by David Mack
“Aye, sir,” Obrecht said, making it sound like a complaint. Beside him, Heaton continued sweeping the area with her own tricorder, trying to lock on to the elusive, scan-shielded door.
Data considered Obrecht’s protest a slight exaggeration, but he was willing to concede that the blizzard had impaired visibility to a dangerous level. The fact that the arctic polar region was also gripped in an extended period of night further complicated matters, and led him to wonder whether their arctic camouflage was necessary. If not for his suit faceplate’s light-intensifying filter, he would not be able to see the two engineers at all in the darkness.
The fierce gales of the storm provided a low, constant yowl of noise beneath their encrypted transmissions.
Parminder emerged from the gray of the storm, next to Data. “Jammer’s set.” She looked up anxiously at the starless sky. “How long until the Klingon fleet arrives?”
“Approximately one hour, nineteen minutes, twenty seconds,” Data said, referencing his internal chronometer. “That is only an estimate, however.”
“Commander,” Heaton said, wiping the falling snow from her tricorder display for the eleventh time in two minutes. “I think I have a reading on the base entrance.” She pointed at the steep, icy slope in front of her. “Under there,” she continued. “It’s buried. Pretty deep, too.”
Data activated his own tricorder, and Heaton transmitted her scan results to him. He checked the readings, and confirmed the most probable location of the base’s entrance was currently concealed beneath more than four meters of packed ice and snow.
“I could melt it off with my rifle,” Parminder said.
“No,” Data said. “The energy discharge would alert the troops inside the base.”
“Guess they don’t get out much,” Obrecht said. He looked around with a dismayed expression at the whirlwind snowfall. “Can’t say I blame them.”
“Well, we can’t exactly wait around for spring thaw,” Parminder said. “Assuming spring ever comes up here.”
“Sir,” Heaton said. “I have something else.” She pointed past the firebase entrance, up a long and gradual slope. “Ninety-eight-point-one meters on relative bearing oh-one-four. Five-point-two meters below the surface, in the permafrost.”
Data synchronized his tricorder with hers and reviewed the readings. He compared the sketchy sensor profile against the copy of the Starfleet prototype-firebase schematic. Down below, Heaton continued to study her own tricorder screen. “Your analysis, Lieutenant?”
“I’d say it’s the subspace signal buffer,” she said.
“I concur,” he said. “Good work.” Data had been positive that the readings were from the buffer, but he had learned by observing Commander Riker that part of helping train junior officers was encouraging them to use their skills and trust their conclusions. “Let us regroup there,” he said, rising to his feet and walking down the gradual incline to his right. Parminder followed close behind him.
Obrecht and Heaton had a head start climbing the slope, and remained barely visible as shadows between drifting curtains of storm-driven snow. The pair did not become clearly visible until Data and Parminder approached to within three meters. Both engineers were intently reviewing their tricorder screens. “Definitely the buffer, sir,” Obrecht said.
Data turned to face Parminder. “Can you cut down to the permafrost without hitting the device?”
The petite, dark-haired woman nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Please begin,” Data said, stepping out of her way. Heaton and Obrecht followed his lead, and gave Parminder a wide berth.
The slender security officer adjusted the settings of her phaser rifle, planted her feet to steady herself against the hammering blasts of wind, and began melting through the snow and ice with short, controlled bursts. In just under two minutes she had cleared from the hard-packed snow a wide crater nearly twice as deep as Data was tall, with a small patch of bare, frozen-solid earth at its nadir.
Parminder halted her efforts and looked at Data. “Below here, the risk of hitting the buffer is higher,” she said.
“Understood,” he said. “The device is approximately one-point-six meters below the surface. Select a wider beam dispersal. Thaw the ground without cutting through it. We will excavate the buffer manually.”
“Aye, sir,” Parminder said, and reset her rifle. She bathed the ground in a warm-orange glow of energy, shifting the beam’s center point in a slow, even rotation around the buffer’s reported position. Snowflakes hurled by wind into the beam’s path were transmuted into swiftly dispersed wisps of steam.
Obrecht and Heaton continued to scan the area with their tricorders while Parminder worked.
