The Left Hand of Destiny, Book 1 Read online

  Startled, Worf caught his breath and wondered, What sign is this? Who could have arranged such a display? The star glowed brighter, and all around the bridge, crew members shouted and cheered until each sensed that something was wrong, the sounds dying in their throats.

  Worf glanced at the sensor display, but refused to believe what he saw. “No!” he cried, and pounded the console. “This cannot be!” The coordinates must be wrong! He looked back up at the main monitor and saw that the perfect circle of white light had frayed, becoming a ragged pink oval, yellow at the ever-widening edges. Flecks of black and gray peppered the center of the explosion, and Worf knew they must be huge chunks of concrete and steel, because nothing else could survive the tremendous energies that were being unleashed. Bodies, certainly, could not survive such a holocaust. Neither would his personal hope of trust or faith that Klingon honor would put his people above inflicting such unfathomable horror on other Klingons. Helplessly, Worf watched the world he had believed in come to an abrupt end. Where moments before there had been a grid of buildings and streets, the heart of the Klingon Empire, there was now nothing but a twisted gray snarl.

  Around him, Worf heard only the ticks and pings of automatic instruments. An acrid scent permeated the air, a scent the scrubbers could not clear away, and Worf recognized it as the Klingon flight-or-fight hormone. But who is there to fight and how can we flee from this? His knuckles ached and he realized he had split them on the console, now smeared with his blood. No one spoke, and it seemed to Worf for a time that no one would ever be able to speak again until he heard K’Tar snap, “Operations: Engage cloak, then route emergency power to the engines.”

  The Negh’Var’s engines groaned to life, and Worf shifted his weight to the right to compensate for the sudden thrust. The weapons officer activated the shields and weapons systems. Seeing that he was no longer needed, Worf looked around the bridge and saw that the strategic intelligence station was not manned. Why would we need an intel officer? he wondered cynically. We’re in orbit over Qo’noS. He quickly activated the main sensors, coaxed them to do a short-range scan of the planet’s surface and the space around them for the distance of five thousand kellicam s; he studied the readout.

  An involuntary cry escaped his throat before he could stop himself, the mourning scream, the shout of rage and defiance that a Klingon bellows when a fellow warrior goes to meet Death, so that Death might know who he is about to face. But how, how could he scream loud enough to announce so many lost souls? How could any of them have been prepared for judgment?

  “Worf!”

  He twisted toward Martok’s voice and could barely make him out, so red and burning was his sight. “Sir!”

  “Report!” Martok scowled.

  Old Starfleet training took hold. Worf scanned the data. And again, because what he saw was too horrific to be believed, it took him a moment to find his voice. There wasn’t enough evidence to make any definite conclusions … but, by the Sword, how could there be any doubt? “The Great Hall, Chancellor … and the Plaza of Heroes … where the council must have stood awaiting you …”

  “Worf: Report!”

  “It’s gone, Chancellor. Gone. There’s nothing left … nothing at all.”

  3

  “FOOL! WATCH YOURSELF!” a sour-faced vendor snapped.

  “So sorry. Really.” Alexander Rozhenko backed away, bending over to retrieve the fruit he’d inadvertently knocked onto the street when he rushed around that last corner. The bruises won’t be too noticeable, he thought, as he brushed the dust from the pulpy melons and shoved them back into the cart. Ignoring the vendor’s protests, he tossed a handful of coins onto the counter and pushed into the crowd swelling and filling every road and alleyway.

  Alexander pushed down the nausea that usually struck him when he visited the First City. Add the stench of sweat-drenched dirty bodies to the incense of the ancestral temples, the cauldrons of peppadugh spice, the fresh meat hanging in the slaughterhouses, and it was all he could do to keep down breakfast. Though he honored his half-human mother for all her gifts to him, he wished that he’d inherited his father’s wholly-Klingon digestive system.

