NOTE: This story takes place during the brief yet costly war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in early 2373.
Klingon Afternoon
What little remained of the colony was a shattered wreck. Partially collapsed buildings had cascaded into the streets to bury the burned out hulks of ground cars and shuttle-buses. The Klingon assault teams had made short work of the local constabulary, though the small Starfleet Marine contingent had given them a run for their latinum. Eventually, however, space superiority had won out. Orbital bombardment had excised the last pockets of organized resistance.
The starship Mendelssohn had warped into this firestorm of chaos knowing full well the odds were stacked against them. The Starfleet ship had been trapped behind the lines when the uneasy truce between the Federation and the Klingon Empire had finally collapsed. Officers and enlisted personnel now found themselves facing the vicious warriors made legendary during their grandparents' generation, rather than the Cardassians or Romulans they would have expected to engage during their careers.
Captain Van Cleve and his stalwart crew had fought mightily, but the Centaur-class ship was no match for a full half dozen Imperial cruisers and twice that number of destroyers. The captain had ordered all personnel beamed to the surface to do what they could to safeguard the surviving colonists from the Klingon's vengeful fury. Van Cleve then took the helm himself and jumped the mortally wounded Mendelssohn to warp. The relativistic collision with the Klingon flagship could be seen from the surface, a bright corona of light that for a brief moment rivaled the intensity of the local star.
The Starfleet teams had closed with the Klingons and died well, taking their fair share of the burly warriors with them and helping to fill Sto-vo-kor's coffers with the souls of the honored dead.
However, he had elected not to join them. There was no honor to be had here, no glory, only death awaited him. His priority was helping the civilians to escape and hide in the broken remains of their once picturesque colony. He was guiding a young mother and her two terrified children into a basement bunker when they found him.
They had disruptors, he had a phaser, but a fire-fight here would only endanger the family he sought to protect. He dropped his sidearm to the ground and held up his Starfleet issue combat knife in a clear challenge. They holstered their disruptors and drew their blades, one armed with a d'k tahg, the other with a wickedly curved mek'leth.
They advanced and he moved to meet them. He grasped his combat knife blade first and hurled it at the mek'leth wielder, who collapsed in a gurgling mass of flailing limbs as the knife lodged deep in his throat. The other warrior's blade cut a swift arc through the air but found only empty space at the end of its journey.
He had feinted to the side and allowed the inexperienced young man to overextend himself. Now, he drove his knee into the warrior's midsection as he wrapped and trapped the man's knife-arm with his own. He twisted the Klingon's elbow joint past its breaking point, and it finally surrendered with a satisfying crunch as the d'k tahg slipped from the young warrior's grasp.
"Not your fault," he whispered softly to the stunned Klingon. He shushed the warrior gently as the young man began to keen piteously and thrash around with the realization that his life was about to end. "You are a predator, and you expected only sheep here. Sorry to disappoint you. If it means anything, at the very least you will die with honor." He released his grip on the man's arm and then lodged the Klingon's head firmly under his armpit, his arm wrapped around the leather-clad soldier's neck. He thrust his hips forward as he pulled and lifted to snap the Klingon's neck with a resounding crack.
"Human!"
He turned in response to the cry and found another three warriors, their honor-blades in hand, facing him amidst the rubble. He looked past them to see the cellar door closed and locked from the inside. His charges were safe. He smiled a peculiar little smile that the Klingons mistook for a rictus of fear.
Starfleet Lieutenant Pava Lar'ragos then stooped to take up the d'k tahg from the fallen warrior. As the other Klingons waited for battle to be joined, he cut the family crest badges from the uniforms of each of his slain opponents before fastening them to his uniform.
He then eyed the crests of the three men opposing him. "Yes," he breathed. "Those will do nicely."
