The Left Hand of Destiny, Book 1 Page 19

  Martok had grown very quiet after Pharh had told him this story. Sirella, his wife, would be executed the next day, which would account for some of the old Klingon’s distraction, but Pharh had a feeling there was more to it than that. The gears were turning. A plan was coming together, Pharh thought, something amazingly devious and clever.

  “I think I need to use the washroom,” Pharh said. “Maybe they have one. And a drink would be good, too. Some delicious Klingon bloodwine. Mmmm. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

  Martok didn’t stir. You had to admire that kind of concentration. Wheels were just whirring away, Pharh figured. Had to be something fiendishly clever, whatever it was, but when was he going to share it? Over supper, perhaps. That seemed sensible, but then doubt began to trickle in: Was there anything sensible about Klingons? Was there anything sensible about someone who traveled with Klingons, but didn’t know where they were going or what they would do when they got there? What’s happened to me? Pharh wondered. Why am I doing this? I have other options. I could go home. Get out of the vehicle now, find a ride to a spaceport, and hire a ship. I would have to use credit, but that would be all right. I’d find some way to pay it off … eventually. And I could even go home. My parents would make me suffer, make me stand on the doorstep and beg, but only for a day or two at the most. It wouldn’t cost much. … Just my pride, and what Ferengi ever gave two strips of gold latinum for his pride? Pride is nothing. It’s the thing you have left when you have nothing left. … And at this, he paused and rephrased the sentence so that it came out, It’s the only thing I still have that I can call my own.

  Pharh reached over and poked the general in the side with his finger. “Mr. Chancellor, sir,” he said. “What are we doing?”

  Martok stiffened suddenly, inhaled sharply, and glanced about. “Sirella,” he said absently, fixing his one good eye on Pharh. “Where?”

  “Here,” Pharh said, his appetite and his determination draining out of him. “We’re right here. Outside this … place. An inn, I think. You told me to stop at the next one. Are you hungry?”

  “What time is it?”

  Pharh pointed at the chrono in the dashboard. “Going on midnight.”

  “Then we’re not too late?”

  Pharh shook his head. “No, of course not. The execution is tomorrow morning. We have …” He calculated. “We have about ten hours, maybe more, to go about twenty klicks. That’s more than enough time. I figured you would want to stop and get something to eat, tell me our plan, figure out what we would do to prepare.”

  “Our plan?” Martok asked. “There is no our here. I get out here and start walking. You turn this thing around and go back where you came from or where you’re going next.”

  Pharh felt heat rise on his face. “But you owe me,” he said.

  “Yes, I owe you,” Martok said. “I owe it to you to keep you alive because you will almost certainly die if you come with me.”

  “And if you don’t take me, you’ll almost certainly die,” Pharh retorted. “Or are you expecting your army to protect you?”

  Expressionless, Martok reached down into an inside pocket and pulled out a piece of jewelry. Pharh saw it was a ring. Martok held it out, waited for the Ferengi to extend an open palm, and then dropped it. The ring was unexpectedly heavy, and even by the dim light of the dashboard Pharh could see that it was little more than a worn, unadorned piece of metal.

  “What’s this?” Pharh asked.

  “The chancellor’s ring,” Martok answered. “They took it off Gowron’s body and gave it to me. I’ve never worn it—wouldn’t have until the ceremony—but I’ve always carried it with me. Now it’s yours. Payment, one way or another. If I survive, you bring it back to me and I’ll reward you. If I don’t, it should be worth a lot to someone, somewhere. A collector’s item. Or perhaps the new chancellor would like it.” He grinned deviously. “He’s not going to get it from me, though.”

  Pharh hefted the ring in his hand and considered. There could be no question that such an heirloom would be worth a considerable sum. When things calmed down, he could sell it or trade it for … well, just about anything. He wouldn’t have to go crawling back to his family or sell himself into indentured servitude to some bank or loan shark (Pharh was enough of a Ferengi that the two were practically synonymous in his mind). It was a considerable amount of profit for several hours of driving and a moderate amount of terror. All he had to do now was lie low and wait for the waves of chaos to settle down. No matter what, eventually events would begin to resume their usual course. That was how business worked. He closed his fingers around the ring. “All right,” he said. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  Martok looked out the windshield again at the glow on the horizon. “I can’t think of anything else at the moment,” he said, then cracked open the passenger-side door and the warm, rank breath of the Ka’Toth plains began to seep in.

