The Left Hand of Destiny, Book 1 Page 15

  Morjod grinned ruefully. He knew the game where she teased him. “I could not imagine the day,” he said. “But if it ever comes, I will honor your teachings and perform … adequately.”

  “You have always performed adequately,” she said, an edge in her voice like cut crystal. “But if you would honor me you must excel.”

  “Have I ever disappointed you?”

  “No,” she said. “Never.”

  His heart soared and he sat straighter in his chair, though he would not allow his expression to change. This, too, was part of their game, but he sensed the morning had brought a new twist to their ritual. A note of desperate joy in her voice simultaneously terrified and enticed him. He sensed in her, for the first time, satisfaction. Knowing that he had even a small part in this electrified Morjod. What would she ask him to do next? Go to Romulus and slay the entire senate with his bare hands? Done, he thought. Done and done again. Ask anything of me and I will do it. I am yours: your weapon and your plaything, yours to command in all things.

  She knew his heart and mind, but she pretended she did not and returned to the subject at hand. “How should we proceed?

  He answered her truthfully, though he already knew she would not agree. For both their sakes, sometimes it was necessary to make a show of conflict. “We will send in ground troops.”

  The lady shook her head. “Vengeance would overcome them and they would kill him without thinking. If he died today, he would become a legend. We cannot allow that to happen.”

  Morjod understood the danger posed by a larger-in-death-than-life Martok. But that did not mean he understood her reluctance to impose a swift, ignominious death on the traitor. Why not throw him to the Hur’q and be done with him? “Then what do we want?” Morjod asked.

  The sun had climbed higher in the morning sky and was peering down at them through a break in the rippling dust clouds, wanly illuminating his lady. She laid a finger on the window glass and stroked it lightly. Against all expectation, she answered. “We want him … humbled.” Her last throaty word sent a thrill of suspense down Morjod’s spine. “On his knees before the empire, before—” She paused. “—you, O Mighty One.”

  “We’re certain he will come here?” Morjod said, hoping his questions prompted more brilliant insight from his lady. “And if he attempts it, can he traverse the long distance between here and Ketha before the execution day after tomorrow? The last we heard he traveled on foot.”

  Her jaw clenched, and she tossed her braids impatiently. She grew irritated—perhaps he had asked one question too many? But she resumed stroking the window glass, and Morjod knew the mood had passed. Within moments, she stood as still as the stone statues that lined the walls of the emperor’s office. “Of course,” she said, a new note in her tone. “His lady is in danger. Is there any who could stand in his way?” She turned her back to him, signaling that the conversation was over.

  For the rest of the day and into the night, this moment, the sound of her voice, nagged at him, but never having had any experience of envy, he was not able to recognize it when he heard it.

  * * *

  “You’re an old man,” the general said to himself. “An old beggar. Act like one.” But how do beggars walk? he wondered. I should know this. Beggars had been a common sight in Ketha when he was a boy, but how long had it been since he had seen one? Generals and chancellors met few beggars during battles, and he found himself uncertain about how they moved. Adjusting the loose rag over his scarred eye, he lowered his head and tried to quicken his pace without appearing to rush. The aromatic cloak and trousers he’d dug out of a trash heap helped his disguise. Around Ketha, he fit in perfectly.

  His feet hurt. He had left his custom-made footwear behind with his armor, in favor of two ill-fitting and worn-out laborer’s boots he’d found in another pile of refuse. But an old beggar should limp, he decided as he gingerly set his weight down and grunted to himself in satisfaction. If he could carry the deception, he would remain invisible.

  The narrow road before him was bordered by marshy ditches and pocked with craters, several as long and wide as a man. A thousand years before, ChanTogh’s troops had fallen back to Ketha, where his soldiers had dug trenches to fight from and live in. Deforesting the plain had provided his troops with fire fuel for two seasons, but the subsequent erosion had leached away healthy topsoil and nourishing minerals. Farmers left behind their meager crops, and animal life vanished, retreating to faraway mountains and forest. Over time, the abandoned plain offered refuge to disease-bearing rodents, scavenger avians, machine carcasses, molding foodstuffs, and the desperately poor. Martok, in his most outlandish dreams, could not picture Ketha as the verdant plain on which ChanTogh had fought his battles a millennium ago.

