“What’s really bothering you, Grelun?” Zweller said. “Are you regretting Falhain’s decision to accept aid from the Romulans? Are you worried about what they’ll expect in return after the Federation leaves?”
Zweller had evidently touched a nerve; Grelun was baring the razor-sharp points of his silvery teeth. One didn’t need to be a Betazoid to divine his emotional state.
“Get down!” Troi yelled.
Grelun raised his swords high and shouted, “Kill them all!” At least two dozen Chiarosan rebels advanced, amid an ear-splitting, ululating cry that seemed to issue from a single gigantic throat. Gomp turned tail and ran as Riker and Zweller both made rolling dives to the stone floor, bringing their weapons up as they landed. Riker could already hear weapons discharges, even before Zweller began firing his disruptor at the oncoming soldiers.
Then Riker realized that he was hearing weapons fire coming from behind the charging Chiarosans. He noticed the distinctive whooshing sound of a Starfleet compression phaser rifle, a weapon he’d not seen in the hands of Grelun’s troops.
The sound of phaser blasts grew louder and the Chiarosans’ united charge became a disorganized scatter. Grelun, his bare forearms badly burned by energy fire, fell back into his men. Chiarosans had begun dropping to the floor.
Moments later, none of the rebels was standing. Miraculously, none of the Starfleet contingent appeared seriously hurt. Near the chamber’s far wall, behind the stunned Chiarosans, stood Lieutenant Hawk, armed with a phaser rifle. Beside him was Admiral Batanides, who was holding a hand phaser.
Zweller smiled broadly as they approached. “Marta, I was expecting to see Johnny. What the hell are you doing here?”
Her face was set into hard lines. “Saving your ass yet again, apparently.”
Riker noticed that something subtle had changed in the way the admiral carried herself. It was as though she had aged a decade since he’d seen her last on the Enterprise.
Zweller apparently sensed something, too. Anxiously, he asked, “How is Aubin?”
“Dead,” she replied coldly, gripping her phaser hard. “And now really isn’t the best time to discuss it, Corey.”
“Admiral,” Riker said, happy to interrupt. “Since you managed to get in here, I’m assuming you also have a way of getting everyone out.”
“Right, Commander.” To Hawk, she said, “ Lieutenant, signal Captain Picard. Tell him we’ve got ten to beam up.”
Hawk nodded. Tapping his combadge, he said, “Away team to Kepler.”
Riker was relieved to learn that Zweller’s gambit had paid off. The captain had indeed brought a shuttlecraft into transporter range for a lightning rescue. Riker smiled at Troi, who grinned back, evidently thinking similar thoughts.
Then Riker looked again toward Hawk and realized that something wasn’t right. The lieutenant was repeatedly tapping his combadge, which issued a burst of static before going silent.
Hawk’s eyes locked with Riker’s. “I can’t raise the Kepler.”
Riker told himself that the shuttle’s transmitter might simply have run afoul of the local weather patterns. But he knew that the combadge’s silence might also indicate that something far more serious had happened. He felt a deep chill spreading in his gut.
“Damn!” Batanides said. “Keep trying. And let’s find someplace to hide. The last thing we need now is to get captured by the Chiarosans. Or the Romulans.”
“Admiral,” Riker said. “Maybe the Romulans are exactly what we need.”
Batanides seemed to grasp his meaning. “What’s your plan, Commander?”
Hawk thought that the Chiarosans looked intimidating even when sprawled unconscious on the floor. He tried to ignore them as he adjusted his tricorder to scan for Romulan biosignatures. While Hawk worked, the admiral quickly brought Riker, Troi, and Commander Roget upto-date, including some of the details surrounding Ambassador Tabor’s death, Captain Picard’s rescue mission, and the discovery of a Romulan cloaking field some five AUs south of the Chiaros system’s orbital plane.
When Hawk idly mentioned that the energy field the Enterprise had encountered might have been partly responsible for the Slayton’s destruction, a collective gasp went up among five of the bedraggled former hostages. Zweller, however, stood apart from his crewmates, stony-faced. Hawk wondered: Had the Section 31 agent known all along about the Slayton ’s fate?
