FIFTEEN

Stardate 9000.9 (Late 2289)

The freebooter ship Hegh’TlhoS, near Korvat

Qagh felt his weight return as his atoms were finally reassembled on the transporter platform. With no support, however—and thanks to his injury—he pitched forward toward the deck. Only the quick intervention of Dr. Nej, who had operated the controls during the beam-up, prevented him from toppling face-first into the operator’s console.

“Are you all right?” Nej said, concern creasing his face as he helped Qagh settle himself into a seated position on the platform’s edge.

“I was injured when I set off the last charge,” the albino said, wincing at the pain in his side. “And it seemed as if something went wrong with the matter stream during the transport process.”

Nej paled slightly. “I’m afraid that it did. Something was interfering with the signal and the mirror relays you set up to allow your beam-out while maintaining our cloak.”

“How long was I hung up in transit?”

“For nearly twelve tups, sir.”

Qagh nodded numbly. The fact that he had reassembled at all after such a considerable length of time was probably a miracle in itself. That, combined with the fact that his mission to personally sabotage the Korvat peace talks—including setting off the bombs while he was still on-site, in order to defeat any effort on Starfleet’s part to jam an incoming “detonate” signal—had gone mostly without a hitch, told him that he was riding the ragged edge of his luck.

That, of course, was nothing new for a man whose very existence had for decades depended upon frequent and repeated medical miracles.

“You’re bleeding,” Nej said as he reached for one of the emergency medical kits that were stowed in one of the wall cubbies.

The albino looked down to see the bloodstains soiling his right side. He gingerly pulled his shredded Klingon military tunic away from the wound. His disguise had allowed him to do his work on the planet below undetected for most of the past three days. It had only been near the end of that time, when one of the Klingon guards had apparently spotted him in his peripheral vision, that he had been caught. The resulting hand-to-hand combat had been swift and brutal, leaving Qagh not only with his facial disguise torn off but also with a deep wound in his side, scant moments before he had succeeded in both dispatching the guard and detonating the final bomb.

He stifled a groan as Nej wiped away some of the blood in an attempt to apply a pressure bandage. “Sorry,” the physician said, wincing empathetically as he saw the pain on Qagh’s face.

“That’s fine,” Qagh said. “Help me get to the main control room. I need to find out if anyone survived down there. And finish what I started now that the shields are down in the conference complex.”

Qagh allowed Nej to put an arm around his shoulder, and they made their way together along the freighter’s narrow, winding corridors. At the control room door, the albino disentangled his arm and steadied himself against the adjacent wall. Although renewed waves of pain lanced through his wounded side, he ignored it and straightened his posture, unwilling to appear weak before his men, his chronic ailments notwithstanding.

The door slid open, and Qagh entered the command deck. “Give me a status report!” he barked at the four crewmen working the controls.

“We withheld firing until we were certain that Doctor Nej had exhausted all of his options in attempting to beam you back aboard,” Messebs, the helmsman, said.

Qagh wondered how much longer Messebs would have held his fire had the rematerialization process taken even longer, then dismissed the issue as unimportant, at least for now. After all, Messebs’s blood carried one of Qagh’s designer viruses, as did the rest of the crew. Therefore the helmsman would have been powerfully motivated not to jeopardize his only source of the counteragents that prevented that virus from taking its lethal course. Such was the stuff of loyalty.

“How much damage did my bombs do?” Qagh asked Messebs and moved toward the centrally mounted command chair. He carefully controlled his facial muscles so as to avoid wincing visibly.

“According to our scans,” said Koro, the Orion who was working an adjacent console, “both the Federation and Klingon contingents took several casualties, but we’re reading the life signs of many survivors as well, in addition to some transporter traffic between the planet’s surface and the Federation starship. The explosives seem to have caused severe structural damage to the conference chambers.”

Qagh cursed under his breath. He had been hoping for far more extensive losses among both the Klingon and Federation diplomatic teams. “Lock our disruptors on the main conference chambers. Fire at will and finish them off.”

Koro gulped audibly. “Sir, the facility’s shields went back up about two tups ago. We can lock onto other targets on the surface, but the conference site itself is too well protected for us to do any real damage to it from orbit. At least, not without revealing our location to the Klingon patrol ships and Excelsior.”

Grinding his back teeth, the albino considered his dwindling set of options. The fact that his bombs had not succeeded in completely destroying the conference chamber and its adjacent buildings was frustrating, to put it mildly. Both Qagh and his crew were keenly aware that a Klingon-Federation peace treaty—and its concomitant introduction of widespread law and order—would ultimately destroy their livelihood, or at least drive them out of the sectors in which they had been carrying out the bulk of their activities for years.

Worse, without the raids on scientific facilities that Qagh sprinkled judiciously among his more traditional pirating operations—such as the assault on a Mempa system facility that he planned to execute shortly after concluding his business on Korvat—he might lose access to the biomedical resources and other emerging technologies that had always enabled him, however precariously, to maintain his grip on life itself.

“Have any of the other ships scanned us yet?” he asked, his mind reeling.

Koro shook his head. “They’re definitely scanning the space immediately surrounding the planet, but our cloak continues to evade their sensors, at least so far as I can tell. As far as we know, they have not yet detected us in any fashion.”

An idea suddenly blazed very brightly in Qagh’s brain. “Get us into position between the Federation ship and the four Klingon vessels,” he said, leaning forward and ignoring the sticky wetness along the margins of the pressure bandage at his side. “One-tenth impulse power. Make sure we don’t show up on their scans.”

Messebs gave him a questioning look, but nodded and returned his full attention to the controls before him.

Whoever survived below will be returning to the ships above, Qagh thought. They will have to lower their shields to do that, and since we’ve given them no reason to believe that we’re still here, they probably won’t wait much longer to make themselves vulnerable. Then I can finish the job that I started on Korvat. He knew that his nascent plan might appear foolhardy. But he also understood that no victory could be won without risk.

Besides, he would have already achieved partial success even if he decided to slink quietly away now. I’ve already disrupted the peace talks, he thought. If I succeed in inflicting even further damage, then that may be enough to create enmity between the Federation and the Klingon Empire that will last for generations.

A brief time later, as the Hegh’TlhoS maneuvered closer to her prey, Qagh saw something—or at least he thought he saw something—that made his heart race.

“Magnify the image of the nearest Klingon vessel,” he said.

The image on the screen was unmistakable. Along the flat dorsal section of the closest Klingon battle cruiser’s secondary hull was graven the very familiar pictographic markings designating the specific Great House that the vessel represented, in addition to the ubiquitous red-and-black trefoil insignia that proclaimed her more general loyalty to the Klingon Empire’s military hierarchy. The House-related markings were a perfect match with those on the iron baby-blanket clasp that he’d kept hidden for years in his quarters, the only tangible remnant of his personal family heritage.

That ship is allied with the House of Ngoj, Qagh thought. A House whose fortunes have finally begun to improve, it would seem.

A House whose holdings rightfully ought to be mine.

If he had needed any more justification to carry out a follow-up attack, then it had just been delivered to him, and gift-wrapped to boot. This fight, he thought, has just become personal.