by Peter David
“Is it working?” Stiles dared to ask.
Quiet with victory, Travis half-turned to confirm with a good glance. “We’re slowing down….”
“We’ve just bought ourselves about twenty more minutes,” Jeremy assessed. “I wouldn’t bet on more.”
“Keep measuring.”
Irritated with the knowledge that he wouldn’t have been able to save his ship if Spock hadn’t been here, Stiles bristled with selfconsciousness, fighting to think with a divided mind.
“Can’t fire out…can we beam through the reflector bubble?”
“I don’t know that!” Zack Bolt rebelled at the idea. “I know for sure I could never beam you back up through that thing!”
“That doesn’t make any—”
“Beam out?” Travis swung around. “Then what? Find the beam housing and kick it down? That thing can take hand phaser fire!”
“We’ll use the nacelle charges,” Stiles told him.
“Those are only five-minute charges,” Travis explained, with sudden fear in his eyes. “They’ll take out a mile and a half. You’ll never get away in time.”
“We’ll do something,” Stiles shabbily assured. “Let’s try it. Ready the transporter.”
“Are you nuts?” Jeremy grabbed at Stiles’s arm, keeping one hand on his controls. “Give me time to analyze the reflector envelope! Maybe you can’t beam through it.”
“How long before it pulls us down, did you say?”
His face sheeting to white, Jeremy shook his head. “All right, all right.”
Some inner checklist rang in Stiles’s head, and he turned to Spock, prepared to use all the resources he had at his disposal—and this was one dynamite resource. “Can we?”
Now that he’d been invited, Spock leaned to look at Jeremy’s science monitors that gave them the energy analysis of that beam. Even after several seconds of study and two significant frowns, Spock could only postulate, “Possibly.”
Stiles’s leg muscles knotted. “Let’s try beaming through.”
On his other side, Jeremy protested, “Let me beam something solid out first.”
“You got thirty seconds. Somebody get me a jacket. I’m going myself.”
“You are?” McCoy asked. “Damn! Another hotshot!”
The comm button was hot under Stiles’s finger. “Jason, bring me two of the shaped charges we use to blow off nacelles. Meet me in the transporter section.” He accepted and yanked on a jacket somebody handed him from the aft bridge locker. “I’ve got to find Zevon. Nobody else knows—”
“Neither do you know the way around the city,” Spock pointed out. He stood squarely before Stiles. “You were a prisoner. But I do.”
That’s what he needed—a super-shadow.
But he couldn’t think of any reason that didn’t make absolute sense. Pushy, pushy Vulcan…
“What about me?” Dr. McCoy made a rickety effort to stand up.
Stiles gaped at him, instantly in a bind. His mouth opened, closed again, opened—what could he say? McCoy couldn’t possibly run or fight, but if he stayed here…and what about the others? Offer to beam a hundred-and-some-year-old man down to save his life and leave the entire young crew behind with their lives dangling?
McCoy’s ice-blue eyes sharpened. “Are you going to refuse one of the greatest explorers and pioneers in Starfleet history?”
Choking on what he hoped was damage smoke and not something else, Stiles uttered, “I…I…uh….”
“Eric,” Jeremy interrupted, “We’re slipping. They’re not pulling us down with our energy now, but it’s still pulling us with whatever energy it can muster itself. We’re slipping deeper into the atmosphere. Sixteen minutes till we hit the surface.”
Travis looked at him. “Can we turn so we don’t hit engines-first?”
“No chance.”
Spock stripped out of his ceremonial robe and dumped it on the deck. “We should go, Commander.”
But Stiles was still gawking at McCoy without knowing what to say.
The aged physician leered back at him with singular determination.
Spock snapped up the front of his formal jacket—it turned out the big clunky Vulcan molded jewels also had a clasping mechanism—and simply preempted, “Doctor, please.”
Leveling a finger at Stiles, McCoy huffed, “If you don’t come out of transport with your arms sticking out of your head and you find that Romulan, you bring me the whole package, not just a sample of his blood. I’ve got to have a constant, warm, living source for several days to do what I need to do. I need him, got it? Not a sample. Him, himself.”