  A chorus of sirens shrieked at pedestrians from virtually every hovercar moving along at a snail’s pace. Visitors who couldn’t afford to stay in the inns had set up housekeeping in the public plazas, pitching tents, tying up their livestock to light posts, building fire pits in curb gutters, and lining store windowsills with pots of congealed rokeg blood pie. Opportunistic vendors hawked souvenirs, from “genuine” beads allegedly worn by Lukara to var’Hama candles smithed by the mistresses of Emperor Todokh the Imperious. Comnet technicians worked to install gigantic viewscreens on every corner, making it easy for those milling in the streets to watch Martok’s formal installation as chancellor. With thousands of citizens settling in to watch the ceremonies, Alexander doubted he’d be able to reach the Great Hall before his father arrived from the Negh’Var. He checked his chronometer. Damn it all! Drex and Lady Sirella must be waiting for me. He hoped he wouldn’t make them late as well; they had agreed to meet at the Taklar Temple and proceed to the first ring as a group. There would be hell to pay from his father if the lady arrived late because of him. He brainstormed other transportation options, but Alexander assumed that there wasn’t a public transporter pad within two kellicams that had less than an hour wait.

  He found himself sandwiched between a hefty Klingon matron herding a gaggle of mangy targs toward a water trough and a legion of graybeards in old KDF uniforms tottering along. Maybe he should join the masses and savor the experience from a healthy distance. He could contact the lady on her personal communicator and tell her to leave without him, freeing him to find a pub someplace, order up a flagon of ale, and watch all the pomp from an anonymous stool. Contacting Sirella in this crowd, however, might needlessly draw attention to the son of Worf.

  Should he make the effort to reach the Great Hall, he would face another possible outcome, considering his current streak: the fool son of Worf might accidentally dump bloodwine down the front of the chancellor’s cloak while billions of Klingons watched the live feed throughout the empire. He sighed audibly, prompting one of the targs pushing past his leg to twist on its leash and whine at him. Make the lesser of the bad choices, Alex, he admonished himself.

  The fact that his day had more or less started last night should have been a sign that his careful planning might be pointless. His accidental activation of the Ya’Vang’s waste-ejection system—the one used when a power loss forced a choice between recycling and warp drive—during yesterday’s dry-dock landing had necessitated he spend an additional shift cleaning up. That his captain had found the incident amusing had assured that Alexander would arrive at the ceremonies without a bat’leth lodged between his vertebrae, which presumably would please Worf. What Worf expected, however, was for Alexander to arrive without a bat’leth lodged between his vertebrae and to be on time. Worf was always a stickler for exactness. Alexander could imagine the look on his face if he rushed in about halfway through the recitation of Martok’s victory on Cardassia Prime.

  He sighed again and started looking for a pub.

  Since the day was originally scheduled to be one of celebration, Alexander had planned on being able to enjoy—indeed, revel in—the fact that he was a member of the chancellor’s House. This condition had not been lost on his crewmates on the Ya’Vang. For the most part, they had treated him well enough after the initial adjustment period, but it was clear that their estimation of his worth was higher than it would have been without the crest of House Martok on his uniform. If nothing else, it was always easier to get resupplied when the quartermaster learned that a member of the chancellor’s House was aboard the ship.

  No, his crewmates treated him just fine, but it wasn’t their opinion of Alexander that mattered as much as Alexander’s opinion of himself. Not being ostracized wasn’t enough; he wanted to belong, but in Klingon society, he had learned, ther
e were only so many ways to make a name for oneself.

  Obviously, his first choice was to become a great warrior, but Alexander was fairly confident that this path was closed to him. He had learned enough basic combat skills to not be treated as an out-and-out liability in a fight, but that was the best he would ever be able to do. Not that being a great warrior was the only way to go. Even in the Defense Force, intellectuals and fine artists were honored almost as highly as fighters. Unfortunately, Alexander was neither a genius nor a songwriter. He wasn’t one of those engineers who could fix a bad warp core with a roll of draq tape and a sharp glare at the plumbing and he couldn’t find a tidy rhyme for Ka’Tarlk (the Klingon equivalent of “orange,” he felt). For a short time, he had made do with being the ship’s lucky screwup, but that had worn thin pretty quickly. Alexander had learned on Earth that people find that sort of thing amusing for a little while, but sooner or later it becomes annoying. On a Klingon warship, it could be fatal.