“Oh, my God,” Troi said, her dark eyes moistening as she appraised Zweller’s colleagues. “No one’s told them.” Hawk’s tricorder nearly slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers when he realized what a bombshell he had dropped on these already-shaken people.
Admiral Batanides interrupted Hawk’s unpleasant train of thought. “Are any more troops coming, Lieutenant?”
Hawk forced himself to concentrate on the business at hand. He raised the tricorder again, watching as its indicators moved slowly across the readout panel. “No, sir,” he said. “But there are definitely Romulan lifesigns here. It’s hard to tell, scanning through all this rock, but there may be as many as half a dozen of them in various parts of the complex.”
“Scan for tetryon particles,” Riker said. Without hesitation, Hawk again adjusted the tricorder and resumed scanning.
“What good will that do?” barked Gomp.
“Romulan ships are powered by quantum singularities,” Riker explained patiently, “that usually give off tetryon particles as a by-product.”
“Got it,” Hawk said, smiling triumphantly—the tricorder had indeed picked up the fingerprint of a Romulan quantum singularity drive. “And it’s located exactly where Commander Zweller’s message said the spacecraft hangars would be.”
Hawk noticed then that all eyes were upon Commander Riker, who clutched a Chiarosan pistol in his right hand. Acutely aware that they were looking to him to tell them their next move, Riker turned a questioning look on the admiral. Batanides gave him a quick nod, effectively transferring command of the mission to him.
“Mr. Zweller, you’ll lead us to the hangar,” Riker began. “Deanna, I want you to keep trying to raise the Kepler. Mr. Roget, I’d like your people to bring Grelun along with us. Lieutenant Hawk will assist you.”
As the counselor tried without success to contact the shuttlecraft, Hawk stowed the tricorder and walked toward the Chiarosan leader’s supine form.Unconsciousness did little to soften Grelun’s fierce visage; it occurred to Hawk that it would be very bad if he were to awaken unexpectedly. He began helping two of Roget’s officers half-carry and half-drag the man, whose dead weight was akin to that of a small tree. The intensity of this planet’s gravitational field wasn’t making matters any easier.
As he strained, Hawk heard Troi raise an objection. “So now it’s our turn to start taking hostages?”
“I prefer to think of him as a shield, Deanna,” Riker temporized as the group began moving. “The Chiarosans might not fire on us while their leader’s in harm’s way.”
Zweller shrugged and looked over his shoulder at Riker as he led the group along. “Then again, they might not let that stop them. They’re desperate people, Commander.”
And so are we, Hawk thought, his back and shoulder muscles afire as he continued to help move the insensate Chiarosan.
The three Romulan officers wasted no time confiscating Crusher’s phaser and combadge. Crusher understood, too late, that she must have locked the Kepler’s transporter onto the engine room of a Romulan ship located somewhere within the Chiarosan rebel base. Romulan warp cores, after all, were known to scatter tetryon particles. In her haste, the “shadow” in the tetryon field, which had probably been created by the shielding of the warp core itself, must have looked like a safe refuge. But that knowledge could do her little good now.
As the seconds slowly ticked by, Crusher’s apprehension grew. Where is Jean-Luc?
The female Romulan, who appeared to be in charge, herded the doctor into the corner of the room farthest from the warp core. The woman spoke tersely into a small
communication device attached to her uniform.
“Centurion, this is T’Lei from the technical group. We have captured and disarmed a lone Starfleet officer in our engine room. I presume she is here to try to hijack our vessel.”
“Detain her,” replied a harried-sounding male voice. Crusher heard some sort of commotion going on in the background. The two male Romulan technicians, who had clearly heard the noises as well, looked nervously at one another.
But T’Lei never took her eyes off Crusher, and the weapon in the Romulan woman’s hand never wavered.
“Centurion?” T’Lei said, tapping the transmitter on her tunic.
