Alone in the interstellar darkness more than four hundred light-years from Andoria, on the border of the frontier sectors known collectively to the Federation as the Taurus Reach, stood Starfleet’s Starbase 47, better known to its denizens and visitors as Starbase Vanguard. The Watchtower-class space station was home to more than two thousand personnel and presently served as the home port and base of operations for three Starfleet starships: the heavy cruiser Endeavour, the frigate Buenos Aires, and the scout ship Sagittarius.
To one side of Vanguard lay the vast territory of the Klingon Empire, a colossal threat waiting for its moment to strike. On the opposite side sprawled the secretive domain of the Tholian Assembly. Where the Klingons could be relied upon to compete with Starfleet for access to the secrets of the Taurus Reach, the Tholians had made it their priority to prevent anyone from unraveling those ancient mysteries—by any means necessary.
The office of the Starfleet Intelligence liaison resided deep inside the station’s domelike command tower. It comprised a few small suites and a handful of private offices, all of them hardened against external surveillance or intrusion, and it was served by several encrypted hard-line uplinks to the station’s subspace communications array.
Like so many other expenditures made in the service of an interstellar-intelligence apparatus, it was redundant in the extreme. In fact, most of the office space assigned to the Starfleet Intelligence liaison had gone unoccupied since the station had first opened for service two years prior. From then until a few months earlier, these sparsely furnished accommodations had been all but the personal fiefdom of a single woman: Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn of Vulcan.
Then had come a series of calamities aboard the station, all of them fallout or collateral damage from intelligence operations gone sideways, culminating in the greatest shock of all: T’Prynn’s public psychological meltdown, followed by her collapse into a catatonic state.
The fall of that domino had in turn toppled several more, leading the station’s former commanding officer, Commodore Diego Reyes, to expose the details of classified Starfleet operations to the civilian media. In short order, Reyes had been arrested and shipped off to a penal colony—a journey he apparently never finished, thanks to a pirate attack on his transport ship. T’Prynn, meanwhile, had been taken off the station by Doctor M’Benga, so that she could be treated on Vulcan by specialists in telepathically induced deep psychic trauma.
M’Benga had since returned to duty; his patient had not. Now a fugitive from Starfleet military justice, T’Prynn was at large somewhere in the galaxy. Consequently, her former billet, which had fallen to Lieutenant Commander Serrosel ch’Nayla on what he had been told was a strictly interim basis, had in fact become ch’Nayla’s permanent assignment.
It was a series of events ch’Nayla had greatly come to resent.
I should never have accepted promotion. I was happy in the field. Now my whole life is reading reports and filing paperwork. I trained to be a spy, not a damned clerk.
It was a soothing daydream, but ch’Nayla knew it had never been a possibility. Within the ranks of Starfleet Intelligence, declining a promotion was unheard of. Doing so was a sign of dissatisfaction, the kind that could earn one a transfer to monitor a comm relay on a lifeless ball of ice at the end of the galaxy, or even an involuntary dishonorable discharge.
The Andorian chan was spending yet another night alone in the liaison’s office, reviewing a seemingly endless trove of work product derived from signals intelligence, known in the trade as SigInt. Tonight’s virtual haystack consisted of random snippets of subspace comm chatter intercepted between foreign ships and commands, as well as the occasional tidbit of civilian comm chatter snagged from monitored government frequencies. If one was lucky, any given morsel might come complete with an AI-generated transcript. When one was unlucky, the absence of a transcript meant listening to entire clips, one after another, and generating those transcripts manually. Nothing in ch’Nayla’s Starfleet medical profile suggested he was at risk for narcolepsy, but on a night of nonstop transcription he would have sworn otherwise.
Then a rarity crossed his screen: a file from Starfleet Command. A bulletin about a prominent missing person, an Ardanan scientist named Doctor Johron Verdo. For some reason, Vanguard’s system had red-flagged this report specifically for ch’Nayla’s attention. Setting aside all other open projects, ch’Nayla dug into Verdo’s dossier.
What’s so important about you, Doctor?
By the second paragraph, ch’Nayla had his answer. Doctor Verdo had served as an expert scientific consultant to Operation Vanguard, the classified program that was the real reason for Starbase 47’s very existence and for Starfleet’s risky, aggressive push to claim the Taurus Reach as its own. The Ardanan xenogeneticist’s work had served as the foundation for several initiatives being pursued by the team in the Vault, the top-secret Starfleet research laboratory hidden deep inside the core of Starbase Vanguard.
