Hell's Heart (12 page)

Kirk glared at him. “Spock.”

“You gave me permission to ask them questions.”

“Granted.” Kirk shrugged. It didn't seem as if any response was forthcoming from the freighter. “Helm, take us back out of—”

Over the comm, the Klingon responded with halting reluctance.
“I . . . agree to be transported for this discussion. For . . . the other passengers' sakes.”

“You are the captain, then?”

“I speak for the passengers. But I am not the captain. I am no one.”

The transmission ended. McCoy clapped his hands on the railing and gave Spock a patronizing smile. “See? He's no one. I don't know why we were concerned.”

Twenty-one

I
t was a fool's errand Spock was on, and McCoy thought the Vulcan responsible for more than a few. Of course, as the doctor had seen many times over the years, Spock tended to be right with amazing frequency. The science officer's guess about the whales had saved Earth. Bureaucracies tended not to reward the playing of unlikely hunches; the fact that Starfleet had done exactly that said much about the organization and the respect they held for Spock's judgment.

But McCoy wasn't so sure Spock was handling the Klingon freighters correctly. Spock hadn't been back in the land of the living for that long—and while he might have some notion about the condition of the Klingons' ships, he knew less about the Klingons' mood.

And his captain's mood, for that matter.

McCoy encountered Spock on the way to the transporter room. Four security officers followed behind the Vulcan. “Why the backup?”

“Hostage exchange,” Spock said, never breaking stride. “The Klingon we spoke with is transporting over with representatives from the two other vessels whose comm systems still worked. But
I
do not expect any difficulties.”

“Just you attending?” McCoy started walking alongside Spock.

“Correct. The captain has chosen not to join us.”

“No wonder about that.” McCoy shook his head as they reached their destination. He grasped Spock's arm, holding him back as the security officers filed into the transporter room. As soon as the doors closed and they were alone, the doctor spoke. “A mission of mercy to help
Klingons
. Spock, your timing stinks.”

Spock raised an eyebrow.

“Klingons killed your friend's son.”

“I was there, Doctor, if not in full possession of my faculties.”

“I know. I had them.”

“But I remember what happened.”

“Do you remember what the Klingon at our inquiry said? ‘There shall be no peace as long as Kirk lives.' Or words to that effect.” McCoy looked into Spock's eyes to see if he was getting through. He wasn't. Just the cool, detached stare. “It's not just that this is too soon, Spock. I don't think Jim will
ever
be okay with the Klingons.”

Spock reluctantly nodded. “Perhaps.”

“No perhaps about it. Put your logic aside just for a moment, and think of your friend.”

“I am, Doctor.” Spock looked back down the hallway, seeming to choose his words carefully. “I do not think Jim Kirk would approve of a starship captain leaving distressed individuals to die. If we left them, the captain would regret it. It is logical that I, his friend and first officer, should try to spare him that pain.”

McCoy rolled his eyes. “Save us from Vulcan angels.”

“The Vulcans have no angels, Doctor. But I can recommend several treatises on our beliefs if you are interested.”

“I'll pass.” McCoy returned a wan smile. “Well, let's take a look.”

The transporter room doors opened, and the pair walked inside. Ostensibly, Kirk had ordered McCoy to attend in case the Klingons needed medical attention. The doctor assumed that he had been sent to play watchdog in Kirk's absence, making sure the first officer didn't offer more aid than necessary.

“Energize,” Spock ordered. Scott activated the controls. The transporter lights came up. The signals seemed to take longer than usual—perhaps a side effect of the conditions in the Briar Patch. When the three figures finally materialized, McCoy had to blink to believe what he was seeing.

Most of the Klingons he had met belonged to the Defense
Force; all had a martial air, whether they were generals or grunts. Few of those meetings had been pleasant, but he had come away with the definite notion that the Klingons had a dress code. If they did,
Enterprise
's three visitors had missed the memorandum. Two males and one female, they wore tattered clothing made of rough material, almost burlap-like—and it hung loosely on them, as if it had been obtained secondhand.

Or more like tenth-hand
, McCoy thought.

