Chapter Five



LEFT ARM NUMB, his chest constricted from the dust, Kirk scraped between the stunned combatants as they stood heaving and staring, and managed to keep from going down on his knees again.

"Spock!" he called.

No answer. He didn't really expect one.

The Klingon general lowered his arms and watched as the captain crossed the battleground. The general seemed to understand and stood like Henry VIII on a jousting field, watching as Kirk came around the gravelly talus skirt.

Kirk first saw Spock as a swatch of blue and black quilted against the stones, surrounded by Giotto and his men, who ringed the fallen body and stood off several Klingons who wanted to deal the death blow if it hadn't been dealt already.

He thought the Vulcan moved, but there was so much dust. . . .

Everything had stopped, just stopped. Klingons, Starfleet crew, Capellans, all standing still—those who were still standing—looking at the Klingon general who waited like a lone monolith at their center, and at Kirk as he moved between the bodies of the fallen.

Maybe this was some kind of demand for surrender. A full general?

He glanced at the Klingon general in something like contempt or dare—even he wasn't sure—but kept to his purpose. One thing at a time.

Giotto's men parted for him, but kept their weapons up and didn't slack their stance against the Klingon soldiers.

It felt good to kneel finally. The ground had been pulling at him—it felt good to give in.

Spock was looking up, blinking, dazed but conscious, at least. His lips were pressed in frustration and effort, pickle-green blood showing in scratches on his forehead and the point of his right ear.

As the gravel cut into his knee, Kirk pressed his good hand to Spock's tattered sleeve.

"You all right?" he asked.

"Stunned," Spock said with effort, and with pain that he was trying to hide. His voice was as gravelly as the stuff he was lying on. Cautiously he raised his head, brows drawn, then in something like amusement added, "And, I believe, grazed here and there. . . ."

"Where?" Kirk persisted.

Suddenly aggravated at not being able to self-diagnose, Spock glanced up at him and belittled himself with a bob of his angular brows. "I am not certain."

Glancing up at the needle of rock above them, Kirk realized it was about two decks higher than he'd estimated from way over there. "How did you survive that?"

"Starfleet training," Spock said lightly. "I rolled."

Kirk pressed out a sympathetic grin. "Think you can get up? We've got a new development."

Faced with that, Spock pressed his palms to the stones and tried to lift his shoulders. His voice cracked as he grunted, "Shall certainly attempt it."

"Mr. Giotto, give us a hand."

In the back of his mind he could hear the protests of common sense as he and Giotto pulled the injured first officer to his feet, but it was important to Kirk that the enemies see the Starfleet officers upright and thinking. Once they got him up it became clear that Spock couldn't stand on his own and Kirk accepted that he might be making a mistake.

He waved in a yeoman to help Giotto, then said, "Bring him over here. I want him to hear whatever goes on."

At the center of what was quickly becoming a scraggly ring of mixed combatants, the Klingon general turned in place. "Who is in command here?" he bellowed, but he was looking from Klingon to Klingon, not at the Starfleet team.

Behind the Security detail, Kirk straightened and watched. Was this some kind of crank?

"I am!" A Klingon commander came up over the incline and hurried down, clearly infuriated. "Why have you stopped our victory?"

The general's big body turned and he raised his arms in contempt. "I see no victory here. What's the matter with you? Why are you squabbling over this bit of dirt? Wasting men and munitions, and for what? A few shipments of toparine? You're a fool."

The commander waved his hand at Kirk. "They killed my representative!"

One of the big Capellans stepped forward and contradicted, "I killed your representative. After he betrayed us."

The blunt honesty silenced the Klingon commander, and Kirk took that as a cue to move in. He didn't care about their inner quarrels. He forced himself not to limp as he put his back to the commander as a kind of insult and raised his chin to the general.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked.

The high-ranker squared off before him. "I am General Kellen."

Behind Kirk, the other Klingons collectively gasped and relaxed their postures in respect.

"Kellen?" Kirk repeated. "Of the Muscari Incident?"

"Yes."

The general waited until his identity sank in all around. Even if they didn't know what he had done in the past, they had heard his name and they knew his reputation. So did Kirk. General Kellen … the only calm Klingon Kirk knew of.

That kind of thing gets around.

The general didn't seem particularly impressed with himself, but he was clearly counting on Kirk's being impressed with him.

And it was close.

They stood together on the printless stone flat, face-to-face, sizing each other up.

After he'd ticked off a measured pause, the general asked, "Your ship is the Enterprise?"

