Part Four (Cont'd)
The entire structure of the mighty K’t’inga-class battlecruiser convulsed all around her.
Denella’s hand gripped onto the edge of the escape pod’s hatch with all of her strength, her other hand still wavering over the control panel.
She could barely make out anything through the smoke any more. In the distance, she could still hear cries of pain and anguish every now and again, as the qajunpaQ went down in flames.
She knew she couldn’t hold on any longer. Aside from anything else, every second she hesitated now meant that the pod ran the risk of being smashed apart by debris as it fled from the rapidly failing mother ship.
But still she waited. Just another second. And then another.
Eventually, just as she reached the point of no return, she saw a figure stumbling through the smoke towards her. A figure she recognised immediately.
“Klath!” she called out, as the burly Klingon approached.
“I told you to eject the pod as soon as the shop decloaked,” he pointed out.
“And I told you I’m not leaving until the corridor collapses.”
Klath’s dark scowl softened into a significantly friendlier expression, as he nodded back at her in acknowledgement.
“Thank you for waiting.”
“Thank you for choosing to leave,” she smiled back, “What changed your mind?”
He paused for a moment, even as the qajunpaQ groaned from the impact of another hit. In the end, he elected for a simple answer.
“I felt that today…was not a good day to die.”
Her smile grew a little bit wider.
“It never is,” she replied, “But, the corridor is kinda collapsing now, so we need to—”
“Coward!”
The fierce growl took them both by surprise. They turned to see Commander K’Vara bearing down on them, her blade already drawn.
“I thought you were a warrior, Klath. I thought I saw that in your eyes, when we were together. But Captain Mekvar was right. You are nothing but a coward!”
Denella’s hand immediately reached for her own dagger on her belt. But she felt Klath stopping her with a swift motion of his own hand.
Instead, he stood facing her with his hands at his side, defenceless. And he responded to her.
“K’Vara, you do not need to react in this way. There is no cowardice in living to fight another battle, I see that now.”
K’Vara paused, weapon still raised.
“No,” she argued, “Captain Mekvar has shown us that there is no other way. We failed the Empire, and now we must atone. In battle. With our lives!”
Inside, part of Klath found that he couldn’t disagree with what she was saying. But he forced that part of him away yet again.
“There is another way,” he persisted, “Come with me, K’Vara. There will be another battle.”
Still defenceless, he held out a hand towards her. And for a moment, she considered it.
But then, the anger flared brightly in her eyes again. And she lunged at him, weapon bared.
The sound of the dagger thudding into a solid Klingon frame was audible even over the alarms and the final convulsions of the qajunpaQ. Denella and Klath watched in shock as K’Vara’s lifeless body dropped to the ground, a sturdy blade protruding from her back.
Further down the corridor, Lieutenant Brakha stood and glared back at them through the smoke.
“
Qapla’, Denella, daughter of Telmis,” he called out.
Further down the corridor, another plasma relay exploded in a burst of fire.
“Thank you!” she bellowed back over the alarms, “But you can still come as well—!”
“Do not burden me with your pity,” the proud chief engineer called back with a dismissive wave of his hand as he stood in the ruins of his ship, “I cannot escape my end. This is my fate, and I will face it with whatever honour I still have.”
For a troubling moment, Denella saw that Brakha’s words caused a fresh look of consternation on Klath’s face. As if he was being swayed to the glorious death side of the scale one last time.
She elected to act, grabbing his arm and pulling him back towards the pod.
“Come on!” she cried out, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
Klath aimed a respectful nod at Brakha, now silhouetted in flames, and clambered into the pod.
Denella finally tapped the controls to close the pod door, as Klath scrambled to the control station at the front of the small craft.
“Firing escape thrusters,” he motioned.
“Think this is gonna work?” Denella asked as she dragged herself into the seat next to him.
“I do not know,” he admitted candidly, “We must hope there is enough debris to effectively disguise the pod from the Tholian sensors.”
With that, he tapped the final command, and the tiny escape pod separated itself from the qajunpaQ, the craft’s thrusters immediately kicking in to propel it away from the doomed ship.
As soon as they were clear, their world was turned upside down. A chunk of debris made glancing contact with the pod and tipped it into a violent spin.
Denella was thrown clear of her seat. Klath gripped desperately onto the controls for a moment, but eventually he also succumbed to the laws of physics, and was flung across the pod.
His head impacted on the deck with a heavy thud. He felt his vision blurring.
Several alarms flared up from the pod’s automated systems. He heard Denella call out. Or he thought he did.
He detected the tell-tale sound of air escaping from a pressurised environment.
And then he succumbed to the darkness. Wondering if he really was on his way to Sto-vo-kor after all.
****************************
The view in front of him slowly but surely resolved into a clear picture.
If he really was in Sto-vo-kor, then the ceilings of the Klingon afterlife looked an awful lot like the ceiling of the Bounty’s medical bay.
“Klath? Can you hear me?”
And Kahless the Unforgettable sounded unerringly like Natasha Kinsen.
As his brain slowly caught up with his situation, Klath sat stiffly up on the Bounty’s single treatment bed. To find Natasha by his side, running a tricorder over him, and Jirel, Sunek and a patched-up Denella watching on at the foot of the bed.
“I am alive,” he grunted to his unexpected audience.
“Hey, there’s only room for one medical expert on this ship,” Natasha chided him with a smile, as she looked over the results of her scan, “But, now I’ve treated the head trauma, the oxygen deprivation and the broken arm, I would have to agree with your diagnosis.”
Klath shook his head to try and clear the fog, and looked at Denella in confusion.
“Don’t ask me how we got here,” she shrugged, “I was in worse shape than you were.”
