Star Trek: I.K.S. Gorkon: Honor Bound by Keith R.A. DeCandido

Author:Keith R.A. DeCandido
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Star Trek, Fiction
ISBN: 9780743457163
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2004-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Dorrek clenched his fist and slammed it onto the arm of his chair in frustration. Nothing was going according to plan. His ground troops were being overrun by Klag’s own troops as well as those be-snouted native creatures, and they had lost four ships.

At least we now have the Taj. Talak had indicated that they might get assistance, but had not said from whom. Having the K’Vort-class vessel fighting on the side of right would prove beneficial, both in terms of evening the fight in orbit and in the additional troops the ship could provide on San-Tarah.

Still and all, it would have been better if they’d shown their true colors sooner. They only really held two villages on the planet, and the latest reports from the QaS DevwI’ indicated that they were losing ground in Val-Goral thanks to the use of explosives.

Dorrek shook his head. Explosives. Of course. He had let his hatred for his older brother blind him to the fact that Klag had always been resourceful. For someone who always carried on about “the way of things,” he had a remarkable ability to make the best of bad situations.

Though Klag was a year older, they both went to officer training at the same time. At one point, they and others of their unit were brought to Rura Penthe. The frozen planet was primarily home to the Empire’s largest prison, but the bulk of the world’s surface area was unused. Each warrior was dropped into the middle of a wide expanse of ice without food or weapons and told to walk to the Defense Force outpost at the planet’s north pole. They were not told how far they had to go, or which direction north was, or what obstacles would be in their path (beyond the obvious one of the frigid temperatures). Some of the local fauna might attack a lone, defenseless warrior—though it was nothing that even an unarmed Klingon shouldn’t have been able to handle, and any who couldn’t were quickly killed and weeded out of the officer corps. Others were similarly weeded by proceeding in a direction other than north.

As one grew closer to the pole, there was a patch of ice that was far too thin to support a person’s weight. That, in fact, was the point at which most ended their test, for the patch was six hours away from the beam-down point, and any who made it that far were unable to survive being dropped into the frigid water underneath the ice, and were beamed out and allowed to heal. Indeed, that was how far Dorrek went, after fighting off two small ursine bipeds and a winged monstrosity, and barely escaping an avalanche.

The point of the test, Dorrek would later understand, was to see how far each warrior got. No one had ever successfully made it to the Defense Force outpost, mainly because no such outpost existed on Rura Penthe. The warriors were rated on how far they got before succumbing, by how long they continued to fight for their lives.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.