The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [38]
Hek watched and listened, hiding his pleasure.
“Why does this have to happen just at the moment of our triumph?” a third delegate cried. “Our people have a right to deliver Retribution!”
It was all going according to script.
“Perhaps it is fate,” another delegate called. “Perhaps we are not intended to deliver it at all.”
Hek frowned.
“Traitor!” someone spat, and the Presider brightened. There was a sudden flurry of fists around the dissenting delegate. When it ended, the delegate had disappeared.
“I’ve spent my whole life preparing for this,” a burly delegate snarled. “My forefathers lived and died to bring me here. Are seven thousand years of suffering, sacrifice, and privation to be wasted just as we are about to achieve Retribution?” The delegate suddenly stood on his seat and waved a fist above his head, howling the rest of his speech.
“No!” he cried, just as he had rehearsed it with Hek’s closest advisors a few hours before. “My ship will never surrender! We will not disappoint our ancestors! We will not squander their sacred devotion to duty! Let our forebears continue to drift easy in their orbits! I don’t care about these alien friends of the Lethanta! Let them come! We’ll send them and their Lethanta friends to the Black Drifts together! Death to the Lethanta! Death to the aliens! Death! Death! Death!”
Instantly there came a giant, unreserved roar of approval, an instinctive cry from the guts of nearly every delegate in the Great Hall. Soon there came a chant: “Guide us, Hek! Guide us! Give us Retribution!” The incantation was quickly taken up by others. The few who dared say anything in opposition, even those delegates who appeared merely unenthusiastic, were mobbed and brought down as the mad demonstration went on uninterrupted.
The Krann were in full cry.
The Presider looked out over the thousands of delegates in the Great Hall, left and right and center, and then he held out his arms to them, as if to embrace them all. It was the gesture of a savior, and the delegates responded to it with yells and cries for his intercession. They beseeched Hek to secure for them a vengeance that had been so long denied.
Hek let them go on for several minutes, knowing that they were his now. With just the proper amount of solemnity, the expression on his face utterly commanding, Presider Hek made the motion himself and called for the vote.
Chapter Nine
Captain’s log, stardate 45527.9. We have been standing five kilometers off the bow of the flagship of the Krann fleet for nearly twenty hours. The Krann have ignored every one of our hails, but neither have they made any aggressive moves toward us. Meanwhile, the front line of their fleet continues to draw ever nearer to Nem Ma’ak Bratuna, and the Lethanta have become more and more apprehensive.
We know the Krann are receiving our signals. Every time we hail them, several of the Krann step up to the windows on the bridge of their flagship to stare out at us for a while in curiosity and, it seems, a bit of fear. It turns out that the Krann are indeed humanoid. They are built rather like the Lethanta, but they seem pallid—just as you might expect, I suppose, from a race that has remained confined within walls of steel for much of its recent existence.
Whatever the reason for their reluctance to speak with us, I must overcome it. We must try to avert the coming war between the two races. With some five billion sentient lives at stake, I am game to try something new—a gambit that I think the Krann might respect.
TEN-FORWARD WAS AGAIN CLOSED, but this time Guinan was not present. Picard, Riker, and Troi stood just before the frontmost window in the lounge. They could see the huge Krann flagship quite clearly. According to the sensors on the Enterprise, the flagship was by far the largest spacecraft in the Krann fleet, the next largest being just over half its size. The spidery little constructs keeping station near the flagship