Narrowing his eyes in the bright sunlight, Kirk felt his brow tighten. "Yes …"

"Then you are Captain James B. Kirk?"

"James T. So what?"

"Then I am here to ask for your help on behalf of the Klingon Empire and your own Federation."

"Help about what?"

"We need your help, Captain. The demons have returned. The Havoc has come."


"Does this mean you're declaring a cease-fire?"

The question had already gotten its answer, but Kirk wanted his men and the Klingon men to hear it from the local top, which at the moment was General Kellen. He didn't want anyone ending up with a dagger in the back from the overzealous among them.

Peering over those funny glasses, Kellen nodded hurriedly. "Yes. And I should mention that your starship is about to punch holes in my cruiser. Instruct them not to."

Perhaps the general was fishing for an act of trust, or at least balance, or maybe he just wanted what he said he wanted. A chance to talk.

Either way, there would be a chance to pause and regroup. Never taking his eyes off Kellen, Kirk snapped up his communicator and flipped open the antenna grid.

"Kirk to Enterprise. Go to defensive posture … cease fire and stand by. If you don't hear from me in ten minutes, open fire." Without waiting for acknowledgment from Scott, he lowered the communicator sharply enough to make a point. "I appreciate who you are, General, but you can't have this planet."

Kellen held out both hands in acquiescence. "I do not want this planet. I don't know why some elements do. It has always been my standing to let the Federation tend these backward herds. Then we'll take the planets when they're worth something."

Kirk snorted. "Wanna bet?"

"It has always been a mystery to me when the Federation will fight and why," Kellen said. "That you will fight to the last man to defend something you do not care to possess. A planet like this is not worth the loss of a ship of the line. I give you this planet without contention. Congratulations. I have already spoken to your Starfleet Command. They have agreed to let me approach you if I agreed to stop this battle. It is stopped. Now I must speak with you, Captain Kirk."

His voice, though he was a large man, was high-pitched, Kirk noticed now, not low as one might expect a large man's to be, yet it had a certain ring of authority—probably out of sheer practice.

"You'll have to wait your turn," Kirk said. "I'll be back in when I've taken care of my men."

Kellen said nothing, but clasped his hands behind his wide back and struck a stance of impatience.

With a measured glance at Spock, Kirk swung around and scanned his surprised crewmen and the disgruntled Klingons, all standing among each other, eyeing each other's weapons, none of them sure what to do.

He turned another quarter turn and spotted McCoy, kneeling at the body of Ensign Wilson.

Good a place as any to start.

With a purposeful stride he hurried—but not too fast—to the doctor and kept his back to Kellen.

"Well," he muttered, "how do you like that?"

"Not much," the doctor muttered back, gazing at poor Wilson as he rose to his feet.

Kirk surveying quickly the surgeon's bruised face. "Are you hurt?"

McCoy blinked, frowned, rubbed his hands together, and said, "No, Captain, I'm not hurt."

"Then get started with your triage."

"Yes, sir."

As the party broke up and others gathered around for instructions, Kirk dashed off orders to others standing around.

"Log that I gave a field commission to Zdunic. He's now a lieutenant."

"Acknowledged," Spock said from behind him.

Weakness in the baritone voice registered suddenly. Kirk turned to his first officer and realized Spock had been answering him as if nothing was wrong, but the first officer was still leaning heavily on the yeoman, picking at his tricorder, valiantly trying to record the details of the aftermath and his captain's orders.

"Mr. Spock. . . . McCoy! Over here first. Yeoman, set him down." Kirk moved in as Spock was gingerly lowered to sit on a handy boulder, and carefully pulled the tricorder strap up over Spock's head to hand it to the yeoman. "Spock … sorry."

There was more pain in the Vulcan's face now. He was having trouble masking it. His lean frame was clenched, stomach muscles tight, shoulders and arms stiff as he pressed down on the boulder, though he didn't take his eyes from the Klingon general. Distrust pulled at him through his pain.

"Curious, Captain," he said, watching the Klingon general, "that he would concern himself with a skirmish."

"He's got me curious," Kirk acknowledged.

"What happened?" McCoy asked as he hurried to them. If he had seen Spock a moment ago in the background, he hadn't noticed that the Vulcan was being held up by the yeoman beside him.

"He fell," Kirk said. "From up there. I can't believe you didn't see it happen."

"I was busy." McCoy ran his medical tricorder from Spock's shoulder to his pelvis. "Jim, my God—you shouldn't have moved him! He's got spinal injuries."