“Lieutenant Heaton,” Data said. “Do you detect any change in the readings from the buffer?”
“Negative, sir,” Heaton said. “All readings steady.”
Data chose not to point out the redundancy of her reply.
“Average soil temperature around the buffer has increased to sixteen degrees centigrade,” Obrecht reported.
“Cease fire,” Data said. Parminder released the trigger of her rifle and stepped back from the now-warmed patch of ground. Snowflakes melted as they touched down. “We need to excavate the buffer immediately,” he said.
Data and the three officers got down on their hands and knees and surrounded the thawed area. They clawed through the top layer of newly made mud and began scooping away the loose, clumpy dirt below it with their gloved hands. A latticework of weed roots made it difficult to tear through the soil, which was cooling rapidly beneath their hands.
Several minutes of manic digging later, the subspace signal buffer lay exposed before them. Data noted that its components were not merely modeled on Starfleet designs—they were genuine Federation-manufactured parts. “I will remain here,” he said. He pointed to the elevations on either side of the firebase entrance. “Lieutenant Obrecht, take up position on that rise. Lieutenant Heaton, take position on the opposite elevation. Then wait for my orders.” The two engineers acknowledged the commands and hurried down the slope into the raging night.
Data began disconnecting optronic cables from the signal buffer and patching them into his tricorder. “Ensign Parminder, conceal one explosive charge in front of the main entrance to the firebase. Angle its effect to project away from the entrance.”
Parminder looked confused. “Sir?”
“When the charge is set, camouflage yourself on the slope above the entrance and wait for my orders.”
“Aye, sir,” she said, and followed Heaton and Obrecht back toward the firebase entrance.
Data removed his helmet and opened the access flap behind his left ear. He retrieved a spare optronic cable from his equipment pack and patched one end into his positronic matrix. The other end he connected to his tricorder, which was now linked into the firebase’s communications system. Using his tricorder as a capacitor and software resource, he initiated a rather complicated dialogue with the firebase’s main computer. Whoever had installed this system had lacked the sophistication to identify or remove its preprogrammed “back-door codes.” Data considered that to be a good indicator that, even if this base’s technology had come from the Federation, Starfleet had not been involved in its installation.
It took him eleven-point-eight seconds to assume master control of the base’s primary and backup computers. He could only hope that the Tezwan soldiers inside the base would prove to be as gullible as their pirated technology.
Chapter 35
Tezwa—Kolidos Desert,
0658 Hours Local Time
FORTY-THREE MINUTES had elapsed while Sierra Team hid under the sand. Cramps had started to knot together in Peart’s calves while he lay entombed with Vulcan security officer T’Sona, who seemed to accept the predicament with a poise that Peart found quite irritating.
Two things had worked in Sierra Team’s favor so far.
The first was that the Tezwans, despite their overwhelming advanta
ge in numbers, had shown a marked reluctance to search the area on foot, preferring to remain overhead in their hovercraft. Based on the footfalls Peart heard tromping by—in what seemed like a particularly sloppy search pattern—he estimated there were fewer than twelve infantrymen deployed. That left the bulk of the enemy personnel—nearly one hundred ninety troops—cruising around overhead.
The second thing Sierra Team had going for them was dumb luck. In Peart’s opinion, that was the best advantage of all.
Before he heard the throb of a hovercraft slowly edging closer, he felt the pulse of its engine through the ground, telegraphing its approach like a swelling heartbeat.
He tensed as the hovercraft passed directly over their position. The loose sand that covered him and T’Sona quivered and shifted, settled under them, flowed around them like water. Peart keyed his com. “Scholz, Morello. Whatever happens, stay down. T’Sona—follow my lead.”
Making use of the planet’s lighter gravity, Peart leaped up, erupting like a geyser from beneath the sand to grab the rear edge of the hovercraft. T’Sona froze for a moment, apparently not having expected this to be his tactic of choice. Springing into action, her superior Vulcan strength enabled her to make the slightly longer jump needed to join Peart on the still-moving hovercraft.
