The Left Hand of Destiny, Book 1 Read online

  As the transport left the area, Morjod could once again be heard over the whine of its departing engines. He began again, “I want you to meet …,” but had to stop and search for the appropriate word. When he thought of it, he chuckled, and Martok found that his laugh was infectious. He pointed a control at the front of the container and it dropped forward with a leaden thud.

  “I want you to meet … my hunting pack.”

  * * *

  What Alexander saw on the viewscreen stopped him dead in his tracks.

  Having been raised by the Rozhenkos, he had grown up with the legends of Minsk: child-eating witches, baba yagas, and snarling wolves that stole babies from their cradles. All these stories provided him with a healthy array of childhood nightmares. The middle-of-the-night-wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat moments when he swore he heard claws scraping at his frosted windows. And while his upbringing had been oriented toward his human side, Alexander wasn’t immune to the night terrors of a Klingon. He knew the primitive stirrings of his ancestors’ fears. As he watched the scene on the viewscreen unfold, he felt his gut clench, his fists curl, his nails digging into the palms of his hands.

  So he knew, without being told, what stood on the lip of Morjod’s container—what his “hunting pack” actually was. He saw huge heads almost brushing the top of the container. Black, wide-set eyes glistened like beetles, blinked, and a long, gray tongue flicked over narrow lips, revealing rows of evenly spaced, small but blade-sharp teeth. Two arms dangled below wide shoulders, and each hand had three long clever fingers and two opposable thumbs. A sound between a snarl and a sigh emitted from its throat.

  Alexander felt some ancient part of his brain speak, a voice that lived between the base of his brain and the top of his spine, and it was telling his hips and legs that now would be a very, very good time to turn and run. He liked to believe he could prevent his legs from playing traitor, so he held himself still, but only just barely.

  Nearby, he heard a hoarse whisper, “Hur’q. It’s a Hur’q.”

  He shivered.

  Five hundred years after Kahless, they had come to Qo’noS, stripped it bare, and slaughtered nearly every living thing. The survivors of the carnage had finally driven off the plunderers with a little carnage of their own, winning back the world that had been taken from them. And while Kahless was remembered as the one who had wrought the hearts and souls of his kind, it wasn’t until they’d fought the Hur’q that they had become Klingons.

  But that was a thousand years ago, Alexander wondered. The Hur’q are supposed to be extinct!

  He watched as the first Hur’q stood for a moment at the lip of the open container and stared around at the Klingons. Morjod looked up at it, its low-slung head a good meter above his own, and grinned. He beckoned to it and the beast strode forward, appearing slow and docile, even awkward, as if it had just awakened from a deep sleep. Stunned, Alexander watched a second Hur’q follow the first. This one seemed more awake, so when it first emerged into the sunlight, it blinked its green, pupilless eyes, tilted back its head, and screeched its pleasure to the skies.

  Up on the screen, near the edge of the crowd, a Klingon warrior broke and ran. The Hur’q twisted its head to follow the man’s path, then dropped its shoulders and tensed as if it was about to spring. Morjod saw these movements and called to it, “No!”

  The Hur’q looked at him, lowered its eyes, and subsided. Falling into step behind the first, it stalked down from the container, and then Martok saw that there were two, possibly three more still in the box. Slaves, Alexander thought, incredulous. He’s made slaves of them. Or pets. But how?

  * * *

  The collectively stunned crew of the Negh’Var watched the viewscreen with undisguised horror. Of all the scenarios Martok believed Morjod capable of, this was one he hadn’t considered. Resurrecting ancient demons to terrify the citizenry into submission would be more effective than dispatching assassins or making mass arrests. Martok had underestimated the lengths the usurper was willing to go to claim victory; he would not make that mistake again.

  Standing before the Hur’q, Morjod raised his arms again, bat’leth shining, and cried out, “I have my hunters. Now all we need is to catch scent of our prey: the cur Martok, his Federation spy, and any who would help them.” He extended his weapon, then slowly swept it across the heads of the crowd, inviting them inside its curve. “Would any of you help them?”

