Star Trek: Typhon Pact 01: Zero Sum Game

by David Mack

  She darted out of the lift, took cover for a few moments behind a stack of empty ammunition crates, then skulked to another hiding spot between two parked load lifters. Crouching as low as she was able, she eavesdropped on a group of passing technicians. “We need to get back on schedule,” said the one leading the pack. “Are we sure these six wings are all flight ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” said a mechanic in the middle of the huddle. “Nezca Squadron has passed preflight. We should start work on Ulco Squadron.”

  The ground crew’s conversation continued as they moved out of earshot. Sarina noted the markings on the nearest fighters and saw the ideogram for Nezca emblazoned on their aft tailfins and forward fuselages. All of them sat in launch-ready positions with their cockpit canopies open.

  She looked past the load lifter on her right and saw more stacked crates. The random jumbles of Breen alphanumeric symbols stenciled on the crates meant nothing to Sarina, but she recognized the large warning icon for high explosives.

  I would’ve preferred a silent exit and a subtle escape, she thought as she sabotaged her disruptor to cause a feedback loop inside its prefire chamber, but this will have to do. A diode on the top of the weapon flashed red, indicating that the disruptor had begun a slow buildup to an overload detonation. Sarina ducked around the load lifter, tossed her overloading disruptor through a gap into the middle of the massive stack of crated munitions, and walked away toward the nearest parked fighter as she silently counted down from ninety seconds.

  No one seemed to notice her until she climbed inside one of the fighter’s cockpits and started pulling down the canopy.

  “Halt!” squawked a metallic voice. “Get out of that ship!”

  She locked the canopy in place, strapped herself into the pilot’s seat, and pressed the Engine Start button on the fighter’s console. The cockpit’s wraparound display flared to life, and the spacecraft’s engines shrieked for half a second before letting out a majestic roar that shook Sarina to her bones.

  On the edges of her vision, she noted dozens of Breen rushing toward her aircraft. More than a few members of her welcoming committee carried rifles.

  A voice crackled over her ship’s comm. “Shut down your engines and surrender Interceptor Ten immediately. This is your only warning.”

  In her head, Sarina’s countdown continued: Thirty…twenty-nine…

  She gripped the yoke and settled her feet on the thrust and braking pedals. Many of the instruments’ functions seemed intuitive—level, altimeter, speed, sensors—but some she could only guess at. They probably don’t leave the manual in the cockpit, she figured, not that I have time to read it. She tapped the thrust pedal. The ship inched forward. A pull on the yoke lifted the nose. Good enough. She pushed the pedal to the deck.

  Her interceptor shot forward. It was only by the grace of her enhanced reflexes that she avoided slamming into the hangar’s ceiling on her way out into the atmosphere of Salavat. The high-velocity launch pinned her to her seat, and she struggled to halt the fighter’s wild rolling and yawing.

  Her countdown progressed through single digits.

  Eight…seven…six…

  She gained control of the interceptor and leveled out her flight.

  Five…four…

  Over the comm, the same voice as before screeched, “Set down your vessel immediately, or you will be shot down!”

  She steered into a climbing turn, stomped on the thruster, and raced toward orbit. Three…two…one. Far below on the planet’s surface, a brief flare of crimson confirmed that the Breen had not found her overloading disruptor in time.

  The gray mist of the atmosphere melted away as Sarina continued her ascent. For a moment she considered breaking orbit and triggering her extraction signal. She pushed the thought aside. No, she resolved. Not after what Julian did for me. I owe him everything. I can’t just leave him here—I need to find him.

  As for how she was supposed to do that…she had no idea.

  Multiple green dots appeared on one of the cockpit’s sensor displays. After a few seconds of translating the symbols on the screen, Sarina deduced that the dots represented a squadron of interceptors scrambled from some other BID facility, likely with orders to destroy her on sight.

  She tested the various tactical controls around her. A toggle on the top of the yoke armed either the forward disruptor cannon or the four missiles mounted under the interceptor’s wings. The trigger was on the far side of the yoke.

