Star Trek: TOS - The Children of Kings Read online

  Enterprise. Number One. Pike had forgotten

  all about them. How . . .

  He looked up at Liyan.

  Pheromones.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and took a step back from the Orion tallith. “I need to speak with my ship.”

  Pike flipped open the communicator again.

  The light on it was flashing red. No signal. What—

  “It is I who must apologize, Captain Pike. I had hoped to avoid this scenario. Tactician.” The tallith spoke without turning, to an Orion Pike hadn’t noticed before, who stood at her shoulder.

  “Down!” someone shouted in Pike’s ear. Ben’s voice; the captain did as he was told and dove to the floor. A phaser beam cut through the air above him; a second later, one of the ceiling support beams crashed to the floor, raising a cloud of dust, cutting them off from the tallith and her guards and most of the others in the room as well.

  “Captain!”

  He turned and saw Ben holding his weapon. Ross stood next to him. A handful of bodies surrounded the two of them. One of those was Smith’s. She wasn’t moving. No surprise.

  Half her head was missing.

  “We have to move, sir,” Tuval said. “Now.”

  STAR TREK®:

  THE CHILDREN OF KINGS

  DAVID STERN

  Based upon Star Trek

  created by Gene Roddenberry

  * * *

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

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  Cover art by Cliff Nielsen; cover design by Alan Dingman

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-5899-9

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7319-0 (ebook)

  To old dogs, new tricks,

  and the Sons (gender-neutral) of the Bird . . . all of us.

  Macbeth: Your children shall be kings.

  Banquo: You shall be king.

  — Macbeth

  Act I, Scene iii

  BOOK I

  DEADFALL

  ONE

  Pike was the last one in. As he entered the briefing room, the others all stood.

  “As you were,” the captain said, and took a seat at the head of the table. “Thank you for coming. Number One?”

  He nodded toward his second-in-command, seated to his right; she leaned forward.

  “We’ve recovered part of the station log,” she said. “A small portion—about a minute’s worth—from the day of the attack. The images are heavily compressed; artifacts abound, both auditory and visual. The audio, in fact, disappears entirely less than halfway through the recording. But even so—”

  “Hang on.” Commander Tuval leaned forward. “Part of the station log? Where did that come from?”

  A fair question, Pike thought, considering that the base itself—Starbase 18, the Federation’s farthest outpost in this sector of the galaxy—was pretty much space junk at this point. A fact Tuval knew better than anyone else in the room. Two days ago, the commander— Enterprise ’s security chief—had almost died exploring its remains. The skin on the right side of his face was still pink, and he had half-healed burns over most of the right side of his body. His lungs were functioning at sixty percent capacity; according to Dr. Boyce, they’d never reach a hundred percent again. All in all, though, Tuval was lucky.

  The other three members of the landing party were dead.

  “You can thank our science officer,” Pike said, nodding toward Spock, who sat to the captain’s right, at the far end of the table. There were seven of them in the room; Chief Engineer Pitcairn, Commander Tuval, and Communications Specialist Garrison on one side of the table, Number One, Boyce, and Spock on the other. “He can explain it to you.”

  Pike gestured to the Vulcan to go ahead.

  “Starfleet’s communications infrastructure in this sector is a patchwork affair,” Spock said. “You are no doubt aware of this, Commander.”

  “Of course. The trouble we’ve had getting through to Starfleet Command …”

  “This is because some of the subspace amplifiers in this region date back to the early years of exploration; to link these early models with current Starfleet equipment requires the use of multiple communications protocols as well as additional processing modules. It occurred to me that stored within some of those processing modules—”

  “You talking about the RECs, Mr. Spock?” That from Chief Engineer Pitcairn.

  “The REC-twos, Chief.”

  “Model twos. Not sure I remember those.” Pitcairn frowned—or maybe it was a small smile. On the chief’s craggy features, it was hard for Pike to tell the difference.

  Three months into his five-year mission with the crew, the captain was still learning their little personality traits. And quirks. And likes and dislikes and how they got along with one another. Which members of which department worked well together and which were like oil and water. In that regard, he’d expected to have some problems with Spock. There were a lot of people who still held a grudge against the Vulcans for the way they’d treated humanity in those early, post–First Contact years. Holding back key technologies, refusing Earthers an equal voice among the quadrant’s space-faring races. Most of that seemed to be in the past now, but occasionally, a bit of that xenophobia still popped up. Pike had prepared himself to have to deal with some of that among his crew; he’d suspected he might have a problem with Pitcairn in that regard. Glenn was old-line Starfleet, senior member of the crew, and the longest-serving non-flag officer in the fleet. But the chief and Spock got along like gangbusters.

