I’m going to miss him, she thought, and recognized immediately the ludicrous character of her thought. Dead, she would not miss him, could not miss anybody or anything. But she missed him at that moment, and felt deeply saddened that what they had begun to share would never come to fruition. They would not wed, they would not have children, even though they had recently started discussing such matters. They had loved each other for a time, and that would have to be enough.
No! Trinh thought. She hated the idea of doing to Hikaru what had been done to her. She loathed the prospect of leaving him in the most permanent way. He deserved more than that.
I deserve more than that, Trinh thought, and amazingly, she actually believed it.
Trinh tried to move again. She flexed one leg, then the other. The ash atop her gave slightly, but still pushed down on her and prevented her from trying to dig herself out. She shifted her hips and torso, and found them as tightly held as the rest of her lower body. She tried to get her left arm to stir, in vain, and then the right.
But then Trinh’s hand opened and closed on nothing. Thinking she might have been imagining it, she tried again. Her fingers furled and unfurled into a fist easily, with no resistance.
My hand is free, Trinh thought, not knowing how that could be, but also not allowing herself to celebrate just yet. Concentrating, she turned her hand over and bent her wrist, reaching toward the ground. She felt it at once, a hard, granular sensation on the pads of her fingers.
Trinh walked her fingertips along the ground to one side. Nothing replaced the texture of the dry, wasted earth. Sending her fingers in the opposite direction, she began to think that she shouldn’t even bother. She had no idea how badly her body had been mangled in the explosion and its aftermath. If she survived, would she even be the whole woman Hikaru had fallen in love with? She would not want—
Trinh’s fingertips brushed against a smooth surface, cool to the touch. It felt like metal—like rounded metal. Trinh stretched her arm out as far as she could, tried to extend her reach even millimeters more. Beads of perspiration formed on her face, and a cramp tightened her muscles just below her rib cage. She ignored it. If I can just—
Her fingers closed around the object. She had no idea what it was, but it fit in her hand and she could grasp it firmly. Carefully, she pulled on it. When it didn’t move, she increased the force she applied, and still the rod or whatever it was stayed in place.
Hope welled within Trinh. She paused for a few seconds to collect herself, to focus her mind on putting whatever strength she owned into what she had to do next. She had to concentrate, for herself, for Hikaru.
And that’ll be all I think about, my love, until I’m free, she told herself.
Then Trinh began to pull.
• • •
More missiles crashed into Enterprise.
“Shields down to seventy-eight percent,” called out Chekov. “We’ve lost shield generators around the starboard warp nacelle and the forward ventral section of the secondary hull.”
Sulu monitored Enterprise’s velocity, then checked his scanner to match it against the three remaining alien vessels. He wanted to push the ship’s velocity higher, thinking that they could draw their pursuers away from the planet, outrun them, then return to rescue the landing party. For the moment, though, he trusted that Spock had a viable plan.
“Viewer astern,” the first officer ordered, and Hadley touched a control. The image on the viewer shifted, and the empty space ahead of the ship gave way to the receding form of the planet behind them. The three slim, black vessels continued to chase Enterprise, weaving evasively as they fired their weapons without interruption.
“Return fire?” Sulu asked over his right shoulder. Spock stood on that side of him and a step behind.
“Not yet,” Spock said. “Have the alien vessels increased their velocity?”
Sulu consulted his scanner. “No,” he said, but then corrected himself, knowing the precision with which Spock thought. “Yes, marginally, but they are not closing the distance.” Even as he spoke the words, Sulu wondered how that could possibly be true. If the speed of the aliens vessels increased to a level greater than that of Enterprise, then they should obviously be shortening the distance between them.
But then Sulu saw the reason why: the alien vessels did not travel in a straight line. Even as they pursued Enterprise, they continued to make evasive maneuvers; they therefore traveled a greater distance than if they followed a linear path, and thus required a higher speed to maintain the gap. Spock wants to straighten them out, Sulu realized. It had been the ability of the aliens to avoid Enterprise’s weapons that had prevented the Starfleet crew from achieving a rapid victory.