  It took her a moment to find the energizer for the shields, which hardly seemed up to the challenge of a dogfight against a superior force. Retreat might be my only option, she realized. Unfortunately, this thing isn’t built to exceed quarter impulse. Which means I can forget about outrunning whatever warships might get called in as backup if I make a run for it.

  On the sensor display, the six blips closed in, and they seemed to be gaining speed. Despite having only the most rudimentary flight training, Sarina was about to find herself in a dogfight against experienced pilots. Improvisation is fine for learning how to sing, she fretted, but for zero-gravity combat? Not so much.

  The engines roared as she stepped on the thrust pedal and tugged the yoke to flip her craft’s nose up and over to face her oncoming attackers.

  Julian, she prayed, wherever you are…I hope you’re having better luck than I am right now.

  40

  Thot Keer arrived at the Ops Center to find the door open, its consoles blasted apart and belching smoke, and its floor littered with murdered personnel. He was overcome with sorrow and fury. They were just engineers and technicians, he raged. Why kill them? What sort of monster could do this? He could almost understand why an enemy would kill the armed security personnel—but had it really been necessary to murder unarmed civilian workers?

  Waving his hands to cut a path through the room’s blanket of black smoke, he worked his way past the carnage to inspect the various consoles. He was unable to find even one intact. “Computer,” he said, “acknowledge Thot Keer.” There was no response. He was about to repeat his request when he looked up and saw that whoever had killed the ops team had also shot out the voice interface.

  Of course, Keer thought with bitter cynicism. The saboteur was thorough enough to murder noncombatant civilians. Naturally, he shot the transceiver. Keer walked back to the upper level, found the auxiliary systems access panel, and pried it loose. Behind it, the backup console and secondary voice-input node were intact.

  He keyed in his authorization code. “Computer, acknowledge Thot Keer.”

  “Acknowledged,” the computer voice said from the backup console.

  “Emergency override toshbek seven five nine,” Keer said.

  “Override accepted. Awaiting instructions.”

  “Access memory core,” Keer said. “Locate all design files related to the slipstream adaptation project.”

  “No files found,” the computer said.

  Horror clouded Keer’s thoughts. “No,” he mumbled, voicing his denial. “They must be there. All my work, my notes…” He keyed commands into the backup console and waited with mounting anxiety. It told him the same thing that the synthetic voice had: his folder of annotated schematics had been deleted.

  He entered more commands. You’re not that good, my little saboteur. You may have found the master copies, but you must have missed—under his mask, he smiled with smug satisfaction—the backup copies. You missed those. Not so clever after all, eh? He restored his files from the backups and marked them for emergency burst transmission. “Computer, send my design files to the central databank at the Confederate Information Bureau. Update all files with my most recent annotations.”

  “Acknowledged. Initiating burst transmission…. Transmission complete.”

  Keer exhaled with profound relief. Whatever happened next, his work had been preserved and was safe offworld. His labors would not have been in vain.

  “Open the outer doors of the main hangar,” he said.

 
The computer replied, “Confirmed. Opening outer bay doors.”

  “Initiate shutdown protocol liska for the base’s main reactor.”

  “Error. Unable to comply. Core containment failure imminent. Damage to control systems near main core is preventing completion of shutdown protocol.”

  Keer knew better than to push a losing position. He sprinted through the door and kept running as he opened a channel through his helmet’s transceiver. “Keer to Tul Jath, respond!”

  “This is Jath,” the foreman said. “Go ahead, sir!”

  “I opened the hangar doors from ops,” Keer said, moving at a full run. “Can you confirm the doors are opening?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  “Then get going,” Keer said. “Get my ship to safety!”

  “It will take five minutes for the doors to open wide enough to maneuver the prototype out of the hangar. You have that long to get back on board.”

