The Expanse - J.M. Dillard [4]
Duras did not need to ask to whom the chancellor referred: the name had burned in his mind and heart with peculiar venom, ever since he had been sent to Ty’Gokor. Archer.
Archer, the human who had destroyed his honor, his life.
Not so long ago, Duras had been the proud, invincible captain of the Bortas, one of the Empire’s finest vessels. The chancellor had given him a command: retrieve the rebels who had fled the Klingon protectorate of Raatooras, and bring them to justice.
It had seemed a simple enough task—until Archer and his ship, the Enterprise, had interfered. The human had “rescued” the starving rebels, whose ship was in disrepair—then had broken Klingon law and insulted Duras by refusing to turn the rebels over.
Duras responded by firing his weapons. It should have been an easy matter of crippling the Earth ship—Duras’s battle cruiser was clearly the superior vessel—then seizing the rebels, and finishing the humans off.
Archer, however, was both treacherous and cowardly. Rather than fight boldly, he sailed his ship into the nearby planetary ring system, then used explosions to create a plasma that blinded Duras’s sensors and temporarily crippled his weapons.
Then he fled, taking the rebels with him.
To deepen the outrage, Archer did not even perform the courtesy of destroying Duras and the Bortas. Instead, the Klingon captain was forced to return in failure to his chancellor.
Duras hoped for death; such grace was not permitted him. Instead, he was demoted to second weapons officer, and sent to the underbelly of space. His kin was shamed, and no longer spoke his name.
They had managed to capture Archer, and bring him before a tribunal on the outpost Narendra III. Duras had appeared and engaged the empires best prosecutor, Orak. Confident of victory, confident that his position as captain would be restored, Duras had watched the trial—only to be aghast when an all-too-lenient sentence was handed down. Archer was sentenced to labor in the dilithium mines on the ice world, Rura Penthe—but once again, human treachery intervened.
Archer escaped, and Duras was left to remain a lowly weapons officer.
Now, standing on the dais before the High Council, a muscle in Duras’s left jaw spasmed, the only outward sign of the hatred that consumed him. He lived only to redeem his house; he lived only to kill Archer.
A Council member spoke, his tone dripping with condescension. “You had a simple mission, Duras: locate the rebels Archer was harboring and return them to the empire. But you failed. Archer made a fool of you!”
Duras permitted himself no reply; the words that sprang to his firmly compressed lips would have cost him his life.
At last, the chancellor uttered the words Duras had long yearned to hear.
“We are offering you a chance to regain your command, and your honor.”
So; the decision had been made in his favor. Duras let go a long breath of pure satisfaction.
“I will not fail!” he swore to the chancellor.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the Enterprise, charred and floating, dead in space.
Aboard the Enterprise, Chief Engineer Charles “Trip” Tucker entered the conference room and immediately knew something was wrong, very wrong.
Even before he received the summons to the conference room, the ship had slowed to impulse—which probably meant communications were coming in from Earth. He’d thought nothing of it, had assumed it meant a new mission, some new chore they’d thought up at HQ. He’d been in engineering running maintenance on the warp drive, and for some odd reason thinking of Lizzie.
Remembering times from long ago: thirteen-year-old Lizzie. Trip had been almost seventeen then, and he had caught her kissing a kid two years older than she was, a skinny sophomore who he knew from the local high school—what was his name? Carlo something. He was a whiz at botany, that kid; he had