At least one.

  Duffy saw movement among the rocks the instant before the disruptor blast ripped into the soil at his feet. He scrambled back behind the boulder, his hand reaching for his phaser but instead closing around the empty holster at his waist.

  Uh oh.

  Getting to her feet, Hrevet was bringing up her phaser rifle when the next energy bolt slammed into her shoulder. She cried out in pain as the force of the strike hurled her to the hard unforgiving ground.

  “Hrevet!”

  Moving to help her, Duffy was already conscious of the sounds of someone running down the slope toward them. His heart racing, he reached for Hrevet’s phaser rifle but stopped at the sound of a high-pitched, digitally synthesized voice from behind him.

  Duffy couldn’t understand the words, but he comprehended the tone well enough.

  Holding his hands away from his body, he then heard another squawked instruction, and slowly turned around to see a disheveled Breen standing before him. Gray soil covered much of the soldier’s tan uniform and armor, and dark, wet splotches stained several rips in the fabric of his clothing. Vapor escaped from cracks in his helmet, a sure sign that his suit’s environmental systems had been damaged in the explosion.

  “Look,” he said, “it’s over. The ship’s gone, along with everything onboard.” Duffy hated the words as they left his mouth, his first verbal admission that he had failed in his mission here. “Killing us won’t accomplish anything.”

  The Breen’s breathing was labored, and several seconds passed before he responded. This time, Duffy didn’t have a clue what he was saying, but he doubted the Breen was agreeing with Duffy’s assessment of the situation.

  Duffy judged the distance separating them to be only a few meters, but with the disruptor trained on him it may as well have been a light-year. Fatigue and pain was evident in the Breen’s voice, even filtered through his helmet, though Duffy doubted the alien’s injuries would prevent his thwarting any attempt to overpower him.

  An odd whistling sound echoed among the rocks. He thought at first that it might be some kind of bird or other animal, but it seemed oddly artificial as it drew closer.

  Then something crossed Duffy’s line of sight from the left, a blurred whirling object slicing through the air to bury itself in the Breen’s shoulder. His disruptor barrel jerked into the air and pushed the soldier off-balance, and Duffy ducked as the weapon discharged and an energy bolt screamed past his head.

  Seeing the Breen still reeling from whatever it was that had hit him, Duffy lunged for him.

  His opponent recovered first, bringing his weapon around to aim at Duffy.

  A phaser whined and orange energy streaked past the engineer, hitting the soldier and sending him collapsing to the ground. Duffy stood frozen in place, his mouth open in muted shock. Then he heard running footsteps and turned to see an enormous figure lumbering down the slope toward them.

  “Rondon!”

  The agent knelt beside Hrevet, leaning over her to inspect her injury. After a moment, he patted her on her uninjured shoulder with one massive hand. “You will be fine.” Rising to his feet, he regarded Duffy. “Are you unharmed?”

  “I am now. Nice timing.” Duffy pointed to the odd weapon still sticking out of the wounded Breen’s shoulder. “Nice aim, too. What is that thing, anyway?”

  Moving to retrieve the odd blade, Rondon smiled. “A long story. Suffice it to say that it comes in handy on occasion.”

  Duffy picked up the Breen’s disruptor rifle before turning to look back up the slope, his eyes tracing the plumes of smoke rising from the decimated remains of the scout ship. “Well,” he said to no one in particular, “I can’t wait to write the report for this one.”

  Two of the Breen had been killed when they entered the ship prior to its destruction, while a third had fallen victim to flying debris from the explosion. Rondon and Duffy treated the injuries of the remaining soldiers as best they could, after which the away team could do nothing but wait for the da Vinci to return. The ship arrived nearly forty minutes later, and it was a simple task for the ship’s tactical officer, Lieutenant David McAllan, to locate and destroy the jamming apparatus the Breen had used on the surface to interfere with the away team’s equipment.