“Increase speed,” the first officer said. “If the alien vessels do so as well, then increase it again.”
“Aye, sir,” Sulu said, and he worked the helm to draw more power from the impulse engines. Enterprise flew faster, and the aliens matched the increased velocity.
“The alien vessels’ sublight engines appear to be at their maximum output,” Chekov said from the science console.
“Lieutenant Sulu,” Spock said.
Sulu pushed Enterprise’s velocity higher. When he looked up at the viewscreen, he saw that the alien vessels had reduced the evasive component of their pursuit. He kicked the ship’s speed up another notch, and the course of the alien ships hewed even closer to a straight line.
Spock crossed behind Sulu and over to the left side of the helm. “Lieutenant, bring all weapons to bear. I want a massive barrage, allowing those vessels no avenue for escape. Do not stop until all of them have been disabled.”
Sulu nodded, then peered into his scanner. His hands moved across his panel without him even looking at its controls. In his display, he saw targeting indicators for each of Enterprise’s phaser banks turn green and stay green, then watched as the photon torpedo tubes acquired their marks. “Firing all weapons,” he said as his fingers pushed multiple buttons.
When the lieutenant peered up at the main view-screen, the red fire of the ship’s phasers had already begun to blaze from Enterprise’s stern. He saw the glowing bolts of photon torpedoes follow. In seconds, he learned that his aim had been true.
Sulu didn’t realize that he’d been holding his breath until the first of the alien vessels blew up in a fiery cloud that quickly vanished to nothingness in the vacuum of space. The helmsman’s breath hissed out in an expression that combined his sense of victory with one of relief. He grew concerned when the other two ships veered off, but their action came too late: they exploded in quick succession.
“Lieutenant,” Spock said, and Sulu turned to look at him. “Best possible speed to the planet.”
Sulu’s hands flew across his panel.
• • •
Trinh didn’t know how much strength she had left—nor how much air. She felt lightheaded, and suspected that she’d been breathing in as much of her own exhalations as the planet’s atmosphere. Her muscles ached, and she wanted nothing more than to relax her body and drift off to sleep.
No! she told herself. There is something I want more. Someone.
Steeling herself, Trinh resumed pulling on the piece of metal her right hand had found outside the mound of ashes that had buried her. It felt as though hours had passed since she’d begun, but she knew that the perception of time behaved strangely in extreme circumstances such as hers. However long it had been, though, she’d succeeded in pulling herself closer to the metal piece gripped in her hand, and therefore closer to freeing herself.
If there’s anything left of you to free, she thought. She had no idea how badly she’d been hurt. Her body ached everywhere, but she felt no bad pains, nothing that might have indicated a broken limb or a massive cut, or something worse.
PULL! she thought, actually visualizing the characters in her mind, seeing bright, red letters, capitalized, complete with an exclamation point. She pictured her right hand, her fingers clenched around the s
tray piece of metal that might save her life. And she pulled.
Something cold touched the top of Trinh’s scalp, and she thought that she’d somehow cut herself, that she’d wounded her head and it had begun to bleed. But then she felt a rustling movement, and then a slight variation in the chill on her skin.
It’s a breeze, she realized. I feel a breeze. She had pulled herself far enough along that her scalp had cleared the heap that had fallen on top of her.
A strong urge to reach her free hand to her head rose within her, a desire to try to dig herself out that way, but she resisted. If she did, she feared that she might never find the piece of metal again. And so, once more, she pulled.
When her nose emerged from the ash and she could breathe in unused air, tears spilled down the sides of her head. She let go of the piece of metal and brushed her face clean—or at least cleaner—then opened her eyes. Great heaps of ash rose high on either side of her, with fragments of debris sticking out of them. Directly above her, the sky looked only slightly darker than when she and the rest of the landing party had bolted from the city center. She waited for a moment, listening for voices, but she heard only a far-off drone—a drone that grew louder as the seconds passed.
Another rocket.
