by David Mack
Wreckage from the lead jumpjet struck the road and rolled like a Catherine wheel juggernaut over a row of decrepit dock warehouses. The second jet disintegrated in midair, scattering its debris in ephemeral, coal-black coils of drifting smoke as it splashed down in the river on the other side of the road.
Hawkins kept his eyes on the truck and his foot on the gas.
He pondered the tactical dilemma that was only seconds away from requiring an answer: How the hell are we supposed to stop them when they have rockets?
The question became moot as a sustained spray of large-caliber machine-gun fire, from an unseen source on the truck’s left, shredded the wood-beam-and-canvas covering of its cargo area—and mowed down the two gunmen in the back of the truck.
From a gap in the several-kilometers-long row of dock warehouses, a flatbed truck swerved toward the smaller truck. Mounted on a pivot secured to the flatbed was the heavy machine gun whose handiwork Hawkins had just witnessed.
The flatbed’s machine-gunner and another Tenebian man leapt into the now-open back of the truck that carried the probe. Both men drew small pistols from under their coats and fired several shots through the truck’s rear window.
The attackers swiftly opened the truck’s doors, pulled out the two men inside, climbed inside, and commandeered the moving vehicle with hardly any loss of forward momentum.
Hawkins veered slightly to avoid running over the two dead Tenebians who’d just been thrown into the street.
“That flatbed doesn’t have Venekan markings, either,” he said, stating the baldly obvious.
Stevens shook his head in shock and disbelief. “How many countries on this planet are trying to steal this thing?”
“All of them,” Gomez said without irony.
Maleska sat next to Yellik on top of the AAV as it rolled toward the turn for West River Road. From adjacent streets he heard the low rumble of two more columns of AAVs converging toward the south end of Lersset.
“What’s going on?” Yellik said, shouting to be heard over the noise.
Maleska shook his head. “No idea,” he said, his voice hoarse from yelling over the thick screech of low-flying jumpjets, which seemed to be leading the way. He had never seen this level of frenzy in either of his previous tours of duty in X’Mar.
Yellik leaned closer to him. He thought the man looked worried. “You don’t think it’s nuclear, do you?” Yellik said.
“I don’t know,” Maleska lied. “You know how it is. We’re just the boots on the ground. Nobody tells us anything.”
He looked back down the road and saw the column of AAVs growing longer with each block it traveled. He counted his men and was satisfied to see them all still accounted for. He sighed. At least we don’t have to hump into the zone on foot.
Gomez leaned forward from the van’s cargo area and assessed the situation. Hawkins was keeping the van a safe distance behind the truck and the flatbed, whose passenger now staffed its gun, leaving just the driver in the flatbed’s cab.
The two large vehicles veered away from the river and sped into a vast industrial plaza that contained several mountains of construction-grade gravel. The flatbed was still on the truck’s left, and the two were nearly parallel.
“I don’t think they see us,” Hawkins said. “I’d say it’s now or never.”
“Okay, what’s your plan?” Gomez said.
“I was hoping you had one.”
Gomez eyed the twisting, obstacle-littered terrain ahead. Then she saw six Venekan jumpjets, still several kilometers away but closing steadily. And she knew that the enormous, advancing cloud of dust rising from the city beneath the jets had to be the product of an army on the move.
“Can you get in front of them without getting us shot?” she said, nodding at the trucks.
Hawkins cocked his head to the side. “Maybe.”
Hawkins swerved left onto a path that ran parallel to the road that the truck and flatbed were traveling on. The path and the road were separated by mound after mound of gravel.
Pushing the van to its limits, Hawkins quickly caught up to the two trucks. The wind cut like a meat ax at Gomez’s face.
As the van raced past a wide gap between two conical gravel mountains, the driver of the flatbed turned his head and saw them. Behind him, his machine-gunner opened fire.
Large-caliber bullets chopped a wide swath across a slope of gravel in front of the van. Bits of rock bounced in through the vehicle’s empty windshield frame.
The flatbed accelerated ahead of the truck as another dark gray gravel mountain filled Gomez’s field of vision.
