All the officers and enlisted men snapped to attention and faced Kutal as he walked to his chair and sat down. “As you were,” he growled. Everyone except BelHoQ resumed preparations for spacedock departure. The first officer moved to stand at the captain’s left side.
“The knuckle-draggers in cargo are lagging again,” he said. “Ready for space in fifteen minutes, sir.”
Kutal grunted and glowered at the image of the spaceport on the main viewscreen. “The sooner the better,” he confided to BelHoQ. “Been here too long as it is.”
The Zin’za had been docked in orbit of Borzha II for more than a week, repairing the damage sustained on its last jaunt to the Jinoteur system. None of the crew, BelHoQ included, was eager to return to that star system. The captain did not seem to share the crew’s lack of enthusiasm. Ever since the mission to Palgrenax, he had behaved like a man driven by restless demons. “Start prelaunch systems check,” he ordered.
“Yes, sir,” BelHoQ replied, and he nodded to the others, who had turned and looked at him for confirmation. They went back to work, their focus now entirely on their duties. The XO asked the captain, “Do I get to know why we cut our repairs two days short?”
Kutal cast a wary glance around the bridge, then replied in a low rasp, “A Starfleet scout ship sent a distress call from Jinoteur. We’re to capture the ship for analysis and its crew for interrogation.” He jerked a thumb toward Tonar. “Tell him only when he needs to know. Tell the others only when the mission is done.”
“Understood, Captain.”
A deep buzzing sound and a green warning light on the tactical console drew fiery stares from BelHoQ and the captain. The first officer stalked quickly across the bridge to Tonar’s station. “Report,” he commanded.
“Sensor malfunction,” Tonar said. “Primary array offline, power spikes in the secondary array.” He looked back at BelHoQ. “If we leave port now, we’ll be flying blind, sir.”
BelHoQ heard the captain’s heavy footsteps approaching and felt their ominous vibrations through the deck. “Those systems were just repaired,” Kutal said. “What’s going on, BelHoQ?”
“Either Fek’lhr himself has defecated inside our sensor array,” BelHoQ replied, “or Chief Engineer Ohq just earned himself forty jabs with a painstik.”
Lieutenant Ohq had shoved aside a half-dozen mechanics to get at the damaged sensor array components. Word of the first officer’s impending arrival in main engineering—a rare occurrence that usually presaged tremendous suffering for the person whose mistake had inspired the visit—had been called down from the upper decks, by mechanics cowed like jeghpu’wI while the commander made his livid passage to the midships ladder.
I will not relay secondhand reports, Ohq vowed as he twisted at the waist and pulled himself deeper inside the smoking jumble of slagged machinery behind the bulkhead. When BelHoQ asks what happened, I’m going to have the answer.
Ohq had been worried that some intricate system failure would have to be tracked down, at the expense of great effort and much time. Instead, he beheld the nexus of the problem in the sensor array and deduced the cause of the malfunction immediately. He called back to the mechanics, “One of you toDSaHpu’ pass me a plasma cutter, now.” A few seconds later the tool was pressed into his hand, and he bent his wrist at an awkward angle to get at a safe place to cut free the component that had caused the cascade failure.
In less than a minute he decoupled it from the part of the spaceframe with which it had fused. As it dislodged and fell into his hand, he heard BelHoQ bellow in the corridor behind him, “What’s your excuse this time, Ohq?”
The chief engineer wriggled backward through the close-packed bundles of cable and protruding junction boxes. He landed on his feet, turned, and looked up at the grizzled black beard and wild mane of the first officer. “This,” Ohq said, handing the damaged part to BelHoQ.
BelHoQ turned the misshapen hunk of metal one way and then the other. He thrust it back at Ohq. “What do you call this?”
“Sabotage, sir.” He took back the half-melted glob. “We had a gravimetric flux compensator installed where a tachyon distortion filter should have been. They look identical on the outside except for the fact we color-code them and label them on every axis. Of course, someone could disguise one as the other pretty easily—until it breaks.” He pointed out a dark red streak where the part’s outer casing had split open. “That’s the kragnite shielding—which is used only in the gravimetric flux compensator.” He lobbed the device back to BelHoQ. “Somebody in the station’s supply depot switched parts on us.”
The first officer’s fist closed white-knuckle tight around the fragged component. He stormed away grumbling foul curses and slamming the side of his fist against the bulkhead as he went.
Someone’s about to get a painstik up the bIngDub, Ohq chuckled maliciously. And for once it isn’t me.
“Could it have been a mistake?” asked Captain Kutal. “Or an error by one of Ohq’s people? Kahless knows, his tool-pushers aren’t exactly the brightest in the fleet.”
BelHoQ slammed the ruined component down onto the captain’s desk. The impact rang like a bell. “This was no accident! Whoever did this should be found and put to death in public, as a warning to others.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Kutal said. “But a manhunt on the scale you’re proposing might take a day or more, and we don’t have the time. Tell Ohq to expedite the repairs. As soon as we have the secondary array working, we can ship out. He can finish fixing the primary array en route.”
Pacing in tight circles, BelHoQ scrunched his face with rage. “This sends a bad message to others, Captain. They will think we are weak, that we let crimes like this go unpunished. It will invite more of the same.”
“Doubtful,” Kutal said. “I suspect this will prove to be an isolated incident, intended to delay us from reaching the Starfleet ship. For all their noble talk, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Starfleet had a hand in this.”
The first officer was grinding his jaw slowly, and his hands had curled into trembling fists. “We must make an example of the scum who did this!”
“Absolutely,” Kutal said. “Flay them alive and quarter them. Set them on fire and put them out with a disruptor blast. You’ll do so with my thanks.” He rose from his chair and made certain that BelHoQ understood that his was to be the last word on the subject. “But not until after we get back. Until then, I want you focused on the mission and nothing else. Get back to the bridge, and keep a fire lit under Ohq until those sensors are working…. That is all. Dismissed.”
A low rumble of protest rolled around inside BelHoQ’s throat, but he nodded his understanding and marched out of Kutal’s quarters. As the door closed, Kutal abandoned his own façade of calm and seethed to imagine what kind of lowly petaQ would resort to sabotage. It made him sick with rage to think of the damage his unseen foes had wrought on his ship. He calmed himself by daydreaming that one of them was human; then he envisioned his hands around the human’s throat, squeezing and crushing until it all but turned to putty in his grip, and he kept on picturing that—until it finally, inevitably, brought a smile of murderous glee to his face. That’s more like it, he thought as he left his quarters and returned to the bridge.
Pennington leaned against Quinn for support, and the pilot was leaning on Pennington. Arranged like a pair of crooked book-ends, they waved their drunken salutations at the two women who had just dropped them off in front of their docking bay at the Lamneth Starport. The attractive young ladies sped away in their hovercar and ascended swiftly back into the flow of traffic.