Trinh quickly reached back to the metal rod and began pulling again. Her mouth came free, and then her entire head. Once her left shoulder emerged into the open air, she squirmed to release it from its captivity. When she had, she grabbed the piece of metal with both hands and tried with all of her might to yank the rest of her body clear. With the drone of the rocket increasing, her torso appeared, and then her waist.
The metal rod moved suddenly. Trinh turned her head to look around at it, but then she heard a noise above her. It sounded different from the rocket, an artificial groan like that made by an overburdened piece of metal.
Then Trinh heard something else above her shift. She whipped her head around to look up and saw flickers of ash floating down. She raised her hand to wave them away from her face. That’s when she saw a huge mass appear atop the mound beside her, at its edge, maybe seven or eight meters above her. She could make out no details of the object, but its size and smooth surface reminded her of the side of a sarcophagus.
It tottered in place, then began to slide down toward her.
Trinh threw her hands into the ground and pushed, trying to scramble backward. One leg came loose, and she thrust the heel of her boot into the ground for additional leverage. Her trapped foot seemed to snag on something, but then finally came free.
Trinh heard more movement above her, even over the approaching rocket. She had liberated herself, but too late. The massive object slipped down the accumulation of wreckage and then toppled over and into the air. She saw it from the corner of her eye as it fell, and then it slammed her back against the ground.
Trinh stared up into the sky. She felt no pain, but the shock of the impact overwhelmed her. It seemed impossible to make sense of what had just happened. Somewhere above her, the rocket continued to get closer.
Bending her neck, Trinh peered down the length of her body. The huge object—she saw that it had a vented metal surface and roughly the shape of a rectangular prism—had landed on the middle of her body. She could not see her legs; she could see nothing beyond her navel. Dark patches ran across the bottom of her light-blue uniform shirt, and as she looked on, they spread.
Trinh let her head fall back onto the ground. She had never felt so fatigued. She could no longer deal with all that had happened to her. Sleep seemed like the best of all possible solutions. At that moment, it didn’t matter to her if she ever woke up.
Trinh closed her eyes. Somewhere, almost directly above, the rocket roared. She wondered idly whether she would die in the explosion or from the injuries she had just sustained. She had no preference. She would just lie there on the surface of an alien world, in the ruins of a dead city, and wait to see what would happen next.
And then she was gone.
Ten
On the main viewscreen, the image of the second world in the R-836 system grew as Enterprise approached it. For Sulu, the seconds seemed to tick away with interminable slowness, so much so that he imagined doing what the aliens had done on their vessels between the moon and the planet: engaging the warp drive for a brief but dangerous jump across local space. But the attack on Enterprise had proceeded much as it had in system R-775, without warning or apparent provocation, and with the ship’s warp drive as a primary target. Scotty had reported that after the shields had dropped around the starboard nacelle, it had suffered damage from the sustained assault.
“Mister Spock,” said Uhura, “we are within communications range.”
“Open a channel to every member of the landing party, Lieutenant,” Spock said. He had taken a seat in the command chair.
“Channel open,” Uhura said.
Sulu heard Spock push a button on the arm of the chair. “Enterprise to Captain Kirk,” he said, and then, “Enterprise to landing party.” When he received no reply, he repeated himself.
“I’m sorry,” Uhura said. “The last vessel is still jamming transmissions.”
“Keep trying,” Spock told her. Then he said, “Ensign Chekov, how soon before we are within transporter range of the surface?”
“One minute, fifty-three seconds,” Chekov reported. “We are already within sensor range. I’m reading the upper strata of the planet’s atmosphere.”
“Scanning for the alien vessel,” Sulu said, employing his targeting scanner once more. If we can’t reach the landing party in time, he thought, we can still destroy our attackers. But the notion of revenge held no interest for Sulu. He didn’t care at all about causing the deaths of strangers, even murderous ones; he wanted only to save the lives of his crewmates and friends. And my love.
“Ship’s sensors are directed toward the surface,” Chekov said. “I’m scanning for our people.”
