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  “IN 2293, YOU PLAYED AN INSTRUMENTAL

  ROLE IN THE ASSASSINATION OF CHANCELLOR

  GORKON OF THE KLINGON HIGH COUNCIL.”

  Tancreda read out the words as if to an unseen audience. “You were a coconspirator under the guidance of the then-Admiral Lance Cartwright. Following his direct orders, you—”

  “I know what I did.” Valeris spoke over her. “We both know.”

  “Are you squeamish about it?” Tancreda asked, seizing on the moment. “You don’t want to hear me say it out loud?”

  “There is no point reiterating facts that we are both already aware of.”

  “Very well.” The Betazoid paged on through the padd’s memory, throwing a sideways glance up the discreet shape of a monitor bead at the corner of the ceiling. “Let’s not speak about the assassination. Let’s talk about what happened after Gorkon was murdered, after you framed James Kirk for the deed. After you killed two men in cold blood at point-blank range. . . .”

  Pocket Books

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

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  ™, ® and © 2011 by CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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  First Pocket Books paperback edition August 2011

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  Designed by Leydiana Rodríguez-Ovalles

  Cover art and design by Alan Dingman

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4516-0717-8

  ISBN 978-1-4516-0721-5 (ebook)

  For Endeavor, and all who sailed in her.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Utility Platform loS pagh loS

  Da’Kel System

  Mempa Sector, Klingon Empire

  Seven years.

  Gedda felt every day of them like a weight upon his back. Seven years since the ink soaked into the paper of the Khitomer Accords, seven years since the revelations and the handshakes, the recriminations and the reconciliations.

  Almost a decade of his life dedicated to this, and only now had the wheels truly started to turn. He felt a curious mixture of elation and sorrow as he walked the rough metal corridors of the space station. On one hand, he was uplifted and energized by the thought that at last he could make a difference; but on the other, he was troubled by the time that had been wasted just to get to this point.

  There had been moments when he felt as if he were banging his head against a brick wall. The Klingons, even when they were trying to be open, were obstructive and cantankerous—and what drove Gedda to distraction was the fact they were spiting themselves to do it. He understood that they had pride, that their martial code made it difficult for them to accept charity from others—worse still if it came from a former enemy like the United Federation of Planets.

  But surely there had to come a point where that bellicose behavior became self-destructive? He’d lost count of the number of times he had been shouted down or outright ignored when he dared to state the obvious—the slight, wiry human snapping at the hulking warrior and getting nothing back but sneers and dismissal. The Klingons did not like Gedda, but they didn’t dislike him enough to consider him worthy of their true enmity. General Igdar, the military chief of staff in the sector, had once compared him to a glob fly—something that would have to rise to reach the level of an irritant.

  And then there had been days when he had wanted to quit. Gedda recalled those quite clearly. How many transfer requests or resignation letters had he written? Hours spent putting down his disappointments on a padd and then hesitating at the last moment to press the TRANSMIT key.

  Gedda had never done it, because he would never have been able to look himself in the mirror again. To go home, back to New Bangalore, would be to admit defeat.

  He had been on Qo’noS when Praxis ripped itself apart, he had seen the horror and the terror on the faces of the most fearless people in the galaxy. It seemed like a lifetime ago; he was an adjutant with the Federation diplomatic envoy in the First City, little more than a functionary if he was honest with himself. When the moon exploded, when the spatial shock wave tore into the Klingon homeworld, Gedda had gone with the others, out into the streets to render what aid they could.

  He looked down at his palms, remembering the red earth that clogged his pores and his nails. The scars on his fingers from ripping up the rubble with his bare hands. The hours of backbreaking work in the aftermath of the disaster. But most of all, he remembered the living and the dead he had uncovered.

  When the Accords were signed, when the articles of the treaty enacted and the lines of support opened, Gedda had volunteered to join the Federation relief effort. He wanted to keep helping.

  But for all the honorable words and honest intent of Chancellor Azetbur, the Klingon people found it hard to take the outstretched hand. Like her father, Gorkon, before her, Azetbur’s bold initiatives and offerings of concord were not to the taste of many of her kind. Stubborn Klingon pride dragged like an anchor on every overture the Federation made, and never let up. In the end, it took the atmospheric contamination, the steady rise in infant mortality due to radiation exposure—the corruption of the very soil of the homeworld—to convince the Klingons to allow the Federation to take what General Igdar dismissively referred to as “a minor support role.”