  Though a little natural camouflage certainly wouldn’t hurt matters, Martok thought, wishing for a bit more tree cover. He had left the main road about midnight, choosing to remain on the secondary roads that headed more directly west, the direction of the First City. Though Martok had to admit to himself that he hadn’t been thinking too clearly when he had left Jaroun and Worf and all the others, he hadn’t hiked far before he had begun to formulate a plan. His mission was to free Sirella. Only that. Part of him knew his cause to be selfish and quite possibly foolish, that he might stand a better chance with his band of followers behind him, but the operative word there was “might.” As much as it pained him to admit it, someone in the group had betrayed their position and, possibly, had been able to relay tactical information. Morjod expected him and probably knew about the Negh’Var survivors, who they were and how many, and their strengths and weaknesses. For the first ten kellicams or so, he had told himself that by going off on his own, he had regained the element of surprise. Somewhere in the middle of walking the second ten, the truth began seeping in: Martok had let his emotions take control.

  There was, he reflected, as he set one foot in front of the other, his blisters sending bolts of pain up his leg, a strange dichotomy in the Klingon soul. He was old enough, he thought, and wise enough to see this: warriors allowed themselves to be swept away on emotional tides. It was part of their nature, part of the romance of their caste. But, conversely, the warriors had somehow risen to be the leaders in their society. And leaders, Martok had learned, must always deny themselves the luxury of indulging their passions, for often reason brought wisdom that emotion did not. And now Martok’s passion for his wife had taken him down a reckless path when perhaps the better choice would have been to seek the greater good for his people. Maybe the damned Vulcans had it right after all.

  Regardless of why he had made the choice he had, being out on the open road again felt good, to be by himself, to have chosen a path and said, “This way,” and not have to listen to a half-dozen dissenting opinions. Martok grinned as he thought of Worf, who, assuming he was not injured too seriously, must be fretting madly. He wondered if he should have stayed behind to see, but then he shook his head. “No,” he muttered. “And what could I have done if he was? Nothing. And with me gone, they have reason to try to move an injured warrior.” Some part of Martok’s mind knew his reasoning made very little sense, but he did not care. He was going to Sirella. He had a little less than two days to get to the First City and he would never make it in time on foot.

  So, what were his options?

  At the bottom of the low hill he was curling his way down, there was a copse of scrubby trees and beyond that a small, scummy pond. Martok recognized the location. Around the curve he would see a wide field of gray, flinty scorca grass bordered by a thick hedgerow of iron thorn trees. Yes. Excellent. This was exactly what he had expected. His memory hadn’t completely failed.

  He had left behind the scorched earth late in the previous night and now was almost at the border of the worst of the Ketha wastelands. Here, in the area most often described as Lower Ketha, he hoped to find one of the few offworld industries allowed on Qo’noS. And there, around the next bend, he saw the first sign: a low cha
in-link fence topped with razor wire. “Ferengi,” he spat, his tone a mixture of disgust and a strange kind of respect.

  Several months earlier, when he had learned of the contract that permitted the company to mine the landfill, it had amused Martok that there were Ferengi who were willing to pay hefty fees to burrow down into the Klingons’ old trash. Then he had been shown some of the balance sheets and some of his amusement had faded. Ferengi, he learned, never did anything without turning a profit and that, apparently, included rooting around in other people’s garbage. The Klingons of past eras had routinely disposed of items that contained raw materials that once could not be easily reclaimed. Now the technology existed that meant the elements could be extracted, and, more, they were absurdly profitable. A half-dozen hundred-year-old hovercraft or shuttles could yield enough raw matter to replicate the pieces of a small starship. Worlds poor in resources would pay exorbitant amounts for such raw materials.