“Thank you,” Spock said. “We shall do our utmost.”
“You’d better.”
And McCoy stepped aside, out of the way of everybody who was working to keep the CST in the atmosphere.
“Travis, come here.” Stiles grasped his friend’s arm and held it fiercely. “Backup plan three, got it?”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Travis…don’t let my ship sink.”
Somehow Travis found a smile. “We’ll do what we have to, Eric.”
Stiles started to respond, but his words stuck in his throat. Travis assured him by returning the grip, and said nothing more.
Drawing a tight breath, Stiles jumped to the hatchway and grasped the hatch handle, then looked back for Spock. “Mr. Ambassador? Let’s fly or fry.”
“After you, Mr. Stiles.”
The Imperial Palace
What had begun as a complex and troubling medical mission had first metamorphosed into the glimmerings of success—a chance to save a thousand royal family members and shore up the stability of the Federation’s closest and most dangerous neighbor on this side of the street—and had now once again altered its form and function. Now Crusher, Data, and the hapless merchant named Hashley were about to fight for their own lives. As abruptly as wind shifts, they had become the targets of an assassination plan that had seemed as distant to them as stars were apart.
As her stomach muscles spun into spirals, Beverly Crusher thought fast, conjuring up a half-dozen alternatives before settling on one. She couldn’t sedate them all. She couldn’t seduce them all…there had to be something better.
“Allow me to play to your sense of honor,” she began, with a bluntness she hoped Romulans would appreciate. “If your men can take my man, Sentinel, I’ll pack up my instruments and leave, and let the empress and her family die. You won’t even have to kill me.”
Sentinel Iavo tipped his head as if he hadn’t quite heard her right. He nodded once at Data after deciding she couldn’t possibly be talking about Hashley.
“Him?”
“Yes,” Crusher said. “Him.”
“A duel?”
“If you have the integrity.”
Iavo glanced at the sergeant of his guards. The sergeant frowned in suspicion, but said nothing.
“How is it honorable,” Iavo parried, “for five men to do battle with one man?”
Crusher shrugged. “Well, he works out a lot. You know Starfleet.”
The five Romulan men, warriors all, looked at Data and saw a lanky, wiry human who carried Crusher’s medical bags.
Crusher held her breath. Come on, men, think…how do we spell Romulan chivalry?
“He has no weapon,” one of the other guards protested as he finally drew his own blade.
“You told us no active phasers or disrupters could get through the palace’s security screen,” Crusher said, “so you can either give him a dagger, or fight him like he is.”
Despite being obviously intrigued by the wager, Iavo’s expression hardened. “There is no integrity in sacrificing everything on a game. I refuse, Doctor. I cannot afford to let you leave here now. You will die today.”
Crusher shrugged. “Have it your way. You still have to fight him.”
Data stood alone in the middle of the carpet, calm and waiting, seeming very sm
all. Perfect—the Romulans didn’t like this at all. Whether they won or not, they were petty about fighting and too chicken to bet on themselves. And she’d piqued their sense of fair play. Conscience could be such a burden, couldn’t it? She hadn’t expected them to take a silly wager, but now they were ashamed to fight Data in what appeared to be a no-win for Starfleet.
The Romulans glanced at each other in waves of hesitation, doubt, suspicion—and a flash of guilt?
Over her shoulder, Crusher heard the faint voice of Ansue Hashley. “I…I can fight…a little….”
“Shh,” the doctor murmured. “Go ahead, Data.”
Without verbal acknowledgement, Data moved forward. Crusher pressed Hashley back, and the line of battle drew itself across the fur carpet. There before her, like a museum painting on a wall, stood the stirring vision of four distinguished Romulan charioteers and their Sentinel in rebellion, and thus they descended to the ranks of hatchet men.
