Reap the Whirlwind

She had a court-martial to win.

Epilogue

Ministers

of Vengeance

Two to Tango

Zett Nilric’s ship, a new Nalori argosy named Icarion, had been drifting for nearly two days with its engines offline. Its life support had been kept at a bare-minimum level, and its effective communications range was less than one light-minute. Unless another vessel was making a determined effort to find it and knew exactly where to look, it was unlikely that the Icarion would be detected. But because his employer had made specific arrangements with Starfleet to keep this sector of deep space clear of patrols and unwatched by long-range sensor arrays, Zett had every reason to believe that he was working in privacy.

It was time. He passed one glossy, midnight-black hand over his ship’s immaculate main console and tapped the secure-frequency transmitter, sending a brief, ultra-low-power pulse of encrypted data into the emptiness of Sector Tango-4119. If his contact was punctual, the wait would be short.

Behind him, in the main cabin beyond the cockpit, the stone sarcophagus sat secured to the deck. Zett was not a man who spooked easily, but he wanted this cargo off his ship. He had sneered at the obvious terror its contents had inspired in the primitive aliens from whom he had acquired it, but within two days of taking possession of it, he had become wary of the artifact. An aura of menace emanated from it. He was certain that it was infecting his dreams with terrors and disquieting his waking thoughts with demoralizing subliminal insinuations. Less than four days in its presence had convinced him that evil was more than an abstract concept—it was a concrete reality, lying silent inside a two-meter-long coffin of dark gray, rough-hewn granite.

He jolted with surprise as the double beep of a response signal shrilled in the silence of the cockpit. A deep breath restored his calm, and then he opened the cha

A gruff voice answered over the comm, “In waiting for the right moment, never forget to attack.”

Zett transmitted beam-in coordinates to his contact, got up from his seat, and walked back into the main cabin. Four signal-blocking pylons stood at the corners of the sarcophagus, as insurance against the client’s potential impulse to try to steal it via transporter beam. The Nalori assassin stepped past the stone coffin and placed himself between it and the beam-in coordinates. Then he waited.

Moments later a shimmer and a singsong, oscillating drone of high-pitched white noise filled the air a few meters in front of him. The swirling glow of light coalesced into a humanoid shape and faded to reveal a ridged-headed, black-bearded, swarthy Klingon named Qahl. As the last traces of the transporter effect faded, the visitor took one step forward, looked Zett in the eye, and pointed at the sarcophagus. “Is that it?”

“Yes,” Zett said. He stepped aside to give Qahl an unobstructed view. “Examine it first, if you like.”

The Klingon stepped past Zett and positioned himself next to one long side of the artifact. His large, callused hands caressed the ruts and peaks of the object’s primitively carved stone lid. Zett followed him and stood on the opposite side of the ancient burial case. Qahl asked, “Where did you get it?”

“Are you prepared to pay an extra five million?”

Qahl scowled at Zett and grunted as he resumed his tactile examination of the casket. “I want to look inside.”

“Go ahead,” Zett said, moving back to give him some room.

Struggling to get a solid grip on the lid, Qahl glared at Zett. “You could lend a hand.”

Gesturing with a fluid, top-to-bottom sweep of his hand at his custom-tailored charcoal suit and perfectly polished black shoes, Zett flashed a smile of glistening black teeth. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not dressed for manual labor.”

Qahl grumbled under his gagh-fouled breath, which Zett could smell from meters away as the Klingon huffed and struggled to lift the sarcophagus lid by himself. With tremendous effort he raised one side of it several centimeters and tilted his head to peek under it, into a mesmerizing flicker of violet light. His eyes widened, and his jaw went slack.

Zett counted to ten, decided Qahl had seen enough to make an informed decision, and pressed his palm against the stone lid, forcing it shut with a resounding boom. “Satisfied?”

The Klingon nodded, palmed a sheen of musky perspiration from his brow, and stepped back. He reached into a fold of his black-and-gold uniform jacket and produced a credit chip, which he handed to Zett. The trim, shaved-headed Nalori accepted it with a polite half-nod and carried it to an interface on the bulkhead to verify that it was genuine, wasn’t booby-trapped, and contained the correct amount of remuneration. Stroking his twisted, pale-violet beard braid, he watched Qahl in the corner of his vision while he waited.

To his surprise, there was more money on the chip than had been agreed upon. He turned and narrowed his flat-black, pupil-free eyes at Qahl, who, apparently having anticipated Zett’s wary response, gri

In Zett’s opinion, his assassination of Lurqal—a.k.a. A

He ejected the chip from the wall panel, tucked it into his pants pocket, turned to Qahl, and said simply, “Thank you.” Then he took a remote control from his jacket pocket and entered the disarming code for the transport scramblers. “You’re all set.”

Qahl plucked a communicator from his belt and flipped it open. A few guttural Klingon commands later, he and the stone sarcophagus dissolved in an incandescent flurry of golden particles accompanied by the siren song of a transporter beam.

Zett returned to the cockpit and sat down. He had no idea what had been inside the sarcophagus, or why the Klingons had been willing to pay such an outrageous price to acquire it. All he knew was that he was glad to have it off his ship.

All in a day’s work, he told himself as he fired up the engines of the Icarion, set course for Vanguard, and made the jump to warp speed.

The knife that T’Pry

Neither were the starless sky, the endless night, the great trackless wasteland spread out beneath the void. Not the pain of her shattered bones, not her flayed skin, not the burning welts across her back, not the split in her lip stung by her saliva, not the coppery swell of blood in the back of her throat.

The only things real in this frozen purgatory were T’Pry