A Time to Kill

by David Mack

  “We are not seeking anything in particular,” Taurik said. “We are gathering data for later analysis.”

  “But it’s all encrypted.”

  “There is no such thing as an unbreakable code, Ensign.” Reconfiguring the fire-control system to respond only to his commands, he noted how many Starfleet-standard protocols were in use at this facility. “If our foes’ proclivity for using our technology without modification is any indicator, I suspect we will have little difficulty decrypting these files.”

  “I hope you’re right, sir,” McEwan said, brushing a stray lock of her red hair from her eyes.

  Unlike many Vulcans, Taurik was not one to sing the praises of logic at every opportunity, but he made a point of skewering illogical outlooks as a matter of principle. “Hope has nothing to do with it, Ensign.”

  Chapter 47

  Tezwa—Nokalana Firebase,

  1157 Hours Local Time

  FOUR MINUTES BEHIND, Vale noted. This is gonna be close.

  Her tricorder indicated that the base was now completely flooded. Sakrysta and Spitale were cutting through the base’s outer hull as quickly as their phasers were able, but the superdense duranium plating was harder to penetrate than they expected. “Vale to Spitale. How much longer?”

  “Sixty seconds,” the blond engineer replied.

  Vale watched the two women work and tried to dispel her own impatience. Their amber-yellowish phaser beams were the only illumination in this deep-sea pit of eternal darkness. Fortunately, the light-intensifying filter on her pressure suit’s faceplate had a smart circuit that prevented it from flaring when exposed to sudden increases in luminosity, otherwise she’d be unable to see anything at all right now.

  She watched her chronometer. Thirty more seconds until I can pester Spitale again. “Vale to Fillion. How’re you doing?”

  “Five by five, sir.”

  “So the Tezwans are playing nice and staying inside their submarine?”

  “I think they’ve got the point now. As long as I’m here, they aren’t comin’out.”

  “Acknowledged. Hang tough, we’re almost done here.”

  Just as Vale had expected, after Sakrysta and Fillion had disabled the submarine’s weapons, armed divers had tried to leave the vessel to inspect the damage and find the saboteurs. Waiting to greet them, however, was Fillion. The security officer had nestled snugly into a cluster of machinery casings on the roof of the Nokalana Firebase, his phaser rifle aimed squarely at the submarine’s top hatch. Every time the Tezwan divers opened the hatch and tried to swim out, Fillion fired a warning shot that sent them scuttling back inside the ship.

  Spitale and Sakrysta ceased fire as the ends of their respective semicircular cuts found the starting point of the other’s incision. The irregularly edged, vaguely circular chunk of duranium succumbed to gravity and fell away from the overhanging angle of the outer hull, landing with a deeply muffled whump on the sandy ocean floor. Sheathing their rifles, the two engineers swam inside the base without even waiting for Vale’s order. Given that the Klingon invasion fleet was now only seventeen minutes away, the security chief didn’t mind the two women’s initiative.

  Following them through the meter-and-a-half-wide hole into an upper-level corridor, Vale was surprised to see the base so intact, considering that it was flooded. The engineers proceeded directly to a pair of turbolift doors. Although the original mission profile had called for avoiding the turbolifts in favor of using emergency staircases or access crawlspaces, that was now unnecessary. Working together, the engineers pried open the doors. Sakrysta checked the upper section of the turbolift shaft, while Spitale confirmed the lower portion was clear.

  The three women swam straight down the turbolift shaft. Two levels down, Spitale stopped and motioned to Sakrysta to help her open the doors to another flooded corridor. Spitale said, “The operations center is down this hallway, and to the right.”

  “Good work. Proceed to your targets. I’ll let you know when I reach ops.”

  “Aye, sir.” Spitale resumed swimming downward, with Sakrysta following close behind her. Vale propelled herself down the corridor with quick kicks and wide forward strokes. Her muscles ached from the constant effort needed to move and manuever in the deep, high-pressure environment, and the exertion made her breathing even louder within the confines of her pressure suit.

  Snaking around the corner, she saw the pale glow from the still-functioning consoles in the operations center. She moved inside and positioned herself at the master-control panel.

  Only fifteen minutes to go, she realized. “Vale to Delta Team. I’m in ops. Spitale, report.”

  “We’re almost there, sir,” Spitale replied, her voice wavering from her ongoing exertion. “We’ll be in position in thirty seconds.”

  “Fillion, status.”

  “Little busy right now,” Fillion said in an agitated tone. “Our friends got clever.” Vale could hear the sound of Fillion’s rifle firing repeatedly in short bursts while he spoke. “Rewired their maintenance bots.” His next few words were mumbled too low for Vale to discern clearly through the phaser fire, but it sounded like he was cussing a blue streak. “Little buggers are fast. And there’s a lot of ’em.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m great,” he groused. “Hang on.” His phaser shots were repeating faster now. Vale knew that sound; Fillion had switched his weapon to rapid pulse-fire. “Divers poked their heads out. Nice try, guys.” Fillion shouted his next string of expletives, which included a few choice words Vale had only ever heard Nausicaans use before. “Score at the buzzer: Fillion twenty-eight, Tezwans zero.”

  “And the crowd goes wild,” Vale said. “Before you do your victory dance, do me a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “Warn the sub to leave now, while it still can.”