Jirel stepped forwards and smiled at his friend.
“You both got lucky. By the time we got here, the fighting was over. But we managed to spot a single escape pod in all the debris and beam you over.”
“Both suffering from the effects of a partial decompression,” Natasha added, “Plus a few more injuries from your bumpy escape. Fortunately, you had some expert medical assistance on hand to treat you.”
“Hey,” Sunek chimed in, “If we’ve reached the ego-massaging part of the story, how about a word for the stunningly handsome Vulcan who came up with a way to get a trace on a cloaked Klingon ship using their own tracking device against them, hmm?”
Jirel shrugged and smiled a little wider.
“Yeah, Sunek helped too. A tiny bit.”
Behind the Trill, the Vulcan pilot aimed an especially obscene gesture in his direction, even as Jirel continued his explanation.
“Anyway, we picked you up, and now…we’re heading for the Vargon system.”
“Why?” Klath asked.
“Because it’s really important that about half a dozen Tholian patrols see us going to the Vargon system. Just to be on the safe side.”
That cryptic response provoked several potential follow-up questions, but as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up, he opted for a different question. One that, deep down, he already knew the answer to.
“The qajunpaQ?”
Denella’s expression turned a little less happy.
“Destroyed,” she confirmed.
“We spent as long as we could looking for other escape pods,” Jirel added, “But there was nothing.”
“There would not be,” Klath conceded, as he contemplated Captain Mekvar and his crew, “The others aboard that ship would not have sought rescue.”
“So,” the Trill ventured, “What the hell was all this about anyway? Why exactly was half my crew abducted by a bunch of Klingons?”
Klath felt himself instinctively closing up, at the renewed threat of a serious conversation. But then, he surveyed the four people standing around him, and had another moment of clarity.
He saw Denella, who had stayed onboard the qajunpaQ even as it was falling apart, waiting for him to get to the escape pod. He saw Jirel, Natasha and Sunek, who had raced into Tholian space without the cover of a cloaking device or the firepower of a battlecruiser, simply to try and rescue them.
He saw a group of people without whom he would likely have been consigned to the same fate as Captain Mekvar and the qajunpaQ’s crew.
And most importantly, he saw an awful lot of honour.
“Klath?” Denella asked, seeing the thoughtful look on his face, “You ok?”
“No,” he replied, with a slow shake of his huge head.
“Huh,” Natasha mused, springing into action with her tricorder again, “I didn’t see any signs of internal bleeding, but this damn tricorder is always—”
Klath gently pushed the tricorder away.
“I do not mean that,” he sighed, forcing the words out of his mouth, “But…I have something to say. To you all.”
“Huh,” Sunek smirked in the direction of the usually monosyllabic Klingon, “Never mind a tricorder, we need to get you to a hospital, stat.”
Klath ignored the jibe, and kept on talking. Something that didn’t come naturally to him, but something that he felt he had to do.
“I realise now that I have been onboard this vessel for so long, and I have known each of you for many years. But…I have never told you why I am here.”
“Um,” Jirel replied uncomfortably, “I kinda thought there was a reason you’d never told us. Y’know, the whole ‘ixnay on the discommend-ay’ rule.”
Klath nodded. He had always stuck to the rule that a discommended individual should not reveal the details of his dishonour to the others.
Until now. When suddenly, that didn’t seem so important.
“That is the way things are for Klingons,” he conceded, “But you are not Klingons. You…are my friends. And perhaps it is more honourable if I am truthful with you all.”
He paused again, and focused his attention on Sunek.
“Even with those who already know my story.”
The other three Bounty crewmembers turned to Sunek with varying levels of shock. The rangy Vulcan simply shrugged back casually.
“What can I say? I’m good with secrets.”
Natasha suppressed a flinch at the reminder of how many details of her own past the Bounty’s pilot had been inadvertently privy to during a mind meld last year, part of a desperate effort to cure her of an infection from a psychoactive plant toxin. *
Still, she took some comfort from the idea that the often unreliable Vulcan seemed to have been a safe harbour for personal information of Klath’s as well.
Oblivious to the medic’s private concerns, and not considering the need to perhaps allow everyone to reconvene to somewhere more comfortable, Klath began his story right where he stood in the medical bay.
He wasn’t a natural storyteller. But then, this was his own story. And as he explained the reasons behind his exile, the fateful choice in the Tygon Nebula that had led him to his exile on the Bounty, the others simply stood and listened.
Sunek had already heard the story from the vengeful Kolar over a year ago, on top of a mountain on the Kraterite planet.
Denella had often wondered about the details of the story, even as she had trained with, and learned from, her Klingon friend.
Jirel, in truth, had always thought the story would be a lot worse than it turned out to be. He’d both seen and heard stories of Klingons doing a hell of a lot worse than Klath was admitting to doing, without being exiled in dishonoured shame.
And Natasha found herself still a little distracted by her own past, wondering if she could ever find a way to be as honest about her own mistakes as Klath was being right now. Certainly not today, she eventually decided.
But none of them interrupted him.
There was none of the usual banter or quips or jibes that tended to dominate any moments of sincerity like this on the Bounty. Even from Sunek.
Instead, they all stood and listened.
And, for the first time since he had been cast into exile, Klath opened up to someone.
End of Part Four
* - Just as Sunek learned Klath's secrets in Star Trek: Bounty - 102 - "Be All My Sins Forgiven", he learned Natasha's secret in Star Trek: Bounty - 107 - “One Character in Search of an Exit”. And also note that Natasha told Jirel about her secret in "Be All My Sins Forgiven" as well, in this scene, but presumably she trusts him more to keep a secret.