  “Sorry for the delay,” the relieved voice of Captain Gold said through Duffy’s combadge. “The Breen tried to make it interesting for us by calling in reinforcements. We played hide and seek around the moons of Lamenda IV, but with Wong’s piloting skills and McAllan’s sure aim, we finally got them to turn tail. They’ll be back with reinforcements soon, though, so I’d like to get out of here. Get ready for transport.”

  Asking the captain to stand by for a moment, Duffy severed the connection as he walked to the small clearing among the rocks where the rest of the away team and their Breen prisoners were situated. Hrevet and Stevens sat nearby, trying to remain still in light of their respective injuries, and Duffy moved to kneel beside his friend.

  “I can’t wait for Dr. Tydoan to get a look at you,” he said, imagining the response the da Vinci’s irritable chief medical officer would have upon examining Stevens’s injury and the crude technique that had saved his life. “He’ll fix it, all right, but he’s liable to kill us both afterward.”

  Stevens chuckled as he tried to get comfortable with his back propped against a rock. “Well, assuming he doesn’t, I’m putting in for shore leave. I think we’ve earned a vacation after this.”

  “I know just the place. It’s this bar on Syrinx III. You’ll love it.”

  “Syrinx III?” Stevens echoed. “The resort planet with all the ancient temples? I heard that place can be rowdy. You’re not trying to get me into more trouble, are you?”

  “Perish the thought,” Duffy said, leaving Stevens to ponder the possibilities as he rose and moved to where Rondon stood covering the remaining Breen soldiers with his phaser.

  “They’re ready to beam us up,” he offered to the Zaldan before directing his attention to the leader of the Breen group. “My captain reports that more of your ships are on the way. We plan to leave you here to wait for them. Our mission was to retrieve the prototype, or destroy it. While I’m not happy we won’t be taking the thing home with us, at least you won’t be, either.”

  From behind him, another voice said, “Don’t be such a pessimist.”

  It was Stevens, holding up…something…for everyone else to see. To Duffy it looked like a padd, but it had obviously been disassembled and reconstructed with parts from other equipment. All of it was banded together with a length of optical cabling.

  “Donovan’s tricorder was beat up pretty bad,” Stevens said, “but its memory core was still intact. Ordinarily I’d have connected my own tricorder to it and retrieved the data that way, but it was destroyed during the fighting.”

  “And since padds don’t have a direct data transfer capability,” Duffy said, “you created your own interface?”

  Stevens nodded. “It’s not perfect, but it was enough to let me get a look at what Donovan stored. From the looks of things, he copied all of the schematics for the prototype. The software to run it isn’t here, but there’s enough information to at least have a go at reverse-engineering the thing.” Glancing at the Breen, he said, “They’ll probably build another one. But when they do, we’ll be ready for them.”

  Next to him, Hrevet said, “It was a lot of work to accomplish that. Why did you simply not wait until we returned to your ship, when the task would have been easier?”

  Stevens pointed to where the covered body of Commander Tobias Donovan had been relocated, awaiting transport to the da Vinci. “I wanted to make sure his efforts weren’t wasted.” Indicating the Breen, he added, “And I wanted them to know it, too.”

  While the Breen offered nothing in the way of response, Rondon smiled at the engineer in genuine approval. “It takes a great deal to impress me, human, and here you’ve done so yet again. Excellent work.”

  Duffy saw the expression mirrored on Hrevet’s face, and offered an appreciative nod of his own. Improvisation and imagination had been the order of the day from the moment they beamed down, though they had proven insufficient to accomplish their primary goal. Still, he had prevented the Breen from recovering the vital technology, and Stevens’s own talents had provided some measure of success to their mission while at the same time reassuring Hrevet and Rondon that their friend’s sacrifice had been a worthy one.

  It was a small victory, Duffy realized, perhaps even irrelevant in the larger scheme of the Dominion War.

  But it’s enough, he decided, at least for today.

