Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code (15 page)

They immediately gathered closer. “Don’t ask us to abandon you, Captain, because we won’t,” Charas insisted. “We stand together or not at all.”

“He’s right, Thenar,” Banerji said. “We’re more than a crew. We’re a family.” He glanced sadly toward Breg. “Or a
sia lenthar,
as Ramnaf would say.”

“I’m not sure she’d extend me that courtesy anymore,” sh’Prenni told the elderly human. “Or that I deserve it. The impatience was mine. And so are the consequences.”

Th’Cheen sighed uncomfortably. “If Zoanra weren’t . . . otherwise occupied . . . I imagine she’d offer some pithy insight reminding us that we’ve survived worse together.”

“Would she?” ch’Gesrit asked. “Considering that what we’re enduring is trivial next to what we’ve inflicted?”

“I can still hear you!” zh’Vethris’s voice carried loudly from across the yard. “And my pithy insight is to shut up, stop
fighting, and just hold on to each other! The rest will sort itself out in time! And we’ll need each other no matter what happens!”

Despite the incongruous roar in which it was delivered, the young navigator’s sentiment was hard to deny. The crew stood together quietly, uneasily, for some time afterward.

But they stood together.

August 24, 2165

Nierl home system

Samuel Kirk stood on a plain of hardened lava, staring down at a set of bone fragments half-embedded in the surface beside the boot of his EV suit. The fragments were in the rough shape of a humanoid arm. A few dozen meters beyond, a jagged chunk of wall, now gray with dust but no doubt white underneath, jutted out of the ground like a misplaced grave marker.

“The Manochai’s bombardment was thorough,” said Tefcem var Skos, Senior Partner for the planet Etrafso. The large-eyed, rodentlike Enlesri stood by Kirk in an EV suit that barely came up to the chest of Valeria Williams, who stood behind them both. “After all, Ware can self-repair from even a small surviving portion, so they made sure to leave no fragments large enough. This moonlet was once entirely covered in Ware habitations, supporting over a hundred thousand Partners of half a dozen races. The Manochai did not stop blasting until the surface was molten. Over the many rotations that followed, as the surface cooled and hardened, fragments blasted into space gradually re-accreted. Most sank into the molten crust, or pulverized on impact once it had hardened. But some . . .” He gazed wordlessly at the remains before them.

He did not need to say anything more about the near-­featureless white globe that loomed above the horizon—­actually thousands of kilometers below the captured asteroid on which they stood, orbited by the asteroid while orbiting a mighty Jovian in turn. The spherical moon had been the homeworld of the Nierl—a larger version of Titan, with a thick crust of water ice and a methane-ethane atmosphere. Hundreds of millions of Nierl had lived on its surface in vast urban complexes made of Ware. Now the atmosphere was all but gone, the surface a nearly pure, smooth layer of ice—refrozen after the Manochai’s bombardment had melted the planet’s crust into an ocean. Planetary genocide had never looked so pristine.

“You are not the first to mistrust our peace with the Ware,” var Skos went on after a time. “Others have decreed that the Ware must be exterminated for the good of all—all except those who rely upon it. The Manochai did not even let the populace evacuate, for our only ships were Ware. They would have done the same to all of us . . . had the Ware not manufactured enough drones to turn back their fleets at last.” The lithe brachiator lifted his head in its compact white helmet. “I hear now that the Klingons conquered the ­Manochai—nearly wiped them out when they resisted, and turned the survivors into servitors. Only the first of the services they have done for us.”

“The Klingons only serve themselves,” Williams told him. “You’ll learn that lesson the hard way if you aren’t careful.”

“Better their selfishness than the aggressive benevolence of you or the Manochai.”

Var Skos clearly felt no love for the Federation. Kirk knew that Reed’s orders were to attempt to persuade the Partnership of Starfleet’s good intentions, but that was evidently a lost cause where this Senior Partner was concerned. His
homeworld had suffered badly in the wake of
Vol’Rala
’s actions, however benevolent their intent.

