Harbinger

“I can’t begin to tell you how deeply sorry I am, sir.” It was the truth; Qui

This, apparently, was going to be one of those times.

Ganz sat up, stood, and walked slowly toward Qui

“Sure. How can I refuse?”

“You can’t.” Leaving his warning implied, Ganz turned and padded casually back to his mountain of comfort. Reclining into its lush embrace, he snapped his fingers, and a pair of lissome young women—one human, the other Deltan—sprang to his sides and began doting affectionately and silently on him.

Choking back the bile of his envy, Qui

Oh, no.

Closing his eyes, Qui

He flopped sideways onto the floor, a thick stream of bloody spittle gushing from his split lip and loosened teeth. Blinking slowly, he fought to see through the heavy swelling around his eye sockets. He recognized the bespoke white fabric of the pant leg standing in front of him.

Overcoming the hideous pain in the vertebrae of his neck, Qui

“Thank you,” Zett said. Then he pulled back his foot, snapped it forward, and broke two of Qui

“That’s enough,” Ganz said, and the beating ceased. Morikmol gingerly lifted Qui

“I slipped in the shower,” Qui

“Very good…. We’ll be in touch.”

Borne away in the hands of the Tarmelite, Qui

He crawled forward. Every muscle and joint burned. When his arms and his legs and his back all finally gave out, he slumped onto the deck for several minutes, then peeked around himself to gauge his progress. To his dismay, he had moved less than twenty meters. Marshaling the atrophied vestiges of his youthful survival instinct, he forced himself to put one hand in front of the other and go on dragging himself forward.

It’s a long way to the bar, he told himself. Keep crawling.

Diego Reyes gazed out into the endless void beyond the main window in Dr. Fisher’s quarters, and he wished for a moment that he could just lose himself in all that comfortingly silent darkness. “It’s just been one of those weeks,” he said.

Behind him, the doctor sat on his sofa, sipping at the gently spiced, half-decaf coffee he had brewed for the commodore’s impromptu, late-evening visit. “Meenok’s disease is about as bad as it gets,” Fisher said. “I wish I could put a silver lining on your mother’s situation, but…well, I’m just damn sorry, Diego.”

Reyes glanced at Fisher’s reflection, half-spectral against the stars on the other side of the transparent aluminum window. The older man’s heavy-lidded eyes projected serenity. It was an emotion that Reyes could only envy this evening.

“I spent the last four days thinking about how awful it must be to get a death sentence like that,” Reyes said. “To have a few months to contemplate the end of your life…. I just couldn’t get my head around it. Then we lost the Bombay.”

“Two months or two minutes, doesn’t make much difference,” Fisher said. “No matter how ready we think we are for death, no one’s ever ready. Not really.”

“Maybe not. But there’s a big difference between getting a terminal illness and getting killed in an ambush.”

“You sure about that? Are there degrees of dead?”

“I can’t take revenge on Meenok’s disease. I can hunt down the bastards who attacked the Bombay.”

“Hang on, Diego. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.” Over the years, Reyes had learned to heed Dr. Fisher’s advice. The old physician, despite being an irascible curmudgeon, was known to dispense some fairly sound philosophy in his spare time. Regardless, tonight his notes of caution sounded naïve.

Reyes’s voice simmered with anger. “It was a milk run, Zeke. Simple as it gets. Except they aren’t coming back.”

Fisher leaned forward with a soft groan of effort and rested his mug on the antique cedar coffee table. “That’s the job,” the doctor said, the gritty edge of his drawl a bit more pronounced than usual. “Sometimes things go wrong. But it doesn’t matter how many times life knocks you down; what matters is how many times you get back up.”

“Spare me the pep talk, will you? I know risk is part of the equation,” Reyes said, the twin demons of doubt and regret wrestling in his gut. “But the Ravanar system was well charted. No anomalies.” In one gulp, he downed the rest of his own mug of black, unsweetened coffee. “If this wasn’t an attack, why is my ship missing?”

Fisher folded his hands together. “A lot can happen to a starship, even under the best of circumstances. There’s still a lot of things in this galaxy we don’t understand.”

“Here’s what I understand,” Reyes said, turning away from the window. “A good ship with a great captain isn’t coming home.” He stalked into the kitchenette and poured himself another cup of coffee. A faint scent of ci

“Why not declare war on both? Could save time later.”

Reyes scowled at the doctor as he picked up his mug and gave it a cooling puff of breath. “Ravanar’s a long way from the Klingon border, and we’ve had Endeavour patrolling that for a few weeks now. But the Tholians haven’t shown any interest in the Taurus Reach, so I can’t figure out why they’d do this.”