Between the two factions in the bedchamber stood the couch and the oblong table and its chair. For a moment these three objects seemed as insurmountable as any moat. The recorded harp lyricals continued mindlessly to play, the fire to skitter and glow, the empress to suffer through her next breaths.
Ultimately the tension in the room became tangible, breakable—or maybe it was just the accursed twangy harp music—and the standoff was shattered by the battle cry of the sergeant of the guard. He flung off his helmet, dashed it to the hearth stones, and charged.
Blocked by the table, the sergeant drove forward anyway and leaped into the air, took two steps across the tabletop, spread his arms, dagger down, and dive-bombed Data where he stood.
Barehanded, Data’s arms shot up; he clasped the sergeant’s nubby silver uniform with both hands and parried the man over his head. If Data had simply completed the arch, the sergeant would’ve landed on Crusher, but Data’s shock-fast computer brain measured the pivot—angle, force, velocity, energy—and he twisted exactly right. The sergeant bellowed his shock and surprise, slashed downward with his blade—raking Data across the back of the neck—and then flew into the wall as if shot from a cannon. Though it looked as if he had just struck the velvet drapery, his body made a distinct thok of bone and armor striking against sheer rock. He crashed onto the corner of the vanity and thence to the floor.
Enraged, the three other guards now charged in unison, vaulting and smashing past the furniture. Data’s hands struck out like cobra tongues, skirting the slashing blades of his attackers with such blinding speed that two of the guards cut each other instead of him and stumbled back. The third received a kick in the gut and was thrown off. The first guard now flew from his position on the floor and jumped onto Data’s back, clinging and grimacing viciously while trying to position his knife at Data’s throat. Data merely turned under them as freely as a weathervane, his expression completely unfazed.
Sentinel Iavo, astounded by what he saw, rushed between the table and the couch, his ceremonial dirk’s long blade golden in the firelight, as he drove it forward into Data’s ribcage. There the blade lodged.
Data reached over his head with one hand to clasp the clinging sergeant by the hair and down with the other hand, to grip Sentinel Iavo’s dirk hilt as it protruded from his chest. Crusher winced as the three men waltzed together.
Behind her, Ansue Hashley’s gasps and gulps narrated every move, and he somehow had the sense to stay back, no matter what he thought he saw.
“He’ll be slaughtered!” Hashley empathized. “That knife—it’s in him!”
Restraining herself from idle boasting, Crusher said, “Don’t worry yet. Data’s the best concealed weapon around.”
In a spin of color and firelight, the sergeant slammed to the floor at Crusher’s feet, dazed, his face bleeding, lungs heaving, weapon completely missing. Crusher stooped and heaved him up onto his knees. “There you go. Keep fighting.”
She stepped back, watching tensely to see if the seed of guilt she’d planted would sprout quickly enough to turn the tide. Already she sensed a halfheartedness in the Romulans’ effort—or was she imagining it?
With a prideful roar, the Romulans surged back into the fight just as Sentinel Iavo and one of the other guards crashed into the couch and drove the whole thing right over backward, dumping them into a stand of shelves, whose contents came shattering down upon them.
“You’re making a mess,” Crusher commented.
“I shall be happy to tidy everything later, Doctor,” Data responded as he whirled and took a blaze of vicious stabbings to the arms and upper body and blocked hard-driven blows that were meant for his face. In return he drove his fists, knuckles, and the heels of his hands into the soft tissues of his opponents. “By the way, I am expecting a communiqué from the empress’s first cousin’s physician on Usanor Four. Would you mind activating the channel?”
“Oh, sure.”
Completely rattled by the casual conversation going on while they were panting like dogs, the Romulan guards let their anger get the better of them. Data’s hand-eye coordination was at computer speed, he had the strength of any ten Romulans all equalized throughout his body, and he wasn’t getting tired. When the next one came within grasping range, attempting to body-blow Data to the floor, Data instead grasped the man fully about the chest and heaved him into the air, propelling him up and into the corner.
“Data, it’s getting out of hand. Wrap it up as soon as you can.”
“Certainly.”
