The Left Hand of Destiny, Book 1 Page 8

  When Worf did not respond immediately, Martok looked toward strategic intelligence. The fine particulate matter spewed from the filtration unit was diffusing all around the bridge, so it was difficult to see Worf clearly, but Martok almost had to believe that his brother looked …confused. “Worf!” Martok shouted. “Report!”

  Worf shook himself, glanced at Martok, and then his fingers flew over the controls. “Chancellor … I regret … It’s …”

  “Out with it, Worf!” Martok could barely believe that this was the same officer who had served as his second for so many months. Could K’Tar’s death have rattled him so badly? Or perhaps Morjod’s words … No!

  Unable to complete his sentence, Worf tapped a command into his console and pointed at the main screen.

  The viewscreen was tuned to the Negh’Var’s bow camera, the one slung behind the belly photon torpedo launcher, which was pointed down at Qo’noS’s polar axis. As the general watched, the icecap seemed to waver and distort, then turned pale blue as a ship shimmered into view. The attacking ship’s main guns blazed orange and red; then it danced out of range before the Negh’Var gunners could lock on. The entire run had lasted about four seconds, but it had been enough time for Martok’s senses to register their attacker.

  A Klingon attack cruiser.

  Martok felt the question “How could they?” begin to form on his lips, but caught himself before he asked it and managed to change it to “How many?”

  Without looking up from the tactical display, Worf replied in clipped tones, “There are four. Also, six birds-of-prey. We have damaged one ship’s impulse engines, but have not done any appreciable damage to the others. …” The ship shook again and the lights dimmed to half, flickered once, and then stayed low. All around the bridge, crew pulled work lights out of emergency lockers and affixed them to their breastplates. The already dense air seemed to thicken.

  Worf continued to read his report while everyone worked: “Shields are down to thirty percent, and at the rate we are currently draining auxiliary power, we will be dead in space in four minutes.”

  “Weapons, get a lock and fire,” Martok bellowed. “Now!”

  Martok watched the gunnery chief take aim at another bird-of-prey as it shed its cloak, and was grimly satisfied to see the ship disappear in a cloud of ionized debris and blue fire. The bridge deck bucked under Martok again, almost throwing him from his seat. Even as Worf announced, “Another direct hit to engineering,” the gunnery chief pounded both fists on his now dark panel.

  They were weaponless.

  “Chancellor,” Worf announced. “We are running out of options.”

  The main screen switched to the aft camera. Two birds-of-prey lurked back there, but they stayed out of range. Good, Martok thought. They don’t know we’ve lost our teeth. But how to turn that to our advantage? But before Martok could devise a plan, he saw shadows blocking the stars on their port and starboard sides: they had visitors. Martok instinctively knew that two of the Vor’cha-class cruisers had moved into position. Another pair would close in from above and below, ready to set up crossfire.

  If he ordered the crew to abandon ship, Martok wondered, would their attackers fire on the escape pods? Would a Klingon blow up the Great Hall? he thought grimly. Escape pods were not an option. Martok considered another. “Worf, can you punch a hole through the planet’s defense grid?”

  From the look on his face, Martok knew that Worf understood the proposal. A ship as large as the Negh’Var wasn’t meant to be taken into the atmosphere, but it could survive, if piloted skillfully. Worf initiated a quick scan, but it was cut off when a Klaxon pounded out the double-time klang that even the most fearless veteran dreaded: a warp-core breach.

  Martok opened a channel to engineering, hearing only a brief cry of rage—of defiance—before static crackled throughout the bridge. The readout on his footrest display confirmed his fears. Fine, he thought. Today is a good day, after all.

  “Navigator,” the general bellowed. “Distance to nearest ship?”

  The navigator barked, “Less than two thousand kellicams.”

  Grinning wolfishly, Martok ordered. “That will do, then. Helm! One-hundred-eighty-degree turn! On my mark, full thrusters! Ramming speed!”