  A Song Well Sung

  Robert Greenberger

  War correspondence: The Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Diplomatic Implausibility introduced the I.K.S. Gorkon and its crew, among them Captain Klag, a character first seen serving aboard the I.K.S. Pagh in the TNG episode “A Matter of Honor.” The adventures of the Gorkon continue to be chronicled in the Star Trek: I.K.S. Gorkon series. “A Song Well Sung” tells the tale of one of Commander Klag’s battles during the war while still serving on the Pagh.

  Robert Greenberger

  Currently a senior editor at DC Comics, Robert Greenberger has worked most of his adult life there. In addition, he finds time to write fiction (most notably, but not exclusively, Star Trek) and young-adult nonfiction on a wide range of subjects (from Pakistan to Godzilla). His latest works have been released in the summer of 2004: A Time to Love and A Time to Hate, both part of the nine-book set-up for the events seen in Star Trek Nemesis. He makes his home in Connecticut with his wife Deb and kids Kate and Robbie. While never having served his country, he remains proud of those who have.

  The first thing Klag noticed was the smell.

  Burning circuits fused with smoldering flesh. It was unpleasant, but he had smelled far worse. Klag blinked several times, trying to get the smoke to stop stinging and blurring his vision. When that failed, he concentrated his efforts, trying to sort out the sounds that assaulted his ears. The hissing sounded like the fire-suppression equipment, and the warning bleeps indicated the sensors were still online. The Pagh might have been old, but it was sturdy. It was that toughness that no doubt saved the lives of the crew, although the number of honored dead would be high.

  As the seconds passed, a key sound was missing. No one was on the communications system, nor was there any sound of breathing on the bridge. He wasn’t deaf—he had proven that already—but something was amiss. That in itself was enough for Klag to gather his strength and try to move.

  It only then became apparent that he was pinned down under something bulky. Odd, he didn’t seem to feel the discomfort, but then again, he always prided himself on his ability to withstand pain. Right now, he assumed his senses were overloaded and he was in shock from the crash landing on Marcan V. His last memory was of the engineering bekk, a beardless youth, reporting the stabilizers had failed and the landing was to be rough. Then they were tossed about the dim bridge like sacks of wheat as the K’Vort-class ship first met the atmospheric pocket surrounding Marcan V and, seemingly seconds later, impacted with the ground.

  Finally, the haze began to clear away and Klag saw the outline of the captain’s chair between himself and the floor. Its armrest was uncomfortably jabbing his abdomen, something he felt through the leather armor he wore. The corpulent form of Captain Kargan was fortunately not in the chair, but that raised another question he did not dare ask as yet. No, the first thing he had to do was regain freedom of movement.

  He tested the wrecked chair and found that it was wedged between other twisted portions of command stations. Try as he might, Klag could not even get his right fingers to wiggle, let alone grip the chair. He gingerly moved to his knees, debris cutting through leather, bracing his left shoulder against the cushioned seat. With his left leg braced against one of the few intact support struts, Klag pushed against the chair, trying to force it forward. While the metal groaned at the effort, it only moved slightly. Klag let out a curse and coughed as the smoky air filled his lungs.

  He paused a moment to note there were no responses to his curse. Could it be that the rest of the bridge crew was dead? With renewed effort, he pushed at the chair and noted it moved just a bit more. Changing tactics, he pulled at the chair and it moved more freely, and he continued to exert force, willing the twisted metal and leather to be gone. And like a cork released from a keg of bloodwine, the chair popped out of its crumbled housing, causing Klag to lose his balance and tumble face down to the damp deck.

  While he had momentarily thought he had actually opened bloodwine, his eyes focused on the cause of the wetness: the blood of the pilot, whose sightless eyes and his own were only centimeters apart. The wound nearly severed the head from the woman’s neck and her heart had long since stopped pumping the blood through useless veins.

  Taking a deep breath, Klag got to his knees and then to his feet. Standing at last, he began to survey the destroyed bridge but finally stopped to examine an odd sensation in his right shoulder. Glancing down, Klag saw in horror that the shoulder stopped and no arm extended from it. He looked further down and saw his appendage lying on the deck, blood pooled at the ripped end and the fingers curled into a fist with nothing to strike at.