A moment later, the voice replied: “We have just been advised that the Starfleet prisoners have escaped. They have captured Grelun and are taking him in your direction. If they wish to leave the planet, they will have no choice other than to take your ship.”
Crusher felt a surge of hope rise within her. But she didn’t dare move.
“Surely Grelun’s troops will neutralize them before they can attempt it,” T’Lei said.
“No. They will stand down, to ensure their leader’s safety. You and your men can better handle this situation using stealth. There are only ten escapees, after all. Expect them to arrive momentarily.”
Crusher’s heart abruptly sank. They’re going to walk right into an ambush.
“Understood, Centurion,” T’Lei said, signing off. The male technicians raised disruptor pistols of their own.
Wearing a viper’s smile, T’Lei spoke directly to Crusher. “The ship’s hatch is narrow, Human. Your friends must enter it single-file.
“Rest assured, we will be ready for them.”
Jean-Luc, where the hell are you?
* * *
A moment after the Kepler’s instrument panel went dark, the emergency lighting kicked in, coloring the cockpit a dull red. Picard silently thanked whatever capricious fortune continued to keep the shuttle’s structural integrity field functioning, though he knew it soon wouldn’t matter. The two remaining Chiarosan fighter craft were still closing in, and he didn’t even know for sure how close to the ground the shuttle had plunged.
Picard channeled every joule of emergency power to the transporter, taking care to leave the structural integrity field in place. Obediently, the transporter controls lit up. Fortunately, he still had a lock on Beverly’s coordinates, and had stayed within nominal transporter range of them.
But he could also see that the transporter’s power level had fallen far below safe operational levels. There was no power to spare anything else now, even life support. It was going to be close.
He checked the transporter’s scanner, which again showed evidence of tetryons. Beverly had evidently beamed into a tetryon-free “shadow” located in the very heart of the most abundant tetryon activity in the rebel base.
Which told Picard what he could expect to find at the beam-down site: Romulans.
Picard left his flight seat long enough to grab a hand phaser from the weapons locker. He entered the “ energize” command and shut off every other onboard system.
The hull creaked and groaned, and one of the braces let go with a loud snap. As the light from the transporter began cascading around him, something slammed very hard into the Kepler. His ears popped as the cabin’s atmosphere vented into the chill Chiarosan night.
A gale-force, ionized wind ripped the shuttle’s hull apart as though it were nothing more than an autumn leaf.
* * *
Hawk was relieved beyond words when Riker’s appraisal of the Chiarosans turned out to be correct; when they’d seen their unconscious leader being spirited away by ten heavily armed Starfleet officers, the Chiarosans had made no move to bar their way to the hangar facility, nor did they pretend ignorance about the location of the Romulan vessel Hawk’s tricorder had detected. After Zweller had made a rather emphatic inquiry into the matter—all the while pointing a beam weapon at the slumbering Grelun’s skull—a Chiarosan technician sullenly punched an authorization code into a console, decloaking a small Romulan scout ship. The vessel’s narrow hatchway now beckoned.
“Scan that ship for Romulans,” Batanides ordered Hawk, who swiftly consulted his tricorder.
After a moment, Hawk shook his head. “I’m picking up too much tetryon activity. It’s jamming my scans.”
“Deanna?” Riker prompted.
Troi closed her eyes, reaching into the small Romulan vessel with her empathic senses. “All I’m picking up right now is a lot of emotional tension,” Troi said. “As though several people were about to engage in combat.”
“Or maybe preparing an ambush?” Zweller ventured.
“Maybe I should knock,” Gomp said, apparently to no one.
Batanides raised her weapon, signaling an end to the debate. “We can’t stay here, people. We’ve no choice but to chance it. Let’s go.” Riker nodded his acknowledgment and took the point, with Zweller and Roget immediately behind him.
Hawk tucked his tricorder away. Muscles straining, he resumed the not inconsiderable task of helping to drag Grelun forward as the group moved across the hangar floor toward the open hatch.
* * *
Picard shook off the slight dizziness he felt when the transporter released him. It had been close, but he was satisfied that he was in one piece.