  Martok walked the perimeter of the compound until he found a gate. There was no sign above the narrow entrance, only a permit number, a warning to trespassers that the fence was charged, and a reference to a law that meant, he suspected, that anyone stupid enough to touch the fence could not pursue legal action against the owners. Because then they would be dead, Martok reasoned.

  He peered through the chain link and saw a trio of dingy gray prefab buildings squatting about one hundred and fifty meters in the distance: an office, a communications building, and a garage or hangar, by the look of them. The communications building looked like it had taken damage in the recent bombings, possibly a stray missile, but the hanger looked intact, and that was where Martok wished to explore.

  As a former general of the Klingon Defense Force, Martok knew something known to only a handful of Qo’noS’s citizens: that every Klingon-built vehicle on the planet had a device built into it that emitted a unique frequency, a signature registered with Imperial Intelligence. If circumstances required, satellites could track and identify any vehicle on the planet’s surface. This was an invaluable tool if, say, the KDF hunted a renegade chancellor, learned what vehicle he piloted, and then lost him during the chase. Intelligence monitors could then be activated and the escaped vehicle tracked.

  If Morjod knew this—and there was every reason to believe he did—then he would be keeping extraneous traffic off the road and monitoring everything headed from the Ketha region into the First City. He could easily dispatch patrols to check out any suspicious travelers.

  But: Ferengi-registered vehicles. Ah, there was a different situation altogether. Another thing Martok knew was that the few foreign business concerns that did work on Qo’noS were not subject to all the same laws as Klingon industries. How could they tell the Ferengi, “We’d like to put transceivers on your vehicles,” without explaining why? And, truly, no one had ever really thought it would be an issue. After all, they were just …Ferengi.

  Now all Martok had to do was get past the fence. He pulled his disruptor from the inner cloak pocket and aimed at the gate’s magnetic lock. If the energy field still functioned, it would reflect the shot, so he aimed at an angle. No sense frying himself over a little casual burglary. The first shot told him what he already suspected; namely, a bomb had destroyed the generator that had powered the fence. The lock split into two pieces, one spinning up into the air and away to the left, the other landing at Martok’s feet. He stepped back to the side of the road and waited.

  No one came running. The place was deserted. Just as well. Martok hated the idea of wasting disruptor energy. Besides, he could only imagine the nightmare of wrongful-death litigation the Ferengi might drag him into.

  He walked quickly to the garage, his cloak flapping in the stiff north wind. Fine grit had begun to fall several hours earlier, irritating his eye and throat and turning everything gray. Martok had taken it to be a new feature in the seemingly endless miseries Ketha could inflict on its denizens, but then he had realized that it was really powdered stone from the First City settling out of the atmosphere. Up until that moment, he had been doing a passable job of holding in his anger, saving it for when he had a target, but he had almost lost himself in the red rage then.

  Stepping inside the garage, Martok smelled odors he remembered from Quark’s bar, all things he associated with Ferengi: burned cooking oil, spiced alcohol, and fermented curd.

  He pressed his eye against a crack in the corrugated steel of the garage door and grunted in satisfaction. Two vehicles. One appeared to be a heavy transport, probably used to haul trash or equipment to and from the landfill. The other was a light single-person hoverbike. Martok grinned. An image flashed through his mind: Straddling the hoverbike, he would swoop over the public stage where Sirella was to be executed. Their eyes would lock and he would pull out his dagger to cut her bonds. Then, laughing, she would fling herself into his arms. … He shook his head, snorted, and then cursed himself for a fool. What sort of idiotic, adolescent nonsense is this? he wondered. My dotage is coming on sooner than I expected. Except it didn’t feel like dotage or even idiocy. He felt good, potent. He had a direction, a plan, even if on some level he recognized that the plan was foolhardy.

