The Blood-Dimmed Tide Read online

  Mere Anarchy

  The Blood-Dimmed Tide

  Howard Weinstein

  POCKET eBOOKS

  New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore

  An Original Publication of POCKET eBOOKS

  This eBook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  POCKET eBOOKS, a division of Trevor & Simon, Inc.

  Copyright © 2007 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

  This book is published by Pocket eBooks, a division of Trevor & Simon, Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  ISBN: xxx-xxx-xxx-x

  First Pocket eBook Edition June 2007

  Historian's Note

  The Blood-Dimmed Tide takes place in 2291, Stardate 9121.4- approximately eighteen months prior to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

  He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

  —human proverb

  Live by the sword. Die by the sword. Capture eternal honor.

  —Klingon Laws of Honor from the Scrolls of Kahless

  Wield the sharpest blade with the greatest care.

  —Vulcan scripture

  Prologue

  Seen from space, certain worlds- with wide blue oceans, emerald lands, and swirling veils of white clouds- whisper, Welcome.

  This particular planet- with wind-scoured, cratered plains, rusty mountains, and one ragged, inadequate sea filling a basin left behind by some ancient cataclysm- this planet snarled, Go away. Only its location, in treacherous unclaimed space near the Klingon and Romulan Empires, made it worth the skirmish taking place there.

  The lone, cloaked Klingon bird-of-prey in orbit was no match for two Romulan warships shedding their own cloaking fields as they opened fire. Several torpedoes found their target, confirming that no stealth technology was completely undetectable. A few explosive seconds later, all that remained of the Klingon ship was a bloom of shards glinting in the starlight as they hurtled away into space. Then the Romulan vessels turned their weapons on their primary target: a military outpost on the planet.

  Hunkered in an equatorial valley, the Klingon base consisted of two structures linked by a tunnel- one a bunker housing a half-dozen soldiers and a bank of deep-space scanners, the other a turret capped by a pair of disruptor cannons. With only one big gun operational, and deflector shields failing fast, the Klingon troops were all too aware that they were overmatched by the warbirds pounding them from space. They expected to be marching into their honored afterlives in Sto-Vo-Kor shortly.

  What the Romulan commanders didn’t expect, and did not detect in time, was the Klingon battle cruiser K’tanco sweeping in with its own weapons blazing. The element of surprise tipped the brief battle in favor of the Klingon cruiser. With precise fury, the Klingon ship routed the Romulans- one vessel destroyed, the other making a hasty retreat.

  Lusty victory cheers filled the Klingon bridge. The weapons officer called for song, but their commander glowered, dark and angry. “No,” Captain Kang said, “not when we must prepare for war with the Romulans… and perhaps the Federation as well.”

  Kang’s bridge officers roared their approval once again, since the prospect of battle in the name of honor was always welcome. But Kang didn’t share their enthusiasm. He knew what they did not- that the Klingon Empire was rotting from within, teetering on the edge of a forbidding abyss promising none of the eternal glory of Sto-Vo-Kor. Kang had shared these fears only with Mara, his wife and first officer, and his two oldest comrades, Kor and Koloth.

  Since before he had the strength to pick up a bat’leth, Kang had dreamed of living and dying as a warrior. His ancestors created a culture that prized uncompromising power so the Klingon people would never be subjugated. He’d served his empire with all his heart and soul, always marched into battle willingly, ready to shed his last drop of blood if his sacrifice would preserve the Klingon way. Now Kang faced the unthinkable. I know no other life. If the empire ceases to exist, what will I be?

  Chapter One

  Dressed in the comfort of her coziest robe and slippers, Raya elMora stood at the window of her bed-chamber and looked longingly out toward the placid S’rii Tuuliie meandering past the grounds of her official residence. The river’s ripples reflected the full light of Varnex, the larger of Mestiko’s paired moons, and the only one still orbiting the planet, presiding over the midnight sky. Back when she was a girl, this was just another provincial Larendan town, called Hur-tuuliie. She and her friends spent many a lazy summer day sailing with the river’s gentle currents, pretending to be explorers, collecting the sweet fruit which fell from the noggik groves along the marshy banks.