Kirk had found it surprising that a Senior Partner of an entire planet, particularly one in the throes of a disaster, would be free to escort the
Pioneer
team like this. But apparently the Senior Partners were more like Federation councillors than chief executives, representing their planets in the Partnership’s collective debating and decision-making process. Their Ware-based lifestyle was so automated that it required little hands-on attention as a rule. Of course, Etrafso’s current emergency was another matter. But evidently var Skos was the subordinate half of a mated pair, speaking on behalf of Etrafso’s real Senior Partner, his “overmate” Wylbet Skos. She had remained to tend to their world in its crisis while he served as her spokesperson abroad, representing Etrafso in the proceedings against
Vol’Rala
’s crew. He had volunteered to supervise
Pioneer
’s officers as they conducted their investigation for the defense.

Williams turned away from the grisly ejecta before them. “You’ve made your point, Partner. Are we done here?”

Var Skos glowered at her for a bit, but he could contrive no excuse not to lead them back to the Ware transport ship that had brought them to the moonlet. Williams took Kirk’s arm, guiding him across the surface with care. His boots were magnetic, but he had little experience walking in gravity this low.

As they trudged carefully along arm in arm, Williams switched to a private comm channel and spoke far more softly than she needed to with vacuum surrounding them. “It’s not guilt,” she said.

“What?” In the context of the dreadful aftermath around them, it was initially unclear to Kirk what she was talking about.

“I’m not just taking an interest in you because I’m guilty about Rigel. I mean, I’m not guilty about Rigel. I mean . . .” Her sigh was a sharp burst of static from his speaker. “It’s not about Rigel at all. It’s about . . . the year since then. Keeping my distance, waiting for you to be ready to be friends again . . . it made me realize how much I missed having you around.” She stopped walking and turned him by his shoulders until their eyes could meet through their helmet visors. “Sam . . . we just click, in a way it took me a long time to recognize because it was so . . . effortless. I’m used to a certain amount of drama and turbulence in my relationships, so I didn’t quite realize what I was feeling until . . . until it went away.

“Sam . . . Oh, I couldn’t have chosen a worse time to talk about this,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s just say I really want to continue this conversation someplace where we can take our EV suits off.”

Kirk winced. Once, this conversation would have been the stuff of his fantasies—present circumstances notwithstanding. Now, he hated that she’d made herself vulnerable to him when he had to let her down. “Val . . . it’s kind of amazing to me that you feel that way. You’re an amazing woman, and you’re way out of my league.”

“Don’t say that. You’re smart, and kind, and strong in ways I didn’t understand before I met you. And you’ve got the sexiest—”

“Val.” He closed his eyes. “You’re also an armory officer, and you’re very, very good at your job. And that job . . . sometimes it forces you to choose your duty over your personal feelings—your relationships. Like saving a stranger instead of a friend.”

“Sam . . .”

“No, listen—it’s not that I still blame you for that. It’s
that . . . it made me understand that your duty will always come first. Val, I would love to be involved with you. I’ve wanted that since the first time we spoke. Probably sooner,” he admitted. “But if I were . . . I’d never know when you might have to put someone else’s safety ahead of us. And . . . I’d never know when you might have to risk your life . . . even lose your life . . . to save someone else.”

He stepped away, pulling free of the anchor she provided. “I’m sorry, Val. I’m just not brave enough to take that kind of risk. I don’t know if I could bear it.”

Var Skos had finally noticed that they’d stopped. “Is something wrong?” his voice intruded on a separate channel.

Williams stared into Kirk’s eyes a moment longer, then turned away sharply and switched back to the wider channel. “Nothing’s wrong,” she told him. “Minor misunderstanding. Let’s just get the hell off this rock.”