  “Ramming speed, aye,” the helmsman acknowledged without hesitation.

  The general’s heart swelled. The crippled and dying Negh’Var had a fine crew. They understood his orders and moved to obey them as swiftly as if he had ordered them to deliver the deathblow to an enemy flagship. The explosion, he thought, will probably be visible all over the northern hemisphere, even where it is daylight. Perhaps Sirella and Drex would see it and one of them could use it as a stanza in a song when they had taken revenge on Morjod and his minions. Martok felt a bittersweet pang at the thought of his wife. It would have been good to hold her one more time, but if this was to be his fate, then so be it. I will see her again in Sto-Vo-Kor and we will speak of this glorious day of battle. …

  The main viewscreen shifted to the bow camera again and Martok watched the image of the lead Vor’cha cruiser growing. Its main cannon glowed red, and the light began to blossom like the bud of a flower.

  “All ahead full!” the general ordered and, faithful to the last, the Negh’Var leaped forward, anxious for the kill.

  * * *

  On Qo’noS, at the edge of the First City, in a heavily shielded room in the center of the Federation embassy, Associate Consul Annup Bommu grew much too engrossed in watching the sensor display and leaned his considerable bulk against the back of the system engineer’s chair. Iris Hume almost tumbled to the floor, but she was a small, nimble person and managed to keep her seat. “Sorry, Iris,” Annup said, and eased away from the chair. He knelt down next to the console to get a better look at the monitor, and his assistant, the intimidatingly lovely Ms. Barnum, shuffled to the left. Annup had noticed that Ms. Barnum did not like to be closer to him than three feet at any time. He knew it was probably some kind of cultural thing—natives of the Indian sub-continent were comfortable standing close to each other—but it still bothered him. Focus on the job at hand, Annup, he told himself.

  “What are we looking at, Iris?”

  Annup had received the usual training in interpreting sensor information when he had gone through his training, but a lot of ceremonial wine had flowed under the bridge since those days. He wished he didn’t have to ask for help, but there was no sense in pretending he understood what the swirling lines and colorful whorls meant.

  Iris pointed at a screen and explained, “We’re looking at a raw-data dump from short-range sensor scans. I’m trying to get a handle on what’s going on in nearby space.”

  “Why raw data?” Annup wasn’t sure if this was an important point, but he felt like he needed to ask a question. He hadn’t talked to Iris many times since she had joined the embassy staff, but he was under the impression that she was one of those rare technicians who didn’t use a word unless it was absolutely necessary.

  “The Klingons are preventing the signals from our subspace relays from reaching our ground-based computers where the signals are decrypted.”

  “But you were able to get something?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “The Klingons don’t dare block the carrier wave from the ground station to the embassy. If they do, an automatic signal goes out via subspace straight to Starfleet Command.”

  “Right,” Annup said. He knew this part. “A fail-safe. So you’re getting some kind of signal off the relay, but you can’t read the data?”

  “Not in its refined form, no. We’d need the relay’s software to talk to the software in the ground station to make it nice and pretty, but I’ve been able to bypass that.”

  “How did you do that?”

  Iris waggled her eyebrows. “I’m good.”

  Ms. Barnum inserted herself into the conversation. “So, you can read this?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Iris pointed at a
series of orange and yellow whorls. “This means there are several high-energy engine systems—impulse engines—in low orbit over the north pole.”

  “And this?” Ms. Barnum asked, pointing at a blotch of green ink.

  “Some kind of concussive force, probably a disruptor.” She pressed a control and the green blotch swirled around and shifted toward the edge of the screen. Very suddenly, a purple blot blossomed in the center of the display and covered the entire screen. Iris stopped the display and ran it back to the point where the purple erupted. “And that is an explosion. Uncontrolled. Very big.”

  “What could cause something like that?”

  “A ship,” Iris answered, not taking her eyes off the monitor.

  “What kind of ship?” Ms. Barnum asked.

  “A big one.”

