However, right now she needed more than faith, she needed surety. Hence the disruptor.
“Kaasin! I’m glad you’re here!” Ja’rod indicated Moraq with his weapon. “This animal betrayed us to the Romulans! We must raise the shields, quickly, before we are destroyed!”
As Ja’rod moved over to the console, Kaasin looked at the prone form of Moraq. He lay in the midst of the wreckage of a console that had exploded in the attack. In fact, the entire room smelled of burning conduits. The base commander struggled to move, but it was obvious that the disruptor had done its job well. He would be dead in moments, and until then he would be unable to make his limbs function properly, the deadly beam having all but destroyed the function of his nervous system.
But he was able to lock eyes with Kaasin. His body was failing, but Moraq’s black eyes burned with the intensity of a warrior.
All her life, Kaasin had heard warriors—mostly old, fat ones—talk about tova’dok,the moment of clarity when warriors spoke to each other without words. She had always given those stories the same level of respect and belief that she did all their other exaggerated tales of mighty prowess—to wit, none whatsoever.
Until now. Because when she locked eyes with Moraq, she knewthat Ja’rod was lying and Moraq died trying to stop the very traitor Mogh had been sent here to find.
Then Moraq’s eyes shut.
“Leave him be, Kaasin! You must aid me in bringing the shields back up.”
She turned and aimed her disruptor at Ja’rod’s back. “Face me, traitor.” Even one such as Ja’rod deserved to look his killer in the eye.
Ja’rod did not do so, however, instead ducking behind a console and firing his own disruptor wildly. Kaasin was able to avoid the beam easily, then she too took cover behind one of the damage-control consoles.
“And to think I thought I had you fooled,” Ja’rod said. “After all, Mogh was finally starting to leave me alone. A pity that none of us will live to see how futile his efforts were. It’s only a matter of time, you know.”
Kaasin was still barefoot from her mok’baraclass. She moved slowly and silently across the room, ignoring the mild pain of the sharpened edges of metal from the damaged consoles as they ripped into the callused soles of her feet. She did not speak, did not breathe, did nothing to give any indication of her position. Only her scent would give her away, but the burning-conduit stink that permeated the room would mask that.
Besides, she somehow doubted that a Romulan-lover like Ja’rod was much of a hunter.
“Soon our people will see the wisdom of a Romulan–Klingon alliance. Together we will conquer the Federation, the Cardassians, the Tholians—all the galaxy will be ours for the taking!”
Keep talking, fool.She only had a little farther to go and she’d be around the other side of the console from where he was crouching.
“You still have a chance, Kaasin—you and your husband, if he’s still alive, can lead the vanguard! Think of it! The House of Duras and the House of Mogh united! The wonders we can accomplish would be—”
Kaasin stood behind Ja’rod and blew his head off.
For a moment, Kaasin was concerned that she had dishonored herself and her mate by killing without showing her face—but the moment passed. He already knows what I look like.
Stepping over the corpse without giving it another thought, she walked back to Moraq’s body, knelt next to it, pried open his eyes, and then screamed to the heavens.
At least I was able to avenge you, Commander—I will see you inSto-Vo-Kor.
The hum of a transporter grabbed her attention—and that there wasa hum meant that it couldn’t be a Klingon transporter, since they were silent. She raised her disruptor—
—only to have a Romulan soldier knock it out of her hands as he materialized. The Romulan then smiled, thinking her helpless before him.
The smile fell as she grabbed his left arm, yanked it around behind his back hard enough to break it in three places, and then broke his neck. She did not let the body fall to the floor, however, as there were three other Romulans who had come with him, and she needed the corpse of their comrade as a shield.
Backing toward the wall, she grabbed her victim’s disruptor and started firing. But the other three fired as well. While two of the shots hit the dead Romulan, one struck Kaasin’s leg.
Pain seared through her shin, clad as it was only in mok’barapants, and she found herself sprawled on the floor, her Romulan shield in front of her. She tried to raise the disruptor to fire it, but another Romulan, a female centurion, did as her comrade had, and knocked it from her grip. Kaasin’s attempt to grab her in a hold did not succeed, as she simply brushed it off.
Instead she leapt backward in what might have been an excellent flip were she not burdened by an injured leg. Still, even though she landed awkwardly, it got her out of reach of the Romulan and the pain only served to focus her rage.
“You will not take me, Romulan,” she hissed.
“A pity,” one of the antecenturions, a male, said, his eyes scanning the shape of Kaasin’s body. “You might actually be worth taking.”
Nausea spread through both of Kaasin’s stomachs at the very thought. “I’d rather die.”
“That can be arranged,” the female centurion said as she shot Kaasin.
Fire spread through her veins as the disruptor did its work. Her penultimate thoughts were glee that she had, at least, killed the traitor, as well as one of those Romulan petaQ.
Her final thoughts were of Mogh and her son Worf, and of Kurn, whom she would never see again…
As he materialized in what was left of the research outpost on Khitomer, Chief Sergey Rozhenko’s entire face scrunched as horrible odors assaulted his nostrils.
Not all the smells bothered him. As a Starfleet engineer of many years’ standing, he was well used to the olfactory clues pointing to melted conduits, burnt chips, and fried consoles. That only bothered him insofar as the stench generally led to his having to put together a repair detail.
No, what caused his nostril hairs to scream in protest was the smell of burning flesh.
Rozhenko remembered stories that his aunt Lilya told growing up on Gault, about their ancestors back on Earth in the days before the Federation—indeed, before first contact, before the planet was even united—who had been hunted down and slaughtered, or put in work camps and thenslaughtered after they had been worked almost to death. Uncle Isaac would usually then interrupt the story and say, “For God’s sake, Lilya, that was four hundred years ago on another planet! Things are different. That couldn’t happen now.”
To which Aunt Lilya would always reply: “That’s because we remember what happened then.The only way to avoid it is to never forget.”
Right now, Rozhenko wasn’t particularly heartened by the knowledge that something a twenty-fourth-century human like Uncle Isaac could dismiss so easily was happening literally under his nose in the Klingon Empire. It made him think that his decision not to re-enlist when his term was up in a month’s time and return home to Gault—and to his wife Helena and their son Nikolai—was most definitely the right one. The only massacres we have on Gault are of the vegetables during the harvest.
“I’m picking up transporter traces. They’re not Federation or Klingon,” said Lieutenant Tobias, the chief engineer of the Intrepid,Rozhenko’s commanding officer, and leader of this damage-control team. Captain Deighan had sent down several teams to different parts of the base to assess the damage and look for survivors. Given that the Intrepid’s sensor readings indicated no life signs, this second was a vain hope, but the captain was not about to rule out the possibility that somebodysurvived this mess.