Star Trek Discovery- Fear Itself

by James Swallow

  The grotesque odor of seared skin entered his olfactory slits, and he grimaced as he turned over Lieutenant Commander Johar’s body. An ugly wound had melted together flesh and fabric across the engineer’s torso, the shock effect of the near hit from the weapon leaving a spider web of damaged blood vessels over the man’s dark skin. Had the bolt struck him squarely, his end would have been instant. Johar was alive, but the shadow of death was passing over him. He would not last long without medical attention.

  He saved my life. The realization was stark and harsh, a blinding light in Saru’s thoughts. I didn’t think he liked me.

  “Move! Move now!”

  The shouted command brought him crashing back, and Saru looked up to see the red-band with the white-streaked hair pointing a weapon at him. At his side, Vetch was jabbing his fists in the air, crowing over their victory.

  The brief firefight had ended as quickly as it began. Johar and another of Nathal’s officers were the only wounded but Saru now saw there had been deaths as well—two Peliar crewmen in the silver vests of their security detail.

  Vetch sniffed, giving Johar’s bloodless face a brisk once-over. “Unfortunate. This one is ended.”

  “Not yet!” A burst of indignant anger propelled Saru to his full height, and he hauled Johar off the deck. “Where are the others from our shuttle? What have you done with them?”

  Around him, the Gorlans were herding the remaining Peliar command crew into a tight cluster, backing Nathal and the others against the far wall. Vetch watched them work, then made an idle nod. “Below. Unharmed. There is value to them.”

  “But not to this man?” Saru glared at the Gorlan as he held Johar up. “Not to me?”

  “Unfortunate,” repeated Vetch, throwing a sideways look at the injured red-band who had almost killed the engineer.

  “I need to take the commander to our medic,” Saru went on. “Otherwise he will die and you will personally be responsible!”

  The white-haired Gorlan orbited close to the conversation and snarled something quick and forceful. Vetch chattered back at him, and Saru guessed he was translating for his comrade. Another of the Gorlans went to a nearby control podium and activated an exterior scanner display.

  “This agreed,” said Vetch. “Take Sah-roo’s man below . . . after you help.”

  Saru’s blood chilled as the other Gorlan came over and took Johar from him. “I will not assist you in endangering any more of this ship’s crew!”

  “Not this ship.” Vetch waved toward the Gorlan at the console, and the holographic panel above it illuminated with an image of the Shenzhou, the vessel floating at station-keeping a few thousand meters off the Peliar freighter’s bow.

  Indicators that could only be the targeting cues for the freighter’s weapons array danced over the length of the Shenzhou, moving back and forth, ready to lock on and fire.

  “No,” said Saru, feeling the color drain from his face.

  “We leave now. But no chase, not to be followed.” Vetch pointed at the Shenzhou. “Help us stop this following.” Where his finger met the hologram, the weapons chose a target. The aiming cues flicked across the crew decks, the underslung bridge, the main deflector. “You choose best. Or we choose all.” Vetch opened his hand and the entire length of the Shenzhou lit up with potential hit points.

  Saru felt sick inside as a terrible choice unfolded before him. An unexpected strike on any one of those locations would result in massive loss of life. But a carefully targeted shot could be sent somewhere that might cripple the ship and injure no one.

  “You help,” grunted the white-haired Gorlan, aping Vetch’s earlier words.

  His hand trembling, Saru slowly reached up to touch the display.

  • • •

  “What the . . . ?” The half-formed question fell from Kamran Gant’s mouth and his brow furrowed as the blip on tactical display panel appeared and disappeared in the space of an indrawn breath.

  “Problem, Lieutenant?” The Shenzhou’s first officer caught the muttered words from halfway across the bridge and in two quick strides the Andorian was at Gant’s station.

  How does he do that? Gant wondered. Has to be those antennae of his. Or maybe it’s like Connor says, he really does have eyes in the back of his head. “I’m not sure, sir.” He ran a quick scanning macro to check the starship’s tactical systems for any kind of anomalous readings. “For a second, I thought there was a low-power sensor beam out there.”