  Would that the rest of his crew mixed half that well.

  “The model twos were identical to the original RECs,” Spock continued. “Except that they were housed in significantly larger storage frames to allow for a wide range of potential expansion requirements.”

  Pitcairn was still frowning. “Well … they couldn’t be co
mpletely identical, then, could they? Larger mass, they’d need a larger stabilization unit to make sure they didn’t drift off position. Am I right?”

  Spock considered the point. “You may be correct, Chief. I only glanced at the construction specifications briefly. I cannot recall the exact increase in mass of the REC-two relative to the original. Perhaps later we can—”

  “They might’ve changed the composition of the beacon, too,” Pitcairn said. “They did that a lot, back in those days. Experimented with different materials. I knew a guy who actually worked at Bozeman—”

  “Chief. Mr. Spock.” Pike leaned forward. Get those two talking about old Fleet technology, they’d be there for hours. And they didn’t have hours. “Let’s stay on track.”

  “Exactly,” said Boyce, who looked annoyed. And impatient. An improvement over his mood earlier that morning, at least. “Captain, I would appreciate it if we could hurry things along. Dr. Tambor is still in regen, you know. A critical stage of it, in fact. And I want—”

  “I know,” Pike interrupted. “You want to be there. We’ll wrap this up as quickly as we can.”

  The doctor nodded, stone-faced, just as angry as he’d been before, when Pike had pulled Tuval out of regen therapy. “He’s got another day to go,” Boyce had said. “You risk permanently compromising his lung function; you risk all sorts of complications. Why do it? He’s not going to be much good in a fight. I won’t certify him for any sort of exploratory mission, either.” Pike understood his doctor’s warnings but didn’t feel he had a choice at the moment. He needed Tuval’s experience right now; therapy had to wait.

  If Conn was alive, it would be a different matter. But Conn was dead, and Tuval’s new second was a kid, and he was not going to trust a kid’s judgment in these matters.

  “To answer your question, Commander,” Spock said. “Standard Starfleet protocol automates mirroring of all base logs at Starfleet Archives via subspace transmission. For Starbase Eighteen, this mirroring takes place via the amplifier designated Echo one-one-nine, one of the old REC-two amplifiers. It occurred to me that those messages might have needed processing within the unit before being passed along. A corollary of that assumption was that portions of the messages might remain as fragmentary information within—”

  “Oh. Automated backup,” Tuval interrupted. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  Spock frowned. “I believe I just did.”

  Chief Pitcairn laughed. He was the only one.

  “What?” he said. “That’s funny.”

  Maybe it was. But Pike didn’t have time for humor right now.

  “All right. Now that we all understand how we got this information”—the captain looked around the table and got a series of nods in response—“let’s take a look at it.”

  Number One leaned forward and waved a hand over one of the table sensors. The briefing room lights dimmed. The wall opposite Pike doubled as a monitor screen; it filled now with video static. The speakers hissed an audio version of the same. Then both cleared, and the screen came to life.

  Pike and his officers were looking at the interior of Starbase 18’s flight tower, a circular room with floor-to-ceiling windows. A man in a Starfleet uniform stood with his back to them.

  “… response yet?” the man asked. There were two women seated at an instrument console directly in front of him. The one on the left was shaking her head.

  “Nothing, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “Sensor images continue to fluctuate, Commodore.” That came from a voice offscreen. “Considerable ghosting—unable to tell if we’re looking at one or two ships here.”

  “That’s a big help.” The commodore—the man who’d spoken first—turned toward the camera, glaring, angry, giving Pike and the others their first head-on look at him.

  Commodore Rafael Higueras. He’d taught self-defense at the Academy in Pike’s first year. One of the service’s most decorated officers. How—why—he’d ended up in command of a starbase, much less a backwater of a starbase like this one, was a puzzle to Pike. Not one he was going to expend a lot of time or energy trying to solve at this point, however.

  “You ran diagnostics?” Higueras asked.

  “Yes, sir. Everything checks out fine,” the offscreen voice said.

  “So tell me what we’re looking at,” Higueras said. “What type of ship?”

  “Again, difficult to say. Sensors are having trouble—”

  “Best guess,” Higueras snapped.

  “Closest match is a Klingon vessel, sir. Warbird-class.”

