The Left Hand of Destiny, Book 1 Read online

  “I’m fine,” Iris said, and Annup could tell from the way she said it that she felt the same way about this voice as he did, though why Iris would be so pleased about speaking to someone who sounded like his grandmother, he could not understand. “I’ve done what you asked.”

  “That’s wonderful,” the woman who sounded like Padwa said, and the pleasure she imparted in the word “wonderful” sent a thrill of pleasure through Annup. “And the Flare is available to us?”

  “Any time you’re ready,” Iris said. “Just tell me what you want to say and I’ll take care of it.”

  “Excellent,” the lady said. “Iris, you’ve really done such a magnificent job. I’m so pleased we met. Aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, Lady,” Iris said. “I am. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Not right this moment,” the lady said. “I’m sure you’ve already taken care of the consul?”

  “Associate consul,” Iris said, and Annup was briefly hurt. He had been thinking that Iris actually respected him. “And the little Starfleet spy, too. It was really very easy with that applicator you gave me.”

  “Excellent, most excellent,” the lady said. “I’m glad it worked for you. So they’re both there? I can come see the embassy?”

  Iris looked down at Annup and grinned at him. She was obviously giddy about the idea of seeing the lady and didn’t care who knew it. “That would be wonderful, Lady. I would enjoy that very much. Come as soon as you can.” She reached down and pulled the key card out from Annup’s inner jacket pocket. “All the doors will be open.”

  6

  “Impact in ten seconds … nine … eight …” the helm officer reported calmly.

  Consoles exploded as the Negh’Var’s wings tangled with her fellow Klingon ships.

  “I will meet you at the gates of Sto-Vo-Kor!” Martok shouted over the cacophony.

  “… seven … six …”

  Klaxons wailed, computer panels sparked and sizzled. None of the sounds were Klingon: his crew met death with stoic honor. An opaque veil of smoke made it nearly impossible for him to see their faces. How he wished to look upon them! Truly, a magnificent memory to take with him to the afterlife.

  “… five … four …”

  The Negh’Var’s convulsions made it difficult for Martok to maintain his balance across the bridge, but he would not leave this life without saying farewell to his brother. Through the haze, he saw Worf diligently tappingcommands into his computer, brow furrowed. Duty bound until the end, Martok thought. He really ought to rela—

  “… three … two …”

  A blinding yellow light. The deck bucked, screeching as metal crumpled and bent. … A curtain drew over his mind—

  * * *

  The general stood upon a tall pile of rubbish and surveyed his domain. He closed his eye, inhaled deeply, and sifted through the complex perfume of his childhood: the yeasty tang of decaying garbage mingled with the acrid aroma of rust-fouled water and a sharp bottom note of zinc. Martok shifted his weight, and a foul liquid spurted out from under his heel and splashed onto his pant leg. He reached down to wipe it off with his gloved hand, then laughed and decided to ignore it. Worse than this would stain his uniform before the sun rose on another day.

  Fists clenched, Martok bared his teeth, bellowing, “What in Kahless’s name are we doing here!”

  Worf seemed to be obtusely unaware of Martok’s frustration, instead seeming pleased with his accomplishment. “I cycled our transporter beam through several dozen communications satellites before instructing the computer to deposit us—”

  “I don’t care how we came to be in this wretched place, I want to know why we are in this wretched place!” He looked around, saw the dazed faces of the twenty or so survivors of the Negh’Var, and wondered if they might all be cursing the day that Martok became chancellor. Martok knew he was.

  “Why the computer placed us here is a puzzle to me as well. But this place offers many advantages. Morjod’s sensors will have difficulty distinguishing us from the nomadic residents of the plain,” Worf explained patiently. “Here, we can find spare parts, old equipment—establish a base of operations.”

  Martok knew the truth of Worf’s words.

  But he didn’t have to like them.