The more ch’Nayla read about Verdo, the more concerned he became. Verdo had been permitted early access to unredacted raw scans of the insanely complex alien DNA string known as the Shedai meta-genome. Though Verdo had not been told what it actually was or where it had been found, his follow-up questions had made it clear that he understood both the opportunities and the dangers it represented, and he was desperate to know more. Judging him a security risk, Starfleet had refused his application to join the Vault team.
Now the man was listed as missing along with two of his most experienced colleagues on Kolasi III—a world on the periphery of the Taurus Reach, one not yet explored but on the short list for a clandestine planetary survey. Clandestine because the planet lay inside the Klingon-Federation Neutral Zone established by the recent Treaty of Organia.
Making matters worse, Verdo had a relative on the Federation Council.
It was enough to make ch’Nayla want to resign his commission on the spot. He couldn’t have cooked up a bigger potential mess if he had tried. Most troubling of all were the questions he knew would be asked once he brought this report to the attention of his superiors—questions for which he presently had no good answers.
Is Verdo still on the planet? Does he want to defect to the Klingons? Do the Klingons know he’s there? If he finds the Shedai meta-genome, what will he do with it? Is he dangerous?
He added those queries to several others and tasked his AI daemon to perform a deep-level data scrape of every bit of accessible information, public and private, domestic and foreign, open or classified, all in the service of generating a virtual model of the missing scientist, one that could predict his actions before his disappearance provoked the entire quadrant into war.
Then he forwarded the entire misbegotten mess to Admiral Nogura, the Starfleet flag officer presently in command of Operation Vanguard, accompanied by a single unequivocal recommendation: WE NEED TO FIND JOHRON VERDO, RFN.
Blood, sweat, and hot metal—those were the scents that told Captain Kang, son of K’naiah, that he was where he belonged: aboard a Klingon warship.
He strode through the corridors of the I.K.S. SuvwI’, a D’ama-class battle cruiser. She was one of the older vessels in the fleet, but she and her crew had proved themselves in battle many times over. Great songs were sung of her victories, and tales were told around roaring fires of foes who had learned to fear her name. Kang was proud to call her his own, and to lead the 297 elite warriors, engineers, and scientists who served aboard her.
He passed the crew’s mess and caught the high-pitched squeaks of fresh gagh, followed by the tantalizing aromas of pipius claw and a rokeg blood pie. It was enough to make him regret having skipped breakfast that morning, but not tempting enough to make him stop.
If only I had the time.
Near the forward end of the corridor, a handful of soldiers stood in a cluster at the bottom of a gangway. One barked order from Kang—“Make a hole!”—put all their backs to bulkheads. Each of them held their chin high as he marched past and clambered swiftly up the ladder.
From the gangway it was just a few long strides to the command deck, which was bathed in soothing crimson light. Warp-stretched starlight filled the main viewscreen. The senior members of Kang’s command crew were all at their posts. As on most Klingon starships, the majority of critical duty stations were arranged in a shallow arc at the front of the cramped space, while the captain’s chair sat behind them, elevated on a dais. Sometimes Kang questioned the wisdom of having an elevated seat in a compartment with a low overhead, but he appreciated the fact that the combination served to make the captain loom large, as was right and proper.
His first officer, Commander D’Gol, vacated the center chair as soon as he noted Kang’s arrival. “Captain.”
“D’Gol. You said I have a comm from High Command?”
“Yes, sir. It was coded for your eyes only. I routed it to your ready room.”
“Good. As you were.”
The lanky warrior returned to the command chair as Kang headed aft, past the science and communications stations, and into his ready room. It was small, but it served Kang’s needs. He sat down behind his desk, and his computer terminal powered up as it registered his presence.
“Computer, open message from High Command.”
A gruffly masculine but clearly synthetic voice replied, “Authorization code required.”
“Kang cha’ vagh Qob Hegh beH tajVaq.”
“Authorized.”
New orders from General Garthog appeared on Kang’s screen. They were, as Kang had come to expect from the general, terse: PROCEED AT HIGH WARP TO KOLASI III. FIND MISSING SCIENTIST. RECOVER CLASSIFIED ALIEN GENOME IF POSSIBLE.
