Day of Honor 01_ Ancient Blood - Diane Carey [28]
And here I am, volunteering for this delivery, without even knowing what I am delivering. I wish I could deliver a foot into the throat of each Klingon here.
Forcing himself to stop dreaming, he shook himself back to the action of the moment. Now a Starfleet scout had spotted them and veered in at high warp, and Ugulan was panicking. The other six Rogues on board were agitated, but waiting for Ugulan to make a decision.
Pathetic invertebrate cowards …
The freighter belonged to the lieutenant governor’s brother, and this morning the Rogues had stolen it and loaded it with unmarked crates. Worf, as the new Rogue, had been careful not to ask questions, for surely that would be a signal. Once the cargo of illicit goods was discovered, Odette Khanty’s plan was for the freighter’s ownership to be revealed, and the lieutenant governor implicated—at least in enough people’s suspicions to tilt the election handily.
Begrudgingly, Worf admired the craft of the plan, but still his hands grew cold in spite of the heat in the cockpit. This was not his kind of mission. He was the wrong man for espionage.
“Betrayed! Betrayed …” Ugulan frantically worked the controls as the ten-man Starfleet scout closed in on them. He barked at his men, who negotiated the ship around a dust belt and between two asteroids, but there was no universe in which a loaded freighter could outmaneuver or certainly outrun a Starfleet pack.
“Attention Cargo Sindikash,” Riker’s voice came again, more forceful this time, angry. “Heave to or we will fire on you. Do you copy? This is your last warning. Stop forward propulsion immediately.”
“We have to do it,” the Rogue named Goric said. “They’ll cut us to shreds.”
“Do it, Ugulan!” another Rogue demanded.
Ugulan snarled, “We are supposed to destroy ourselves before ever giving up.”
“For her?” Goric charged. “I have no wish to die for that woman!”
Worf turned and sneered at him, and for a moment he could be himself. “What will you die for?”
Goric gaped back at him, caught briefly in the magnetism of underlying meaning.
A strained silence, bizarre stillness, folded over the cockpit.
What are you and how did you come to this?
“That was the oath we made to her,” Ugulan reminded them, but not with enthusiasm. “We swore on our honor we would never allow ourselves to be captured as evidence against her. She has not violated her agreement with us.”
“You are all cowards,” Worf snarled. “You swear an oath that swallows your honor, then you betray even that.”
On that, Goric spun again to Ugulan. “It does me no good if she wins and we are all dead!”
Ugulan growled, looked at the other Rogues, deciphering their agreement with Goric, and decided whether or not he wanted to self-destruct for Odette Khanty’s purity of position. “If we fail her, we’ll be hunted down.”
“Better dead tomorrow than today,” Goric declared.
The other Rogues grumbled their agreement.
Worf held his breath, prepared to circumvent disaster if he had to, for he indeed did not intend to die for Khanty, but that turned out not to be necessary. Ugulan pounded the helm console, slowed the ship down, and prepared to comply.
All around Worf, the Rogues’ faces were pasted with bloody-minded anger as they realized their acrimony would get them nowhere. Worf scrutinized them as if their pasts would rise in print on their foreheads if he looked hard enough. Were their plans for power and influence eroding before their eyes? Were they angry that all they could do now was be angry?
His stomach twisting with disgust, Worf found a certain sorrow in watching the wreckage of Klingons thinking there was nothing to do but give up.
Give up! Curse you all into the dirt!
Worf plunged in between Ugulan and the helm and slammed the thrusters back on again, and doubled the freighter’s speed under them.
“What are you doing!” Ugulan