  The bloody sun sank into the horizon, casting the hills of the Ketha lowlands into shadow, but in the middle distance Martok could see lights glowing. Some—the flickering yellow ones—were cook fires. Others—the yellowish greens—were the leaky cores of old, cracked engines half buried beneath the battered hulks of starship hulls. The orange lights that faded down into red were piles of eternally burning garbage. Once, long ago, he could identify the exact composition of a burning pile by the depth of hue and the twist of a churl of smoke, but those days were long past.

  “Home,” Martok murmured. A smile would be disrespectful at such a moment—most of the crew of the Negh’Var had died less than an hour earlier—but he was tempted. Instead, he spat.

  Low, gray clouds scudded across the sky; the first drops of greasy rain spattered against Martok’s face. He knew they had better get under shelter. Letting too much Ketha rain descend on you wasn’t a good idea, either.

  He half walked and half slid down the hill of loose soil and garbage, trying to move as silently as possible, his senses alert for the sound of approach, but even when he moved as carefully as he was able, Martok cringed at the amount of noise he was making. As a boy, he could have crossed the entire plain in full daylight, loaded down with scrap metal, and not even a security drone equipped with motion sensors and infrared could have picked him out. Of course, he had been a tough, wiry thing wearing little more than a twist of cloth for modesty’s sake, and not an old man weighed down with kilos of armor and weaponry. Martok hardly considered that an adequate excuse; the boy he had been would have laughed at the man he had become.

  As he neared the bottom of the hill, Martok could hear Worf organizing the remains of the Negh’Var’s crew into work details. “You two,” he was saying to young M’Kec and a security officer Martok did not know, “go to the top of that hill and find a concealed place you can use as a watch post. Watch the north.” Martok approached the trio, indicating with a wave of his hands that the two crewmen should continue listening to Worf, who was studying a relief map on his tricorder. “If anyone attempts to come in overland from that direction, they must pass through the break between the hills.”

  The security officer, a grizzled veteran, reviewed the display and nodded in agreement. “It will do for now,” he said. “But if a reconnaissance team scans us from low orbit …”

  “They will not,” Martok said. “There is too much interference from the lingering radiation in these wrecks. Back in the old days, smugglers used to conceal their bases here for that very reason. When I was a boy, I would run supplies out here for some of them—” He stopped himself before rambling on in a nostalgic reverie. Who he had been did not matter to these warriors: they looked to who he was now for leadership. “Carry on.”

  The two guards nodded in salute and then left. As they passed him, Martok sensed their uneasiness. Neither of them liked taking orders from Worf, and perhaps they sensed that he was on the verge of—what? Reminiscing? Rambling on? Over the course of the day, his past and present had merged together in such a way that he could easily succumb to confusion were he not a stronger man. His visible surprise when they had materialized on the planet’s surface, his realization that they were in Ketha, might have been disconcerting to his soldiers. For a brief, terrifying instance, he had thought that this was to be his afterlife: not Sto-Vo-Kor, not even Gre’thor, but Ketha. Would even Sirella have understood that? Probably not. The only person he still knew who had lived in Ketha was old Darok. He missed him in moments like this. Hopefully, the reprehensible old reptile had survived whatever had befallen himself and Sirella when the disaster had unfolded.

  * * *

  Darok, gin’tak to the House of Marto
k, scowled as he watched the trio of hovercraft approach the outer compound wall. They were large, well shielded, and, worst of all, uninvited. Of course, it was impossible to say whether the pilots had attempted to hail them. With so many jamming and antijamming signals flying back and forth through the ether, it was a wonder that any signals got through at all. After Morjod’s speech ended, the planetary comnet went offline, which struck Darok as just too convenient for it to be a coincidence. Sirella had long ago planned for such a contingency. One did not have a mate such as Martok without anticipating that someday his enemies would make a move such as this.

  She had called up her network of alternative information sources before her escape from the First City this afternoon. But even given the time she took to travel home, her sources were slow and sporadic about providing dependable intelligence. Combining her firsthand experience on the day of the attack with what little information they did receive, they created a picture of what might be happening beyond Shrana. Neither of them liked the image that was forming.