9

August 26, 2165

I.K.S. Krim
IKC-1050, orbiting Mempa VII

L
ANETH HAD THOUGHT
this would be a bad day when she’d learned that the ship had run out of
qa’vIn
beans. The bitter, black brew they produced may have been an invention of the weakling humans, introduced to the Empire through the looting of
Terran cargo ships, but Klingon agronomists had bred a far more potent strain of the beans, making them a stimulant worthy of a warrior when properly brewed. Yet today, Laneth and the rest of her twenty-five-Klingon crew had needed to settle for the instant stuff, which was nowhere near strong enough for warriors who needed to stay alert to danger. The entire crew had gone through the day surly and irritable . . . but only half as much as they should be.

That, she had thought, was the cost of being
QuchHa’
in today’s Empire—forced to exist on the margins, to settle for limited and low-quality resources. Even crews in the service of the few powerful
QuchHa’
nobles, like her own patron General K’Vagh, needed to make do with the meager leavings cast aside by the
HemQuch
majority.

But now, as her ship convulsed and groaned around her, as plasma conduits burst and spewed a heady mix of fumes into the air, as her gunner lay dead atop the burning ruins of his console and Engineer Muqad struggled to reroute weapons
control to Laneth’s command throne, she knew that the cost of being
QuchHa’
was far dearer than she had realized. Her Bird-of-Prey and the small battle fleet it led were all that stood between the
QuchHa’
colony on Mempa VII and total obliteration. And it was beginning to look as if it might be a good day after all—a good day to die.

To be sure, there were better ways to die than as a near-defenseless sitting target. But even that could be an honorable end if the cause was worthy. The people of Mempa VII had done nothing to warrant annihilation. Councillor B’orel had encouraged their persecution and harrassment by
HemQuch
from the neighboring Mempa VIII colony in order to provoke retaliation, then had claimed that the Mempa VII colonists had launched an insurrection—even that they had conspired with the native
jeghpu’wI’
on Mempa II, using those frail bipeds’ skill in genetics to engineer a new version of the Qu’Vat virus and turn all Klingons into
QuchHa’
. A lie, of course; if the Mempans’ science had been capable of that, the
QuchHa’
would have used it to cure their affliction rather than spread it further. But B’orel’s power on the Council was based on his exploitation of the Klingon majority’s hate and fear toward the victims of the Qu’Vat mutation, and he hoped that he could win the chancellorship by rallying the Empire behind a war of extermination against them. Starting with Mempa VII, so that the evidence of his lies would be turned to glass and ash along with every populated area on the planet.

Laneth cursed Arbiter Daqel for his slowness in picking the new chancellor. The weakling claimed it was to allow fair consideration of all candidates, but it had only created more instability within the Empire as factions like B’orel’s acted on their own to bolster their status. B’orel had even implicated
General K’Vagh in the alleged insurrection, scuttling her patron’s bid for the chancellorship before he had even completed the declaration of his achievements in the
ja’chuq
—­achievements that easily eclipsed B’orel’s. And civilians like the Mempa colonists were paying the price for B’orel’s political maneuvering.

It was the Klingon way not to fear death, but a pointless death raining down from above, based on a lie and delivered against those with no opportunity to defend themselves, was without honor for either side of the battle. By sparing the colonists to fight on, and more importantly by standing against the lying, dishonorable
HemQuch
who sought to annihilate them for selfish gain, Laneth and her crew would earn their own place in
Sto-Vo-Kor
.

At least, she hoped they would. She strove not to believe B’orel when he argued that the human taint within them would forever bar them from the fields of the honored dead. Surely his own actions proved he had little understanding of honor. But at least he was still a true Klingon.