She pointed to the next gap linking the path and the road. “Cut across up there, and don’t slow down!”
She moved back into the cargo area. Grabbing the bolted-down weapons rack along the wall to her left for leverage, she kicked open the van’s rear double doors.
Reaching down, she opened a box of grenades. She took one grenade out of the box and armed it. The van lurched into a sharp right turn. As Stevens fired out his window at the flatbed, Gomez jammed the live grenade back in the box.
The van cut a hard turn across the industrial yard’s main road. Gomez heaved the box out the van’s rear door. Then she hit the deck and grabbed the first thing that didn’t budge.
Behind the van, the flatbed raced into the intersection. A chattering burst of machine-gun fire tore through the van, unleashing a storm of metal fragments. Hawkins and Stevens yowled in pain. Gomez felt a sharp impact in the back of her left thigh, followed by an agonizing burning sensation.
A shrapnel-filled fireball erupted beneath the flatbed’s second axle, directly below the machine gun. The blast lifted the truck off the ground and dropped it in a burning, broken-backed heap. Gomez enjoyed a very brief moment of gloating until she heard the screech of brakes from behind the flatbed.
The truck carrying the probe was unable to slow down in time to avoid the crippled flatbed in front of it. Making a desperate left swerve up a gravel slope, the truck lost its traction and slid out of control. It clipped the back edge of the flatbed and rolled several times until it came to rest on its side, several meters from the flaming husk of the larger vehicle.
Hawkins stopped the van and shifted it into reverse. He backed up the van to the truck, which lay on its left side, helpless as an overturned turtle.
Gomez got up and stepped out the van’s rear doors, her submachine gun still clutched in her hand. Every step with her left leg caused sharp jabs of pain to radiate from her wound.
She looked back as Stevens and Hawkins got out of the van. Stevens’s door looked like it had been chewed up and spat out. Hawkins pressed down on a bloody wound along his lower right abdomen. Stevens limped beside him and clutched fiercely at the left side of his neck. “How bad are you guys hit?” she said.
“Flesh wound,” Hawkins said.
“Grazed, but it stings like a sonofabitch,” Stevens said. As Gomez got closer, she realized both men’s faces and hands were covered in tiny nicks, scratches, and cuts that were only now beginning to bleed. She also saw that the right leg of Stevens’s pants was shredded below the knee. He noticed her watching him limp. “Shrapnel,” he said simply. “From the door.”
They gathered in back of the overturned truck. The probe was still securely fastened to the floor of the truck’s rear section. Hawkins and Stevens loosened its restraints and lowered it quickly but carefully to the ground.
The low mechanical roar of approaching tanks, troops, and aircraft grew steadily louder, from both in front of and behind the trio. Except for the van, the two wrecked vehicles, and the gravel mounds, there was no significant cover in the industrial yard and no means of escape.
Hawkins stared into the distance, also tracking the Venekans’ approach. “Make this quick, Fabian,” Gomez said. “The Venekans’ll be here any second.”
Stevens ran his hand along the probe’s casing until he found the probe’s hidden access panel. “Stevens to Abramowitz,” he said.
“Carol, we need the tricorder to transmit the security code that opens the probe’s maintenance panel.” There was no reply. “Carol, do you read me?”
“I can’t,” Abramowitz whispered over the open channel. Even over the transceiver, Gomez could tell Abramowitz was speaking through a clenched jaw. “They’ll kill me.”
“Carol, if we don’t get the panel open now, we’re dead,” Hawkins said. “Just get clear long enough to send the signal, and we’ll beam outta here in two minutes.”
“You don’t understand,” Abramowitz said, her voice rising with desperation. “There’s nowhere I can—”
“Abramowitz,” Gomez said. “Activate the tricorder and send the signal. That’s an order.”
For several seconds there was no response. Then Gomez heard Abramowitz’s muffled and dismayed answer: “Yes, sir.”
The dust cloud followed the Venekan troops as they entered the industrial yard and fanned out around its perimeter.
Gomez heard the engines of large, heavy ground vehicles and the frantic clatter of boots growing closer.