As Peart pulled himself up and over the craft’s safety railing, the dozen Tezwan soldiers sitting inside simply stared in shock for nearly a full second. He and T’Sona vaulted over the railing. The Tezwans collided with one another while trying to get out of their seats and arm their weapons all at once.
The gangly one closest to the rear of the hovercraft had almost succeeded in aiming his rifle at the two Starfleet officers when Peart punched him in the chest. Hollow bones cracked loudly, audible even over the craft’s engines. The fragile-looking, feather-headed Tezwan rifleman sailed backward, toppling most of his squad behind him and pinning their weapons beneath a jumble of flailing limbs.
Before any of them could scramble free, T’Sona drew her rifle from its back-mounted holster and stunned the entire group with one wide-beamed blast. Jumping over the pile of unconscious bodies, Peart snapped off one shot to stun the hovercraft pilot, then pulled the man from his seat and took his place.
In every direction he looked, other hovercraft crews were looking up from their search patterns. He and T’Sona had just used up their quotient of surprise.
Peart grabbed the vehicle’s steering yoke and felt the trigger for the vehicle’s forward-mounted dual pulse cannons. He squeezed it and held it down as he rotated the hovercraft in a smooth arc to starboard. Electric-blue pulses split the quiet desert morning with a high-pitched shriek. Peart strafed the closely grouped squadron of antigrav vehicles, which erupted in sparking explosions, belches of flame, and billowing plumes of smoke. Several craft rolled sideways, tossing their crews across the sand. A few pitched nose-first into the ground and rolled into the valleys between the dunes. Trailing the cannon bolts were wide-dispersal phaser stun-blasts fired by T’Sona.
Five seconds later, eleven hovercraft had been reduced to twisted, smoldering wreckage. Then a fusillade of screaming blue flashes slammed into Peart’s hijacked vehicle. The cockpit controls spat up a fountain of sparks as the craft rolled to port. Free-falling from the seat, he tucked and rolled.
Tumbling up to a ready position, he increased his phaser rifle to maximum power. T’Sona was crouched on the ground next to him, huddled beneath the listing but still airborne crippled hovercraft, which was spewing out a very convenient smoke screen. Peart squinted in the direction of the four Tezwan-controlled hovercraft that had downed their stolen vehicle and were now rapidly drawing closer. In a few seconds, the four vehicles would be in optimal range of his rifle—and he and T’Sona would be sitting ducks for their pulse cannons.
He didn’t feel like waiting that long.
Setting his rifle to rapid-pulse mode, he sprinted away from the wrecked craft and ran flat-out, directly across the four vehicles’ field of fire. Keeping his trigger down, he bull’s-eyed one craft’s engines. As it pitched to the ground and catapulted its crew into the arms of the desert, the other three hovercraft returned fire at Peart. Dodging and spinning in random directions, he found himself surrounded by the angry whine of energy pulses that filled the dry desert air with the scent of ozone.
Then he heard the screech of T’Sona’s weapon firing at full power, and the satisfying crack and clap of explosions that took down two more hovercraft. He heard a lone antigrav engine on his right. Turning, he reduced his rifle to heavy stun. The pilot of the last airborne hovercraft looked like he couldn’t decide whether Peart or T’Sona presented the greater threat, and as a result his forward cannons had ended up aimed at neither of them. Fortunately for the pilot, the twelve soldiers behind him had all taken aim at whichever Starfleet officer happened to be on their side of the vehicle, and Peart was now looking down the barrel of six enemy weapons.
Two sets of rapid-fire phaser blasts lit up the soldiers from behind. Peart and T’Sona dived and rolled up to shooting stances, picking off the Tezwans who were lucky enough to duck the first barrage. Peart wasn’t really certain whether he or T’Sona fired the shot that stunned the pilot. Overlapping stun-blasts blanketed the Tezwans already on the ground, ensuring none of them would be going anywhere for a while.
The shooting ceased. The hovercraft slowly floated down and settled with a soft bump on the sandy ground. Peart looked over at Scholz and Morello, both of whom were sitting upright, their lower bodies still concealed in the sand, their rifles propped up vertically against their shoulders.
“Why didn’t you tell me you know how to fight?” Peart said. “We coulda used you guys out here.”