  In seven years, despite all that had happened, all the setbacks and the politicking among the fragile peace, there had been little victories. This platform was one of them, along with the ships drifting out beyond it in orbit over the Da’Kel III colony. Finally, the Klingon Defense Force had turned over a facility to serve as the sole staging area for the ongoing relief efforts. Now that the station was up and running, it would be the core of all resource distribution
to Qo’noS and the other worlds brushed by the death throes of Praxis. Ships from Federation space could cross the border and off-load here, the cargoes of supplies then taken up by Defense Force ships and indentured transports.

  It would have been far simpler to send the vessels straight to the reconstruction sites, but even Azetbur could not muster the backing for a vote to allow a steady train of alien starships passage to the heart of the Empire. Da’Kel would have to be enough.

  After years of slow going, hardheadedness, and hindrances born of political pressures and old prejudice, they had passed a milestone. Gedda wanted to make a difference; he wondered if he could allow himself to believe that now he had.

  A gruff voice called his name as he entered the operations dome, and he looked up to see Supervisor Kol approaching. He straightened in her presence; it was a reflex action he couldn’t break.

  “Look at this,” she said, without preamble. The Klingon woman beckoned him over to one of the large viewports.

  Gedda followed with a nod. Kol was a good head taller than him, and her skin was a shade darker than his tawny complexion. She had one of those ridge-crests that lay flat and complex across her forehead, unlike the massive wrinkles of bone and skull visible on many of the Klingons he encountered. Kol was the closest thing to Gedda’s opposite number here, but still she had the ability to make him feel like he was her inferior. He didn’t correct that assumption: Gedda learned early on that Klingons were much easier to deal with if they were allowed to think that they were in charge of everything.

  Kol pointed. The curved triangle of the window also doubled as a control panel, holographic panes projecting directly onto the surface. She was indicating a shipping manifest, and several items were blinking in red. “The Tellarites have displayed their inability to follow simple commands once again,” she told him. “The cargo pods containing these medical supplies are not on board their ship.”

  Gedda peered out into the darkness and found the spade-shaped Tellarite freighter that had earned Kol’s chilly ire. “There must be a good reason,” he offered. “They’re usually very conscientious about this sort of thing.”

  Kol shot him a look. “I understand that is true of some outworlders. But I have yet to be convinced they fall into the same category.”

  He wondered if that had been some kind of backhanded compliment, and then pushed the thought away. “It might have been moved to one of the other ships in the flotilla,” he suggested. “Let me look into it. I’ll sort it out.”

  “Vessel dropping out of warp,” reported one of the operations crew. Gedda looked and saw a display screen showing a nondescript Monarch-class merchantman. The manta-like ship transmitted a series of pass-codes that identified it as part of the Tellarite convoy.

  “There,” he said. “A straggler. I imagine they’ll have the missing supplies on board.”

  Kol looked down at a padd in her hand. “The Tellarite Shipping Commission only authorized four ships for passage into the Empire. That one will be the fifth.”

  “Oh.” Gedda blinked. “I suppose . . . we should contact them?” Kol snapped out a command in Klingon, stalking away from him. “It’s probably just a clerical error,” he added.

  Kol gave him the look again, and he wilted a little, sighing. Sometimes it could be extremely trying how the Klingons treated every problem, no matter how large or how small, as if it were a matter of utmost martial import.

  “They’re hailing us,” said Leru, crouched forward over the main console.

  Zennol didn’t look away from the merchantman’s forward screen. “That was quick.” Framed on the display, the angular, copper-green shape of the orbital platform floated in space, catching the glow of the distant red Da’Kel star. He smiled without warmth, the skin around his narrow eyes wrinkling, tightening the pattern of pigment-spots that passed down the sides of his face to disappear into his collar.

  Leru stared at him across the empty bridge of the freighter. “Do we answer?” He ran a nervous hand through his lank, pale hair. The younger man’s pigment-patterns were stark against his fairer skin. “If we open a channel, I’ll need to activate the visual mask,” he went on. “If they don’t see us as Tellarites, the ridge-heads will—”

  “We’ll answer them,” Zennol said, silencing him as he climbed to his feet. “There will be an answer,” he repeated. The older man left the helm chair and went to the makeshift panel wired into the merchantman’s engineering station.

  “Now?” He heard the gasp in Leru’s voice. Zennol frowned slightly. He had always believed that the youth would be hesitant when the moment came, but he had hoped that Leru might, at the end, show a little more strength of character.

  “Now,” Zennol replied. “We’re close enough.” He activated a control and sent a signal to the device sitting alone down in the ship’s main cargo bay. He imagined it there, power moving through the activation grid as it awoke from dormancy. Finally he turned back to his comrade. “It’s time. Send the message.”