  Slipping out onto the ground, the general began to close the door, then stopped halfway and reopened it enough to poke his head in. “On second thought,” he said with a wry grin, “do me a favor. Afterward, if you find yourself in a position to tell anyone about me, exaggerate nothing. Don’t make me bigger than life.”

  Pharh frowned in confusion. “But, General, you are bigger than life.”

  “I’m not a general,” Martok said.

  “All right, Chancellor.”

  “Or that.”

  Pharh sighed and gripped the ring tighter in his hand. “Then what are you?” he asked.

  “Just a Klingon. Just a man.”

  “Who’s looking for his wife.”

  Martok nodded once.

  “Well, then, good luck.”

  “In Klingon, we say ‘Qapla’.’ It means, ‘Success.’”

  “Then Qapla’.”

  “Qapla’, Pharh, son of … What was your father’s name?”

  “Just Pharh will do,” Pharh said.

  Martok nodded once again and repeated, “Qapla’, Pharh. May your storehouses grow ever fatter with wealth and your account books always balance.”

  Pharh laughed and said, “You have spent time around Ferengi,” but Martok didn’t hear him. Pharh watched the tall figure hunch into himself and raise the hood over his head before he disappeared into the night. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea for him to go inside and ask about cranch, Pharh decided, so instead he turned the Sporak around with a series of convoluted reverses and ground gears, then headed back down the road into the east and the rising moon. There was a lot of road between him and the landfill, but, somehow, Pharh doubted he would run into anything he couldn’t handle.

  14

  AS DAWN APPROACHED and the streetlights of the First City began to dim, Martok concluded that his plan was going about as well as he could expect. He was in the city, near the site of the Great Hall, and had managed to find a guardsman who was stupid enough to let Martok kill him and take his uniform. He was surprised that Morjod had kept the guardsmen on duty, since they were usually more closely allied with some sort of civilian authority, but perhaps that was just one more indication of how deep into the power structure the usurper had penetrated. It didn’t matter. Martok’s only concern was that guardsmen wore helmets where Defense Force soldiers did not, offering him a way to maintain his anonymity, and that there might even be a logical reason why a guardsman would be inside the Emperor’s Palace.

  Still, he was beginning to wish he had not let Pharh take the Sporak. The last kellicam’s walk to the city center had felt like eternity. His pain from cramping leg muscles had been exceeded only by the excruciating ache of his feet. Fortunately, the deserted-looking home he had broken into really had been deserted, and both their larder and medical-supply cabinet had been well stocked. In fact, in the last two hours, Martok had noticed that many homes inside the city limits appeared to be deserted. Either Morjod had been making arrests or, more likely, civilians had decided it was time to visit their distant relations. Martok couldn’t condem
n them. It was one thing to be asked to fight in a war or to take sides in a revolution; it was quite something else to back a coup. Perhaps more Klingons had come to that conclusion than Morjod had anticipated. They might, Martok reflected, even be willing to fall in behind a deposed chancellor if given the opportunity. Martok shook his head, finding the thought distracting. Whether he had a future as chancellor didn’t matter. Not immediately, anyway. Rescuing his wife came first. After Sirella was safe, after he had ascertained what had happened to the children, then he would decide what to do about the chancellorship and Morjod. For all he knew, the usurper might be precisely what the Klingon people wanted or needed. Or deserve, he thought wryly. Not even Kahless had shown up to say anything one way or another, though Martok had to consider that the emperor was either in Morjod’s power or dead. Strange how few people had even mentioned the clone emperor’s name in the past few days, almost as if they had all been looking for an excuse to forget him.

  He shrugged and felt the unfamiliar straps of the guardsman armor bite into his back and shoulders. Pulling on the helmet, he scanned the area, memorizing the location of doors, stairways—potential escape routes—should he come back this way. From the silence, he determined that the area surrounding the palace must be mostly empty, so he felt safe moving deeper into the compound.