Sentinel Iavo was poised ten feet from them in an attack stance, staring at the body of his guard. Summoning the commitment he had made, he forced himself to swing once again at Data with his dirk blade slashing. The blade fell on Data’s shoulder and glanced off. Iavo stumbled.
In that instant, Data managed to drive off all three remaining attackers at once, just long enough to grasp the dagger hilt that was still sticking out of him. With a firm yank, he drew it from his body. The blade dripped with colored fluid as he turned it toward the charging guards and the Sentinel. He was armed.
His eyes narrowed and his teeth gritted, Data’s jaw locked, and there was a flush of effort in his complexion. The Sentinel and two of the guards attacked him as a unit with their blades, met with driving force by Data’s weapon. The clang and shriek of metal against metal erupted over the harpsong.
“Uh-oh, he’s getting mad,” Crusher observed. “And they say he doesn’t have those emotions…apparently he’s got something like adrenaline on his side.”
“How can he do this?” Hashley asked. “How can he throw those big guards around!”
“He eats his broccoli. This is what happens to all conspirators, Mr. Hashley. Sooner or later they have to show themselves.”
Iavo spun around and glared at her while two of his men lunged at Data and were thrown off. “Conspirators?”
“The Sentinel did it, didn’t he?” Ansue Hashley reckoned, taking the topic and running with it while the other men fought their way around the arena. “He poisoned the royal family! He wanted power all the time. He’s been close to it all his life, like the prime minister waiting for the queen to die, but he gets impatient. I’ve heard of that.”
Crusher rewarded him with a nod, then accused Iavo with a glare. “I guess he thought he could get away with killing the entire royal family.”
In the middle of a dagger-swipe, Iavo let his move be parried without challenge as he sang out, “I did nothing to make this happen! I have no idea why they turned ill at the same time! I thought it was their blood!”
Wondering how good an actor he was, Crusher moved sideways, keeping behind the periphery of Data’s slashing weapon. “Who helped you engineer the viral terrorism?”
“I did not do it!” Iavo shouted. He actually stopped fighting, backed away from Data, and stood there waving his weapon in a kind of helpless gesture, as one of his guards writhed in pain at his feet and the other braced to charge again. “This was providence working! I had the power to see what could be! I wanted
to change the hearts of our people, not this…this—stop it!”
He lashed out at the last guard, driving the charging soldier sideways into the table just before the other man would’ve plowed back into Data’s circle of engagement.
“Stop, all of you!” Iavo ordered. “Stop…stop. No more…”
The other guards—the two conscious ones—clasped at their bleeding and broken limbs and obeyed him. Mindful of Data’s dangerous abilities, they shrank back, away, and crouched near the fireplace. Somehow Crusher could tell that they weren’t obeying because they were beaten. They were obeying because they knew they were wrong.
Emotionally destroyed, baffled and sickened by the rankness of what he had been tempted toward, Iavo stalked the width of the room, then finally sank into the chair at the center table as if some magical pry bar had opened a valve and let the air out of him. He raised his striking jewel-like eyes to Crusher, and she saw mirrors of anguish.
“A thousand loyalties,” he mourned, “a thousand pressures…these days have been torment for me…I have spent my life in the service of the royal family, never once thinking such thoughts, until along came this miracle, this disease that struck every one of them…at first it seemed tragic, soon changing to a glimmer…the allure of opportunity…to cut away the throne’s ancient core…change the future of the empire, dilute the power of blood succession that causes these terrible dangers and finally try something new—this might’ve been the only chance in history to try. But I can’t finish it—”
Demolished, Iavo sank back on the vanity, his head hanging, his arm draped across the console.
“I could let them die,” he moaned, “but I could never kill them. You must believe me….”
“Data, stand down,” Crusher ordered.
The android lowered his weapon, although Crusher was reassured when he did not put it away, and remained poised in the middle of the room, ready to spring in case anybody got any ideas.
“Good work,” she said as she came to the android’s side. “How badly are you hurt?