No—she quashed the doubt within herself. If nothing else, Laneth felt an obligation toward the
QuchHa’
people. She had been one of the original subjects of Doctor Antaak’s Augment experiment at the Qu’Vat colony, under K’Vagh’s supervision. The idea of injecting herself with human DNA to become stronger had seemed ludicrous to her, even knowing that it was genetically augmented; but she had obeyed the general’s orders and undergone the treatment. At first, the increase in strength, aggression, and sensory acuity had been heady, but the loss of her beautiful ridges and fangs had been a high price to pay. She had soon learned that there were deeper changes as well, for when she and the other four survivors of the experiment had attacked the
Starfleet vessel
Enterprise
to prevent its interference, Laneth had felt fear for the first time in her adult life. She had been sickened by the human taint within her—at first figuratively, then literally as the mutagenic virus had become deadly and nearly killed her and her brother Augments. When Antaak and his Denobulan consultant had finally devised a cure, by cruel fate it had stripped the five of them of their superior abilities, while leaving them and countless others with the taint of humanity upon their faces—and, she had believed, in their hearts.

In those first bleak months following the Augment crisis, Laneth would have agreed with the likes of B’orel that she and all the other victims of the mutation should be put out of their misery. She would have taken her own life if General K’Vagh had not forbidden it. Though K’Vagh had been made
QuchHa’
himself, a sacrifice he had made to save Laneth and millions more from the dishonor of death by disease, he had refused to compromise his own honor, becoming a relentless advocate for the
QuchHa’
under his command and all others like them on Qu’Vat, Mempa VII, and every other world ravaged by the virus. His own son Marab, whom Laneth had once scorned as weak for allowing himself to be beaten by
Enterprise
’s human crew, had died honorably in a battle against
HemQuch
bigots, proving that his heart was Klingon after all.

Marab’s sacrifice had convinced Laneth that the weakness she had felt within her heart had been merely the result of her own fear that the human element within her would make her weak. K’Vagh had reminded her of the Sixth Precept of the
qeS’a’
and the words of Kahless that went with it: “All Kling­ons have weaknesses. Warriors know to hunt their weaknesses and cut them out.” B’orel now twisted that very precept as his
excuse to slaughter the
QuchHa’,
but Marab had shown Laneth what it truly meant: that it was the effort to destroy the weakness within her own heart that made her Klingon. Battle against others was merely a crucible to burn away the weaknesses within oneself.

Laneth took comfort in that thought as enemy fire continued to tear into her Bird-of-Prey, hoping that, by defending this colony, her fleet could prevent B’orel from gaining a victory that would propel him closer to the chancellorship.

At first, that had seemed an attainable goal. B’orel’s commanders were dull-witted sorts employing typical, straightforward orbital bombardment tactics, parking themselves over the colony towns in forced synchronous orbits and sending down torrents of disruptor fire. This had made it easy enough to counter them, whether by striking at the sitting targets or moving beneath them to block their fire. Laneth’s fleet had managed to take out half the
HemQuch
ships while losing only one of their own, and that one merely a five-person
Tajtiq
-class fighter of the type Laneth had commanded in that long-ago attack on
Enterprise,
back when all this had started.

Her hopes had been dashed when enemy reinforcements had arrived, thanks to B’orel’s alliance with Ja’rod, son of Duras. Although his father had been disgraced and defeated by Archer of the selfsame
Enterprise
,
Ja’rod had spent the subsequent years seeking to rebuild his fallen House’s reputation through victory in whatever battle presented itself. He had managed to accrue enough wealth, lands, and glory through his conquests to make it likely that he could win a seat on the High Council, particularly if he had the patronage of the next chancellor. Ja’rod had come personally to join the
attack on Mempa VII, and Laneth had found that, however much she might scorn his opportunism and
HemQuch
sense of entitlement, his battlefield victories were well-earned. His ships employed a more imaginative bombardment strategy, taking advantage of orbital dynamics to send torpedoes on spiral paths around the planet to strike from multiple directions, running the defenders ragged in their attempts to intercept the fire. Once B’orel’s remaining ships had followed this lead, Laneth had seen no choice but to let the Mempan colonists endure some hits while her ships targeted the enemy fleet directly. Her brave
QuchHa’
had inflicted serious losses on the foe, yet at the cost of equal losses on their own side—and the enemy had more and larger ships to spare. A battle of attrition would inevitably be resolved in the foe’s favor.

