They guided their mellulsinside a low, three-walled ruin. McLellan dismounted first, but Quinn was right behind her. He grabbed a pipe that rose up from the concrete foundation and tried to shake it, but it held fast. “This’ll do,” Quinn said. He tied his mount’s reins around the pipe, then did the same for those of McLellan’s steed. “Need anything from the packs?”

“No,” McLellan said. “Let’s travel light. We’ll take turns on point every couple of blocks.”

Quinn nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll go first.” He peeked through the doorway and scouted the street. “Clear.”

He slipped through the door, and she stayed close behind him. They crossed the boulevard of broken asphalt, whose prominent fissures were choked with weeds.

Darting from one building’s corner to the next, McLellan remained alert for any sign the Klingons might be near. Her fifth turn on point, she heard the sound of disruptors echoing in the distance ahead of them. “Great,” she muttered.

“Ain’t nothin’ to panic about,” Quinn said as they ducked for cover inside a deep doorway. “Figured this might happen. The ship’s camouflaged, it’ll be fine.”

McLellan regarded her partner with a scornful stare. “You think I’m worried about the ship?”

“I sure as hell would be,” Quinn said.

Frustration made her jaw clench. “I’m worried about Naya and her people. If they make the same mistake the nomads did—”

“They won’t,” Quinn said. “I showed ’em what Klingons look like and told ’em not to piss the lobster-heads off.”

The tension in her jaw melted away as her face went slack with disbelief. “You told them about the Klingons?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Quinn said. “And seein’ as they’re here, I think I made the right call.”

“You realize that’s potentially a Prime Directive violation,” McLellan said.

He rolled his eyes. “I call it bein’ a Good Samaritan. Ain’t like the Denn don’t know about other worlds, or warp flight. I didn’t pollute some precious paradise. And if my bit of friendly advice keeps these folks from gettin’ their faces shot off, I’ll just call that a win, thank you very much.”

Much as it pained McLellan to admit it, he was probably right. “Okay, fine,” she said, motioning him to move on. “You’re up on point.”

Quinn checked the street and moved out. He blazed a trail through the rubble beside the streets, using it for cover as they passed near the village’s central square.

Minutes later he and McLellan ducked under a slab of shattered cement and waited while a Klingon squad marched past. When the crisp echoes of stomping jackboots receded, McLellan peeked out from under the slab toward the town square.

Naya and her daughter, Ilka, stood at the front of a phalanx of Denn, flanked by the landgraves who had come to dinner with McLellan and Quinn on their first night as Naya’s guests.

A goateed Klingon commander stood facing Naya and read aloud from a scroll-like document. McLellan didn’t speak much tlhIngan Hol,but she understood enough to know he was explaining the new laws under which the Denn would henceforth live as subjects of the Klingon Empire. As was typical for any such proclamation, the penalty for nearly every offense against the Empire, no matter how trivial, was summary execution.

Quinn looked at the Klingon commander and whispered, “Meet the new boss.”

“Pretty much.” She stole glances in either direction along the street. “Looks clear. If we can make it behind that row of building façades over there, we should have solid cover all the way back to the ship.”

He patted her shoulder to let her know he was moving ahead of her on point, then he broke cover and skulked across the road. She stayed with him, moving quickly but also quietly. For several seconds she felt precariously exposed, but then they were off the street and concealed once more in the embrace of Tegoresko’s crumbling urban landscape.

It took them more than half an hour to reach the Rocinante,but to their mutual relief the scanner-blocking modifications Starfleet Intelligence had installed on the vessel had kept it hidden from the Klingons. As an added precaution, Quinn had moved the ship from its original landing site to one in the heart of the city, inside a roofless building whose windows and street-level access points had been boarded up or bricked in.

After the ship had been secured, the Denn had added a flimsy faux roof to the building. Though the roof wasn’t strong enough to support even one man’s weight, it looked more than solid enough to thwart a visual scan, either from orbit or from a recon flyover. As long as the Klingons didn’t make a hard-target inspection of every abandoned structure in the city, the Rocinantewould likely be safe for some time.

Quinn slipped through a gap in one boarded-over window arch, stopped, and listened. “Okay,” he said. “No one here.” He led McLellan inside the building and over a series of rickety plank walkways and ramps that hugged the walls and sloped down to the bottom of its foundation. He jogged to the ship and entered the code to unlock its rear hatch.

The gangway lowered with a dull hiss and a cloud of vapor. “Home, sweet home,” Quinn said as the ramp touched the ground.

He and McLellan hurried inside. She went straight to the cockpit and fired up the communications system.

“Can you do me a favor?” she asked. “Check the sensors and see what kind of ship the Klingons have in orbit?”

“On it,” Quinn said, powering up the sensor package. He called up the results and grimaced. “It’s a D-7 battle cruiser.”

“Lovely.”

McLellan typed quickly and composed a brief, code-worded report: Saw sights. Neighbors are here with a big dog. Staying with friends. Would rather see family. Waiting for next song.She encrypted the message with SI’s latest ciphers and sent it in a low-frequency subspace burst transmission to Vanguard.

“There,” she said. “Message is away. Now we wait.”

Quinn smiled. “I know a few ways to pass the time.” Before she could scold him for his shameless flirtations, he held up a deck of cards. “Texas Hold ’Em, no wild cards, no jokers.”

She sighed. At least it’ll keep us busy until we get a response from Starfleet.“Okay,” she said, “but no strip bets. We bothkeep our clothes on this time. Especially you.”

He frowned but started dealing out cards. “You’re no fun.”

20

One minute the view outside the Skylla’s cockpit was nothing but stars surrounding a dull orange rock of a planet; the next it was dominated by a Klingon bird-of-prey dropping out of warp all but on top of Pennington and T’Prynn’s stolen vessel.

“Bloody hell,” Pennington said as he scrambled to shut down all of Skylla’s nonessential systems. “Where’d they come from?”

T’Prynn was the picture of calm as she stepped into the cockpit and took her seat beside Pennington. She looked at her console. “They appear to be generating a field that returns false sensor data. Their stealth technologies are improving.”

As the hum of the ship’s onboard systems faded to silence and the console lights dimmed and went out, Pennington eyed the warship cruising away toward the planet and replied, “The Klingons are developing stealth systems?”

“Indeed,” T’Prynn said. “They have been working on them for several years. The fact that this ship eluded our long- and short-range sensors suggests it possesses advanced silent-running protocols.” The bird-of-prey became a silhouetted speck against the distant planet. “Fortunately, they do not seem to have detected us, which might indicate their new technology restricts their own sensors’ range and precision.”

Pennington said, “Lucky us.”