Broken Bow - Diane Carey [6]
“A wheat farmer named Moore shot him with a plasma rifle,” Forrest filled in. “Says it was self-defense.”
“Fortunately,” Tos added, “Soval and I have maintained close contact with Qo’noS since the incident occurred.”
Archer turned. Oh, what the heck—just ask. “Qo’noS?”
“It’s the Klingon homeworld,” Admiral Leonard said, proud that he could pronounce it now.
Forrest eagerly added, “This gentleman is some kind of courier. Evidently, he was carrying crucial information back to his people—”
“When he was nearly killed by your ‘farmer,’ ” Soval stuck in.
Uh-oh. Archer’s back stiffened. He knew that tone, that inference. Your farmer. Good thing he was well enough educated to understand the subtle nastiness as wielded by the pointy among us.
He turned, faced them all, tilted his head just a little, and waited for the other shoe to drop.
Carefully Admiral Forrest finally admitted, “Ambassador Soval thinks it would be best if we push back your launch until we’ve cleared this up—”
“Well, isn’t that a surprise?” Archer snapped. He looked directly at Soval with what he hoped were his father’s eyes. “You’d think they’d come up with something a little more imaginative this time.”
Soval’s face was impassive. “Captain, the last thing your people need is to make an enemy of the Klingon Empire.”
“If we hadn’t convinced them,” Tos filled in, “to let us take Klaang’s corpse back to Qo’noS, Earth would most likely be facing a squadron of warbirds by the end of—”
“Corpse?” Archer broke in. “Is he dead?”
That would change things, but he had no idea how. What was an alien agent or courier doing bumbling about on Earth anyway? If Archer understood the general layout of this part of the galaxy, Earth wasn’t particularly easy to stumble onto, which was why nobody had stumbled here until Zephram Cochrane sent up his big flare.
The Vulcans were annoyed at his questions, but Archer wasn’t about to be swayed by that. Where was it written that humans had to be polite and accommodating to Vulcans and everybody else, but nobody felt obliged to be polite back?
Starting today—
He stepped past Soval and Admiral Leonard to the ICU door, opened it, and cued a passing physician. “Excuse me—is that man dead?”
Though in hospital garb, the physician was some kind of exotic alien breed, nothing Archer recognized, but his delight at getting to work on this patient was downright human. “His autonomic system was disrupted by the blast, but his redundant neural functions are still intact, which—”
“Is he going to die?” Archer pestered. Yes or no. Just yes or no.
“Not necessarily.”
Close enough.
Without amenity, Archer turned back to the five musketeers. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to disconnect him from life support, even though he could recover. Where’s the logic in that?”
“Klaang’s culture finds honor in death,” Soval explained. “If they saw him like this, he’d be disgraced.”
“They’re a warrior race,” the other Vulcan went on. Did these two always share lines? “They dream of dying in battle. If you understood the complexities of interstellar diplomacy, you would—”
“So your diplomatic solution is to do what they tell you? Pull the plug?” Archer heard his temper rising in his tone. Why not? The putrid lesson in diplomacy betrayed the Vulcans’ own ignorance. What Earthling hadn’t heard about a dozen cultures on his own planet with that Viking morality of dying in battle? It wasn’t exactly new, and Earth was only one planet. So the Klingons carried it to an extreme—all it did was guarantee that they’d be at war with somebody all the time and they’d fight each other if they couldn’t find some stranger to fight. And the Vulcans called Humans primitive? But this they respected?
“Your metaphor is crude, but accurate,” Tos said.
“We may be crude, but we’re not murderers.” Archer turned a cold shoulder to the Vulcans and faced Forrest. “You’re not going to let them do this, are you?”
And he asked in a way that made them all understand that he wasn’t going to let this happen and the admirals could help if they wanted to. As he waited