  “NO!”

  “Will you help me build a new empire?”

  “YES!”

  “Then raise your blades and tell me, who will lead you to victory, to honor, to a new day?!”

  And with a sound like thunder, like a drum, like a death knell, they answered as one: “MORJOD!”

  And that was when the first disruptor bolt hit the Negh’Var.

  4

  PHARH HAD ALWAYS considered himself a Ferengi with a very limited imagination. He took pride in the idea. Imagination, he decided, was not one of the essential ingredients for profit making. As often as not, an innovative idea could end up costing money. Pharh was fairly certain there was a Rule of Acquisition about that, but he couldn’t remember exactly how it went. He never had felt a burning need for a good memory, either. He had memorized the essentials: his name, address, teleport code, and credit rating. Memorizing a bunch of rules that could all be distilled down to the same thing—don’t give the other guy a chance to get one over on you—didn’t prove a frinxing thing as far as Pharh was concerned.

  If he were a Ferengi with a little more imagination (or a slightly greater inclination toward introspection), he might wonder whether it was his lack of imagination that had led him to his current situation, which was, to wit, under a table. In a Klingon bar. On Qo’noS. Just as the entire planet appeared to be on the brink of going barking mad.

  Or maybe I’m being too hard on them, Pharh thought as he covered his head with his forearms as something heavy bounced off the tabletop. They’ve had a bad few months. Years, really. Decades, if you think about it. Maybe they just need to blow off some steam. Sounded reasonable when you put it that way.

  He rearranged his arms and legs, trying to find a more comfortable position, when he put his palm in a puddle of something he fervently hoped was old, congealed bloodwine. Something poked him on the top of his head. Klingon tables tended to be set low to the ground, and their undersides, for some reason, were frequently festooned with pointy objects (no one ever asked why), and since Pharh was unusually tall for a Ferengi he had to be careful how much he sat up.

  Back on Ferenginar, some of his friends … well, “friends” would be inaccurate. Pharh had never really had friends. “Classmates” was a better word. But even that wasn’t quite right, either. He pondered for a moment and finally settled on the right description. Several of the “guys who used to feign friendship and then extort his money after school every day”—that was it—had been struck with the idea that one of Pharh’s ancestors had been intimate with a Klingon at some point. It was, they said, the only thing that could explain how he could have such a big head and yet be so stupid at the same time. “It must be bone in there,” they said. Pharh had never felt like he was in a position to argue the point, especially because most of the time, while the point was being discussed, two or three of the “guys” were counting his money.

  The only good thing that had come of those “discussions” was that they had made Pharh curious about Klingons. He pondered that fact as the twenty or so Klingon warriors around him began to chant the name of the man who had been on the 2-D screen mounted over the bar. It was a quandary: Pharh had always been fairly sure he had left Ferenginar because he had wanted to get the krug away from his family, but now he had to wonder. Maybe it had been the remark about Klingons all along.

  Of course, there had been all sorts of reasons for wanting to get away from his family. His mother had wanted him to settle down with a nice, traditional Ferengi girl, never mind what Pharh thought. His moogie didn’t hold with any of the
modern ideas that had started sprouting up like fungus ever since Zek had taken up with that female, Ishka. Pharh’s moogie thought a wife should stay at home, stay naked, and set the thermostat way too high for anyone else to be comfortable.

  Then there was his father. Usually … Somewhere nearby … Usually over at Uncle Mirt’s house playing tongo. Uncle Mirt’s house, typically, wasn’t so warm, not because his wife wasn’t a traditionalist and didn’t set the thermostat too high, but because Aunt Marna—the theoretical Aunt Marna—had gone out to the store to pick up some puja butter about eighteen years ago and no one had thought to go look for her since. Uncle Mirt seemed to be bearing up under his loss pretty well.