They had thought there was safety and surety in numbers. He corrected that misperception immediately. He found himself in the eye of a proverbial storm of fury, and so Pava stopped thinking and gave himself over to his base instincts, allowing his unique perversion of his people's gifts to guide his body. He knew when and where their blows would land, so he made a point not to be there. He knew when and how they would be vulnerable, and so he struck those places at those moments of opportunity. Blade cleaved flesh, blood spurt in angry gouts, bones splintered, tendons rent, and the warriors were left to consider this unlikely turn of events in their last, frenzied moments.
When it was over and the three Klingons lay dead or dying, Lar'ragos collected their crests and added them to his collection. He paused to examine his surroundings and found only destruction and chaos all about him. It would be days before Starfleet could muster a relief force to drive the soldiers of the empire from the battered colony. The odds that he might survive to see that day hovered somewhere between slim and none.
Until he was rescued or finally brought down by the Klingons he would hunt. It had been centuries since he had last let himself completely free of the confines of civilized behavior. Unshackled from codes of conduct, rules of warfare, ethics or morality, he could be a potent threat, especially to arrogant warriors who believed the colony had been completely pacified.
Once upon a time he had been prey. Now he would become the hunter. Pava pondered the irony of having come full circle as he collected his weapons and set off.
*****
The carnage Vibbins viewed through his rifle's scope was almost enough to give him pause. He was a Starfleet officer, sworn to safeguard the lives of Federation citizens and protect their property rights. But in the here and now, he and his comrades were left with little else to do but sit and observe.
He and the rest of his Special Missions Team had killed a good number of Klingons since the invasion of the colony had begun, but now their survival depended upon their going unnoticed by the victorious warriors. The team had been assigned to the colony's Marine base for a scant three weeks for training purposes, and had been as unprepared as anyone else when the Defense Forces had arrived on their doorstep.
Since the pitched battles of the first few hours, sensor scramblers had hidden the group from Klingon scanners. Their perch atop the remnants of the colony's now damaged long-range sensor array gave them a bird's-eye view of the smoldering remains of the settlement.
"And..." Vibbins assessed for the benefit of the team's leader, "...I've got another Fleeter, boss." He tamped down the urge to shake his armored head, however fractionally. Vibbins watched as the Starfleet officer with gold department coloring across his shoulders made his way clumsily up a pile of rubble that had been a hospital the previous day. A Klingon patrol stood less than thirty meters from him at the crest of the collapsed building, idly drinking bloodwine from flasks disguised as high-yield power cells.
"Security officer by the looks of him, too," Vibbins said, noting the phaser and disruptor pistols clutched in the man's hands, as well as the Klingon knives tucked into his belt. "Of all the people who should know better than to try and sneak around in broad freaking daylight..."
"People do funny things in seemingly hopeless situations," remarked Lt. Commander Robin Estershire, the squad's commander. "Maybe he's trying to surrender."
Torbak growled in response, the very notion of surrender anathema to his Capellan upbringing. "He had better be an engineer, then. Any security man who surrenders like a cowering futh'pa deserves to die in disgrace."
Vibbins chuckled darkly, "He's weaving all over the place, like he's dancing or something."
"Dancing?" Estershire's curiosity had finally been piqued. She up-linked the image from Vibbin's sniper scope onto the display screen in her helmet. The commander watched the man for a long moment. "He's not dancing, Vibs. That's stealth you dummy."
"Wha?" Vibbins inquired articulately from the prone position.
"He's moving in such a way as to make no noise," she clarified. "It looks silly as hell, but it's effective. They used to teach that in the Teams back before our sound suppression gear became so common." Estershire continued to watch the man's advance. "And he's not surrendering. He's stalking them."
"Really?" Now Torbak linked in as well, though the other three members of the team maintained watches on their various fields of observation.
The man moved to a position just below where the Klingons were congregating. He holstered his phaser and drew some manner of small gun-like device from within his uniform jumpsuit. He appeared to adjust the weapon's setting, and then moved a hand to his mouth as if calling out. The man then scuttled quickly behind a large piece of broken masonry, crouching behind it for concealment.
