Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice (2 page)

“Yes, Captain, you are,” Ssura said with a nod. “Are there any other questions you have that I cannot answer?”

“A ship-ful,” Riker replied, the frown deepening.

They entered a turbolift and the slight junior officer tapped in a destination code with a clawed finger before looking up at him, his green eyes wide. “Sir, you are possibly thinking I am being obstructive. That is not my intent. May I speak freely?”

Riker gave a wary nod. “Until I say otherwise, you can consider that a standing order.”

“My colleagues . . . fellow officers of junior rank . . . they sought to compel me to ask you as to what you may have heard out in the greater quadrant about . . . events at hand.”

Despite himself, Riker gave a bitter chuckle. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Ssura gave a shrug. “Again, another waste of your time, sir. There have been few official statements in the immediate aftermath of President Bacco's death. The Federation Council speaks of it as required for issues of security.”

Riker raised an eyebrow. “And yet there are unconfirmed reports and gossip on every media channel in the quadrant.”

“Indeed so. Who can tell what is true, and what is supposition?” said the lieutenant. The turbolift halted and the doors opened. “Here we are.” Ssura led Riker along a corridor lined with conference chambers and briefing rooms.

Riker's first clue that this would be no ordinary meeting had been when Ssura ordered the lift to go to the conference levels of the complex instead of directly to Akaar's office on the upper floors. Now as they approached one of the doorways, he saw four men in the dark, nondescript suits that were the typical uniform of the Federation Council's security detail.

Each of the Protection Detail operatives wore optical-aural comm devices that looped over one ear, suspending a small holographic lens over their eyes. One of them made no attempt to hide the fact he was scanning Riker and Ssura with a military-specification tricorder, but they all stepped aside as the doors opened.

Riker's lips thinned as he heard the echo of Vale's words about a gallows march, and he entered.

*  *  *

It was a tribunal chamber, and Riker was standing on the wrong side of it. This wasn't the first time he had been in places like this, a curved raised bench ahead of him and a panel of unsmiling senior officers arrayed behind it. But in the past, each time he had known
what he was walking into. Here and now, Riker came up short, suddenly wondering.

Had he done something wrong? In the midst of all the concerns washing over the Federation at this moment, had something important slipped past his notice? Suddenly, Will felt like a midshipman again, about to be called on the carpet for some infraction of regulations.

Ssura halted at a respectful distance behind him as Riker walked to the podium. Directly in front of the captain sat Fleet Admiral Leonard James Akaar, his hard-eyed and craggy face framed by shoulder-length hair the shade of gunmetal. The Capellan, tall and broad like all the males of his species, was a head higher than the olive-skinned Vulcan woman to his right and the Benzite male to his left—even while Akaar was seated. The other two admirals shared Akaar's steady, unwavering focus.

“Captain William T. Riker, commander
Starship Titan,
” he announced formally, “reporting as ordered.” As the words left his mouth, Riker noticed another group in the chamber. Seated off to one side were figures in civilian garb, and by their manner he immediately pegged them as staff of the Federation Council. He made a point of memorizing their faces for later review. Among them sat a Tellarite with heavily braided hair and a shaggy beard; a deep, disdainful scowl showed across his face.

“Riker,” began Akaar, his voice a low rumble of thunder. “You are fully aware of our current situation?”

He decided to risk being completely candid with the superior officer. “In all honesty? Not
fully
aware, Admiral.”

“That will be rectified in due course,” said the Benzite.

Akaar went on. “Unfolding circumstances require an immediate reorganization of certain Starfleet assets and personnel.” Riker caught the momentary flicker of the admiral's gaze toward the civilians. “Despite concerns from some quarters, I have deemed it necessary to issue a series of priority commands and re-tasking orders. You are subject to such an order, and so is the
Titan
and her crew.”