  “We . . . we’re really doing this. . .” Leru said aloud, as if he had to give voice to the words before his actions could become real. He reached out and tapped a keypad; the merchantman’s subspace radio began to broadcast a prerecorded string of words. “Done,” he added.

  Zennol walked up to the main screen, counting the number of ships orbiting in orderly rows alongside the transfer platform. He saw more than he expected, and nodded at their good fortune. He made out the shape of a Starfleet tug, civilian barges of Vulcan, Tellarite, and Caitian design, but what drew his smile wide were the Klingon ships beyond them. Bulk cruisers and tankers suckling at the station, their crews ignorant of what was about to happen, and in a slightly higher orbit, the shapes of D-7M battle cruisers billeted here on missions of escort and security.

  The latter they had failed to perform, thanks to information passed on to Zennol from the rest of his group. He didn’t wonder where the pass-codes and the transit route details had come from; all Zennol cared about was that they had gotten him to this place, at this moment. He would fulfill his purpose here and now. His life had been building to this one moment.

  Zennol’s hand went to his pocket and he pulled out a flattened holograph and unfolded it. The plastic panel gave a soft chime and he was suddenly looking into the eyes of his wife. She was frozen in that moment, as beautiful as she had ever been, full of life. This was how he wanted to remember her, instead of how she was when he found her: charred and dying from the kiss of a Klingon disruptor.

  Leru’s eyes were closed and he was muttering something under his breath, some litany or invocation. Zennol nodded to himself. Whatever helped the youth to get the work done . . . He himself had never believed in Higher Powers. He needed no other motivation than the face of the woman in the holograph.

  He watched the ships and listened to the words of the message . . . and waited.

  • • •

  Sent on all channels, wide-banded to every subspace receiver in the star system, the message was clear and concise. In flawless, unaccented Klingon, the words were picked up by every vessel. Many of those who heard them did not understand the import of the phrase; those who did—those who knew the truth of what was said—were granted enough time to become angry at the insult they bore.

  “MaghwI’ chuH ghobe’ QIb,” said the voice.

  The merchantman vanished in a sudden liberation of uncaged energy.

  The detonation was not a conventional blast, not nuclear or electrochemical in nature. Instead, it was initiated by a forcible shattering of key physical laws; inside an envelope of projected power, fundamental rules of the universe were twisted and bent to the breaking point, and beyond. It was a bastardization of the principles and technologies that allowed starships to break the light-speed barrier and transmit messages across vast interstellar distances.

  A mailed fist of corrupted energy punched down through the layers of reality, briefly opening up a tear in the fabric of space-time. Nature would not stand
to let such a brutality exist for more than a few microseconds, but even that was enough to release vast quantities of extradimensional energy from the realms of subspace.

  At the heart of the expanding shock-front, the merchantman was already gone, the atoms of its structure and everything aboard it instantly reduced to their component particles. A cloud of crackling, shimmering power, blue-white and wild like auroral lightning, unwound and whipped at the space around it. The discharge destroyed dozens of vessels outright, and others it tore open as it passed, venting them to vacuum; but the core power of the energy flared along the axis of its spin, mirroring the motion of a singularity. The rippling wave engulfed the orbital platform and sheared through its low-level deflectors.

  For brief moments the blast cut at the station, stripping it layer by layer from the outermost hull plating, down through the superstructure and into the internal pressure spaces; compartments popped and disintegrated, the life within them snuffed out. Then, mercifully, the over-wash of subspace energy caused the station’s fusion core to implode, and the platform died in a final flash of light.

  Less than a minute had elapsed from the moment the voice had begun to speak to the subspace surge released by the merchantman. As the wake dissipated, unguided wreckage began to tumble into Da’Kel’s gravity well. Those few ships that still had survivors aboard them could only watch them fall, and hope that they would live beyond the next few hours.

  Starfleet Penal Stockade

  Jaros II

  United Federation of Planets

  “I need you to be open,” said the Betazoid. “If you hold back, our progress will be slow.”

  The patient didn’t look up, but she raised one arched eyebrow by the smallest of increments. “Is the speed of our . . . progress . . . a mitigating factor, Doctor Tancreda?” The question was flat and devoid of weight, or so it seemed.

  The Betazoid gave a little frown and reached up to brush her shoulder-length brown hair back from her face. She was pale—too pale for the warm, steady sun of Jaros II—and even though she sat in the shade across the eastern side of the meeting room, she appeared uncomfortable. After a moment, Tancreda leaned forward, her slender fingers coming together in a steeple, her dark eyes returning once again to her subject. “This is supposed to be a guided meditation. I can’t guide you if you won’t follow me.” When an answer didn’t come at once, she went on. “I understand this may seem simplistic to you, at first—”