  As Alexander’s grandfather would have said, he needed a new shtick. Fortunately, he had learned something very important in the schools on Earth and the classrooms on the Enterprise that helped him out tremendously. Students, he had figured out, fell into several basic types that could be found in any classroom, and, by extension, any social situation. First there was the popular crowd, the men and women who ruled by virtue of natural ability or family background or some combination of the two. Then there were the well-developed specimens who were valued for their physical abilities. In school, these had been the athletes; on a warship, they were the frontline troops. Then there were the smart ones (school: brainiacs; ship: scientists) and somewhere below that, the tech-heads (school) and the maintenance teams (ship). The screwups seemed to hold the same position in both hierarchies. The big difference between them was that in school, the screwups generally survived to see graduation. On a Klingon warship, the position was frequently open due to attrition.

  When Alexander perceived how similar the social structures were in the two environments, he did a quick compare-and-contrast and found that there was one category in human schools that was not present on a Klingon warship: the class clown.

  Alexander Rozhenko decided to assign himself a new role. He figured that if he could make his shipmates laugh (while avoiding having them laugh at him), it might significantly improve his chances to survive long enough to find something else he could do. In any case, anything had to be better than screwup and the introduction to an airlock sans EV suit that the role frequently entailed. And, as chance would have it, Alexander Rozhenko had a gift for making other people do stupid things. He decided (privately) that it had something to do with having done so many stupid things himself. As his father would have said, practice makes perfect. At breakfast that morning, he had made a comment about Lieutenant Charak’s unfortunate (and inexplicable) tendency to belch loudly just before he stepped on a transporter pad at exactly the right moment to motivate Charak’s subordinate, Aktaj, to expel a mouthful of gagh through his nose. Alexander had never seen anyone do that before. It was one of those sights, that, well, if he was lucky enough to ever be an old man on his deathbed, he had a feeling he might make a comment about it.

  Alexander had chosen to see it as a good omen for the day, especially since several people in his shore-leave party were talking about it like it was something they had seen at their own table (which they hadn’t). All of them, even Aktaj, were treating the gagh expulsion like it had been some great victory and he, Alexander, had been the general at the forefront of the battle. Against all expectation, Crewman Rozhenko found himself looking forward to seeing his father later that day and actually being able to introduce his shipmates as friends.

  A crackle of the sound system indicated the broadcast was about to begin. Mostly, the crowd took the cue, pausing where they stood, throwing rugs or blankets on the cobbled streets and plopping down to make themselves comfortable. A few cracked open ale kegs; still others began passing the bloodwine. This might be more fun to watch drunk, now that I think of it, Alexander thought, knowing how much that behavior would displease his father. He would wait until after the installation to imbibe, making it easier for him to face his father’s scowling disapproval. Alexander threaded his way around the kiosks and street stalls to an empty doorway where he had a decent view of the screen.

  A grainy shot of the Great Hall appeared on the screen, prompting cheers from the crowd. The camera pulled away, revealing various High Council members clad in their finest ceremonial clothes, striding about, assuming their rank-dictated positions in the receiving line. He squinted at the footage, trying to discern the identities of the various politicians, wondering who were enemies of the House of Martok, and thus his enemies. Settling in against the doorframe, he shifted his armor so it wouldn’t dig into his shoulder—

  A concussive blast eclipsed all sound, and he covered his ringing ears with his hands. He hunched over, retreating deeper into the doorway. Glancing up, he saw a geyser of flame erupting in the first ring. An ominous rumble became a roar. Cracking and creaking of things flying combined with screams and wails.

  Panic ensued.

  Ominous clouds of black smoke billowed over stone walls as a haze of dust and silvery flakes of vaporized matter descended from the sky. Sharp shards showered the streets, projectiles of stone, metal, and plasteel arbitrarily wounding the unlucky. And body parts—a bloody hand, a chunk of skin and muscle—descended with building fragments. The daylight dissolved into soot and ash and palpable heat.

