Three - Michael Jan Friedman [34]
Not a good way to go, Gerda thought. “I hope they weren’t in too much pain.”
“Not too much,” said Gerda Idun. But the noticeable tremor in her voice made it clear that she was understating the truth. “And your parents?”
“Killed also,” said Idun, “but not by disease. They were private cargo haulers—engine components, EPS couplings, that sort of thing.”
“Their routes carried them well beyond the boundaries of Federation space,” Gerda noted. “They routinely ran into Orions, Athaban, Talarians.”
“It sounds like dangerous work,” said Gerda Idun.
“It was,” Idun confirmed. “A bit too dangerous for most other cargo haulers. But our parents were excellent pilots, and they never tried to take on more than they could handle.” She glanced at Gerda. “Until one day, they ran into a squadron of Pephili raiders.”
“It was a one-in-a-million encounter,” said Gerda, [99] recalling the stricken looks on her parents’ faces when they realized what they were up against. “The kind of thing that’s not supposed to happen out in space. We came out of a nebula and there they were, no doubt every bit as surprised as we were.”
Idun heaved a sigh. “Once the Pephili had our ship in their sights, they weren’t going to stop until they stripped us of our cargo—and our lives. Our father led them on a chase, but he couldn’t elude them forever. Finally, they hit one of our warp nacelles. Our parents knew it was only a matter of time before the cowards caught up with us, so they looked for a planet on which to set down.”
The memory was like ashes in Gerda’s mouth. “We found a class-M world and landed safely in the midst of some hills. But the Pephili came after us with a party of armed thugs.” She felt a lump in her throat and willed it away, knowing it wasn’t worthy of her. “They killed our parents, stole our cargo, and took whatever else they could rip from our ship. Then they left us there to die.”
Gerda Idun looked from one of the sisters to the other. “Just the two of you?”
Idun nodded. “Just the two of us. We were eight years old. And the land around us was barren as far as the eye could see. For several days, we lived on scraps we found in our ship’s pantry. Then we ran out of even those. We fully expected to starve to death, but we didn’t have the courage to set out across the wastes and try to do something about it. So we sat and waited quietly for death.”
“Then,” said Gerda, “a ship appeared.” She could see it in her mind’s eye—a dark speck against a pale orange sky, growing bigger with each passing moment. “It was [100] a Klingon scout ship, but we didn’t know that. We thought it might be the Pephili, coming back to kill us as they had killed our parents. So we ran into the hills and hid.”
“Still,” said Idun, “they found us—a squad of Klingon warriors, surprised to find a strange ship on a world they had long ago made part of their empire. We had never seen Klingons before, so we didn’t know what to expect of them. But they took us back to their ship and presented us to their captain, a warrior named Warrokh.”
“He seemed to like something about us,” said Gerda, “though I can’t imagine what it was. We were pathetic—cringing, mewling little girls, too frightened to even look him in the eye. As it happened, he and his wife Chithar were childless. Warrokh thought it would please her to take us in and make us their own.”
Idun nodded, her eyes glazed with memory. “And that is what they did.”
Gerda Idun looked at them, her expression one of disbelief. “These Klingons ... adopted you?”
Gerda nodded. “They took us into their House and made us their legal heirs, according us rights and privileges as if we were their own blood.”
The newcomer winced. “But Klingon society is so ... different from ours. It must have been ...” She seemed to search for a word.
“Rigorous? Painful? Terrifying?” Idun suggested. “It was all of that—and more.”
“And we were still mourning our parents,” Gerda noted, “wrestling with the feelings any newly orphaned