  A deep rumbling shook the base. Overhead lights flared white-hot as power surges ripped through the base’s energy-distribution network. Smoke snaked from behind wall panels, followed seconds later by licks of flame, and Keer knew that plasma fires would soon spread throughout the command facility.

  “On my way,” Keer said as he ducked down a passage to an emergency ladderway, which suddenly seemed preferable to trusting the turbolifts. “But do not wait for me one second longer than you have to,” he added, dodging around a jet of fire that spat from a splintering wall panel. “Get Marjat to safety. That is an order.”

  Everywhere that Bashir looked in search of an exit he found only missed chances. Entire corridors were lined with empty spaces from which escape pods had been launched, sent hurtling away through seemingly endless tubes tunneled through the asteroid. He considered trying to crawl through one to get outside—until a thunderous sound rocked the base, and one tunnel after another imploded and filled with rubble and jagged slabs of stone.

  He lagged a few paces behind a cluster of base personnel who shared his predicament. They, too, were trapped and looking for a way out, unaware that the man responsible for their plight was standing in their midst. Scurrying through the smoky darkness, they radiated panic and confusion. They had worked their way down through the base one level at a time, their collective anxiety growing as their options dwindled. Following them into the lowest level, which was made up of cargo bays that ringed three sides of the main hangar, Bashir feared that they—and he—would find no cause for hope, only a final dead end to their flight.

  The first workers to enter the bay let out an ear-splitting wail of electronic noise from their vocoders. Bashir presumed it was the Breen’s equivalent of a victory whoop. When he at last joined them, he saw the cause of their celebration.

  The triangular outer doors of the main hangar were creeping open.

  Around him, the celebration degenerated almost immediately into chaotic violence. Breen workers were fighting one another with tools and fists in order to lay claim to one of a handful of small zero-g work vehicles, and Bashir understood why: if the outer doors were open, then these tiny worker-bee spacecraft were the survivors’ best chance of making it out of the base in time.

  He set his hand on the grip of his disruptor and prepared to shoot his way through the free-for-all to the nearest work vehicle. Then he caught a flash of golden light out of the corner of his eye: the prototype was warming up its aft thrusters and preparing for its own getaway. If the prototype escaped, his mission would be an unequivocal failure; all the lives he had taken would have been ended for nothing, and Sarina’s sacrifice in Utyrak would have been in vain. That wasn’t an outcome that Bashir was prepared to accept. Change of plan, he decided.

  Hovering on the edge of the riot engulfing the cargo bay ahead of him, Bashir searched the shelves of tools and equipment, taking stock of their contents and imagining alternative uses for them. Then he saw what he was looking for: a panel on the wall marked with the Breen symbols for emergency equipment. He ran to the panel, pulled it open, and retrieved a compact fire-suppressant canister. It was heavy and solid in his hands. He nodded. This will do.

  Bashir charged toward the nearest work vehicle. The last Breen standing from the mass struggle to claim the craft was opening its side hatch. As the Breen started to pull himself inside the spacecraft, Bashir hefted the fire extinguisher over his shoulder and swung it forward, striking the Breen in the back of the neck. The Breen fell forward, twitched for a few seconds, then fell backward, away from the vehicle. He landed in a limp heap on the floor.

  Watching his victim collapse with the traumatic blunt-force injury he had inflicted filled Bashir with an urge to vomit.

  None of the few Breen still standing in the cargo bay seemed to notice or care what Bashir had done; they were too busy stealing the other work vehicles in desperate attempts to save themselves.

  Choking back his remorse, Bashir lobbed the fire extinguisher inside the vehicle, climbed in after it, and closed the hatch behind himself. Have to hurry, he told himself as the prototype starship’s main thruster burned ever more brightly. I can’t let that ship get away.

  He pushed the Power On button and started flipping switches, surprised at how similar the Breen vehicle’s primary controls were to those used by Starfleet. The console in front of him lit up, and he skipped any pretense of a preflight check, choosing instead to guide the ship into motion without delay. A few Breen tried to throw themselves at his craft, perhaps hoping to hijack it, only to be knocked aside by the brutal collision with something far more massive than themselves.