While two of the unwashed Klingons looked about the same young age, one of the males had seen some living. His long hair was a deep brown, highlighted with silver streaks—but it was soiled and stringy and not bound in the Klingon manner. As his companions looked around the transporter room warily, the older male's dark eyes never left the pad beneath his feet.

The security officers took a step forward after confirming that no weapons had beamed across. It was never polite to frisk the guests. The confirmation didn't fill McCoy with confidence. The older Klingon seemed sedate, but the other two appeared wound up. Always the diplomat, Spock nevertheless gestured for the security officers to holster their phasers.

Spock focused on the senior Klingon. “Did I speak with you earlier?”

“Yes.” It was a guttural acknowledgment, little more than a cough.

“What should we call you?”

The flooring's hypnotic power over the older visitor seemed unbroken. “I have no name.”

“Let the record show,” McCoy mumbled.

The Klingon woman spoke up in Klingon. The universal translator caught it. “This is a Starfleet vessel. Are we your prisoners?”

The younger male, irritated, barked at her. “Do not speak.”

She appealed to their elder. “Potok, we must know.”

The tatterdemalion said nothing in response—but at least now he had a name, or so Spock surmised. “You are called Potok?”

His arms hung limply at his sides. “Call me what you will. It does not matter.”

McCoy had met some sullen Klingons before; Maltz, the sole survivor of Kruge's bird-of-prey, had been downright suicidal when he first saw him. Potok's mood seemed a shade different from that, but not by much.

“This is a Starfleet vessel,” Spock said. “We only wish to ascertain your needs.”

“We have none,” Potok said.

Great,
McCoy thought.
Then thanks for dropping by.

But now he had noticed something else: a deep scar on Potok's face, from a cut delivered some time earlier. The skin had closed, but the surrounding area looked swollen and infected. The doctor gestured. “Have you had that looked at?”

Potok shirked away, allowing his hair to fall over the cheek with the gouge.

“
Enterprise
has medical facilities if you are in need of them. You and all your passengers.”

The younger Klingons looked to each other—and then to the walls and surfaces, in search of inscriptions. They spoke to each other hurriedly in Klingon before facing Spock. “What . . . is this ship?” the male asked.

“Perhaps you could not hear our hail given the interference,” Spock said. “This is
U.S.S. Enterprise
.”

McCoy grinned weakly. “Welcome aboard.”

Even Potok reacted to the news, finally showing a pulse. And more. “
Enterprise
?
” The older Klingon snarled, baring broken teeth. “Impossible.”

“Impossible how?” McCoy asked.

Potok glowered at the doctor, providing McCoy his first good look at the Klingon's piercing eyes. “Impossible because
Enterprise
was destroyed months ago. Sabotaged, in the Mutara Nebula, to murder Klingons.”

“I disagree with your characterization of events—but this is that ship's successor,” Spock said. “Registry number NCC-1701-A, under Captain James T. Kirk.”

“
Kirk?
”
Potok's younger companions said in unison—and launched themselves from the transporter pads toward Spock. The security officers converged on the wayward Klingons from either side before they could reach the Vulcan—only to see Potok suddenly springing to life behind the others. He, who had looked defeated and spent minutes earlier, now moved with the speed of his younger companions, charging the scrum like an angry bull. Potok struck the group hard, causing bodies to fly. One of the security officers tumbled toward McCoy, just missing him.

A full-scale brawl ensued. The female tried to strangle one of the guards, while her male companion tried to wrest another officer's phaser away. Potok, meanwhile, climbed off the pile and started moving toward the exit. McCoy, who had been standing in front of the doorway, put his hands before him, trying to stave off the suddenly wild-eyed Klingon. “Whoa, there. Let's talk this—”

Spock let his hands do the talking. With a lightning lunge, he caught a firm grip on Potok's arm and yanked him away from McCoy. Potok spun, flailing; his fist struck the side of Spock's cheek and would have caught the Vulcan full in the face had it not been for Spock's
Suus Mahna
training. Spock wrested the Klingon around by the arm and shoved, making Potok a projectile against his female companion.