Priorities screwed on backward. Kirk knew he'd made a mistake. Always thinking of Spock as not just half-human, but superhuman.

Spock was pale as sea wake. Deep-rooted pain etched his face. He still watched Kellen.

"Take him back to the ship, emergency priority," Kirk said, letting himself feel guilty.

Spock looked up. "Captain, I would like to stay."

There was something behind his eyes. Havoc … whatever that was. Spock knew something and he wanted to hear what Kellen had to say.

And I need him here, if he knows something.

Under his swatch of dusty brown hair, McCoy was glaring at Kirk. Pretty clear message there, too.

"A few minutes," Kirk decided. "McCoy, you take care of him here for now. Contact your staff and beam down a full medical team to take over triage."

"Captain," the doctor began, protesting with his tone.

"I said a few minutes. Until we find out what's going on."

Fuming, his blue eyes boiling on Kirk, the doctor cracked open his communicator. "McCoy to Enterprise. Patch me through to sickbay."

Plagued not by the glare but by the reason for it, Kirk was suddenly motivated to pierce the mystery fast and get Spock to the ship.

He swung around and stepped back to Kellen. "All right, General, I've taken care of my men. Now let's talk about you."

Kellen nodded. "The Havoc has come and we have to deal with it."

Kirk eyed him. "I don't like the sound of that 'we.' What's 'havoc'?"

Spock tipped his head to one side. "In Klingon lore, 'Havoc' is essentially an apocalypse. The releasing of all captive souls to wreak revenge on those who imprisoned them."

"Yes," Kellen confirmed, wagging a finger at the Vulcan. "Yes, yes."

"How do you know it's coming?" Kirk asked.

"My squadron encountered the beginning of it. The coming of the Havoc ship."

"The apocalypse comes in a ship?" Cynicism blistered the air between them. "General, I'm not in a good mood."

"And I am not here to put you in one." Kellen's weathered face didn't change. He utterly believed that he was here for the right reasons. He looked like a latter-day Ben Franklin waiting to see whether he'd be the father of a nation or on the business end of a noose.

Kirk drilled him with a meaningful glare. "What happened to you? Start from the beginning."

"There was a mass falloff," the general began. "At first we thought our instruments were failing, but then the sun of a nearby solar system began to expand and the planets to disintegrated. This continued until all things went to zero—"

"Nothing could exist in a zero-mass environment," Spock countered, as McCoy worked on him. "Everything that moved would accelerate to the speed of light."

"We came within seconds of that," the Klingon confirmed, nodding at Spock as if anxious to be understood. "We watched as the nearest solar system broke to hyperlight and was vaporized. We managed to hold our ships to positive mass by diverting all our power to the shields. We were down to one one-hundredth percent of our mass when the effect stopped. We …" He paused, measured the impact of what he was saying, then decided to admit, "We did lose one ship."

Everyone everywhere was utterly still. Even McCoy stopped in the middle of applying a field splint to Spock's back.

As they all stared at Kellen, the whine of transporters cut into the tension.

To Kirk's right, six pillars of garbled energy buzzed into place, then quickly and noisily materialized into the forms of McCoy's emergency medical staff of interns and nurses.

McCoy waved at them without saying a word, and they dispersed to triage the wounded.

"I have recordings of this," Kellen offered, pulling Kirk's attention back. He spoke with control, as if completely convinced they would want these. He raised his arm, and pulled from his belt a Klingon tricorder. "The device has a translator."

He held it before Kirk, and did not lower it.

Kirk tilted his head to his left, toward Spock. "Over there."

Without pause Kellen took the one step necessary to hand the tricorder to the yeoman with Spock, but he never took his eyes off Kirk.

The yeoman blinked as if he didn't know what to do, but a wag of Kirk's finger at the tricorder snapped him out of it. He keyed up the instrument, working as well as he could with a Klingon mechanism, then faced Spock and ran the recordings on the small screen for him.

"I was transporting back to my flagship," Kellen went on while Spock watched the tricorder, "when my beam was diverted to another place. At first I believed I was on some distant planet, for there were caves and growing moss and a source of light and heat. I explored this place and discovered solid metal walls and electrical lighting with signal panels. But also there was a corridor of skulls."

"I'm sorry?" Kirk interrupted. "Did you say 'skulls'?"

"Skulls. Bare, boiled skulls. Of inconceivable shapes and kinds—creatures scarcely imaginable, Captain Kirk. Each was set in a niche of its own from which moss bled and lichen grew. Then, it … came out of the wall."