Vibbin's audio pickups were able to discern a plaintive call for help, but one made intentionally to sound further away than the man's present position. The Klingons reacted immediately. They dropped their flasks as they hefted their disruptor rifles and slid clumsily down the unstable slope of debris. Inebriated as well as lulled into a false sense of security by their seemingly easy victory over the colony, most of the Klingons merely poked at their combat tricorders with their heads down and neglected to maintain situational awareness.
The man popped up from behind the shattered stonework, but his weapon appeared to malfunction. There was no beam, only a strange puff of what appeared to be gas. Before Vibbins could comment on this sad state of affairs, the entire cluster of warriors vanished in a cloud of dust.
"What the hell was that?" the sniper wondered aloud.
"Flechette gun," Torbak replied, his voice buoyed by the sight. "Set to wide dispersal."
The dust cleared to reveal all six of the Klingons laying still. The man scampered down to where they had fallen, limbs akimbo in the choking masonry dust. At first, Vibbins thought the man was checking them for signs of life, but as he adjusted the resolution on his scope, it became apparent that he was removing their badges of familial allegiance and pinning them to his uniform.
"Trophies," Estershire observed with a mix of wonder and revulsion. "He's taking kill trophies."
Then the man looked up, staring straight ahead as if gazing directly into Vibbin's scope. His mouth began to move, and the long-range audio receiver crackled with the words, "So, are you kids just going to sit up there and watch the show, or are you going to come down here and get your hands dirty?"
"Shit," Vibbins breathed. "How the hell... ? "
Estershire used her command override to increase the resolution on Vibbin's scope even further. As she studied the features of the Starfleet lieutenant she emitted a portentous sigh. The sudden realization of whose presence now plagued her team set like a weight in her stomach. "Pava Lar'ragos." She said it like a curse.
"The guy from Tzenketh?" Vibbins wondered.
"None other," she confirmed darkly. "So much for laying low until help arrives. This crazy son-of-a-bitch is going to drag us right into the middle of the shit."
As if he could hear her, Lar'ragos broke into a broad smile that promised many unpleasant things to come.
Klingon Afternoon
What little remained of the colony was a shattered wreck. Partially collapsed buildings had cascaded into the streets to bury the burned out hulks of ground cars and shuttle-buses. The Klingon assault teams had made short work of the local constabulary, though the small Starfleet Marine contingent had given them a run for their latinum. Eventually, however, space superiority had won out. Orbital bombardment had excised the last pockets of organized resistance.
The starship Mendelssohn had warped into this firestorm of chaos knowing full well the odds were stacked against them. The Starfleet ship had been trapped behind the lines when the uneasy truce between the Federation and the Klingon Empire had finally collapsed. Officers and enlisted personnel now found themselves facing the vicious warriors made legendary during their grandparents' generation, rather than the Cardassians or Romulans they would have expected to engage during their careers.
Captain Van Cleve and his stalwart crew had fought mightily, but the Centaur-class ship was no match for a full half dozen Imperial cruisers and twice that number of destroyers. The captain had ordered all personnel beamed to the surface to do what they could to safeguard the surviving colonists from the Klingon's vengeful fury. Van Cleve then took the helm himself and jumped the mortally wounded Mendelssohn to warp. The relativistic collision with the Klingon flagship could be seen from the surface, a bright corona of light that for a brief moment rivaled the intensity of the local star.
The Starfleet teams had closed with the Klingons and died well, taking their fair share of the burly warriors with them and helping to fill Sto-vo-kor's coffers with the souls of the honored dead.
However, he had elected not to join them. There was no honor to be had here, no glory, only death awaited him. His priority was helping the civilians to escape and hide in the broken remains of their once picturesque colony. He was guiding a young mother and her two terrified children into a basement bunker when they found him.
They had disruptors, he had a phaser, but a fire-fight here would only endanger the family he sought to protect. He dropped his sidearm to the ground and held up his Starfleet issue combat knife in a clear challenge. They holstered their disruptors and drew their blades, one armed with a d'k tahg, the other with a wickedly curved mek'leth.