  Blank faces, faces pinched in fear, faces scraped and bleeding from shrapnel wounds horrified Alexander. Some ran. Some dropped where they stood, numb with shock. Children cried for their parents. Hovercars, desperate to escape, churned dangerously over the heads of the crowd. A chaotic tangle of life and death and madness surrounded him on all sides.

  Falling back on his soldier’s training, he quickly assessed the situation, his mind racing through possibilities. We’re under attack. … There’s been an accident. … This is an insane assassination attempt on the council—on Martok—

  On my father.

  If Martok’s enemies had decided to move, all those loyal to him—especially members of his House—would be targeted. He wouldn’t even be safe on the Ya’Vang. I need to get out of here. Immediately. And then find my father.

  Choosing a path moving away from the city center, Alexander joined the fleeing crowds, kept his head down, and focused on recalling the maze of alleys and passageways that would provide his escape.

  * * *

  Qo’noS’s tiny northern ice cap disappeared off the bottom of the viewscreen as the Negh’Var moved under cloak into a stationary polar orbit. The pole’s magnetic fields played havoc with their cloak’s graviton emissions, helping to further conceal the ship from those who would know how to find them. Experienced warriors knew the tricks to finding cloaked ships and even more tricks to finding a ship when magnetic fields garbled sensor readings, but finding a ship that was using both? That was sleight of hand that only captains as old and experienced as Martok and Captain K’Tar could execute. The Negh’Var was as concealed as it was possible to be under the circumstances.

  When K’Tar looked to Martok moments after issuing his orders, the general nodded his approval. K’Tar had followed the prescribed protocol for their circumstances, a set of rules that Martok himself had learned when he had been the captain of the ship: Secure the chancellor, then collect intelligence. Martok expected they would decloak shortly, once they knew who and what to attack. But for a few minutes? He wouldn’t protest.

  As soon as their position was stabilized, K’Tar ordered the communications officer to tap into the comnet and feed news reports onto the main viewscreen. Martok steeled himself for a cyclone blast of media outrage, but all sources were blacked out or broadcasting banal public health announcements. Several minutes of listening to warnings to citizens of the First City about breathing without filter masks needled him. “Deactivate vie
wscreen!” he ordered. The screen went dark, and the red glow of the emergency lights was all the illumination left.

  Martok stalked around the bridge like an injured sabre bear ready to snap at anyone who dared to speak. He fought his instinct to rant and roar, to call on his ancestors and threaten to tear out the throats of whoever had done this, but he dared not. General Martok would be allowed such histrionics, but Chancellor Martok could not let his emotions crowd out reason. This crew—no, the entire empire—expected his next action to be the absolute correct action.

  And, truly, Martok had to confess to himself, if no one else, that what motivated him in that moment was shock, tempered with a good deal of rage. The general had been a warrior for most of his life, had fought in or overseen engagements that had involved cities, planets, even systems, but somehow this … this attack on the heart of the empire … this atrocity was unfathomable, because the worst part of it, the part that his brain kept circling back to, was one thought: Only a Klingon could have done this.

  But, no, no, it was too dangerous to make such conjectures without more information. And yet it was just as foolish not to be prepared for the worst. “Captain,” Martok snapped.

  “Chancellor?”

  “All weapons on standby. Instruct tactical to maintain sensor sweeps.”

  “Yes, Chancellor.”

  A thought struck him. “Communications? What activity on the surface military channels?”

  “Minimal traffic, Capt … I mean, Chancellor.”

  Martok glanced at K’Tar, who seemed amused at the slip. He was, Martok thought, the calmest, most rational officer in the fleet, only one of the many reasons he had been appointed captain of the imperial flagship. He was also one of the most deadly warriors Martok had ever met, which was another reason. “Monitor the military channels for encoded transmissions.” K’Tar cocked his head in a manner that communicated to Martok that this was already being done, and Martok nodded his approval. Fine, he thought. If it’s to be battle, then let them come, whoever they are.