that is, Morjod’s—office was on the [168] east side of the palace. Normally the morning sun would flood the room, but today the light was anemic. It was his doing, Morjod knew. Though their blow against the fossilized relics of the old empire might have been necessary, it also had the unfortunate side effect of casting tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere. Last night’s spectacular coral-scarlet sunset would replay for the next several months, the scientists said, but the price was a thin, gray-brown tint to the atmosphere that Morjod found depressing.

  Serenely, she gazed out over the First City, perhaps contemplating the new world they had birthed together. He would like to hear her thoughts, listen to the silvery caresses of her words. He especially liked to see her eyes when they talked, enjoyed the sensation that he might at any second fall into them, plunge headlong into their darkness and never return again to the land of the living. She could not see him with her back turned, but he knew that she was aware of his eyes being fixed on her. If she tilted her head back, he would be able to see the tiny smile she wore when her plans were successful. To Morjod’s profound delight, she had been smiling from morning till night every hour of the past several days.