  For a moment Klag, first officer of the I.K.S. Pagh, took stock of what the future held for him. There were many decorated warriors still active in the Klingon fleet missing an eye like General Martok, or a hand such as Dahar Master Lethik. But an arm? Could he still serve with honor? The one thing he knew was that he would not, could not, return home to sit beside his father M’Raq and await death without honor.

  He needed to return to productive duty and now. Blood continued to drip from his wound so that needed attending to first. There was no sense in waiting to see if anyone else was still alive to come to his aid. All his training prepared him for survival on this waste of a world. His eyes darted about the bridge and he took in the bashed bodies and damaged equipment. Clearly, the Pagh would never again take to the stars, and for that he was sorry. It was a worthy ship, even if its captain was a weak fool.

  Finally, he spotted the helm still sparking, a small fire crackled from exposed circuitry. With careful steps, he made his way over the mixed bits of metal and soldier, stopping before the active station. With his remaining good hand, he waved it over the station, sensing its heat. This would have to do, he decided. He kneeled, taking several deep breaths, and then leaned his damaged shoulder into the hot metal.

  There was more pain than he had ever before endured. Involuntarily, his teeth clamped shut with a clack, a scream constricted in his throat. His eyes wanted to shut, but he willed them to remain open, watching as the high heat did its job. He focused on the drying blood.

  Again he was assaulted by the smell of charred flesh, but this time it was his own as he cauterized the wound. The sizzle stopped the blood flow and sealed the damaged nerves, tendons and veins from the infectious air. But with each popping and hissing sound, Klag felt as if doors on his career and his path to Sto-Vo-Kor were being slammed in his face. He endured the pain, now no worse really than the painstiks during the Age of Ascension, but this time the agony extended to his soul.

  After a minute, Klag withdrew from the station and regained his feet. He saw with his eyes what he knew in heart was to be true. Captain Kargan, the weak-willed, close-minded animal, was on his large belly, his neck at an unnatural angle. Kargan was from the powerful House of K’Tal and had used his position to stay in command and keep Klag from rising up the ranks. How he wanted to challenge the older man, but Klag knew that even if he won such a challenge, his own life would be forfeit at the hands of House K’Tal’s agents. Klag’s own House would also suffer, and it had endured enough with the way his father M’Raq lay in bed on the Homeworld waiting for death. So Klag remained under Kargan’s heel—until now.

  Others from the crew were scattered around the bridge, all dead, and try as he might, no one responded to a single call over the partially working communications network.

  It was possible he was the sole survivor on Marcan V. His blood, what was left of it, burned for the fate dealt his shipmates. Most deserved better than this, he knew, and to die, deprived of a chance to end life in battle, served to make him angry. First, at Kargan for foolishly leading them for so long and second, at the Dominion for fighting in an honorless manner.

  Reinforcements were on the way, Klag knew, so it was only a matter of time before he was rescued. But there was still business to conduct. After all, if he managed to survive the crash, so too might the despised Jem’Hadar. One of their ships also survived the battle in the Marcan system, and it was on a trajectory to crash on the fifth planet as well. With working sensors, he quickly determined that they had indeed landed, not far from his position.

  Trying to refine the reading, he reached to his right, but there was no hand to touch the control. He withheld the curse this time, recognizing it was time to train himself to function. Crossing with his left hand, he triggered the control. The sensors clearly showed eight life signs moving in the Pagh’s direction—seven Jem’Hadar, one Vorta. Good, they were coming to him, it would save him from hunting them down.

  Klag knew he would be tested in the coming struggle. His shoulder ached, there were cuts and bruises all over his body, his uniform in less than perfect condition, and of course, he had lost a considerable amount of blood. There was to be no time to rest, certainly no time to heal—the enemy was coming.

  And he smiled, baring teeth.

  His mek’leth remained strapped to his right leg, and he took some trouble to transfer it to his other leg. Then he stuffed a disruptor into his belt holster. So fortified, he was ready to go out and meet them.