Phaser drawn, he now stood in what appeared to be an engine room. To his right was what he recognized as a Romulan warp core—obviously the source of the tetryons the Kepler’s sensors had detected. Some five meters away, in a far corner to his left, stood Crusher, surrounded by a trio of armed Romulans, one of whom had just turned in his direction. The doctor saw him as well, and rolled lithely to the deck.
Using the warp core as cover, Picard opened fire.
Riker held his Chiarosan disruptor at eye level as he entered the hatch. He expected to be fired upon at any moment, and was mildly surprised when nothing of the kind happened. As the others followed, Riker led the way into the crew compartment.
It was empty.
Riker heard an electronic hum coming from the forward portion of the vessel. It sounded as though someone were in the process of activating the scout ship’s instruments, perhaps even preparing the vessel for flight. His weapon ready, he moved toward the sound as Zweller, Roget, and Batanides covered his back. Cautiously, Riker stepped through an open hatch and into a small cockpit.
He was shocked to see Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher seated behind the instrument panel, evidently trying to make sense of the Romulan script on the control panels.
Picard looked up and smiled broadly. “What kept you, Number One?”
Lieutenant Hawk thought that fitting a Tellarite male, a half-Betazoid woman, eight assorted humans, and an insensate Chiarosan aboard such a small craft might be problematic, but it turned out that there was enough room, after all. But only barely. Hawk accompanied Batanides into the small cockpit, where the admiral had relieved Crusher to allow her to assist Riker, Troi, and Dr. Gomp in tending to a trio of unconscious Romulan technicians. For a moment, Hawk had wondered how much important information the Romulans might reveal—until he considered how crowded the vessel already was. There simply wasn’t enough room to take the Romulans along.
The lieutenant was impressed by how well the admiral knew her way around Romulan instrumentation. It made sense, though; she was an intelligence officer, after all. Perhaps the study of things Romulan was her specialty. Hawk watched her carefully, memorizing each control she touched, each command sequence she entered.
As Picard and the admiral powered up the little vessel, the Chiarosans scrambled to open the hangar doors for them, apparently unwilling to engage in a game of “chicken,” which would more than likely get their leader killed.
Hawk smiled triumphantly. “We’re actually doing it. We’re getting away.”
“We haven’t gotten away yet, Lieutenant,” Picard said, still working busily alongside the admiral to get the ship moving.
Bat
anides nodded in agreement with the captain. “They can still chase us. Or even shoot us down, Grelun or no Grelun.”
Seconds later, they were under way. The scout ship ascended quickly into the chill darkness of Nightside. Hawk continued observing and memorizing while the admiral coached Picard on the instrument panel.
“That blue rectangular touchpad beside your right hand should control the cloaking device. Activate it.”
Picard complied, smiling ironically. “I suppose we’re in violation of the Treaty of Algeron now, Admiral.”
She chuckled gently. “I don’t think the Romulan diplomatic corps will be in any position to complain about that, under the circumstances.” Hawk was well aware that under the current Federation–Romulan treaties concerning Chiaros IV, neither side were permitted to conceal either personnel or equipment anywhere on the planet.
He wondered what other secrets the Romulans guarded—and if Zweller had any inkling of what those secrets might be.
The admiral frowned as she stared at a readout. “The cloak’s not working.”
Picard activated the comm system. “Picard to engine room.”
“Hearn here, Captain,” responded the chief engineer of the late starship Slayton.
“The cloaking device is not functioning, Mr. Hearn. We need to engage it immediately.”
“Sorry, Captain, but Commander Roget and I have our hands full right now just keeping the engines operational. The Romulan techs had everything in pieces down here.”
Hawk suddenly became aware of Zweller’s presence behind him. “I know a thing or two about cloaking devices, Marta,” the older man said.
“Then get below and get the damned thing working before they start chasing us.”
Finally seeing an opportunity to speak with Zweller in relative privacy, Hawk turned toward him. “Need a hand, Commander?”
Rogue Page 16