Riker felt the blood drain from his face.
My ship.
His first thought was of his command, suddenly slipping from his grasp.
He's going to take away my ship.
He swallowed hard, feeling the metaphorical noose tightening around his career.
No,
he told himself.
Not possible. Not after all we've done.
Titan
has earned her place!

The Vulcan officer read from a padd on the desk in front of her. “As of this stardate, the
U.S.S. Titan
's mission of exploration is hereby suspended and her primary area of operations redesignated to Sector 001 and surrounding zones. The
Starship Ganymede
will extend her mission profile in the Gum Nebula in the
Titan
's stead.”

“You are hereby relieved of your post as commanding officer,” Akaar went on, and the words landed like a punch in the gut. “New tasking to commence simultaneously.” He stood up and beckoned Riker. “Step forward.”

Riker did as he was told, his legs leaden and heavy. As Akaar approached, he found his voice again. “Sir, what is—?”

Akaar didn't give him the chance to finish the question. Instead, he reached up to Riker's throat and
with remarkable dexterity, tugged at the side of his collar. Akaar's hand came away and in his fingers were four gold pips; the signifiers of a captain's rank.

Riker met Akaar's gaze, but the stern Capellan gave him nothing in return. With his other hand, the commander of the fleet pressed something into Riker's grip and stepped back.

Will looked down, outwardly rigid, inwardly in shock. There, in the palm of his hand, was a new rank sigil, a two-gold pip inside a gold rectangle.
What the hell?

“William T. Riker, you are summarily promoted to the rank of rear admiral, with all the requirements and responsibilities thereof.” The Vulcan officer said the words, but Riker was still trying to keep up.

“Your assignment is here at Starfleet Command,” Akaar told him briskly. “Your designation will be ‘flag officer without portfolio,' but you will report directly to me. Your mission is to act in support of my command in the current time of crisis.”

“And . . . my crew?”

“For now, you have leave to retain the
Titan
as your flagship, if that is what you wish.”

Riker took a deep breath, his fist tightening around the rank pin. He spoke quietly. “Admiral Akaar, sir, I don't think that I can accept this.”

Akaar's dark eyes flashed. “Put it on, man,” he growled, low and angry. “Or you'll leave this room with your discharge papers. Clear?”

Refusal, it seemed, was not an option. Riker glanced at the Tellarite and the other civilians, who were already gathering themselves to leave, as if they had dismissed the entire discussion. He had the sudden, damning sense that he was being used as a proxy
in this arena, pulled without justification into a game where he didn't know the rules or the players.

A flare of anger lit inside him, a resentment at being treated like a dupe. He wanted to demand an explanation, to force it from Akaar then and there, but he knew that would never happen. What choice did he have to find the answers he wanted unless he accepted? More was going on in the Federation's corridors of power than he could guess at, that much was certain.

Riker felt as if he had been pushed to the edge of a cliff. He could fall . . . or he could stand fast.

Slowly and carefully, he reached up to his collar and snapped the sigil into place.

*  *  *

Feathery flakes of toxin-laden snow fell from a sky that resembled a sheet of beaten lead. The lower-than-standard gravity of the frigid little world encouraged the lazy blizzards that constantly washed across its surface, a far-off and feeble sun doing little more than warming the landscape to somewhere just below freezing point. Rounded towers of greenish ice, polluted by heavy metals in the soil, reached for the low clouds, occasionally backlit by flashes of lightning from over the line of the near horizon.

The planet was an unwelcoming place, barely capable of holding on to a thin and unforgiving biosphere. What life existed here was ugly and full of fury, rapacious beasts that preyed on each other in bursts of brutal savagery.

Some of the warriors expressed the desire to sharpen their skills with an impromptu hunt of the larger ursine forms, but their leader put down any such thoughts with an angry snarl. This was not a huntsman's retreat, not some game for youths. They had
been called here for a mission, a deed that involved a weight of blood spilled and blood yet to be spilled.

The leader was the only one of them who knew the full dimension of the sortie. She alone knew why they were on this nameless, ice-rimed rock, and she had seen fit not to impart it to her men. She required only their obedience.