  That hometown was long gone, ravaged like most of the world by the same disaster that had sent the planet’s second moon, Kifau, careening out of Mestiko’s orbit. A new cosmopolis stood in its place. Renamed vosTraal, it was Mestiko’s global capital city. Raya’s childhood home was home again, but it wasn’t the same. Then again, she thought, nothing is the same, and it never will be.

  She padded across the carpet and sat at her simple desk made of noggik planks, which never lost their fragrance. Bathed in the soft glow of a lamp and her computer screen, she scrolled through a revised proposal for celebrations marking the upcoming twelveyear anniversary of her return to leadership of the planet’s ruling Zamestaad council. How could it be that long since the end of her exile on Kazar and her smashing election victory over the remnants of the corrupt, mar-Atyya regime? Raya sighed. She’d rejected the first ceremonial plans from her staff as too elaborate and self-congratulatory, and her chagrined aides had retreated to craft something more in keeping with their leader’s modesty.

  Frankly, she’d have preferred that the occasion pass with no more notice than the turning of a calendar page. But there was no escaping the tendency of civilized beings to pay considerable attention- too much, maybe- to milestones marking time’s progress.

  Bureaucracies possessed that same tendency, if only to justify their own existence. With the approach of the somber thirty-sixth anniversary of the devastation of their planet, government agencies worldwide spared no effort in preparing voluminous reports measuring Mestiko’s progress. When her staff offered summaries, Raya insisted on reading the full documents. So she knew as well as anyone that her people had indeed come a long way since the days after the radiation-ignited firestorms, whipped by violent winds and fueled by vast forests, had incinerated wilderness and cities alike. The boundless flooding storms that followed had quenched the holocaust but left behind a toxic, seared surface, nearly stripped of life.

  Call it the Pulse, the Scourer, or simply the disaster… no one knew back then if Mestiko could survive, much less flourish. Yet, even in those literally dark days of crushing despair, with a billion dead and wretched survivors forced underground, development and trade of natural resources had rebounded steadily and stabilized the planet’s economy. Once freed from Klingon meddling, the miraculous satellite system created by the Federation’s Dr. Marat Lon had restored the atmosphere, settled the climate, and permitted accelerated terraforming. That enabled the Kazarites to work their brand of ecological magic and achieve enough environmental regeneration to make the planet increasingly habitable and arable.

  Though it would take generations more for the population to even approach predisaster levels, people did what people do and the birth rate had begun to blossom. Many
Zamestaad council members insisted on heralding those triumphs, and Raya could hardly dispute that her world had made an amazing recovery, considering the near-fatal blow dealt by the rogue pulsar.

  It was the curse of politics that Raya’s public statements focused on success while her private thoughts dwelled on failures and frustrations. Food production and land reclamation still lagged behind predictions, which had been conservative to begin with. Ugly swaths of the planet remained barren, like wounds reluctant to heal. Will we ever truly recover? Or is this as good as it gets?

  Raya sighed again, slouched back in her chair, and picked up her mug of herbal tea. Never mind the debatable measures of material progress- it was the social-services reports that most troubled her. Rates of suicide, depression, and crime were rising. The planet’s once-thriving arts communities had failed to reinvigorate themselves. It might have seemed trivial that few important new dramatic works, novels, or musical compositions had been created since the Pulse. But Raya knew that culture sustained the soul, and the Payav soul seemed as charred and barren as the noggik groves after the disaster.