A pair of Venekan aircraft cruised low overhead, stopped in midair over the river, hovered, then began doubling back.
Soft chirping noises accompanied the opening of the probe’s maintenance panel. Stevens reached inside and deftly handled several delicate-looking gadgets. He reached deeper inside the probe and pulled out a tiny kit of Starfleet repair tools—which decades ago some genius engineer had, in a moment of rare foresight, thought to design into the probe itself for exactly this kind of emergency field repair.
“Good work, Carol,” Gomez said. “Hang tight, we’ll be outta here in a few minutes.” Gomez watched Stevens work for a few seconds, then realized Abramowitz had not acknowledged the good news. “Carol, do you read me? Gomez to Abramowitz, do you copy?”
Silence reigned over the transceiver channel.
Abramowitz stared up into the crazed, maniacally gleaming eyes of teenaged Lica, elderly Mother Aleké, and the formerly gentle and caring Nedia. They and a dozen other women surrounded her.
Nedia had been the first to see the tricorder and alert the others. Now they all stared angrily at the high-tech device in Abramowitz’s hand, as if it were the very embodiment of evil.
“What is this thing?” Mother Aleké said, her voice grave.
“It’s hard to explain,” Abramowitz said.
“It’s a Venekan tracking beacon,” one of the women said. “She’s helping them follow us to the sanctuary.”
“No,” Abramowitz said, “I’m not, I swear. Please, I—”
“I can’t believe I let you deceive me,” Nedia said. “You said your friends were ‘captured’ by the Venekans?” Abramowitz nodded. “Was that before or after your friends built you that shelter? And collected the wood for your fire? Certainly, with your injuries, there’s no way you did that work yourself.”
“Yes,” Abramowitz said, “my friends built my shelter. They were captured later.”
“How could you know that?” Nedia said. “Unless they were captured close enough for you to have seen or heard it. But if the Venekans were that close to you, how could they have not seen the smoke from your fire? Smoke that we saw from more than two tiliks away?”
An even larger crowd was now gathered behind the circle of women surrounding Abramowitz. Nedia snatched the tricorder from Abramowitz’s hand. “Or did they contact you with this?” In the moment between Nedia’s grabbing the tricorder and her holding it up to the crowd, the device vanished—poof.
Nedia stared at the dissipating tendrils of vapor in her hand, then looked down at Abramowitz, her rancor now tinged with fear. The entire crowd had seen the tricorder vanish in Nedia’s hand, spawning a wave of horror that rippled out into the troubled sea of refugees massed on the cold mountain road.
Mother Aleké pointed a gnarled, bony finger at Abramowitz.
“She is a spy,” Mother Aleké proclaimed.
Mother Aleké drifted back into the crowd as dozens of X’Mari women kneeled down, picked up fist-sized rocks from the road, and carried them toward Abramowitz—who had done enough research on the xenophobic X’Mari culture to know there was nothing left she could say that would stop them from executing her.
Chapter
9
A voice distorted by electronic amplification resounded from across the industrial plaza. “This is the Venekan Army,” it squawked with ear-splitting volume. “Lay down your weapons and surrender. This is your only warning.”
Gomez felt her stomach churning as humanoid figures—decked out in military body armor and carrying a variety of small arms—began to coalesce into distinct shapes, even though they were still obscured by the amber haze of the growing dust cloud.
“Talk to me, Fabian,” she said.
“It’s not good,” he said. “I need a few minutes.”
Hawkins shook his head. “Stevens, we don’t have—”
“Look,” Stevens snapped. “I’m not making this up. I’m telling you, I need a few minutes.”
Gomez looked at Hawkins. “Help me unload the van.”
He followed her back to the van. She hurried inside and handed two assault rifles out to him. “You can’t be serious,” he said.
“We don’t have to win the battle,” she said as she handed him a heavy box filled with loaded rifle magazines. “We just have to hold our position until Fabian arms the self-destruct trigger. But there’s an entire army coming at us, so we need all the firepower we can get.” She handed him another weighty box, loaded with short, round-nosed cylinders. “What are these?”