  As dawn approached, the periwinkle sky brightened, lending him light to see by. He passed through winding alleys and small courtyards, each step bringing him closer to Sirella. He mentally mapped each section, noting which alleys dead-ended and which might be a good hiding place, should he require one. After twenty minutes of twisting and turning through the mazelike passageways, Martok crossed the deserted square to the Emperor’s Palace, the identification card he’d lifted from the guardsman snugly cupped in the palm of his hand. If it didn’t work, he would attempt a diversion. Martok knew that he didn’t stand much of a chance if forced to fight his way in and then out again.

  The disgraced lady was being held in the emperor’s gaol, the first person to be so honored in many hundreds of years. Morjod had heavily publicized her location, so Martok anticipated a trap. What he hoped was that Morjod and his conspirators had planned on defending against a much larger group, possibly even an army or a guerrilla strike. A single guerrilla, on the other hand, would be difficult to prepare for. Though the odds were heavily stacked against him, he knew that stealth was the one weapon that could conceivably defeat Morjod’s layers of security.

  The adjoining plaza where the Great Hall once stood had been cleared of all but the largest chunks of debris. Where the most ancient of Klingon edifices had once risen above the city was only a shallow crater half a kellicam across. Cracked stone and concrete edged the crater, but raw earth filled in past the three-meter mark, most of this churned up into mud by heavy demolition equipment. The openness of the setting would make it difficult to stage a rescue in the crater, should circumstances require that approach. Crude bleachers ringing the sides assured that hundreds if not thousands of citizens with unknown loyalties would be in attendance. I will have to rescue her before she is removed from her holding cell.

  In the center of the crater, Martok could see carpenters still putting the finishing touches on a platform where stood the execution device. Martok had seen pictures of the cha’ta’rok—literally the “machine that tears”—in history books, but he had never imagined that he would see a working model. In the days before the original Kahless had unified the empire, some nefarious genius had created the device, intending it to be both an instrument of execution and a test of a warrior’s strength. The concept was deceptively simple: the victim was strapped down to a platform and four long flexible poles were pulled toward him or her. The poles had leather thongs at their ends and these were tied to the victim’s arms and legs and around the neck. On a signal from the chieftain, the executioner would release the straps that bound the victim to the table and then the stays that kept the poles bent. If the victim was weak or had simply surrendered, the poles would instantly snap back into position, pulling his or her arms, legs, and head from the sockets. It was a messy, intentionally humiliating death, but, by the standards of its era, mercifully quick.

  Conversely, if the warrior was strong, he could keep the poles from snapping away for minutes or, as had been reported in legends, for hours at a time. Every young warrior was told the story of Mighty Borma, who won his freedom by holding the poles bent for so long that the tops sprouted roots that grew into the earth. Even with the thrilling, heroic stories the cha’ta’rok had inspired, its creation had not been, Martok concluded, the Klingons’ finest hour.

  Beyond the crater, on the opposite side of the plaza, Martok crossed the gardens fringing the palace walls. Dingy gray ash coated the usually lush grounds. Plants and trees were still alive—it had only been two days since the attack—but Martok was surprised that Morjod’s vanity hadn’t compelled him to have them cleaned. During his visits here, he had become friendly with one of the gardeners, an old woman named Gratach, who had been tending the emperor’s gardens since Urthog’s day. Because she reminded him of Darok, Martok had enjoyed his conversations with her. Could Morjod have been so unwise as to imprison or dismiss Gratach? It seemed inconceivable, but there wasn’t any other explanation. Except …

  Of course. She had been part of the receiving party at the Great Hall. Gratach would have wanted to see him enter the Hall and take the oath. Staring at the dirty trees, Martok clenched his fist. Thousands must have died yesterday! Reaching up, he took a leaf between his fingers and brushed it until pale green showed. I shall avenge you, too, old woman. …

  Beyond the gardens, Martok noted pairs of guards on duty at every corner and at all the palace entrances. The guardsmen and the Defense Force patrolmen appeared to be exhausted and oblivious of everything save the workmen at the center of the crater. He moved slowly, purposefully, toward a particularly droopy pair of guards, a satchel that he had found in the guardsman’s kit folded under his arm. The sound of the workmen cranking one of the winches almost made him stop to listen, but then he maintained a courier’s weary pace toward the secondary entrance he had chosen.