Sulu heard an intercom channel open, and then Spock said, “Bridge to transporter room.”
“Transporter room,” responded a voice that sounded slightly tinny. “Kyle here.”
“Lieutenant, prepare for an emergency beam-up of all six members of the landing party,” Spock said. “We will be within transporter range in one minute, nineteen seconds. We do not presently know if the group is together, so you must be ready to transport from as many as six different locations.”
“Understood, Mister Spock,” Kyle said. “I’ll multiplex that many of our targeting scanners together to facilitate separate coordinate locks.”
“Do it quickly, and keep this channel open,” Spock said. “Because of Captain Kirk’s plan for the landing party, all scans should begin in the center of the city and radiate outward.”
At the helm, Sulu saw the alien vessel appear on his scanner. “I’ve got the last ship,” he said. He wanted to hurtle the ship’s phasers and photon torpedoes against it, wanted to destroy it as quickly as he could in order to protect Enterprise’s crew members on the ground. To protect Trinh, he thought, admitting the truth to himself. He hoped to save the entire landing party, of course, but Trinh . . .
Sulu couldn’t finish the thought. He knew that firing on the alien vessel would actually endanger the landing party. Any errant phaser beam, any photon torpedo that missed, could end up killing the Enterprise crew members on the surface. And even if Sulu managed to cleanly shoot the vessel out of the air, its wreckage would still crash to the planet somewhere.
As the seconds passed, Sulu studied his display, until at last his sensors picked up the city. The readings horrified him. “I’m detecting an explosion on the surface,” he said. He felt instantly numb, his voice seeming to originate from somewhere outside his body. “And the alien vessel just launched another missile toward the city.”
“Lieutenant Sulu,” Spock said, “lower the shields.”
“Aye,” Sulu said, and worked his panel to comply. “Shields down.”
“Mister Chekov, Miste
r Kyle?” Spock intoned.
“Scanning,” Chekov said, and over the intercom, Kyle echoed him. Sulu waited, desperately hoping that the first missile hadn’t killed any members of the landing party, and that they’d all be back on the ship before the second one plunged its destructive power onto the surface.
“I’m reading two life signs,” Kyle suddenly said. “And a third. Energizing.”
Sulu could not hear the distinctive hum of the transporter over the intercom, but the sound played inside his head. He visualized Trinh materializing on the platform, healthy and uninjured, as though thinking such a thought might make it so.
“Bridge, we’ve got them,” Kyle said.
“I have another life sign,” Chekov said. “Transferring coordinates directly to the—” Chekov stopped in midsentence, and Sulu turned from his scanner to look at him, fearful of what the hesitation might signal. “I’ve got the last three,” Chekov said. “Transferring coordinates directly to the transporter room.”
“Coordinates received,” Kyle said. “Energizing.”
Emotion overwhelmed Sulu. A pressure formed behind his eyes, and he realized that tears threatened. He wanted to leap from his chair and race down to the transporter room, but he knew he still had a duty to perform. With an effort, he peered back into his scanner. An instant later, he saw the second missile explode on the surface. He informed Spock.
“Track the alien vessel, Lieutenant,” the first officer told him. “We will attempt to capture its crew.”
“Aye, sir,” Sulu said. He activated a sensor-tracking program.
Several seconds passed, and when no word arrived from the transporter room, Spock said, “Lieutenant Kyle?”
Sulu thought that the intercom channel had been closed, a fact confirmed a moment later when the boatswain’s whistle sounded and a voice spoke from the transporter room; it did not belong to Kyle. “Spock, this is the captain,” Kirk said. “What happened? Is the ship all right?”
“Lieutenant Sulu, raise the shields,” Spock said. As Sulu did so, the first officer went on. “Captain, we were attacked by six smaller vessels evidently crewed by the same beings who demolished the city on the planet in system R-Seven-Seven-Five. We have destroyed three of the vessels, incapacitated two others, and are tracking the sixth, which we believe set out to attack your landing party.”
Star Trek: TOS: Allegiance in Exile Page 16