Some of them, the ones too quick to act and too slow to consider, would not have shown the correct dedication to the deed had they known its origins. No matter. All that they needed to know they had been told. This mission was about revenge, and that emotion sang to the heart of every Klingon.

Commander Ga'trk rolled back the hood of the gray battle cloak from her head and allowed the burning cold to sear her face. Ice crystals had already turned her brows a muddy white, and she brushed them away, taking care not to let the toxic snow anywhere near her eyes or lips. She peered owlishly through the storm, surveying the shapes of the prefabricated buildings below her. At her side, her subaltern Koir was using a periscope sight to do the same, running a passive scan for sensor beams or cloaked guardians.

From the top of the ridge where they crouched, Ga'trk could count six distinct dome-tents, common structures of Ferengi manufacture built for temporary colonies and used on a thousand different frontier worlds. Flexible tube corridors connected some of them, and dim illuminators picked out the shapes of heat-lock doors.

“No detections,” reported Koir. “Transport inhibitor remains active.” His words were as much for her ears as they were for those observing the unfolding events through the monitor device clipped to the warrior's
shoulder. Through its omni-directional eye, a real-time holographic relay of the mission was being beamed back to their support ship and on to some nameless place where Ga'trk's masters watched and waited.

The commander accepted Koir's report without comment. Somewhere in the camp, a dispersal field generator was throwing out enough ionic distortion to render a direct beam-in impossible, but that did not deter the Klingon. To teleport in at point-blank range, to appear standing over an enemy as he rested and gut him before he could rise? Where was the challenge in that? Similarly, they could have bombarded the site from low orbit with a stun blast or erased it completely with a photon torpedo, but such tactics were the tools of weaklings.

No
. The work of Ga'trk and her unit was to be the silent, lethal hand of the Empire. They had no formal designation within the ranks of the imperial military; they eschewed the gaudy trappings of honor and tribute that so many of their kinsmen counted as measure of their worth. Their trophies were in darkness and silence, in the unseen footprint and the vanishing of a foe.

Commander Ga'trk and her warriors had no medals and chains of status. The only thing they bore with pride was a brand—a single word, written across their chest beneath an Imperial trefoil.

The word was
qa'
; some translated it in the tongues of other races as if it meant
ghost,
but that did not plumb the full depths of the name. These were soldiers whose duty was to move like the breath of wind and leave no trace they had ever been there. No trace, that is, but the erasure of their chosen targets.

Ga'trk drew her
mek'leth
from the scabbard beneath her cloak with one hand and with the other hand, she drew a shrouded disruptor pistol. It was the signal Koir and the five other Klingons had been waiting for.

Like stalking wolves, they swept fast and silent over the lip of the ice ridge. Keeping low, the warriors fanned out into three smaller groups, approaching the encampment in a pincer formation.

The orders from the general had been direct and gave no room for interpretation. The terrorists hiding in this place were to be captured alive for forcible after-action interrogation. Terminations would be seen as failures and punished as such; Ga'trk's warriors were as skilled as surgeons with their blades, and they were expected to be precise.

It had been in a mission under similar parameters that intelligence had come to light, the same intelligence that had led them to this ice world. In that instance, the boarding of a gunrunner ship and the execution of a crew of Orions had given up this locale. Ga'trk frowned at the thought of that operation; compared to this sortie, it had been undisciplined, all noise and brute force. In the aftermath, mistakes made had required her to discharge two errant soldiers with her own
bat'leth
.

She hoped the data they had compelled from the Orions before they died had been worthwhile. Up until the moment she laid eyes on the camp, the commander had thought this to be a fool's errand.

The cowards in those domes, hiding in the snows and unaware of the killers that stalked them, had murdered an empress, and they were soon to pay for it. Not Ga'trk's queen, of course, but still the leader of an honored ally and thus undeserving of a wastrel's fate.