  The pair of guardsmen beside the security barrier barely glanced at Martok as he swiped the identification card through the scanner, though one asked him to identify himself.

  “Gorsh,” he replied, and glanced at the voiceprint analyzer.

  Neither guard bothered to look at the display, because they knew what Martok knew: The analyzer at this gate was poorly calibrated and would not give either a definite positive or negative ID. He pointed at it and said, “They still haven’t replaced that?”

  One of the guards shrugged.

  “It was like that when I was posted here two years ago. I called maintenance every week,” Martok continued.

  This time the second guard shrugged and said, “They’ll fix it when it pleases them. They have other, more important projects now.” He nodded toward the crater and Martok shook his head in sympathetic disgust. Pushing past the barrier, he silently thanked Gowron for his indifference to day-to-day maintenance minutiae. He walked briskly to the second door just past the barrier, but then turned around and casually mentioned, “I didn’t see any of his pets outside.”

  Both guards looked at each other uneasily and one replied, “They haven’t been around since yesterday afternoon. Where have you been?”

  “My unit was in the lowlands looking for rebels.”

  “Did you find anything?” one of them asked.

  Martok shook his head in the time-honored manner of all weary soldiers. “I do not know,” he said, and held up the satchel. “But my petaQ commander does not like me and I was selected to bring this report.”

  One of the guards laughed. “Too bad. Maybe he’s keeping the pets hungry just for bearers of bad tidings.”

  “Or for her,” the other said, and nodded his head toward the center of the castle. “For Martok’s widow. After they’ve used the cha’ta’rok.�
��

  “His widow?” Martok asked, surprised. “You think he’s dead.”

  The first one touched the d’k tahg on his belt and replied evenly, “He must be.”

  Martok glanced at the man’s eyes. “Why do you say that?”

  The guard shook his head, but refused to speak. The other, either less fearful or less circumspect, answered for him. “If the general was alive,” he said, “he would be here by now.”

  He acknowledged their answers, turned his back, and headed for the inner door. Once safely through, he ducked into the nearest storage closet, leaned his back against the wall, slipped off the stifling helmet, and breathed deeply. Steady, Martok. Those last comments had unnerved him: the rank-and-file soldiers believed he was dead. They would follow me—I sensed it. I could see it in their eyes. The prospect of leading an army against Morjod revitalized him.

  He pulled the bat’leth off his back and hefted it with one hand. From the appearance of the dull blade, Martok could see that it had not been used much in recent years. He decided he liked the old, off-balance, and slightly blunted weapon; it felt companionable. You need a name, he thought, and decided on the spot to call it Dagh, which in Klingon meant simply “tooth.” He slung it back over his shoulder and felt better for it. Arriving in Sto-Vo-Kor with a blade that had a name would be honorable.

  Far more important than the bat’leth was the guard’s confirmation that Sirella was here.

  Replacing the helmet, he continued on his way. Up ahead, he remembered, and around the corner was a T-intersection with stairs leading up to the right. Couriers would proceed up the stairs to the main reception area, where the administrative adjunct would relieve couriers of their satchels or parcels. To the left was another stairway he had never taken, one that led down into the bowels of the palace. Instinct told him that this was where he would find Sirella.

  Peering around the corner down at the T-intersection, he saw a single guard, this one looking considerably more alert than any he had spotted outside. He touched the slim knife in the sheath on his forearm. He had been surprised to find the blade on the guardsman’s wrist, but, unlike the bat’leth, he reasoned, this was precisely the sort of thing a soldier who worked the streets of the First City would want to have at hand. Sweeping around the corner in what he hoped looked like an officious pace, he fervently hoped he would not have to kill the guard, possibly drawing needless attention to his presence.