The security officers grabbed her where she fell. The young male, who had risen to free her, collapsed in surprise as Spock applied a pinch to the back of his neck. Recovering from his tumble, Potok turned to see two of the guards pointing phasers at him. And while that didn't appear to intimidate him, a look at his subdued companions caused him to yield.

The fire continued to rage in Potok's eyes for several
moments—until he suddenly sagged. The guards had no trouble taking him into custody.

“This was not necessary.” Spock shook his head. “We greeted you as guests. Now, I am afraid you are our prisoners.”

“Dinner for three in the brig.” McCoy took a deep breath as Potok was escorted out. “I hope you like the food.”

Twenty-two

“F
orty-seven hours and ten minutes,” Kirk said in the turbo­lift.

“Excuse me?” The fresh-faced Bolian ensign sharing the lift looked up at him expectantly.

“Sorry—I was talking to myself. You do that when you're in command. There's a class for it.”

Not understanding, the Bolian meekly exited on his deck. Kirk restated his destination: the brig.

Forty-seven hours and ten minutes.
That's how long
Enterprise
's probes required to send back the minimal information about the Briar Patch needed to satisfy Starfleet. It had been, for Kirk, a countdown. He wasn't going to stay in the area a moment longer than he had to.

He had hoped that the freighters would get going on their own, but Scotty said they seemed as dead as ever. Kirk knew he would need to exit the Briar Patch at some point to send a clear transmission about the Klingons' presence to Starfleet, but he had mixed feelings. On one hand, he absolutely wanted Command to know about them—they could be up to anything. Yet he feared being dragged even further into some kind of Klingon plot.

Further than Spock dragged them, that is. And now, thanks to his first officer,
Enterprise
had guests.

There wasn't any question in Kirk's mind that the Klingons in the freighters were trouble. Trouble for whom, he didn't yet know. But as long as he had control over their destinies, those answers didn't interest him much. The report from his security officers had told all. They had been typically mum Klingons when they boarded, lashing out when Kirk's name was mentioned.

Well, fine.
He didn't mind being a source of irritation to the whole race. They were an annoyance to him. He would see
them because Spock had asked. And then he would be done. He exited onto the deck and checked with the security officer.

He found the prisoners held together in a single force-field-protected cell. Spock and McCoy were outside, conferring about something. Kirk looked at the Klingons for just a few moments. Their clothes were out of the ordinary, to be sure—they were pulling a kind of sackcloth-and-ashes routine for some reason. If it was a disguise, it certainly didn't matter. They were otherwise garden-variety Klingons, full of insolence and rage and stalking about their cell like caged animals.

Or, rather, two of them were. One wasn't. Older, he simply sat on the cot, staring off into space.
Maybe he's all paced out,
Kirk thought.
Let's get this over with.

He stood before the force field, defiant. “I'm James T. Kirk.”

The younger Klingons stopped in their tracks and glared at him, enraged. “You killed Kruge,” the female hissed.

“All in a day's work,” Kirk deadpanned. The two seethed and cursed in their language, but the captain's expression didn't change. The response had been more glib than he'd intended, but he wasn't about to feel guilty for avenging his son.

The young pair turned back to their older companion and found him motionless, still sitting on the cot. Unable to do anything else, the two slowly retired to the back of the cell.

Kirk moved to face the silent Klingon. “What's the matter? Didn't
you
hear me? I'm James T. Kirk.” He continued to stare at the older Klingon, but could not provoke a reaction.

As stoic as a Vulcan.

“He seems to be the leader,” Spock said. “I overheard one of his companions calling him Potok. A few minutes ago, they both called him General.”

“General?” Kirk smiled, his suspicions confirmed. So they
were
warriors, after all. “General Potok, is it?”

Saying nothing, Potok turned his head to stare at the bulkhead. Spock stepped to Kirk's side. “He seemed to revile the term when his juniors said it.”

“That's the only sign of life we've seen out of him,” McCoy said. “That, and when they tried to redecorate the transporter room.”