"What came? A skull?"

"No. No skull … the Iraga itself."

The Klingon general nearly whispered the word, as if speaking the profane, yet he was trying to be clinical and scientific.

Iraga. Didn't sound familiar.

Kirk canted forward slightly enough to get across his do-I-have-to-keep-asking expression.

"A … vision from our past," Kellen said, sifting for words. "A gathering of evils in one body, with snakes living out of its head and flame in its eyes. It means nothing to you, but to Klingons … it is our past coming back."

"We have legends of snake-headed beings," Kirk mentioned, "but I don't recall anything with fire for eyes. Mr. Spock?"

"I am unfamiliar with any such legend, Captain," the science officer said. "Research may prove of service."

"Captain, please," McCoy wedged in.

Kirk gave him a shut-up nod, then looked at Kellen. "Let's deal with facts right now. You say there was a power source? Readout panels? And you could breathe?"

"Yes. I felt the engines of the ship."

"Demons don't need atmosphere or conventional power. And they certainly don't need engines."

Kellen acknowledged that with what might have been a shrug. "Whatever is going on, legends and reality have come together and this might be the end of things for us all. Whatever has been our collective nightmare for eons has now come to ruin us again. We must work together now. Compared to those, we are so much alike that I would rather be your slave than live on the same planet with them. Now that the invaders are here, there is no difference between you and me anymore."

A hot breeze coughed down the incline between the two breasts of rock and across the warm belly of the shale flats. Kirk found himself suddenly sweating under his shirt. He didn't like the feeling. He wanted to scratch his chest as perspiration trickled down his ribs.

He glared at Kellen. The sun enhanced his frown. His eyes were hurting.

"Captain," Spock called.

Kirk pursed his lips and crossed the ten steps or so to where Spock was sitting on the boulder.

Grimly Spock said, "He is telling the truth. At least, he is truthfully relating what he saw. And according to vessel-stress readings and analyses of the computer registry, there did seem to be a mass falloff. Their records also have a visual log of a solar system's burst to warp speed."

"Could his records be falsified?"

"Of course."

"But you don't think they are?"

Spock sat as stiff as an Oriental statue. "No, sir."

"What could cause a mass falloff?"

"A weapon." Kellen surged, plunging two steps closer before a handful of Security men stepped between him and Kirk and Spock. "A shot fired across our civilization's bows, Kirk. For after it, there came the vessel of demons. We have to put aside hating each other for now."

"Put aside decades of trouble just like that?"

"What do you want?" Kellen asked, becoming much more agitated than anyone would expect from the calmest Klingon in the Empire. "You want me to imprison my grandson? You want me to find a husband for your ugliest sister? Tell me! This is important, Kirk! If you could have one thing from the Klingon Empire, what would you want?"

Irritated by the pettiness Kellen seemed to take for granted, Kirk bristled. "You know what I want. The same thing the whole Federation wants. Freedom and peace for all our peoples."

"You want us to leave you alone."

"Not enough. You have to leave your own people alone too."

The whole idea crossed the general's face as utterly foreign, but he didn't laugh or show any sign that Kirk had asked for something he wouldn't consider today. Kellen seemed willing to hand over the galaxy if he could get the help he wanted.

"Just a minute," Kirk stalled. He turned his back on the general and lowered his voice to Spock and McCoy. "Opinions?"

"Obviously profound," Spock murmured, "if the effect on him is so profound that the tension between Klingons and the Federation seems childish to him now."

"Whatever's going on," McCoy nearly whispered, "it's got Kellen spooked. And from what I've heard about this particular Klingon, he doesn't spook lightly."

Kirk looked at him. "Are you saying we should go?"

"Captain, I'll say anything you want if you'll let me take Spock to sickbay."

"Captain," Kellen interrupted, and waited until Kirk turned back to him. "I do not know if I can give you the things you ask," he said, "but I give my word as a warrior—I will do everything I can for the rest of my life to work toward a treaty. You help us survive today … and I will dedicate my life to your wish."

What?

The Klingons around the battleground stirred and audibly choked at what they had just heard. Kirk's men held very still, cocooned in disbelief.

"You can take me aboard as hostage if you like," Kellen added, "but help us against them!"

Was this Klingon bravado? A bet Kellen was making with himself? An experienced general knew the Federation would never take hostages.

So I will.

"Fine. You'll stay with us." Through Kellen's surprise, Kirk finished, "We'll go out there, and we'll see what this is."