Kang shook his head in disappointment. Why is there always a missing scientist? And why don’ we ever let them stay missing? He didn’t worry about the absence of the scientist’s name in the communiqué. Garthog preferred to keep his comms brief and bury the meat of his messages inside encrypted dossiers sent as attachments. It was a tedious habit, but Garthog was a general, which meant his idiosyncrasies had to be indulged without comment.
Well, without public comment.
For a moment Kang felt inclined to brush off this latest assignment as being beneath him—until he saw the warning Garthog had appended to his orders: EXPECT TO ENCOUNTER FEDERATION STARSHIP ENTERPRISE. GOOD HUNTING.
The very mention of that ship filled Kang with the thrill of the hunt.
Kirk, you old devil! Cross my path again, will you?
It had been almost two years since Kang had last encountered the increasingly infamous Starfleet captain. Freshly promoted to his first command, the I.K.S. Doj, at roughly the same time that Kirk was elevated to his command of the Enterprise, Kang had thought himself fortunate to be the one to intercept the Enterprise after it illegally entered Klingon space, on a direct heading for Qo’noS, the Klingon homeworld. To his chagrin, however, he soon learned that Kirk’s ship had been hijacked by Klingon renegades, and that the young Starfleet officer and his crew were not, in fact, to blame for the incursion.
And Kirk, damn him—even though he had willingly remained Kang’s prisoner, he had appealed to Kang’s honor, asking for a chance to reclaim his ship and, with it, his own honor. Though Kang had offered Kirk no assistance, he struck a bargain that he never expected Kirk to fulfill: if Kirk could retake control of the Enterprise in one hour and deliver the Klingon fugitives to him so they could face Klingon justice, Kang would let Kirk have his ship back.
To Kang’s lasting surprise, Kirk did exactly that.
Nearly two years later, Kang still had no idea how Kirk did it.
Maybe this time I will get a chance to ask him, face-to-face once more.
He decrypted the files from the communiqué and copied them onto a data card, which he took with him as he returned to the command deck.
As expected, all eyes were upon him as he emerged from his ready room. New orders were often cause for excitement. He hoped this time would be no different.
Kang reclaimed his command chair from D’Gol, and then he handed the man the data card. “We’re going hunting. A missing lab rat or something. But more important, we might get a chance to face off with Kirk and the Enterprise. Have the crew battle-ready by the time we get to Kolasi III, and put together a landing party to find the lab rat.”
“Yes, Captain.”
D’Gol backed away from the dais, and then he turned and set about issuing orders to the gunners, engineers, and other officers, in preparation for a chance to bring glory to their names.
A discreet, silent notice blinked on Kang’s tactical console. It was a signal from his science officer, Lieutenant Mara—who, as it happened, was also his wife. They had taken care not to spark resentment among the other officers by doing anything that would suggest she wielded undue authority simply by virtue of her status as Kang’s mate. At the same time, he knew that to sideline her too forcefully would aggrieve his true love. So they had devised a system by which they could covertly let each other know when they wanted or needed to speak.
Kang waited half a minute, and then he swiveled his command chair aft, stood, and descended to the deck. He moved aft to Mara’s post, the science console. In a confidential register he said, “Speak, my love.”
She replied with equal discretion, “I’ve reviewed the survey file for Kolasi III. The planet’s equatorial and tropical latitudes are encompassed by a powerful electric storm that will make it too dangerous to use transporters there—and the mission profile indicates our missing scientist is likely in that region.”
“What do you recommend?”
“Our strike team should go planetside by shuttle.”
“Agreed. Anything else?”
He could tell by the way Mara averted her eyes from his that she was reluctant to speak her mind, though he wasn’t sure why. “What else concerns you? Speak freely.”
“Besides the fact that Kolasi III is located inside the new Neutral Zone, it’s also technically inside the Gonmog Sector. That region has seen a recent sharp increase in reports of lost or missing vessels. There’s no telling what Starfleet might have stirred up out there. Perhaps we should exercise a measure of caution—for once.”
It was all Kang could do to keep his reaction to a low chortle and not a roaring laugh. “Mara, really? Are we to start marking our star charts of the Gonmog Sector with ‘Here there be monsters’?” She narrowed her eyes into a cold glare that made clear she did not find him funny, at all. He reined in his mirth. “Forgive me, my love. I meant no insult. But I beg you—pay less mind to ghojmok’s tales of ghost ships and creatures of legend, and focus on the strike team’s loadout for the search mission.” With a mischievous gleam in his eye he added, “The only monster we’ll need to slay at Kolasi III will be James T. Kirk.”