Hawkins glanced in the box. “Rifle-fired mini-grenades,” he said. “Pump-action launcher. You can preload up to four.” He turned and set down the box. Gomez took the rocket launcher from its box, handed it to him, and picked up the box of rockets next to it. She stepped out of the van and looked around.
“The wrecked flatbed’ll give us some cover,” she said, setting down the box of rockets. “I’ll take the left. You take the front and the right.”
She took off her serape, laid it on the ground, and piled rifle magazines and mini-grenades onto it. Hawkins slapped a magazine into his rifle and began loading mini-grenades into its secondary chamber beneath the main barrel. “Sir, you do realize these weapons have no stun settings,” he said.
“Wound if you can,” she said, jamming a magazine into her own rifle. “Kill if you have to.”
She slung her rifle across her back. Grabbed the corners of her serape; pulled them together to make it a bundle. Jogged in a low crouch to the front edge of the van. Kneeled down. Opened the serape on the ground. Counted ten thirty-round magazines of rifle ammunition and ten mini-grenades. Loaded four mini-grenades into her weapon.
Gomez looked over her shoulder. Hawkins loaded a rocket into the launcher. Between them, kneeling behind the truck, Stevens worked furiously, his hands deep inside the probe.
She peeked around the corner of the van at the advancing clusters of soldiers. There were hundreds of them, advancing in groups of ten and twenty. Leading them in and providing them with cover were large armored vehicles equipped with sizable gun turrets.
Four of the six Venekan aircraft that had led the soldiers here hovered nearby, low over the gravel mountains, at angles ideal for avoiding the risk of cross fire. The remaining two aircraft stayed together and circled the industrial yard.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, Gomez thought. I came here to save these people, not kill them. She closed her eyes and reminded herself of the destructive potential of the probe’s antimatter fuel payload. No choice, she decided. If we let these fools capture the probe, they’ll blow up their planet trying to take it apart. Better for a few of them to die by our hands than for the whole species to die by its own.
“This is your final warning,” the distorted loudspeaker voice said with ear-splitting clarity. “Put down your weapons and surrender, or we will open fire.”
Gomez looked again at Hawkins, who lo
oked back at her, awaiting her order. She nodded to him, then aimed her rifle around the corner of the van at the Venekan soldiers, who had closed to within sixty meters of the vehicles.
She pulled the trigger. Her weapon roared like rattling thunder and kicked painfully into her shoulder. Two soldiers fell to the ground as their comrades ran for cover, firing back in Gomez’s general direction.
The overturned truck stuttered with metallic echoes from scores of bullet impacts. From behind her came the foomp of Hawkins pump-firing a mini-grenade. As she heard it explode, the buzzing clatter of Hawkins’s rifle joined her own.
Her weapon clicked empty. She gripped the pump-action slide underneath her rifle’s barrel and fired a mini-grenade into the path between two large gravel slopes. The explosion kicked up an enormous cloud of smoke and dust. She ejected the empty magazine from her rifle and slapped in a fresh one.
Bullet holes poked randomly through the overturned truck, a few at first, then several more. A round zinged past Gomez, close enough for her to feel the wake it cut through the freezing morning air.
A phaser, she pined, my kingdom for a phaser.
Abramowitz lifted her right arm to shield her face as Nedia cast the first stone. Abramowitz cried out in pain as the rock slammed into her torso.
She turned away and felt the second and third stones strike almost simultaneously in her middle back. Another rock hit her in the back of the head, purpling her vision. Then she lost count of the blows as a flurry of rocks rained down on her.
One agonizing blunt impact overlapped another and another and another. Her shouts of pain became an unbroken string of sobs and whimpers. She struggled to crawl away from the mob, with her one good arm and leg. A jagged stone hit her left arm dead on the break. Flashes of pain coursed up her spine.
Her fingers clawed at the cold, rocky ground as she pulled herself forward beneath the brutal onslaught. Her fingertips scraped across the thin layer of sand scattered across the high mountain road. She heard the clamor of hate-filled voices and the shuffle of leather-shod feet following close behind her.