  When he pulled the door open and the solar-powered lamps flickered to life, Martok’s fragile fantasy abruptly died. The hoverbike wasn’t going anywhere. A beam had fallen and crushed the engine system. He recognized that the spicy smell he had detected earlier was actually coolant. He moved hastily away. A healthy whiff of coolant could damage throat and lungs, and he possessed neither the tools nor the time to repair the engine block or himself.

  That left the heavy transport. Well, Martok conceded to himself, perhaps that’s more appropriate anyway. It was an old Federation Sporak 460, probably decommissioned twenty years ago and salvaged by the Ferengi. Any old hand in the Defense Force who had participated in a ground action had seen a Sporak at one time or another. They had been ubiquitous for the past fifty or sixty years. They were tough, nimble vehicles that could transport personnel or supplies over long distances in relative comfort and safety. Usually part of colonial equipment, the vehicles were built with three axles and could be equipped with either four or six tires, which could be swapped in and out to accommodate the terrain. This one had four gigantic, heavily treaded, solid tires, meaning it was being used to travel primarily over mountain roads.

  Inspecting the vehicle carefully, Martok decided it was a filthy, patched-together antique and riding any distance as its passenger would pound his lower back into gelatinous mush. And he still had a full night’s journey ahead of him. Smiling, he decided the rickety vehicle made him feel strangely at home. It will do, he thought.

  Yanking open the creaking door, he swung up into the cab and inspected the panel until he found the most likely candidate for the starter, then slapped the switch with the flat of his hand. There was a soft beep and a soft human woman’s voice greeted him in Federation Standard, “Insert authorization key now.” Martok sighed and sagged forward over the steering yoke. They didn’t disable the authorization key. Who in their right mind would purchase a decommissioned vehicle and not disable the authorization key? Then, he shrugged one shoulder, a tiny surrender. A Ferengi, of course.

  Look in the office, he decided, or the communications building. Look for a bulletin board or a hook by a door. The key will be hanging on a chain where everyone can get it when they need it. Martok had seen enough motor pools in his life to know how things worked. Not a serious setback, he told himself. You’ll be away in ten minutes. But the small worm of anxiety that had been eating at his gut all day had grown several more segments.

  He crossed the compound to the communications shed, the closer of the two buildings, and was pleased to discover that the bomb blast had torn a large hole in its side. Things are going better already, Martok decided as he stepped through the gap, apparently into some kind of storeroom. Electronic equipment, fiber-optic cable, and tools were strewn around the floor.

  The dark inside made it
nearly impossible to see and there were no emergency battery-powered lamps as in the garage, so he spent a couple of frustrating minutes looking through the tools to see if there was anything he might find useful. Grunting with satisfaction, he pulled a hand welder with a nearly full charge from inside an overturned toolbox. Set on its lowest power, the welding arc cast a dim green light. It wasn’t much, but it would be enough to keep him from stumbling into or over anything dangerous.

  Entering the main room, Martok became aware of a staccato thumping, the low sound of water dripping into a basin. Pipes might have cracked. Water would be a valuable supply. There might even be food, though he doubted if Ferengi would have anything around that he would want to eat.

  Moving forward slowly, using the welder as a torch, he explored the room carefully, examining every scrap of trash and junk on the floor. When he reached the center of the room, he saw that the ceiling had collapsed inward and a supporting beam had crushed the main communications console. Martok felt vaguely disappointed by this until he reminded himself that he had no one to call.

  Studying the ceiling, he couldn’t find any broken pipes or dripping plumbing, but the thudding noise was definitely louder. Turning slowly in a circle, Martok decided it was coming from under the crushed comm console. No place to find water. And I don’t see any likely places for the key to be hidden. Time to head for the other building. He retraced his steps, but paused just before squeezing through the half-open door. The thumping, he realized, wasn’t perfectly regular. It would stop every few beats, then resume.

  Martok stood in the doorway for the space of a dozen heartbeats, struggling with himself. Why am I wasting time with this? Sirella waits. But the thumping was hypnotic. A sneer of self-disgust creased his brow, but he could not stop himself. He had to know what was making the noise.