  Annup knew that Iris was just trying to avoid a painful disclosure, but he had lost patience. “How big?”

  “There was only one thing in orbit that could have done this,” Iris replied, anticipating the next question. “Negh’Var. But we can’t assume we know anything until we get more evidence.”

  “And where are we going to get more evidence?”

  “The Klingons,” Iris said flatly. “Unless they turn off the block.”

  “The one they deny is there,” Ms. Barnum stated.

  “Right.”

  Annup wished that all the senior diplomats hadn’t gone off for the big “greet Martok” fest. He didn’t relish the idea of being the one to make the next decision. It wasn’t that Annup didn’t know how to make decisions. He did: he was a career diplomat, an embassy work-horse, unlike most of the political appointees who cycled through every year or two. But the point of being an associate consul was to be in the position of offering advice, of making the de facto decision without actually having to take the heat if something went wrong, which it almost assuredly would. These were Klingons they were dealing with, after all.

  To forestall making a decision, he asked Ms. Barnum, “Any word from Karg?” She had been trying to get through to Annup’s Klingon counterpart since the explosion at the Great Hall, with no success. “Their communications officer said he was ‘unavailable.’” She had a way of talking where her lips barely moved that was fascinating to watch.

  “Not ‘missing’?”

  “No: ‘Unavailable.’”

  “Not very like them, is it?” Iris asked.

  Annup shook his head. Having Klingons tell bald-faced lies was, in its way, as disturbing as massive explosions in a city center. “Any more information on what happened to the Hall of Warriors?”

  “No,” Iris said. “Lots of particulate matter in the lower atmosphere, but very little radiation, so it wasn’t an energy weapon. I have a theory, but …”

  “A theory?” Annup asked. It wasn’t the same as hard data, but it was something.

  “But what?” Ms. Barnum asked.

  Iris looked around at her. “But it’s a very frightening idea and I don’t like thinking about it.”

  “Tell,” Annup said.

  Iris inhaled and then let it out slowly. “All right,” she said. “This is an old idea, but it would still work if you have particular goals and restrictions in mind.”

  “Goals?”

  “Like if you want to pulverize a specific chunk of real estate without doing a lot of collateral damage.”

  “Like you would get with phasers or disruptors.”

  “Right. This is what you would do: Drop something heavy from very high in the atmosphere. Laser sights it in so you’re sure you don’t destroy anything else.”

  “Like dropping an empty hull?” Ms. Barnum said, sounding interested despite herself.

  “No, that wouldn’t work,” Iris said. “Too much would burn off in the descent and it wouldn’t fall right, either. Not aerodynamic.”

  “Sooo?” Annup said.

  “You drop a lot of small, heavy things. The one plan I read about this suggested masses of depleted uranium, something very dense. Lots and lots of them. Make them into little pointed bars to give them some aerodynamic flow.”

  “How many little uranium bars would it take to produce the kind of explosion you saw?” Annup asked.

  “A lot,” Iris said. “I’d need to do some modeling to check it out, but say in the neighborhood of ten thousand.”

  This idea insulted Ms. Barnum’s sense of order. “How would someone get a platform over the city that could carry ten thousand uranium bars without the Klingons noticing?”

  “That’s just it,” Iris said. “They couldn’t. The only ones who could do it would be …”

  “… Other Klingons,” Annup finished for her. Then he said, “Damn,” which was very undiplomatic of him, especially in front of two coworkers, but fortunately neither one heard him because the alarms were ringing.

  Ms. Barnum lost her calm demeanor. “What the hell is that?” Apparently, she had skipped drill day at training.

  Iris replaced the sensor display with a shot from the security camera in the embassy’s entrance hall. Twenty or twenty-five Klingons had just entered the main doors and were efficiently dealing with the security guards.

  “What are they doing?” Ms. Barnum asked. “This is an embassy! This is an act of war!”

  “Only if someone finds out,” Iris said. “Or if they don’t care.”

