“Wise counsel, my lord. Lead on.”
They walked together down the hall, back to the dining room, where the kitchen staff was setting out the first course of their meal—fresh pipius claws and flagons of warnog. Gorkon’s wife, Illizar, met them as they entered. “You’re late.”
“Nonsense,” Gorkon said. “We’re right on time.” His wife shot him a challenging stare, which he weathered in good humor before taking his seat at the head of the table. Illizar took the chair opposite his, and Chang sat halfway between them on one of the table’s long sides, facing the broad picture window that looked out on a vista of dizzying sea cliffs and crashing waves.
As Gorkon hoped, Illizar asked Chang to tell tales of his greatest victories and narrowest escapes, and the Captain provided the evening’s entertainment by obliging the lady of the manor. But as Gorkon listened to Chang spin one yarn after another of vengeance, cunning, and cold-blooded violence, he wondered if such a man was really the ally he needed for the long work that lay ahead. He harbored no doubts of Chang’s loyalty, but unlike Lugok, Chang struck Gorkon as one who might never accept the idea of rapprochement with the Federation. Despite his youth, the man had already amassed a lifetime’s worth of hatred for the Empire’s greatest rival in local space; such animosity, in Gorkon’s experience, was never surrendered easily or without great reservation.
Well, it’s not as if I need to make a diplomat of him overnight, Gorkon reasoned. He expected his political agenda would take decades to bring to fruition. Perhaps, given that much time, I can sway his thinking. Mitigate his bloodlust. Persuade him of my vision for the future.
Gorkon kept telling himself that, while Chang guzzled one goblet after another of bloodwine and filled the dining room with gales of malicious laughter.
31
Every passageway on the Endeavour was crowded with mechanics making last-second repairs through open panels in the bulkheads, ordnance crews moving antigrav pallets stacked high with photon torpedoes, and noncombatant personnel from the station who had been packed like sardines into the ship’s guest quarters and cargo bays.
Bersh glov Mog shouldered through the chaos, moving from one urgent repair to the next, checking his crew’s work and making sure no important corners had been cut. They had spent the past four days shaving minutes off each bit of overdue damage control, sacrificing perfection in the name of having the ship ready for combat before the Tholian armada arrived. The Tellarite chief engineer didn’t know what troubled him more at that moment: the need to tolerate substandard workmanship aboard his beloved starship, or the knowledge that in a few hours there was a high probability it would all be destroyed in a Tholian crossfire.
His snout wrinkled at the stench of melting duotronic cables, and he spun toward its source to see smoldering globs dripping from an open panel in the overhead. “Faran!” He cornered the enlisted engineer’s mate who was ducking away from the molten circuit junction. “You can’t use plasma cutters near the relays! I’ve told you a hundred times!”
“Sorry, sir,” said the frazzled Efrosian, whose drooping blond handlebar mustache and swooping golden eyebrows were sullied with grime, just like his pale hands and his red shirt.
Mog grabbed an extinguisher from an emergency locker, aimed it, and snuffed the fire before it spread past the slagged junction. Then he tossed the extinguisher to Faran, plucked his communicator from his belt, and flipped open its antenna grille. “Mog to—” He stepped barely clear of a pair of gunner’s mates rushing by with another pallet of torpedoes, then tried again. “Mog to Stegbauer. We need a new circuit relay on Deck Five, Section Three.”
“Copy that,” replied the lieutenant, who had distinguished himself by doing outstanding work under tremendous pressure in the past few days. “I’ll have it back on line in thirty minutes.”
“Good man. Shield status?”
“All back to full except aft port ventral. T’Vel and Burnett are working on it.”
Mog nodded to himself. “All right. Impulse systems?”
“Up to ninety percent.”
Not perfect, Mog figured, but good enough for now. “Phasers?”
“Still not getting the power we should. We need to swap out the main coupling.”
The mere suggestion raised the fur on the nape of Mog’s neck. “Absolutely not! We’ll never put it back together in time!”
Stegbauer didn’t sound any happier about it than Mog felt. “In that case, the best we can hope for is seventy-five percent efficiency on forward phasers.”
That was not going to be remotely good enough. Mog walked to a nearby wall companel and checked the chrono. It read 1324. “What’s the Tholians’ ETA?”
“Last update from Vanguard says four hours, nine minutes.”
The chief engineer’s thoughts filled with unspeakably vile Tellarite profanities. “All right, swap out the main coupling. Pull anybody you need to get it done before 1700.”
“Acknowledged. Engineering out.” The channel closed with a soft click.
Mog moved on and continued his inspections—hoping as he went that he hadn’t just signed Endeavour’s death warrant.
“People, please! Form lines!” Chief Petty Officer Ivan Vumelko was a fireplug of a man, squat and solid, with bulging eyes and meaty hands. In his decades of Starfleet service, he had never been easy to push around. Now, however, with only hours until the expected arrival of the Tholian armada, the paunchy customs inspector felt like a boulder being swept away by a tsunami of panic. “Everyone, proceed to your transports in an orderly—”
Something collided with his protruding gut and knocked the breath out of him. He kept trying to force words out, but all he produced were empty gasps. Civilians and noncombatant Star-fleet personnel surged around him, and the flood-crush of the crowd carried him away toward the three small ships parked behind him in the docking bay. Stumbling and fumbling, he weaved through the headlong mass of running bodies until he was clear of it.
Vumelko watched as desperate people scrambled up the gangways of the recently arrived civilian ships, their arms laden and backs burdened with the few personal possessions they had chosen to salvage, only to reach the top and be forced to abandon their duffels and bags in exchange for passage. Every cubic meter of space on these ships had become precious, and only living beings and the bare necessities to sustain them were being taken aboard. A steady rain of luggage tumbled to the deck, each impact reverberating in the cavernous space.
Standing apart as a witness to the madness, Vumelko knew that he was supposed to be heading for one of those transports. Technically, he was considered a noncombatant and had been put on the list for mandatory evacuation aboard the passenger ship Kenitra.
He slipped out of the docking bay and sprinted for the turbolift, determined to put his early training as a gunner’s mate on the starship Tamerlane to good use in a few hours’ time.
Evacuate, my ass, he stewed. If it’s a fight the Tholians want, I’ll give ’em one.
Vanguard’s security center was a bedlam of shouting voices and constant alarms. Standing in the center of the chaos, Haniff Jackson felt as if every crisis he resolved spawned two more.
“Tahir, we’ve got a riot brewing in Docking Bay Sixty-one! Get a squad down there!” Another monitor on the wall to his right flashed a warning. “Holmgren, we’ve got a GTS in progress! Lower Pylon, Slip Two. Lock down the docking clamps and tell Seklir to get over there, RFN!” He had taken to using the acronym GTS for the offense of grand theft starship because the increasing frequency of the crime over the past two days on Vanguard had rendered usage of the formal term burdensome.