“Curious,” Spock said. “When no guard is present, we have seen from the sensors that his juniors assume an identical pose. Their recent stalking displays have been entirely for our benefit.”

“What do they do,” Kirk asked, “sit around moping?”

“I do not believe Klingons mope.”

Kirk stared. The life had gone out of the younger Klingons. They slumped on their cots in the same manner as Potok. The general, if that is what he was, seemed dragged down by more than captivity. He had less life in him than some corpses he'd seen. “Could he be suffering from something?”

“There's nothing physically wrong with him, to the extent we know about Klingons,” McCoy said. “He's got a scar that looks worse than it is. But he seems a bit off from the usual grade of dour and sullen. I'd almost say he's depressed.”

“Of course they're depressed, Bones. Who likes captivity?”

“Seems like it's more than that—and I think it's the same with the other two. The only life they've shown since they got here was when your name was mentioned—and just now when you walked in. But like you saw, even that played out.”

Kirk doubted that.
Just imagine if this force field weren't here.
He looked impatiently at Spock. “You asked me down here. What do you want?”

Spock turned and addressed the prisoners. “Potok, if operations are required to aid your fellow passengers, they can only occur with Captain Kirk's approval.”

Potok flinched a little at that, before returning to his sphinxlike expression.

“We must ascertain why you are here,” Spock continued. “This area is part of a Federation study. When Kor withdrew after the Battle of Klach D'Kel Brakt, Starfleet believed the Klingon Empire had no further interest in the region. Was that assumption incorrect?”

Potok said nothing.

Spock pressed on. “The Federation does not wish to challenge any Klingon rights in this region. Our peoples are not formally at war.”

Still, silence.
This is a waste of time,
Kirk thought.

“Your spacecraft are in need of immediate repairs, or your people will die. Are you capable of repairing them on your own? If you do not wish to accept aid from
Enterprise
, we can contact Qo'noS and ask them for—”

“
No
!” Potok snapped.

McCoy mumbled to Kirk, “That got us somewhere.”

The captain shook his head. “I'm definitely reporting these people to Starfleet. Especially if he's a general.” Kirk stared at him. “Are you a general?”

“I do not answer to that title—and I do not answer to you.” It was a mild rebuke, nothing in comparison to his juniors' earlier outbursts.

Spock interjected. “Potok, then.”

“I do not answer to that.”

“Then what is your name?”

“I do not have one.”

That's it.
Kirk turned to leave. “They're playing games, Spock. I don't have time for this. And I'm damned if I'm not going to report them. Let the Klingons fish them out of the Briar Patch.”

Spock looked toward the prisoners, deadly serious. “Potok, my captain intends to send you back to Klingon space. He will contact Starfleet, who will contact the Klingon Empire to retrieve you. Should we do that?”

Potok focused on the Vulcan and spoke slowly. “They will not come.”

Kirk looked at McCoy—and then shrugged. “Keep working on them, Spock,” Kirk said. “You've got forty-seven hours.”

He exited, and McCoy stepped out into the hall with him. “That was a waste of time,” Kirk said.

McCoy nodded. “You could have a better conversation with a jack-o'-lantern.”

The captain grinned in spite of himself. Where did McCoy get these bromides? He started walking down the hall, the doctor beside him. “It's not putting us out. We've got to be here anyway.”

Then he remembered something. “You know the strangest thing?” Kirk asked. “Uhura told the freighters we had taken their spokesman into custody. Their response was something like, ‘Oh.' ”

McCoy chuckled. “Maybe they've all got the blasé bug.”

“If only the whole Empire caught it.” After a moment, he stopped and looked at McCoy. “Bones, what do you make of those people? An invasion force? Should we board the ships?”

“I've been watching them. With the exception of that little set-to in the transporter room and then when you walked in, I don't think they could attack a good meal. And Potok's got it worse than the others. None of the bluster they've all got.” The two paused, and Kirk watched McCoy's eyes as the doctor looked back toward the brig in contemplation. “It sounds crazy to say this,” McCoy said, “but it's almost as if his
pride
had been amputated.”

“You're right, it does sound crazy. But I like the sound of attacking a good meal.”