Warship Deathstrike
Pergamum Nebula
“Vauss, you are a true imbecile. There is no prevarication about you; you are every bit as stupid as you appear.” Gripping his lieutenant by the throat, Baladon crushed him against the bulkhead. “Were it not for the lie Mother tells of our kinship, you would find yourself floating with the jetsam outside.”
Vauss struggled against his massive older brother’s hold. He attempted to speak, without success. Hulking and yellowish gray, Lurians had faces that normally looked like shriveled pieces of fruit. His had turned nearly fluorescent.
“What’s that?” the gravel-voiced Baladon asked, baring his teeth. “You wish to admit your first mistake, surviving childhood?”
Back at a control station, Baladon’s navigator—also a brother—mumbled without much interest. “He’s choking. Or something.”
“Hmph.”
Baladon had attempted to strangle his siblings many times before; he usually knew when Vauss was about to expire. It wasn’t easy to kill a Lurian. Their bodies were stuffed with redundant organs, as if evolution had predicted just how stupid some of Baladon’s relatives would later be. Someone who might drink used reactor coolant on a dare could use a spare stomach or two.
Baladon brought his head centimeters from his brother’s face and glared into his bulging yellow eyes. “We had one photon torpedo, Vauss. And you wasted it.”
“Nrfflmph,” Vauss replied.
Baladon decided to take that as an apology and released his hold. Vauss fell to the deck, gasping.
“The detonation was too soon. You cost us Enterprise.”
“Not . . . me,” Vauss muttered between wheezes. He pointed. “Blame Jeld! Ship . . . too far.”
The navigator, younger brother to the two of them, snapped back, “Clouds too thick.”
“Ship too far. I said get close!”
“We’d be in their galley!”
Galley. The word, and its suggestion of food, calmed them all. Baladon knew this was normal for Lurians, and indeed offered their society what stability it had. It was also the longest word many of his relatives knew.
Baladon turned from his brother and stalked about Deathstrike’s dilapidated bridge. “There is no need to argue,” he said, adopting his most leaderly tone as he plopped down in his command chair. “You are all equally incompetent. You function together as parts of a machine that does absolutely nothing. When the end comes, I will be able to say with pride: each crewmember aboard brought me to it.”
Several on the bridge erupted in self-congratulatory cheers. Baladon closed his eyes and groaned.
It was not true, as a spacers’ joke went, that in the land of the Lurians, the one who knew how to operate an automatic door was king. Many leaders Baladon had known would’ve failed that test. It was why he had left. Born into a family of privateers, he had the requisite brutality—but also a gift for words. That set him apart from most Lurians, who kept their thoughts to themselves—when they had them. His smart-sounding talk attracting attention, Baladon had promised great wealth to warrior families that would join him in his piratic exploits outside the Ionite Nebula. The nearby Pergamum, as stolen Starfleet charts called it, was larger and mostly unknown, easy to sell as a vast realm of plunder and profit.
He’d misjudged on two counts. The recruits that he’d hoped would be sharper than his relatives turned out to be equally useless, barely able to operate a starship at all. And they wasted his precious black-market ammunition on the few targets they’d found. Those pickings were meager, indeed, because conditions in the Pergamum were far harsher than in their home nebula. They hadn’t seen as much as a workpod in weeks—
—until Enterprise appeared. The frozen image of the starship still remained on the screen on the starboard wall, taunting them for their failure. Deathstrike’s surveillance drones had spotted her days before; building stealth probes for use in nebulae was one thing Lurians were good at. Baladon had stalked the Starfleet vessel, using the clouds to cover his approach. And then, just as Enterprise lingered near a colossal planet known in records as Susquatane, the starship turned and rocketed for the nebular boundary.
“No one saw us,” Jeld said. “We had a clear shot.”
“Don’t start,” replied Vauss, rubbing his neck. “And it was just one torpedo.” That was the other long word Vauss knew. He gestured to the Enterprise image. “What could it do to that?”
“The same thing we always do,” Baladon growled. “Strike the unshielded aft—then send over the boarding pods. They couldn’t have more than a couple hundred people over there. We have that many belowdecks, eager to kill on command.”
“They want food,” Jeld said. “So do I.”
Baladon didn’t want to hear it—but he was hearing something. Yellow eyes shifted. “What is that sound?”
“Rogall is beeping,” Vauss said, pointing to the comm station—or, more precisely, the corpse slumped over it and bleeding out. The comm operator had announced during the earlier pursuit that he was going to hail Enterprise to ask the Starfleet ship to slow down. He’d gotten his hand to the send control when Baladon relieved him of his duties. The leader’s knife still protruded from the unfortunate Lurian’s back.
“What is it?”
“Message,” Vauss said after shoving the corpse to one side. He read aloud from what sounded like an intercept: “Alert. Hos . . . til . . .”
“Hostilities,” Baladon said.
“. . . opened with Klingon Empire . . .”
After the interminable wait while Vauss finished reading the entire message, Baladon punched his hand with his fist. “That explains it! Why they were in haste to leave the nebula—and why they were willing to take the worst route possible.”
Jeld frowned. “Then they won’t come back.”
“They aren’t out yet—which means we still have a chance.” Baladon regarded the image on the wall and rubbed his hairless chin. “A Starfleet ship fancier than any we’ve ever seen. I ask you, Vauss—what might that be worth to the Klingons?”
“Klingons like fancy ships?”
“No, my good dolt. If we’ve never seen anything like this Enterprise before, it’s a lock that they haven’t. If we bring that ship to them—or even just a shuttle, a sickbay couch, a serving spoon—it might be worth more to them than it would be to us!”
“How much?”
“Fortune will tell.” Baladon cracked his knuckles. “Follow the Enterprise, brothers. This time, we’re going to get it right.”
And if not, he thought, I’m soon to be an only child!