They advanced and he moved to meet them. He grasped his combat knife blade first and hurled it at the mek'leth wielder, who collapsed in a gurgling mass of flailing limbs as the knife lodged deep in his throat. The other warrior's blade cut a swift arc through the air but found only empty space at the end of its journey.
He had feinted to the side and allowed the inexperienced young man to overextend himself. Now, he drove his knee into the warrior's midsection as he wrapped and trapped the man's knife-arm with his own. He twisted the Klingon's elbow joint past its breaking point, and it finally surrendered with a satisfying crunch as the d'k tahg slipped from the young warrior's grasp.
"Not your fault," he whispered softly to the stunned Klingon. He shushed the warrior gently as the young man began to keen piteously and thrash around with the realization that his life was about to end. "You are a predator, and you expected only sheep here. Sorry to disappoint you. If it means anything, at the very least you will die with honor." He released his grip on the man's arm and then lodged the Klingon's head firmly under his armpit, his arm wrapped around the leather-clad soldier's neck. He thrust his hips forward as he pulled and lifted to snap the Klingon's neck with a resounding crack.
"Human!"
He turned in response to the cry and found another three warriors, their honor-blades in hand, facing him amidst the rubble. He looked past them to see the cellar door closed and locked from the inside. His charges were safe. He smiled a peculiar little smile that the Klingons mistook for a rictus of fear.
Starfleet Lieutenant Pava Lar'ragos then stooped to take up the d'k tahg from the fallen warrior. As the other Klingons waited for battle to be joined, he cut the family crest badges from the uniforms of each of his slain opponents before fastening them to his uniform.
He then eyed the crests of the three men opposing him. "Yes," he breathed. "Those will do nicely."
They had thought there was safety and surety in numbers. He corrected that misperception immediately. He found himself in the eye of a proverbial storm of fury, and so Pava stopped thinking and gave himself over to his base instincts, allowing his unique perversion of his people's gifts to guide his body. He knew when and where their blows would land, so he made a point not to be there. He knew when and how they would be vulnerable, and so he struck those places at those moments of opportunity. Blade cleaved flesh, blood spurt in angry gouts, bones splintered, tendons rent, and the warriors were left to consider this unlikely turn of events in their last, frenzied moments.
When it was over and the three Klingons lay dead or dying, Lar'ragos collected their crests and added them to his collection. He paused to examine his surroundings and found only destruction and chaos all about him. It would be days before Starfleet could muster a relief force to drive the soldiers of the empire from the battered colony. The odds that he might survive to see that day hovered somewhere between slim and none.
Until he was rescued or finally brought down by the Klingons he would hunt. It had been centuries since he had last let himself completely free of the confines of civilized behavior. Unshackled from codes of conduct, rules of warfare, ethics or morality, he could be a potent threat, especially to arrogant warriors who believed the colony had been completely pacified.
Once upon a time he had been prey. Now he would become the hunter. Pava pondered the irony of having come full circle as he collected his weapons and set off.
*****
The carnage Vibbins viewed through his rifle's scope was almost enough to give him pause. He was a Starfleet officer, sworn to safeguard the lives of Federation citizens and protect their property rights. But in the here and now, he and his comrades were left with little else to do but sit and observe.
He and the rest of his Special Missions Team had killed a good number of Klingons since the invasion of the colony had begun, but now their survival depended upon their going unnoticed by the victorious warriors. The team had been assigned to the colony's Marine base for a scant three weeks for training purposes, and had been as unprepared as anyone else when the Defense Forces had arrived on their doorstep.
Since the pitched battles of the first few hours, sensor scramblers had hidden the group from Klingon scanners. Their perch atop the remnants of the colony's now damaged long-range sensor array gave them a bird's-eye view of the smoldering remains of the settlement.