  Mestiko faced a looming spiritual crisis, one resistant to the calculus of charts and graphs, and nothing worried her more. Various studies attempted to quantify a rift in attitudes between generations born before and after the disaster. Those old enough to remember the good old days often found themselves drifting into nostalgic lethargy. Those just coming of age seethed with frustration, knowing they might never taste the halcyon existence whose loss their parents lamented. Lost souls flocked to the latest lunatic-fringe fundamentalist faction, this one preaching yet another new twist on the corrosive mar-Atyya belief that the Pulse was punishment for having abandoned the old religious ways, and warning of an even greater and final apocalypse to come. Just what this wounded world needs.

  Things could certainly have been worse at this point. But they could also have been better. Even Raya’s closest aides were unaware she’d been considering stepping down from Zamestaad leadership before her term was up. Not that she wasn’t proud of her stewardship, but maybe it was time for fresh hearts and minds….

  A frantic pounding on her apartment door disrupted her ruminations, and she immediately felt queasy. In all her life, Raya had never known a late-night knock to be a harbinger of good news. She swung the door open to find Jaarg etDalka, her young chief of staff, standing there, looking even more harried and pale than usual. “What’s wrong?”

  “The Discovery Center.” Jaarg swallowed and tried to quell the shiver in his voice. “It’s been attacked.”

  “What? Who- ?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  Raya’s head sank. She rubbed her long, still-elegant neck with both hands. She forced herself to breathe slowly, fighting off that spark of panic she always felt at the onset of a crisis. It was a reflex she’d learned to live with, and she knew the antidote: action. “Does Blee know?”

  Jaarg nodded. “I called her first.”

  “Good boy.” Raya smiled despite the situation, knowing her old friend and chief adviser Blee elTorno was already organizing a response.

  “She’s gathering all the information she can, and I’ve already summoned the security minister and the military chiefs. They’ll be at your office in ten minutes.”

  “Good. Oh- one other thing. Contact Ambassador Settoon and tell him I’ll need to see him within the hour. Now, go.”

  As Raya ducked into her closet and quickly threw on some casual clothes, she couldn’t even begin to guess why anyone would target the science institute on Varnex. It was no secret that some regional leaders still chafed at the surrender of sovereignty necessary for the Zamestaad to manage a generation-spanning global recovery. But even the naysayers generally saw the Discovery Center as a crowning achievement, built up from the ruins of Mestiko’s first lunar outpost, which had been severely damaged by the Pulse. To this day, almost a twelveyear after the center opened, it still infuriated Raya that anyone could object to an institution established not only to improve life on Mestiko but also to enhance the planet’s stature in the quadrant.

  Yet, the sentient capacity for discord apparently knew no bounds. Some contrarian politicians and civic leaders considered it their veritable vocation to pick at the center’s annual budget, though never with a vehemence that suggested they would sanction a violent attack on the place. And while she knew for a fact that certain religious zealots hated the progressive symbolism of the lunar science colony, she doubted they had the ability or reach to do something like this- not on their own, anyway.

  No, rooting out those responsible for this crime would entail poking under some altogether new rocks, and Raya dreaded what might come slithering out. As much as she did not want to drag the Federation into this, that might prove unavoidable.

  Just when things seem to be going along smoothly, somebody has to blow something up….

  Chapter Two

  “So… what’s wrong, Bones?”

  “What’s wrong?” Leonard McCoy sputtered over his coffee mug. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong.”

  Seated alone at a private corner table in the Enterprise-A mess hall, McCoy looked up at Captain Kirk looming over him. Noting the anxious twitch of McCoy’s eyebrows, Kirk mulled the option of hasty withdrawal. But, after all these years, he knew McCoy was willing to blurt what others bottled up, protocol be damned, and that made his cantankerous chief medical officer a useful barometer of the crew’s general mood.

  “Assuming that wasn’t a rhetorical question,” McCoy said, biting off each syllable, “the Klingons and Romulans are at each other’s throats, Spock’s gone, and there’s mayhem on Mestiko.”

  Well, Kirk thought with some consternation, that sums things up pretty accurately.