  Ch’Theloh glanced at the wallowing Peliar transport through the main viewport. “From them?”

  “It’s—” Gant started to explain when the blip suddenly returned, once more blinking on and then off. “There it is again!”

  “I saw.” The commander leaned over the console. “Could the sensors be picking up a radiation artifact, something left over from the nadion pulse?”

  “Possible.” Gant looked up, across the bridge to Ensign Troke at the science station. “Are you seeing this too?”

  “Gentlemen . . . ?” Captain Georgiou put down the cup of tea she had been drinking and gave her crew a sideways look.

  “Potential sensor anomaly, Captain,” said ch’Theloh.

  “Ah, no it isn’t,” corrected Troke, tapping the neural implant at his neck. “It’s coming from the Peliar vessel. But not powerful enough for a full-blown scanner emission.”

  The Andorian threw the Tulian a brisk nod. “Thank you for the clarification, Mister Troke.”

  “Could it be a communication?” said the captain. “Like the line-of-sight laser we’ve been using with the Yang?”

  “Why would it be bouncing all over the hull?” said ch’Theloh.

  “They’re bad at aiming?” Gant said the words without thinking, and his breath stuck in his throat as his mind caught up with his mouth, the solution to the mystery abruptly revealing itself. “It’s not sensors! It’s a targeting sweep!”

  As he spoke, a flicker of warning icons appeared down the length of the Shenzhou’s twin warp nacelles, zeroing in on the intercoolers and magnetomic flux arrays that were vital to the vessel’s faster-than-light drive system.

  “Confirmed, alien ship is locking on to us!” Ensign Detmer called out from the helm console in alarm.

  “They’re charging weapons . . .” Gant heard himself give the report.

  “Red alert!” ordered Georgiou. “Tactical, raise the—”

  Blood-crimson light doused the chamber, and Gant’s hand was already on the activation control for the Shenzhou’s deflector shields when the attack came, but it was too late. A blinding storm of phase cannon bolts ripped past the lower tier of the ship’s primary hull and the crew reacted, turning away from the firestorm. An instant later, the precisely aimed salvo cut into the starship’s engines and blew through the nacelles, sending a cascade shock down through the warp coils in stormy flashes of vented plasma.

  Gant shook against his station as a rumble of tormented metal vibrated back up the engine pylons and through the Shenzhou’s saucer-like fuselage. Across his alert board, impact markers bloomed in a line of orange and yellow icons. Power, light, and gravity briefly dropped away as the vessel rolled with the blow, like a streetfighter shaking off a sucker-punch.

  He tried to tap into the auxiliary power, desperate to route energy to the shields. If the surprise attack was the opening blow in a sustained assault, they had to be ready for another hit. The light-headedness from the low-g surge went away and the red lights glowed once more.

  “Warp drive is offline.” Lieutenant Oliveira had taken an early shift to cover the bridge’s engineering station, and Gant had to wonder if the young Brazilian woman was now regretting it. “Captain, that attack was surgical. They knew exactly where to hit us.”

  “Fan, can you reach our people on the shuttle?” Georgiou shot a look toward the communications officer, but the young woman could only shake her head.

  “Shields? Weapons?” The first officer stalked back toward Gant’s panel, his face like thunder. �
�Can we return fire?”

  Gant stifled a curse. “Power is intermittent . . . I’ve got thirty percent on the forward deflector array. But it’s that or phasers, sir, I can’t give you both.”

  “Helm, back us off, one-quarter impulse,” said the captain.

  Detmer scowled. “Impulse drive is not responding. Thrusters only, Captain.”

  “Do your best, Kayla.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The ensign complied, using the maneuvering jets to extend the distance between the Starfleet vessel and the bigger ship.

  “Why did they shoot at us?” At Detmer’s side stood Ensign Januzzi, his dark face a mask of confusion. “We were no threat to them . . .”

  “They hit us while we were looking the other way,” ch’Theloh said grimly. “Because that is the only way they could wound us. Cowards.”