  “This is looking a little too prearranged for my taste,” Annup said. “The Great Hall, the Negh’Var, and now this.” He sneaked a quick look at Ms. Barnum and realized to his horror that she was actually perspiring. The Ice Queen crack’d … “Any ideas?” he asked Iris.

  “Just this,” she replied. Iris pressed a series of controls in quick succession and then Annup watched as the Klingons who had been striding through the lobby suddenly dropped in their tracks. Unfortunately, so did everyone else.

  “Cordine Orange?” Annup asked.

  “What’s that?” Ms. Barnum asked, her voice edged with cautious optimism.

  “Nonlethal gas. Everyone will wake up with a headache, but nothing worse.”

  “Do we have any more?” Ms. Barnum asked.

  “No,” Iris said. “I did the whole complex except for the security offices just to be safe, though they don’t know that.” She tapped her front teeth with a stylus she had been holding. “I don’t get this. The Klingons know we have defense measures.” She pointed at the sleeping bodies. “These guys were sacrificed. But for what?”

  “Wheels within wheels,” Annup said. “Someone has been planning this for a long time, but I don’t think we have any choice but to wait for the next step.”

  “We could leave,” Ms. Barnum said. “We have a ship just for that purpose.”

  “They’ve thought of everything else, why not assume they’ve compromised the shuttle as well?” Iris asked. “We launch and go ‘boom’ before we clear Klingon airspace.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance,” Ms. Barnum snapped.

  Annup waved at both of them to be quiet. “Whoever it was who brought down the Negh’Var wouldn’t hesitate to shoot us down, too. No, I think we should just lock up those Klingons, sit tight, and keep trying to contact Starfleet.”

  Iris nodded. “Though I think we’ll have to assume we’re on our own,” she said. “For a little while, anyway.”

  “I think you’re right,” Annup said resignedly.

  “And you’re the senior consul,” Ms. Barnum added—a little petulantly, Annup thought.

  He groaned. This was not at all what he had in mind for today. A nice grain embargo would have been all right. When was the last time anyone had a pleasant row over grain? He pondered for several moments, then finally said, “No matter what else happens, we need to get word of what’s happened to Starfleet.”

  “I agree,” Iris said.

  “Me, too,” Ms. Barnum added, though Annup was no longer very interested in what she thought.

  “Then we’ll need to use the Flare.”

  “The what?” Iris asked. Annup was
surprised. He had begun to suspect she was an intelligence operative, a technician who knew more than she was letting on.

  “It’s a small, warp-capable drone,” Annup said. “Shielded and cloaked as well as we could devise and programmed to avoid detection at any cost. It’s for situations exactly like this, when every other communication method is blocked.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Iris said, her voice still level and efficient, but Annup thought he detected something like relief. “How do you activate it?”

  “There’s a program,” he said. “Let me at the console.”

  Iris pushed her chair away from the console and Ms. Barnum took another step to the left.

  Annup touched the ident pad, spoke his name and password, and waited momentarily for the brief blue flash as the security system checked his retina. The control surface shifted and displayed the Flare’s launch controls. “There,” he said. “Now all we have to do is enter our message and …”

  Annup stared at the ceiling. I’m on the floor, he realized, but couldn’t remember falling. He could move his eyes and hear, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs. No sensation below his neck at all, really. Strangely, he wasn’t frightened, only confused. Above him, he heard someone talking. Iris, he decided. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see she was speaking into a small, dull gray piece of metal. It’s the stylus, he realized. The one she was playing with.

  “Can you hear me now, Lady?” she said.

  From the console speaker came a soothing voice with a seductively musical quality that Annup found irresistible. Strangely enough, the voice reminded him of his grandmother, Padwa. The thought of her gave him a sense of peace that he hadn’t felt since he was a young boy and would fall asleep with his head in her lap, her entire house smelling of spice and incense. He became so lost in memories of her that he could barely focus on the lady’s words. “Yes, that’s fine,” the voice said. “How are you, Iris?”