  Morjod had taken control of all the major military installations both on and in orbit around Qo’noS, as well as most of the minor ones. He hadn’t been forced into battle on many occasions during the day, and when he had, the conflicts had been settled quickly. A large percentage of the Klingon fleet had been pulled back closer to home, though not so many that the Federation or Romulan intelligence agencies would suspect a coup was in progress. In fact, as near as Sirella and Darok could tell, practically no one off-planet knew that anything was any different. Sirella had learned that the Federation embassy, under Morjod’s control, had been ordered to maintain a surface impression of normalcy. Darok unhappily found that a feeling suspiciously similar to admiration for the usurper possessed him.

  On the monitors, the hoverships banked to the south, then abruptly dropped below the level of the low foothills bordering the compound on that side. This was as it should be. The south side had been designed to look as appealing as possible to a commander trying to off-load an attack force, though it was important that it not look too attractive. Darok pressed a series of controls that opened three pairs of hidden doors and raised cannons onto the surface. The scanners found the hoverships quickly, and Darok opened fire.

  He had absolutely no expectation that any of his shots would penetrate their shields, but the show was important. The invaders expected resistance when they landed, so he would put up resistance. One of the hoverships opened fire with its main gun and reduced the three cannons to slag within seconds.

  This is ridiculous, Darok thought. He had expected them to be well prepared, but not this well prepared. Muttering with displeasure, Darok watched as hatches opened and ramps were extended. A word came to his lips, one that he had learned in the slums of Tor’aq back in Ketha many, many years ago. He had been all of six years old when he had first heard the word and so, naturally, had gone home to ask his mother, Most Fearsome of All Women, what it meant. She failed to successfully cut out his tongue because his neck was slippery from the blood flowing from his head wound. The memory made him smile, so he repeated the word again, safe in the knowledge that Most Fearsome was dead and wouldn’t be able to punish him again until he met her again in Sto-Vo-Kor, which, undoubtedly, she now ruled.

  One of the reasons Darok had lived to such a ripe old age was that he had never been the sort to confuse “honorable” with “stupid.” He knew that on occasion running away was not only the smart thing to do but the right thing to do. (This was beginning to look like one of those times. There were, after all, monsters coming out of the hovership.)

  In the transmission from the First City, he had seen Morjod’s creatures. But the creatures now stalking the perimeter were qualitatively different from those he’d seen on the transmission. The Hur’q on the holovid had been fascinating—even fearsome—alien beings, but they had seemed almost like wild pets. The creatures he watched now on the monitors were nobody’s pets. Rather, they radiated a malicious intelligence Darok could scarcely comprehend.

  In short, he expected this to be one of those times when it would be a good idea to run. But not yet.

  Darok entered Sirella’s call sign and waited for her personal communicator to acknowledge him. “My lady,” he said respectfully, imagining her regal mien as she sat, straight-backed, behind the ornately carved desk where she presided over the estate. Flickering candles would cast shadows on the tapestry she often gazed upon when she wanted to meditate. The wall-sized weaving told the story of her ancestress’s challenge to the emperor’s court. Perhaps, while she calmly watched the perimeter security vids, she had poured herself a mug of bloodwine. Her relations had produced a magnificent vintage several seasons ago.

  “Speak.”

  “Three assault craft have just landed outside our walls.”

  “I know,” Sirella said. “The sensors alerted me, but I have not seen detailed scans. What have you discovered?”

  “Hur’q,” he said, knowing that she already knew of their arrival.

  “How many?”

  “It is difficult to say,” Darok said. “They are blocking all but the most fundamental scans. However, judging from their size and the size of the transports, I would judge between twelve and twenty.”

  “Anything else?”

  “They are very large.”

  “Anything else useful?”