  Gant nodded to himself. The Andorian was right. The Peliar ship’s weapons systems were basic, even compared to those of an older class of cruiser like the Shenzhou. Had they been at combat readiness, the shots that knocked out the nacelles would have been repulsed. But now none of that meant a damned thing. As well as phase cannon turrets, the Peliar ship carried a cluster of merculite rocket pods that would make short work of the Shenzhou’s hull plating if they decided to go for a coup de grace.

  “Lieutenant, are we still being targeted?” Gant looked up as his captain spoke.

  “Negative,” he replied. “At least, as far as I can tell.” He glanced out of the main screen. Dust and flecks of wreckage from the damaged engines swirled around the bridge’s bowl-like windows as they continued to draw back. “I think I can give you a photon torpedo spread.”

  “They shoot at us, we shoot back at them . . .” Georgiou shook her head. “I didn’t bring us across the border for a firefight.” She trailed off as the turbolift at the back of the bridge hissed open and Lieutenant Burnham rushed out.

  “Captain!” Burnham sprinted over to the second officer’s station. “I thought I could help.”

  Georgiou nodded and glanced at ch’Theloh, still processing Oliveira’s earlier statement. “The Peliars never had access to our systems while they were on board,” she said, and the Andorian shook his head.

  “We would have known about it. Those were more than lucky shots.”

  “What about Saru and Johar, the rescue team . . . ?” Burnham couldn’t bring herself to voice the question that Gant and everyone else on the bridge was thinking.

  Are they still alive? His brow furrowing, the lieutenant peered at the tactical scan coming in from the Shenzhou’s sensor grid. “I’m reading the shuttle’s mass attached to the outer hull of the Peliar ship. Whatever’s going on over there, the Yang is still intact.”

  “Captain.” Ch’Theloh drew himself up. “How do you wish to proceed?”

  “They’re not giving us a lot of options,” said Georgiou. “Lieutenant Gant, can we return the favor and knock out their warp drives? Level the playing field?”

  “Not with photons,” he replied. “The destructive yield of our torpedoes is too high; we’d blow holes in their spaceframe if we hit the nacelles. Tight-beam phaser strikes could do it, but I’d need to transfer power from the shields for that.”

  “The instant we do so, we give them an opening to fire on us again,” said the first officer. “If you ask me, they hit us, we should hit back harder.”

  “There are civilians on that ship,” said Burnham.

  “And our own people too,” noted the Andorian. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Preliminary damage report coming in,” called Oliveira. “Confirming . . . we are dead in the water.” She couldn’t keep a sigh from her words.

  Burnham shot her a worried look. “Any casualties?”

  “Doctor Nambue says no fatalities, minor injuries only.”

  “Something to be thankful for, then,” said the captain.

  “Small mercies,” ch’Theloh countered. “I have little time for those.”

  A new flicker of light blossomed on Gant’s console and his head jerked up in shock. Across the compartment, he saw Troke reacting to the same sensor reading.

  “Power flux detected!” snapped the Tulian. “Reading an energy buildup on the Peliar freighter!”

  “The phase cannons? The missiles?” Ch’Theloh glared at Gant, demanding an answer. “Are they going to fire?”

  “They’re not charging weapons,” he reported, seeing the juddering returns from the still-fogged sensors. The power flow was too regular to be going into a distributed offensive system. Gant thought the Peliar ship was bringing its shields online, but then he realized what the crew was actually doing. “They’re powering up their engines.”

  Out past the bow of the Shenzhou and the halo of splintered metals from the damage she had suffered, the massive hull of the bulky transport ship was moving, gathering momentum as it came about. Gant and the rest of the bridge crew could only watch as the star-freighter presented its stern to them and accelerated away at high impulse. The engine nacelles clustered around the forward section of the big vessel’s hull glowed purple green as they came to full potentiality, and then with a shudder of twisted light and distorted space, the Peliar ship threw itself into warp speed and left them adrift behind it.

  For a long moment, no one spoke; then Captain Georgiou stood up, breaking the silence with her words of command. “Track that ship. Assign every able hand to repair details immediately.” She turned to study the faces of her crew, briefly making eye contact with Gant. He saw the steel there beneath the softness.

  “This will not stand. No one takes our people from us.”