Morello shrugged. “We didn’t want to get in your way.”
Peart couldn’t fault the man’s logic. “Okay, you have a point,” he said, climbing into his second stolen vehicle of the day. “Come get these clowns outta my hovercraft.”
Chapter 36
Tezwa—Nokalana Sea,
1116 Hours Local Time
KEEP LOOKING, Christine Vale commanded herself. It’s got to be here somewhere. You just have to find it.
Vale had never been fond of underwater operations. Working underwater was a lot like working in space. All the consequences were reversed, of course—crushing pressure versus vacuum, freezing instead of instantly boiling, implosion rather than explosion, flooding as opposed to venting—but they were still just as deadly, and the environment just as unforgiving. One other thing they had in common was the awkwardness of movement. Each milieu was alien to human physiology in its own way, and Vale, left to her own devices, would avoid them both.
But here she was, now with less than an hour—give or take a few minutes—until the start of the Klingon invasion, looking for the firebase’s waste-exhaust port, which refused to be found.
The meter-wide venting aperture was almost certain to be located on the ocean floor, within less than a fifty-meter radius of the entrance tower. Unfortunately, that meant Vale now had to search an area of nearly eight square kilometers, one meter at a time, while swimming in circles. Her tricorder also wasn’t proving to be of much use. The port must be camouflaged, she reasoned.
Spitale’s voice crackled over the com. “Spitale to Vale,” she said. “Ready to go here.”
“Acknowledged,” Vale said. Spitale had been burdened with the team’s second-hardest assignment: deducing a structural weak spot in the entrance tower’s outer shell that, if ruptured, would cause rapid flooding of the entire base but also leave the Tezwans a path of escape to the docked submarine. It was a testament to the young woman’s intelligence that within a matter of minutes she had found an exterior hatch used by maintenance robots and determined it to be this base’s Achilles’ heel.
The ocean floor was rocky and barren, permanently sequestered from daylight. No vegetation grew down here. Vale’s only company as she swam in lonely, ever-widening circles around the base were roaming
crustaceans, skittish bottom-feeders, and a single luminescent aquatic predator that had wearied of shadowing her after its third zap from her phaser, which the Enterprise’s team of weapons experts had specially modified for underwater use.
Another transmission scratched over the speaker in her helmet. “Sakrysta to Vale.”
“Go ahead,” Vale said, hoping nothing had gone wrong. Sakrysta and Fillion’s mission was to sabotage the submarine’s weapons and primary propulsion. Once Delta Team started their assault, they couldn’t let the submarine crew shoot at them or move out of jamming range to alert the planet’s military.
“We’re in position,” Sakrysta said.
“Glad to hear it,” Vale said. “I’m still—” She was about to apologize for her delay in finding the elusive waste vent when a chugging surge resounded through the depths. Turning to look behind her, she saw a jet of air bubbles and discolored fluid surging up, seemingly out of solid rock. She locked her tricorder onto the frothing plume, which dwindled and vanished a few moments later. She keyed her com. “Stand by.”
Following the tricorder’s target lock, she found herself floating above an expertly disguised metallic iris. Its outer surface was composed of natural composites from the surrounding sea bed, but the durable metal inside defied her tricorder’s attempts to scan it. On a hunch, she chipped away a small chunk of the outer coating, then fired a low-power phaser burst at the exposed metal underneath. The phaser beam reflected off the metal like a flashlight beam off a mirror. The tricorder still couldn’t read the metal, but it detected a momentary surge of several types of rare particles.
Chimerium, Vale realized. The only place to get this stuff is Sarindar. And only the Federation has the right to export it from the Nalori Republic. Starfleet might not have put this stuff here, but we definitely built it.
She increased the power of her phaser and swiftly burned a hole through the ocean floor right next to the phaser-proof iris, cutting at a sharp angle into the shaft beneath. She was gambling that because chimerium was so rare and difficult to work with, whoever built this facility would not have used it for something so mundane as a waste-exhaust shaft. Her hunch proved correct, and her phaser beam easily sliced a short, twenty-centimeter-wide channel directly into the exhaust shaft.