TWENTY-EIGHT

Early 2290 (the Year of Kahless 915,
late in the month of Doqath)

The freebooter ship Hegh’TlhoS

The scalpel slipped effortlessly through Kor’s neck, but to Qagh’s surprise, this was not because the tissue was soft or the blade was sharp; it was because Kor had disappeared in a cascade of green-gold sparkles of light.

Roaring in anger, Qagh looked up toward Kang, then whirled to see the spots where Koloth and Dax had recently been restrained. All he caught was a brief afterimage of Koloth as he disappeared, his broken fingers raised in a rude Klingon gesture.

“They’ve beamed out!” Nej said, startled into stating the obvious.

Qagh whirled toward him, wielding the scalpel. His bloodlust and anger might have ended the physician’s life had the Hegh’TlhoS not violently shuddered to one side at that moment. Half the tools in the infirmary slid across the countertops, many of them clattering to the far-from-sterile floor that tilted beneath the freebooter captain’s feet.

“Captain, we’re under attack!” the voice of the Hegh’TlhoS’s Orion navigator said, slightly distorted by the ship’s comm system. “They’re firing at us even though we’re still cloaked!”

“Raise shields! Evasive maneuvers!” Qagh shouted, steadying himself against one of the room’s medical tables as the ship rocked again. He heard a loud, rumbling sound coming up from one of the lower decks, followed by a brief roar. The hull’s been breached, he thought ruefully. “I’m on my way to the command deck.”

Nej hurried after him, following at a respectful distance. “The prisoners must have been carrying hidden transmitters of some kind,” he said. “There’s no other way their rescuers could have pinpointed their location.”

“Obviously,” the albino snapped. “Despite all of your searches and scans, they apparently went unfound.”

“I am a physician and a biological researcher, Captain,” Nej sniffed as the pair made haste toward the forward section of the modified freighter. “I am not a subspace radio engineer. I respectfully suggest you focus your attention on the problem at hand rather than on blame. For instance, how do we know that our guests didn’t leave more small transmitters behind? If one of their ships could achieve a transporter lock, they may be able to continue targeting us in spite of our cloak.”

“Then I shall make sure that nothing gets left behind,” Qagh said, punching the pad on the wall next to the command deck’s entrance. The door slid open obediently.

The vessel’s cramped bridge was in chaos, and Qagh could see on his viewscreens that the three Klingon battle cruisers were indeed firing purposefully, rather than blindly, at the Hegh’TlhoS.

If they can see through our cloak, then simply running will do us no good, the albino thought. I must confront them.

“Keep the cloaking system running at all costs!” Qagh barked. “Continue evasive maneuvers. And get a scrub team to make certain that our other recent Klingon guests really left nothing behind after they were disintegrated.”

The eyes he’d taken would have to be disintegrated as well, of course. Qagh hated to lose any of the trophies he had just gone to so much trouble to collect. But if his crew performed up to his expectations, the sacrifice would prove more than worthwhile. We’ll have control of their ships—and their lives—soon enough, he thought with a rueful smile.

“They know we’re here, Captain!” exclaimed one of the Orion helmsmen. “We no longer have the element of surprise in our favor. Shouldn’t we be retreating?”

“I have something else in mind,” Qagh said in a tone that made clear that he would brook no further argument. Despite his crew’s fear of the Klingons, the albino felt confident that his people would neither quibble nor complain. After all, they lived or died by his decisions, regardless of the outcome of this particular battle.

I.K.S. Klothos

“Continue firing!” Kor shouted as he retook his place in the elevated chair that dominated the center of the Klothos’s bustling bridge. Since there had been no time for him to attire himself for battle, he remained stripped to the waist, his many livid if superficial injuries somehow enhancing his authority as he led his men into battle yet again.

“We’ve lost our weapons lock on them just after beaming you back aboard,” said Kat’re’q, a female bekk, barely sparing a glance in Kor’s direction as she worked at one of the starboard duty stations. “We must have lost our lock with the other transponder signals when they raised their shields.”

“I don’t give a HIvje’ of warm targ nIj why you lost the target!” Kor exclaimed. “We know where they were. Some of our weapons fire has to have hit them, so there must be some debris out there that we can follow back to them. Find something that you can lock onto!”

“I have conveyed the same instructions to the Gal’tagh and the QaD,” Koloth said from the rear of the bridge. Hurghom, the Klothos’s chief medical officer, was doing his best to treat Koloth’s broken forearm and fingers with a handheld osteoregenerator, despite the captain’s adrenaline-fueled pacing. Curzon Dax was nearby as well, helping Dr. Hurghom’s semi-capable assistant to patch the stab wounds and cuts on Kang, who had also insisted on coming to the bridge rather than wasting precious time in the Klothos’s infirmary. Kang’s treatment consisted mostly of quickly sterilizing and closing the thankfully superficial wounds, then covering them with an antiseptic foam that sutured most such wounds cleanly and quickly without depriving a warrior of whatever braggable scars he may have earned.

As he watched the Trill ambassador work, Kor had to admit that he owed the young man a great deal of credit. Dax’s idea of having subcutaneous subspace transponders inserted into their jaws prior to their mission to Mempa II had saved the lives of four members of the assault team. Without Dax’s precautions, the entire landing party would have been butchered. The tactic had also greatly increased their chances of finding and defeating the wily albino. Kor wondered for an instant whether the idea had originated in Curzon Dax’s humanoid brain or if it had come from the sentient parasite he apparently carried with him. They’d had no time to discuss this surprising revelation—or Kor’s own dark secret—since they’d been beamed back aboard the Klothos.

“Captain Kor, we’ve got a lock on several additional signals now,” the helmsman said, drawing Kor’s distracted attention back to the matter at hand. “And they’re coming from our men’s transponders!”