"And..." Vibbins assessed for the benefit of the team's leader, "...I've got another Fleeter, boss." He tamped down the urge to shake his armored head, however fractionally. Vibbins watched as the Starfleet officer with gold department coloring across his shoulders made his way clumsily up a pile of rubble that had been a hospital the previous day. A Klingon patrol stood less than thirty meters from him at the crest of the collapsed building, idly drinking bloodwine from flasks disguised as high-yield power cells.
"Security officer by the looks of him, too," Vibbins said, noting the phaser and disruptor pistols clutched in the man's hands, as well as the Klingon knives tucked into his belt. "Of all the people who should know better than to try and sneak around in broad freaking daylight..."
"People do funny things in seemingly hopeless situations," remarked Lt. Commander Robin Estershire, the squad's commander. "Maybe he's trying to surrender."
Torbak growled in response, the very notion of surrender anathema to his Capellan upbringing. "He had better be an engineer, then. Any security man who surrenders like a cowering futh'pa deserves to die in disgrace."
Vibbins chuckled darkly, "He's weaving all over the place, like he's dancing or something."
"Dancing?" Estershire's curiosity had finally been piqued. She up-linked the image from Vibbin's sniper scope onto the display screen in her helmet. The commander watched the man for a long moment. "He's not dancing, Vibs. That's stealth you dummy."
"Wha?" Vibbins inquired articulately from the prone position.
"He's moving in such a way as to make no noise," she clarified. "It looks silly as hell, but it's effective. They used to teach that in the Teams back before our sound suppression gear became so common." Estershire continued to watch the man's advance. "And he's not surrendering. He's stalking them."
"Really?" Now Torbak linked in as well, though the other three members of the team maintained watches on their various fields of observation.
The man moved to a position just below where the Klingons were congregating. He holstered his phaser and drew some manner of small gun-like device from within his uniform jumpsuit. He appeared to adjust the weapon's setting, and then moved a hand to his mouth as if calling out. The man then scuttled quickly behind a large piece of broken masonry, crouching behind it for concealment.
Vibbin's audio pickups were able to discern a plaintive call for help, but one made intentionally to sound further away than the man's present position. The Klingons reacted immediately. They dropped their flasks as they hefted their disruptor rifles and slid clumsily down the unstable slope of debris. Inebriated as well as lulled into a false sense of security by their seemingly easy victory over the colony, most of the Klingons merely poked at their combat tricorders with their heads down and neglected to maintain situational awareness.
The man popped up from behind the shattered stonework, but his weapon appeared to malfunction. There was no beam, only a strange puff of what appeared to be gas. Before Vibbins could comment on this sad state of affairs, the entire cluster of warriors vanished in a cloud of dust.
"What the hell was that?" the sniper wondered aloud.
"Flechette gun," Torbak replied, his voice buoyed by the sight. "Set to wide dispersal."
The dust cleared to reveal all six of the Klingons laying still. The man scampered down to where they had fallen, limbs akimbo in the choking masonry dust. At first, Vibbins thought the man was checking them for signs of life, but as he adjusted the resolution on his scope, it became apparent that he was removing their badges of familial allegiance and pinning them to his uniform.
"Trophies," Estershire observed with a mix of wonder and revulsion. "He's taking kill trophies."
Then the man looked up, staring straight ahead as if gazing directly into Vibbin's scope. His mouth began to move, and the long-range audio receiver crackled with the words, "So, are you kids just going to sit up there and watch the show, or are you going to come down here and get your hands dirty?"
"Shit," Vibbins breathed. "How the hell... ? "
Estershire used her command override to increase the resolution on Vibbin's scope even further. As she studied the features of the Starfleet lieutenant she emitted a portentous sigh. The sudden realization of whose presence now plagued her team set like a weight in her stomach. "Pava Lar'ragos." She said it like a curse.
"The guy from Tzenketh?" Vibbins wondered.
"None other," she confirmed darkly. "So much for laying low until help arrives. This crazy son-of-a-bitch is going to drag us right into the middle of the shit."
As if he could hear her, Lar'ragos broke into a broad smile that promised many unpleasant things to come.
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