  There was a faint crackling of energy across the craft’s front windshield as it passed through the pressurized cargo bay’s invisible force field and entered the airless microgravity environment of the main hangar.

  A small cloud of similar spacecraft raced toward the small but widening gap in the hangar’s outer doors. Bashir turned in the opposite direction and flew toward the slipstream prototype. This kind of piloting had never been Bashir’s forte. His flying was fast and sloppy, almost careless, but it didn’t matter—there wasn’t much for him to run into.

  Within seconds he was at the rear wall of the hangar, behind the prototype’s aft main thruster. Heat alarms started to sound on his console. Squinting against the engine glare, he silenced the buzzing alarm, engaged the spacecraft’s manual override, and programmed the vehicle for a collision course—starting at the end of a fifteen-second delay.

  He grabbed the fire extinguisher, opened the craft’s starboard hatch, and jumped out. The momentum of his leap shifted the spacecraft by half a centimeter before its nav thrusters kicked in to stabilize it, enabling Bashir to launch himself clear by several meters. Even through his vacuum-rated Breen armor he felt the scorching heat of the prototype’s main thrusters, and he was grateful that he had parked his craft a few degrees starboard of dead center behind the engine.

  Angling the extinguisher’s nozzle with care, he released a short spray of foam and compressed gas. A rapidly widening cone of foam appeared and then evaporated in the prototype’s engine wash as the extinguisher’s emissions propelled Bashir away from the starship. Now a course correction. He halted his drifting with a few spurts of the extinguisher. Relying on his visor’s HUD to help him choose his angles, he unleashed a steady stream of fire suppressant. It lacked a jetpack’s sensation of velocity, but he could tell he was steadily gaining speed as the extinguisher’s spray pushed him through the hangar.

  Thanks to the vacuum environment, there was no sound from the explosion as his abandoned work craft flew into the prototype’s main thruster—just a bright and, to Bashir, satisfying flash of light followed by a spreading cloud of debris.

  As he passed between the half-open doors of the hangar bay, Bashir hoped his final spanner in the works would be enough to doom the prototype to a fiery end. For a few seconds he was surrounded by walls of metal and machinery, and then he was back in deep space, floating away from the asteroid.

  He adjusted h
is visor’s filter, confirmed he was clear of the base’s energy-dampening field, and turned so he could see a constellation that he knew lay in the direction of home and rescue. Breathing a sigh of relief, he triggered his emergency recall beacon. Cue the cavalry.

  41

  Dax stepped out of the turbolift in such a hurry to reach the bridge that she nearly clipped the doors as they sighed open. “Report,” she said, moving toward her command chair. “Do we have a lock on the recall beacons?”

  Lieutenant Kedair replied, “Yes, sir. It’s in the asteroid belt between the fifth and sixth planets of the Alrakis system. But it’s only one beacon, Captain.”

  Casting an anxious glance back at Kedair, Dax asked, “Which one?”

  “Doctor Bashir’s. We’re continuing to monitor Lieutenant Douglas’s frequency, just in case.”

  “Good,” Dax said. “Mister Tharp, plot a course to Doctor Bashir’s recall beacon, maximum slipstream velocity.” She looked at her first officer. “Mister Bowers, sound Red Alert and get ready to cross into Breen space.”

  Bowers nodded, stepped over to an aft console, and opened a shipwide channel. His voice reverberated from the overhead speakers as he spoke. “Attention, this is the XO. Red Alert, all hands to battle stations. This is not an exercise. Repeat, this is not an exercise. Bridge out.” The alert klaxon whooped twice as the overhead lights on the bridge dimmed to their combat setting.

  “Mister Helkara,” Dax said, “spring the trap.”

  The Zakdorn second officer looked up from the science console to face Dax. “Aye, sir.” Then he exchanged nods with Lieutenant Mirren at ops. “Ready to hack the Breen comnet, on your mark.”