The freebooter ship Hegh’TlhoS

The albino grinned at the images that filled his viewscreens. The three Klingon ships were falling right into his trap. They had expended considerable firepower shooting into the volume of space where the Hegh’TlhoS had been, and now they were making it clear that they had trained their sights toward the region where he had just dumped the last traces of the Klingon assault team. He felt certain that nothing remained aboard the cloaked freebooter ship that might reveal its position to the searching Klingon warships.

Qagh knew that his people remained nervous, if still obedient—after all, they were still well within weapons range of the Klingon vessels—but none of them had dared to give voice to their fears. After all, they knew as well as the albino did that as long as the ship’s cloak continued to hold, they would be safe from detection on their new heading.

At least until such time as he decided to play the next card in his hand.

He hadn’t forgotten the unauthorized shuttle launch that had distracted him earlier—and which might even have revealed the presence of the Hegh’TlhoS to the Klingons’ sensors—but investigating that matter would have to wait until after he’d resolved the current crisis. Right now, Qagh knew he had to keep his attention focused tightly on exploiting his next clear opportunity to lessen the odds against him—or perhaps even to eliminate his pursuers once and for all.

“Are all torpedoes armed?” he asked, not even bothering to look over toward his ordnance chief.

“Yes, Captain,” came the crisp response.

“Tell Bront to transfer all the power he can spare to the forward shields now,” he said.

“And on my mark, we move.”

I.K.S. Klothos

“Still nothing, Captain,” the navigator said, scrutinizing the computer panels in front of him.

“It has been nearly thirty tups since we last detected any traceable signal from the albino’s ship,” Koloth said, growling. “From the trajectory of the corpses, it is clear that the albino dumped them in great haste—just before fleeing like a whipped targ.”

Kor nodded as he continued studying the forward viewscreen. All three of the warships had launched fusillade after fusillade into the empty space where they had first detected the presence of the albino’s vessel, in addition to firing in almost every direction save directly at each other. And yet they still had found no evidence of debris from the pirate ship, no vented atmosphere, no radiation, no warp trail, and no bodies save those of their own warriors.

“He is cunning,” Kor said finally. “He has waited patiently before, like a sea pochtoQ waiting for a ghargh to wriggle into its open maw. I don’t believe that he has left the system.”

“Then where is he?” Kang shouted. He had been noticeably more irritable than usual since returning to the Klothos. Despite Dr. Hurghom’s expert but hasty medical ministrations, he seemed to be sweating profusely, as though battling a fever. “How long do you intend to wait to find him, when he may well already be on the way to his next raid?”

“I agree with Kor,” Curzon Dax said, stepping forward. “The absence of any kind of warp trail at all leads me to believe that the likeliest possibility is that he is still here.”

Kor watched closely to see how the other two captains were reacting to Dax’s suggestion. Irrespective of whatever might be living inside him, the Trill had shown significant bravery and intelligence so far, well in excess of any of their expectations. Perhaps because of this fact, neither Koloth nor Kang reacted negatively to Dax now, although neither of the other Klingon captains seemed willing to give his supposition much credence.

“If you wish to stay here, Kor, then you certainly may do so,” Koloth said, pointing toward him with his already half-healed hand. “I will return to my ship and find a way to chase this aberration, rather than remain idle.”

“I shall do the same,” Kang said. He approached one of the communication consoles and toggled open a particular channel. “Gal’tagh, lower shields and prepare to beam me over.”

As Koloth gave a similar command to the QaD, Kor silently considered his options. Other than the demands of the albino’s terrorist ambitions, and those imposed by his chronic medical condition, nothing about the actions of Kor’s unwanted kinsman had been predictable; not only did he appear to defy the laws of nature merely by existing, he seemed to survive by defying both luck and logic as well.

Kor rose from his chair and was about to speak when a brilliant fireball erupted on the main viewer. A missile of some sort, a plasma torpedo from the look of it, had just exploded in extremely close proximity to Kang’s vessel, the QaD, blowing away much of the K’t’inga-class battle cruiser’s starboard wing in the process.

Perhaps half a heartbeat later, the Gal’tagh exploded in a massive blast, plasma and atmosphere igniting and reigniting in cascading bursts as hull metal and internal components arced away from the conflagration in a shower of tiny fragments.

The shockwave produced by the Gal’tagh’s sudden demise rocked the Klothos, but in the one or two lups that it took the three Klingon captains and Dax to regain their footing, the albino’s ship hove up from below the rapidly expanding debris cloud where the Gal’tagh had been mere moments earlier.

Qagh’s vessel had barely cleared the debris field’s fluid perimeter when it began to slowly re-cloak, its image shimmering like a very deadly mirage. In the last moment before the freebooter ship vanished from sight, Kor saw its engine nacelles ignite as it prepared to go into warp, fleeing from all the torture and murder and sabotage its cowardly master had wrought.

Kor was barely aware that he was automatically yelling orders to fire on the albino’s ship, even as the cacophony created by alarm klaxons, and his busy bridge crew, and Koloth’s blood-chilling howl to Sto-Vo-Kor on behalf of his abruptly slain subordinates, all competed for his attention.

With a calm born of countless previous life-and-death struggles undertaken in the unforgiving cold of space, Kor assessed the tactical situation. The Gal’tagh was destroyed, though its captain still lived; the QaD was crippled, but was probably repairable; and the Klothos was altogether unharmed.

He purposely saved my ship, Kor thought, his rage rising well past anything he had ever experienced before. He actually felt shooting pains in his heart.

He saved my ship because it carries the markings of the House of Ngoj.

And he intends to take that house back.