  6

  * * *

  The makeshift prison where the Gorlans had placed their hostages was what remained of the star-freighter’s long, narrow mess hall. Food fabricators, water purification modules, and raw ration bins from the storage compartments along the longest axis of the room had been removed, dragged away to the lower decks and the refugees in their tent-city communities. All but one hatch had been welded shut to keep the captives inside, and a pair of red-bands armed with disruptors stood guard outside.

  Commander Nathal and the Peliar Zel crew clustered together and talked amongst themselves in low tones, ignoring the Starfleet team from the Shenzhou. There were very few of them, the small skeleton staff that had been running the big vessel now all crammed into this chamber.

  For his part, Saru had been able to convince Vetch to let him recover some equipment from the shuttle—some survival packs, a medical kit, and another universal translator—but anything that looked like a weapon had been confiscated. He hoped that wouldn’t matter. Right now, the very last thing on Saru’s mind was armed conflict. He sat on one of the hall’s steel benches, staring across at a table opposite where Zoxom was working to make sure Saladin Johar did not die. The Gorlan had refused to let them use the freighter’s own meager infirmary, so the task had to be done here, under these crude circumstances. Subin worked with Zoxom, handing over loaded hyposprays, anabolic protoplaser tools, and other items as they were required.

  The Xanno nurse’s wrinkled face was filmed with sweat. He had been at this for a few hours now, refusing to step away until Johar was stabilized. The chief engineer lay across a survival blanket on the metal table, his breathing shallow and his chest rising and falling in stutters.

  Saru sensed someone at his side and glanced up. Chief Petty Officer Yashae stood there, and she offered him an emergency ration pack. The Kelpien waved it away. “Later,” he managed.

  “We all need to keep our strength up, sir,” said Yashae, and she dropped the pack in Saru’s lap. Then her expression clouded. “What happened back there?”

  “I have already explained,” Saru said quietly. “They took control of the ship. Fired on the Shenzhou. The rest you know.”

  “How the hell did they neutralize a starship?” The question came from behind them. Ensign Weeton looked as worn out as all the rest of them, but he was turning that fatigue into anger. An
ger that wanted a target. He glared at Nathal and the other Peliars. “Who’s responsible for this mess?”

  I am. Saru stiffened, and for a terrible moment he thought he had said the words out loud. I helped them cripple our ship. The inner voice went on, refusing to fall silent. I delivered us into the hands of the desperate and the violent.

  He couldn’t look away from Johar, couldn’t move. A great weight of guilt was pinning him in place.

  At length, Zoxom stepped back from the table and pulled up the survival blanket to cover Johar’s torso. The nurse dosed him with another hypospray and the injured man grew still.

  “How is he?” said Yashae.

  Zoxom dropped onto the bench across from Saru’s and hung his head as he cleaned off his hands. “Stable. I did what I could to stanch any internal bleeding, but the halo effect from the disruptor did a lot of damage to the organs down one side of his body. Kidney function, one of his lungs . . . all badly affected. Nothing we couldn’t deal with in the Shenzhou’s sickbay, but—”

  “We’re not on the Shenzhou,” snapped Weeton.

  The nurse’s head bobbed, and then he glanced at Saru. “Sir, the commander is unconscious, and I intend to keep him that way. His body needs to rest.”

  “That makes you the ranking officer, sir,” Yashae said quietly.

  “I know.” Saru’s bleak mood threatened to engulf him, and he tried to force it away. He had made a stark choice in order to preserve the lives of his crewmates, and if one were to consider it in the light of pure, exacting logic, his decision had been the right one. Somehow he doubted that Weeton, Yashae, and the others would see it that way.

  “Lieutenant,” said Subin, a warning in her voice.

  Saru turned to see Nathal approaching with her second-in-command Hekan and a few other Peliars. Nathal’s default grimace was, if anything, even more deeply ingrained on her face. “He lives?” She jerked her head at Johar.

  “He does,” Saru replied, without getting up.

  “Two of my crew were not so lucky.” She waved in the direction of her officers at the far side of the compartment. “Their deaths are at your feet, Federation.”