  “Hmmm.” Darok studied the images. His eyesight wasn’t what it once was, but he was pretty certain … yes. “They carry weapons. Disruptors and isomagnetic cannons, I believe.”

  “Very well. Activate the defenses.”

  “As you say, my lady. However, if I may be so bold, I do not think we can stop them all.”

  “Neither do I. But one more we kill now is one less for my husband to face later.”

  “Excellent, my lady.”

  Darok smiled as he activated the defense systems. I will stay for a little bit longer, he decided. It is always worthwhile to see anything she does.

  * * *

  The scouts from among the Negh’Var survivors found the old outpost just as the rim of the sun dipped below the horizon. As soon as Martok had recognized the shape of the nearby hills, he had been surprised with the clarity of his memories of the surrounding territory. Of course he would remember: the lay of the land was etched into his bones. Fortunately, Worf was on hand to take over organizing the work details while Martok worked with his officers on a battle plan.

  The outpost’s main building was much as Martok had remembered it: large, open to the elements on two sides, but defensible from a ground assault and partially impervious to an air attack owing to the fact that it was half buried under one of the mounds. Martok should have been amazed that the building still stood, but he had noticed that everything constructed by the empire in the previous century had been built to outlast its makers by many lifetimes. He wondered what the men of his grandfather’s generation had expected their structures to endure.

  When they entered, Martok found something he had not remembered: two walls of the inner rooms were lined with banks of sophisticated equipment. How had he not noticed this? he wondered, and then the truth dawned on him: Military technology had not been a part of his child’s world. Worf had become (for him) effusive when he saw the communications and computer equipment, and almost immediately he, the assistant chief engineer, Taarl, and the young communications officer, Maapek, were burrowing into the panels.

  It was not long before Worf reported: “The lines to the local communications node are intact. If Morjod has not set the system to watch for our passwords, we should be able to access the comnet before morning comes.”

  “Do you think this is possible?”

  “The idea is not beyond him,” Worf said. “He has shown remarkable tactical wisdom so far; however, it would require time to find our passwords in the military databases, decrypt them, then program the network to search for us.”

  Martok felt encouraged. “Then we must take the chance. We
need intelligence, and this is the best way to get it.” He glanced at the engineer and the com officer and lowered his voice. “Work them hard as you must, Worf, but don’t exhaust anyone, including yourself. We may need to move quickly, and we cannot afford to leave even one man behind.”

  “Understood,” Worf said. “To that end, I asked Tamal to scan the structure, and she reported an unusual hatch in the lowest level.”

  “An escape tunnel?”

  Worf shrugged. “I have asked her to devote her energies to opening it. If nothing else, it will give her something to occupy herself.” Obviously, Worf had observed some of what had passed between Martok and Tamal on the bridge. “We cannot permit anyone too much free time now.”

  Martok nodded. “I agree. It does no one else any good to think too far into the future.”

  “Except you.” Worf looked from side to side, assuring that no one was eavesdropping on their conversation, and whispered, “You have much to consider, and I can see your thoughts straying from the here-and-now. When you returned from your reconnaissance, you appeared to be elsewhere. What did you see on the hilltop, my brother?”

  Much to Worf’s obvious surprise, this question prompted Martok to gasp with mingled surprise and something approaching amusement. He collected himself and then attempted to reassure his brother that he had not lost his mind. It was difficult sometimes to remember that Worf had spent very little time on Qo’noS and lacked familiarity with what he would regard as folk culture. Martok explained, “Your question, ‘What did you see on the hilltop, brother?’ is the first line of an ancient song, one my father and mother sang when I was a boy. The response is ‘I saw rivers of our blood, my brother, our mothers’ and fathers’, our sisters’ and our wives’.’ And then you would sing, ‘What did you see by the river, my brother?’ and the response is ‘I saw mountains of corpses, the bodies of our sons and daughters.’” Martok tried to remember the next line, but could not dredge it up, so he settled for saying, “It goes on that way for a bit.”