  Then, of course, there was the whole problem of the family business and Pharh’s place in it, which was, predictably, near the bottom. Pharh’s people had made their money by mining out landfills for recyclable resources. They had bored down through all the trash on Ferenginar ages ago and were now focusing their talents on the midden heaps of alien races and peoples who were less interested in getting intimate with their ancestors’ refuse. Fortunately, most of the physical part of the business was subcontracted out to locals, so Pharh had never been expected to do any digging or sloshing or sorting as part of his training. On the other hand, he had been expected to learn as much as he could about the accounting end of the business, which turned out, in its own fashion, to be just as much about digging, sloshing, and sorting.

  But as exciting as accounting frequently was, Pharh knew he needed something more. The adventure bug had, against all odds, bitten him; Pharh suspected it had all started when he was twelve years old.

  On one of the rare clear nights, he had decided to sleep outside on the flat roof of their building to escape the wall-rattling thunder of his mother’s snoring. Pharh had fallen asleep fairly quickly despite the oppressively uncluttered sky, but had awakened when something spiny and multilegged had crawled into his sleep sack. Pharh never saw what it was, but it made a crunchsquish noise when he rolled over on it. This, in and of itself, was not all that unusual in his home. When you were in the trash-mining business, even in the managerial area, there was, on any given night, the real possibility that something lumpy or spiny or skittery would run across the floor when the lights came on. Sometimes you knew its name. Sometimes, if you were lucky, its name was “supper.” The important thing was that Pharh had been asleep one second and the next was performing—had he but known—a very passable version of the Antareans’ torekadora dance. On Ferenginar—as on most worlds occupied by bipeds—this step was usually referred to as “Get-it-off-my-neck-get-it-off-my-neck-get-it-off-my-neck!”

  There was a ledge around the roof—Ferengi are, if nothing else, a cautious people—and it would have been high enough for any normal-sized Ferengi, but Pharh was a long-legged lad. He cleared the ledge on his third pirouette and unexpectedly found himself staring down into open air. Granted, it was open Ferenginar air. There were whole weeks where the skies over Pharh’s hometown were so dense that a light-footed individual could walk to the store and back again without ever touching foot to pavement, but this hadn’t been one of those evenings.

  Pharh managed to twist around in midair and fling out both of his long arms before gravity pulled rank and yanked him below the level of the ledge. Even as he sat under the Klingon pub table and tried to curl himself up into a tighter ball, Pharh could recall the smell of wet concrete, the way the cloth on the knees of his pajamas frayed as he scrambled up the side of the building, and the echo of his own howling between the buildings. It was, without question, the most terrifying moment of his life.

  And, though this didn’t make any sense to the very real thick, pasty core of Ferengi in Pharh, he had never felt more alive.

  When he told his parents about it the next day, they simultaneously displayed relief and disappointment. Relief because an “alive” Pharh could be counted on to work for virtually nothing and be a valuable deduction for several more years. Disappointment because the conglomerate that made the sleeping sack and the pajamas had deep pockets and could have been relied upon (at some point years in the future after all the proper judges had been bribed) to cough up a hefty settlement. They considered suing the building’s owner, but Pharh’s parents lacked the imagination and free time to sue themselves. Not that other Ferengi hadn’t tried this and made it work well for both parties.

  This was all well for his parents. But what was a young Ferengi to do when he saw the abyss yawn open beneath him, heard his heart race and his blood thundering in his ears, felt perspiration (and other liquids) soak into his pajamas, and decided that he liked it? He had, Pharh realized, almost died and found out that, until that moment, he had never truly lived.

  Because he was a Ferengi and because he loved his parents, Pharh stayed silent. He endured what he came to recognize as the grind of his daily existence because he knew that the day would come soon when his apprenticeship would end. Pharh’s father, as his own father had before him, would take him aside and ask with a conspiratorial leer, “So, you want to take a few weeks off and go do some exploring?” Pharh was supposed to leer in response, take the offered latinum, pretend to go off for a few weeks on a wild tour of all the bordellos and casinos that Ferenginar had to offer, but secretly keep the money and use it as a stake in his first big private (that is, no sharing profit with the family) venture. It was an old family tradition.