  Alliances between predators were notoriously prickly, so Kirk had long believed the Klingon-Romulan connection would eventually fray. That inevitable final act had apparently begun, with reports of sporadic scuffles along the Klingon-Romulan border setting the entire quadrant on edge. Saber-rattling drowned out depleted attempts at diplomatic conciliation. The difficulty of getting reliable intelligence out of either insular empire made it impossible to know with certainty their relative strength or even the reasons behind the hostilities- which only made the situation more tense. Kirk had no love and little respect for either of the Federation’s brutal enemies, and in his rosiest personal scenario, a war between them might lead to the demise of one and the weakening of the other. But wars rarely worked out according to anyone’s optimistic prophecies, and Kirk preferred to avoid dwelling on the nightmarish alternatives. When the time was right, he intended to make his opinions clear to Starfleet Command.

  He couldn’t help wondering if Spock’s sudden departure was related to the Klingon-Romulan nastiness. Not three days ago, with the Enterprise in Earth orbit, Spock had been summoned unexpectedly to a private meeting with Federation President Ra-ghoratreii at his office at the Palais de la Concorde in Paris. Then, without returning to the ship or providing any explanation to Kirk, Spock was dispatched on a mission so classified that Kirk could not extract a shred of information from any source on his whereabouts or when he’d be back from whatever the hell he was doing.

  Without Spock aboard, Commander Chekov had added the role of first officer to his duties and Lieutenant Saavik had taken over as senior science officer. But even though it had been five years since Spock’s stunning death and resurrection during the Genesis incident, Kirk and McCoy retained a shared raw memory of the void they’d felt without him then. Both felt uneasy about his absence now.

  As Kirk sat across the table from him, McCoy leaned over and muttered, “Don’t you ever tell Spock I said so, but he’s as close to indispensable as anybody on this ship.”

  Once again, Kirk knew McCoy was right. “Maybe that’s why the president picked him for this assignment.”

  “So meanwhile, we’ve got a mess on Mestiko, and we don’t even know what we’re dealing with.”

>   “Whatever it is, it’ll have to be handled minus one Vulcan.”

  Kirk hadn’t been to Mestiko in more than a decade, when he had clandestinely tried- and failed- to extract Dr. Marat Lon. He’d been enjoying retirement on Earth when the Enterprise delivered Raya elMora home from exile three years later. Their relationship had certainly had its ups and downs since the rogue pulsar dispassionately designated PSR 418-D/1015.3 had devastated Raya’s world. But once Raya had realized Kirk’s role in subtly engineering events to assist her return to power, their friendship had mellowed to a level of supportive warmth that had remained unwavering over time.

  Kirk always found Raya’s personal letters more satisfying to read than official reports. And although she often voiced her frustrations, Kirk believed the Payav were doing more than creating their own miracle- Mestiko was, in essence, an ongoing real-life restoration experiment, providing invaluable lessons that would likely save millions of lives on other planets facing future global disasters.

  In fact, Kirk had been so upbeat about Mestiko’s rebirth that he’d allowed himself to believe Raya and her people would face only smooth sailing ahead. That was why this attack on their lunar science center was so troubling. He also knew how stubbornly independent his friend preferred to be. She was always conscious of the need to prove her recovering world didn’t need constant aid. Though he didn’t know all the details yet, the situation had to be pretty bad for Raya to call for help.

  As the Enterprise approached Mestiko, Kirk contacted the Federation embassy in vosTraal, and Ambassador Settoon appeared on the viewscreen. Settoon was a burly being from Ana’siuol, a planet inhabited by humanoids whose general affability made them natural diplomats. The Ana’siuolo’s otherwise unexceptional facial features were defined by a single, startlingly large, multifaceted eye set just above the fleshy nose. Though Kirk had never met Settoon in person, they’d spoken often since the ambassador’s posting to Mestiko eight years earlier. Kirk recalled being mesmerized by that large central eye at first, but Settoon was even more jovial than most of his people; before long, the smile dominated the eye.