Laneth had lost most of her fleet now, and
Krim
’s own weapons were nearly silent, forcing her to block the enemy’s fire with her ship’s shields for as long as they lasted. It was little more than a token gesture . . . but a Klingon never retreated. The only ground she would let herself or her men fall back to was the endless battlefield of
Sto-Vo-Kor
.

She tried to take comfort in the thought that she had earned an honorable death, that she would soon be reunited with Marab and her father and brothers. But a trace of doubt lingered. She could not be sure what awaited her upon her death. All she could be sure of was that she was losing. She had failed in her mission to protect the colony. She may have failed to prevent B’orel’s chancellorship and the extermination of her people. What comfort was honor in the face of that? What she needed was victory, and her last chance at that had been taken from her.

Along with a decent cup of
qa’vIn
.

She was just about to cut loose with a string of curses against the inevitable when a new tone sounded from the barely functioning tactical station. “Commander!” cried its operator Kholar, one of the few surviving personnel on the bridge. “A wave of new ships is incoming!”

“Theirs or ours?” Laneth demanded.

“I do not know, Commander! I do not recognize the configuration. They are small, but these energy readings . . . Odd . . . I read no life aboard!”

She stared. “They must be shielded.”

“Not that I can detect. Commander, now they decelerate. The sheer force of it! It would crush a crew, even with our best dampers.”

“Never mind that! What is their course?”

“They are closing . . .” Kholar gasped and straightened. “On the enemy fleet, Commander! They are opening fire!”

The main screen was cracked in two, so Laneth had to watch the tactical display over Kholar’s shoulder as the strange, boxy gray ships unleashed powerful energies against the fleets of B’orel and Ja’rod, battering down their shields. Three
HemQuch
ships were blown from orbit before they could redirect their batteries from the planet to the new attackers. That put paid to the last of B’orel’s forces, but Ja’rod’s ships managed to return fire effectively, tearing large holes in the newcomer ships. But to Laneth’s astonishment, the new ships seemed to repair themselves and continue the attack. More and more of Ja’rod’s vessels were rendered unto dust, and Laneth found herself bitter that she could only watch this glorious battle—and hopeful that the newcomers were truly on her side, rather than some new invaders who would turn their attention against her next.

The battle was resolved when Ja’rod’s flagship turned tail
and ran, vanishing into warp with one other survivor and lowering Laneth’s opinion of the man enormously. So much for Klingons never retreating. Still, he had survived to fight more battles, which made him better off than Laneth had been a moment ago. After all, her fleet was holding its ground only because they had no means to do otherwise.

“Commander,” Kholar said, “they are hailing.”

She let out a breath. Hailing was not shooting. “Respond.”

A
QuchHa’
visage appeared on the screen, but it was not one she knew. He had the long hair that Defense Force regulations no longer permitted
QuchHa’
males to wear, but it was scruffy and unkempt, as was the leather vest he wore instead of a military uniform. Behind him was a bridge that seemed to be that of an old corvette, probably decommissioned decades ago.
A privateer?
she wondered.

“I am Captain Lokog,”
the Klingon said, offering no patronymic.
“I control the fleet that has come to your rescue. And in timely fashion, it seems.”

She looked down her nose at him. “An earlier arrival would have been preferable, Captain. I am Commander Laneth, daughter of Garjud, in service to General K’Vagh.”

“Then I would like to speak with your general and offer him
my
services. I control many of these ships.”
Lokog leaned forward and smiled.
“And with them, we
QuchHa’
can conquer the Empire!”

Laneth smiled back. Perhaps fate had sided with her after all.

August 27, 2165

U.S.S. Endeavour

T’Pol had been staring into her meditation flame for some moments before she realized that Hoshi Sato was giving
her a puzzled look from its other side. The captain had invited her friend to sit with her so that they could discuss a matter of some delicacy, but she had fallen into silence thereafter.