  Instead, Pharh took the money, called his cousin Mawk the travel agent, and asked (without saying why) which ship currently in dock and scheduled to leave that day was going to be traveling farthest from Ferenginar. After a few minutes’ checking, Mawk told Pharh about a slow freighter headed to Qo’noS. Passage to the Klingon homeworld was always cheap because, basically, no one beside Klingons ever wanted to go there. Pharh almost laughed out loud. It must be, he decided, some kind of a sign. After booking the passage, he then used the balance of the latinum to pay Mawk the bribe that would keep him silent until Pharh was far enough away that his parents wouldn’t pay to bring him back.

  Pharh spent the first few weeks of his very long trip staring at bare walls, afraid to leave his tiny cabin because he didn’t like the idea of what Klingons would think of him. Then, as time passed, as he became accustomed to solitude, Pharh realized that he had never had time by himself to simply think. Much to his surprise, he discovered that he wasn’t stupid or slow or thick-witted, but simply required a quiet space around him in order to string thoughts together. Pharh began to plan, so by the time he arrived on Qo’noS, a strategy for staying away from his family indefinitely and turning a profit had been formulated. He was still a Ferengi, after all.

  And it had just started coming together. Pharh had figured out that, yes indeed, there were huge areas of Qo’noS that required the services of someone who knew how to mine resources out of landfills and, predictably, there weren’t many Klingons willing to do it. The Young Entrepreneur had been on the verge of working out a potentially very profitable deal with one of the government councillors. But then someone dropped a building on that government councillor. The Klingons—most of whom were really fine fellows once you got used to the snarling, but everyone had their limits—had gone crazy. When the chanting had started, he knew it was time to find a place to hide. Pharh didn’t think there was any Rule of Acquisition about that—“When the chanting starts, find a place to hide”—but there should have been.

  Current status: One of the Klingons had jumped up on the table on the other side of the bar and some other fellows looked like they were surrounding him and he was talking … er, shouting at them. Sounded like more oratory. They liked oratory on Qo’noS. But, wait, no, it wasn’t oratory; it was a knife fight. Pharh squashed himself even smaller and tried not to worry about what now soaked into his pants.

  * * *

  And today started out so well, Alexander lamented as he jumped up onto the barroom table. He ducked as a pewter mug flew dangerously close to his skull.

  Bu
t then, he thought, drawing his d’k tagh and loosening his disruptor in its holster, the sky fell. So much for the day’s low point being his father’s chastisement for his late arrival (and he would have humbly accepted the chastisement, which would have pleased Worf).

  Being pragmatic, he wondered if he would ever see his father again; the thought troubled him. They hadn’t been at their best the last time they had talked, and Alexander had been hoping they could do better this time. Worf had still been wallowing—Alexander’s word, not Worf’s—in doubt about defeating Gowron in battle and anointing (again, the son’s word, not the father’s) Martok as chancellor, but Alexander had to assume his father’s mood had improved since then. That was the hope, anyway. It was never easy to know what would make Worf happy. Even the use of the two words “Worf” and “happy” in the same thought came hard. …

  Now Alexander would be satisfied knowing whether his father was alive, happy or not.

  He hoped that he would make it out alive to find out his father’s fate. He’d come so close—not even three hundred meters—to escaping the First City when he saw a flash of recognition in a face in the crowd.

  Ducking into a tavern proved to be the wrong move.

  A maintenance worker took a swing at Alexander’s leg with a prybar. Alexander did something very few Klingons would do: he took a step backward, putting himself out of range of the backstroke. The worker stepped up on the bench, but before he could find his balance, Alexander stepped forward, within the sweep of his weapon, and jabbed him in the base of his throat with his fingers. Alexander had long known that he could not match most Klingons for strength or ferocity, so he had made a study of Klingon nerve clusters. His attacker dropped to the ground, clutching his throat, unable to move anything below his neck. He would stay that way for about three minutes, Alexander knew, and then recover quickly. It was the sort of move that should be followed by a couple of swift kicks to the midsection, but Alexander didn’t have time for follow-through, not with the ring of angry faces around him. Time to leave.