  At the briefing-room table, Pitcairn cursed under his breath. Tuval shifted in his seat and swore out loud.

  “We have data to go with this audio?” the commander asked.

  “No,” Spock said. “However …”

  “Let’s watch the vid now, please,” Pike said. “Commentary later.”

  On the screen, Higueras had turned around again and was now standing with his back to the camera, staring out the tower window. Pike couldn’t see his face, but he felt as if the man was squinting off into the distance. As if he could see what the instruments couldn’t by virtue of sheer willpower.

  Give it up, Rafe, Pike urged him silently. Don’t worry about exactly what’s out there, just activate your shields. Get a distress signal out. Now. Don’t wait. Because if you wait—

  But of course, Higueras did precisely that. Waited. Three full seconds. Same as he had the first time Pike viewed the vid.

  The captain had to console himself with the thought that those three seconds would probably, in the end, have made no difference whatsoever. The firepower that had been directed at the starbase …

  Higueras and his people were doomed any way you looked at it.

  “Let’s play it safe,” the commodore said. “Activate defense systems. Put all ships on yellow alert. And get me—”

  The base’s comm sounded.

  “This is Dr. Corzine. Report, please.”

  “Speak of the devil.” Higueras managed a smile. He leaned over the communications officer and punched a button on the console. “Andreas, we were just about to—”

  There was a sudden burst of static, and then the vid went silent, though on the screen, Higueras continued talking in the same easy, relaxed manner.

  “We are currently endeavoring to recover audio from this portion of the recording,” Spock said. “The odds of doing so, however, are not good.”

  Higueras suddenly straightened up, a look of alarm on his face.

  The console in front of him began flashing a single line of text, white against the black screen:

  WEAPONS FIRE DETECTED

  Higueras turned and strode directly toward the camera, barking out orders as he came. For a second, his face filled the screen.

  Then it went to black. The room lights returned to full-level illumination.

  Pitcairn was the first to speak. “Sonofabitch. So it was them after all. Never mind what Kritos said, the damn Klingons …” The chief looked up at Pike. “What are we gonna do, Captain?”

  “What are we going to do?” Pike glanced toward the porthole at the far end of the room, a two-meter-square window with a view of space and, as luck would have it, 55 Hamilton, the asteroid Enterprise was currently orbiting. A geosynchronous orbit a few hundred klicks up kept them in position over a little patch of black that marred the otherwise uniformly gray surface.

  Until a few days ago, close-up scans of that little patch would have revealed a rainbow of colors, not just black but the green of hydroponic gardens, the blue of an artificial lake, the golds of rich farmland, the gleaming silver of a half-dozen multistory buildings, which taken together had made up Starbase 18. It had been home to eighty-seven people—civilians, Starfleet personnel, and their families. All of whom were now so much space dust.

  “We’re going to wait to see what Starfleet has to say, Chief. They have a copy of that recording as well. I expect to hear word from them shortly. In the meantime, I want us prepared for a
ll eventualities. Mr. Garrison.”

  “Sir?”

  “Let’s make sure that we don’t experience any of those intermittent difficulties contacting Starfleet for the next few days.”

  “Yes, sir. A suggestion—if we can transit the galactic plane, get the ship above the interference sources—”

  Pike shook his head. “We hold position here for the moment, Specialist.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Mr. Tuval, Chief Pitcairn, you’ll make sure the ship and your people are at full combat readiness.”

  “Sir.” Both men nodded.

  “Mr. Spock is assembling a report on Klingon weapons developments. You might want to review it with him—sooner rather than later.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Pitcairn said.

  “You’re talking about the cloaking device?” Tuval asked.

  “I’m talking about a lot of things,” Pike said. “Cloaking device included.”

  “And I suppose I get sickbay prepared to be a triage facility,” Boyce said.

  “We will want to prepare for that possibility,” Pike said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “But if it does,” Boyce said quietly, “I could work up some sort of Klingon-specific pathogen, give those murdering bastards a little taste of their own medicine.”

  At those words, the room fell silent.

  “Pun intended, of course,” Boyce added.

  Pike shook his head. “Not funny, Doctor. Not funny at all.”

  “And expressly prohibited under Gorengar,” Spock added. “Treaty Section Three, Paragraph Four. ‘The use of biological/biochemical agents in any deliberate form or fashion shall result in—’ ”

  “He’s kidding, Spock,” Pitcairn said.

  “Gorengar. You think the Klingons are paying attention to Gorengar?” Boyce looked around the table. “Any of you think that? Or—”