Qu’Vat

“I know you think this is the only way to reclaim your honor, Doctor Antaak,” said Quv. The younger Klingon man’s voice shook in a distressingly un-Klingon manner that strangely suited his unnaturally smooth forehead. “But what you are about to do isn’t far short of pure insanity.”

As he continued walking briskly through the throngs in the central public transport concourse of the Klingon colony world of Qu’Vat, Antaak clutched his medical bag close to his chest and cast a weary smile at his student, who breathlessly kept pace beside him.

“How little you truly understand of honor, Quv,” Antaak said. “And of what it means to lose it.”

Antaak couldn’t blame Quv for his reticence; his student was far too young to truly understand or appreciate what Klingons were supposed to look like. Quv was younger than Antaak’s own adult children, and thus had no firsthand memory of the time before the Change. The time before Antaak’s own attempts to create genetically enhanced Klingon warriors had unexpectedly created the mutated Levodian flu virus that sentenced all of Qu’Vat’s millions to a horrible death—a fate that Antaak had averted only by distributing a therapeutic retrovirus suffused with specially altered Earther DNA.

The consequence had been the creation of a new sub-race that now dwelled on Qu’Vat and far beyond, Klingons whose bodies were so free of their people’s traditional texture that even Kahless himself would doubtless have been unable to recognize them as his own folk. Although those afflicted with this mark of shame represented only a minority of the overall population of the Klingon Empire, a large generational cohort had grown up literally wearing Antaak’s failure upon their faces.

It was an intolerable reminder, and it plagued Antaak, assailing both pride and conscience, every time he looked in the mirror. He had been determined to remedy it since it first happened, regardless of the cost. And now that both success and redemption finally lay within his grasp, he would brook no further delay.

Antaak came to an abrupt stop beside the fire fountain in the main square, which housed an obelisk that stood as tall as three large men. Rising from the center of the stone display’s perpetual conflagration stood oversized cast duranium representations of Kahless and his brother Morath, locked in their eternal hand-to-hand struggle on the slopes of the Kri’stak Volcano, where legend had it that Kahless had fashioned the very first bat’leth out of a lock of his own hair. The complex topography of the foreheads of both brothers seemed to dance and jump in the chaotic spray of flames and sparks that framed their age-old conflict. It seemed to Antaak that the metal colossi were but pausing in their eternal combat, as though eager to watch Antaak redeem both his people and his own honor.

He reached into his medical bag and removed a small vial, pausing to watch the preoccupied crowds as they paced to and from the maglev platforms and the tube trains that were taking most of them back to their homes for the evening, while transporting a few less fortunate others back into the business and industrial districts where the night shift was about to begin.

The only one present who seemed to have any inkling that anything out of the ordinary might be about to occur was Quv, whose brow now appeared nearly as furrowed as those of his honored ancestors.

“Are you really certain this is safe, Doctor?” Quv said, his voice quavering in unmistakable fear.

Quv’s continued sniveling had finally reached the elastic limits of Antaak’s patience; Antaak thought it might soon snap, like a length of frayed cable suddenly placed under far too much tension.

“My senior staff is satisfied with the bioagent’s preliminary tests,” Antaak said, biting off his words one at a time. “So there is no reason to delay deployment any longer—especially when our financial patrons on the High Council have grown so restive of late.”

To say nothing of the demands of honor far too long denied, Antaak added silently. Besides, if I were to allow this research to drag on long enough to completely satisfy the fainthearted, I’d never live to see it reach its conclusion.

And B’Etris, his wife of more than twenty years—a great beauty whose brow had retained the proud cranial topography of the warriors of old—might never see her husband finally become worthy of her again.

Antaak’s gnarled thumbs pushed at the vial’s cap, launching the stopper skyward with an audible pop. He raised the open container over his head, trusting the vial’s preprogrammed internal mechanism to do the rest. A woman carrying a small child paused to eye him curiously for a moment before she walked on and blended into the milling, shifting crowds.

The vial moved slightly in Antaak’s hand, the mild sensation of recoil confirming that the tiny aerosol delivery device had launched itself high above the open-air plaza. Within moments, the vial’s microscopic contents would be randomly distributed throughout the transit mall before spreading swiftly beyond via the station’s efficient network of maglev trains and the prevailing winds.

Antaak wondered if he dared hope not only for redemption, but also for immortality in the annals of Klingon history. There would be stories told at the Kot’baval festival, and songs sung, in between the celebrations of Kahless’s legendary defeat of the tyrant Molor in single combat. Perhaps an achievement such as this one—the complete restoration of the pure Klingon genome, a battle won by science rather than blades—might even rate its author a statue in the Hall of Heroes.

Minutes passed as Antaak stood silently beside the fire fountain, watching the passage of the unwitting crowds. He could only wonder if the proud foreheads of their ancestors would begin to return immediately, even as he watched. Or would the mass metamorphosis these people were now carrying with them to home and workplace take hours or even days to manifest its full effect?

“I don’t feel very well, Doctor,” Quv said.

Antaak had finally had enough. “Be silent, you fool. Can’t you see that you are witnessing history?”

Quv was indeed silent after that. He remained particularly so after he pitched forward onto the stone pathway beside the fountain, where he landed as limp and boneless as a child’s rag doll.

“Quv?” Antaak knelt beside his student, whose breaths were now coming in rapid, shallow bursts. Perhaps this is some manner of allergic reaction, he thought, willing his jangled nerves to steadiness.

A scream pierced the air a short distance behind him, prompting Antaak to rise quickly and turn in the direction of the sound. A smooth-headed woman held a toddler—Antaak wasn’t certain whether she was the same young mother he had seen watching him a few moments earlier—and the child was in obvious distress. The child, a boy who couldn’t have been more than two or three years of age, appeared to be in the grip of some sort of convulsion or seizure. Like the forehead of the panicked woman who carried him, his own was smooth, though it was growing noticeably inflamed and red even as Antaak watched.

A familiar pattern of bumps and ridges was clearly beginning to appear on the child’s forehead.

Then the boy screamed, vomited, and went limp. He hung apparently lifeless in the young woman’s arms even as she, too, began developing facial features similar to those displayed by her son. Two other people near the woman appeared to be having difficulty breathing. A short distance behind them, a uniformed constable tore off his helmet, displaying a badly inflamed but heavily ridged forehead before he, too, collapsed onto the transit mall’s unyielding stone floor.

Antaak quickly lost the ability to distinguish further manifestations of the new plague he had apparently just unleashed. He saw only flashes of mortified faces, heard only pained screams and running feet, felt and tasted only terror. Antaak’s suddenly rubbery legs gave way beneath him before he came to the belated realization that he, too, could no longer breathe properly, nor even gasp. His mind flashed back to the Hall of Heroes, which he understood with resigned finality would now enshrine neither his name nor his likeness, both of which would doubtless be reviled, now and for all the ages to come.

He realized that dull, plodding Quv had been right after all. Had he the breath for it, he would have laughed.

Among Antaak’s last coherent thoughts before oblivion pulled him under was to hope that his wife, his grown daughters and son, and his five young grandchildren would find a place of safety before this new plague reached them.

Along with gratitude that none of them had been immediately present to witness this final, career-defining failure.