  “My pleasure. Fillion out.”

  Vale noticed that the Tezwans, before evacuating their base, had taken the precaution of locking out all their system controls. Which meant that control of the six nadion-pulse cannons to which this base was linked had been automatically handed off to the two closest firebases. Three of Nokalana’s guns were under the control of the Kolidos Firebase, and the other three were now under the control of the Ranakar Firebase.

  “Vale to Peart and La Forge.”

  “Peart here.”

  “This is La Forge, go ahead.”

  “Nokalana Firebase handed off its guns to your targets. Can you both confirm control?”

  “Affirmative,” Peart said. “I’ve got your guns online.”

  “Commander La Forge?”

  “Can’t tell you that just yet.” Vale sensed from the tension in his voice that the situation was worse than he was saying, but she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “How soon can you confirm handoff?”

  “I’ll let you know once we get inside the base.”

  “You’re not inside yet?” The words had just tumbled out of her mouth. La Forge had to know the Klingon attack fleet was only thirteen minutes away. Reminding him of it served no good. Nonetheless, if Piper Team had not yet entered its target at Mount Ranakar, then the Tezwan personnel manning that base had just been alerted that the Nokalana base had gone offline. If and when they attempted to contact Nokalana—or anyone else, for that matter—they were bound to realize their communications had been completely cut off, at which point they would go to full-alert status.

  “We’re working on it. I’ll contact you as soon as we’re in. La Forge out.”

  Unlike some notable Starfleet engineers, La Forge had never earned a reputation as a miracle worker. He was a brilliant engineer—methodical, precise, and scrupulously honest in his estimates and analyses—but he wasn’t known far and wide as the one to turn to when you needed a rabbit pulled from a hat. Vale could only hope the chief engineer actually had a few magic tricks up his sleeve that he hadn’t told anyone about.

  “Spitale to Vale. We’re in po
sition and setting the charges.”

  “How soon until you’re set?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Make it eight,” Vale said, watching the chronometer count down their rapidly dwindling time. “And swim quickly.”

  Chapter 48

  Tezwa—Mount Ranakar,

  1602 Hours Local Time

  LA FORGE AND T’EAMA each gripped one of Braddock’s arms and pulled the muscular young security officer up onto the summit plateau of Mount Ranakar. The fog had cleared, though the fearsome dome of charcoal-colored clouds drifting overhead had all but blotted out the midafternoon sun, leaving the area shrouded in a grim, unnatural twilight.

  Taking a second to recover his breath, La Forge was acutely aware of the drenching, full-body perspiration that trickled across his skin. Scaling the cliff had taken a terrible toll on his palms and fingers, which were raw and sore. Falling chunks of jingle rock had left him with fat bruises on his clavicle and forehead, and all his muscles cried out for rest that he couldn’t yet allow.

  T’Eama and Braddock, who kneeled with him behind a small outcropping of thick brush, were also in poor condition. Despite his athletic prowess, Braddock looked like he’d just been run over by a Klingon sark. T’Eama, whose Vulcan biology had gifted her with tremendous strength and endurance, was the least exhausted, but even she was pulling ragged, tired breaths.

  Disguised as a natural depression on the slope of the summit’s rocky, rounded crest, the door to the firebase was less than fifteen meters away. Because of the many delays La Forge and his team had endured while scaling the unstable cliff, the Tezwan personnel on the other side had been forewarned by the shutdown of the Nokalana base that something was amiss.

  So now the base was on alert. Piper Team was one man short, and the rest of the team was injured and exhausted. The Klingons were only twelve minutes away, and La Forge still had absolutely no plan for what to do next.

  Braddock observed La Forge’s intense scrutiny of the base entrance. “What’s our next move, Commander?”

  “Well,” La Forge said. “We’ve lost the element of surprise. How would you feel about a direct frontal assault?”

  “With ten-to-one odds? Against people who are shooting to kill?” Braddock looked dubious. “Not great.”

  “T’Eama? If you’ve got a suggestion, now’s the time.”

  “Perhaps you can order them to surrender,” she said dryly.

  “That’s not bad,” Braddock said. “But what do we do after they shoot us dead?”

  “Hang on a second,” La Forge said. “I’m looking at this all wrong.” Shifting the frequency range of his vision as easily as most people shifted their focus from near to far, he surveyed the land around the summit and the rock surrounding the entrance. Leaning over the edge of the cliff, he cycled through infrared and gamma wavelengths, searching for clues to which his normal luminosity-and-chrominance spectrum might be blind.

  Looking back across the summit he saw a huge boulder, half his height but twice as wide, twenty meters away from the main entrance. Its heat signature was unlike those of the other rocks on the summit. He moved closer to it, and with his tricorder confirmed that it wasn’t hollow, or artificial. Switching his synthetic eyes to maximum magnification, he discovered that its surface had been sealed with a concrete resin to hide the fact that the boulder was pitted with tiny cavities.

  “This rock is volcanic,” La Forge said. “But the nearest volcano is several hundred kilometers away.”

  Looking down at his feet, La Forge noticed the ground here by the boulder was covered in a thicker layer of dry sand than the rest of the summit. He kicked through the sand until he hit solid earth, and he kneeled down to run his fingers across it. He didn’t need magnified vision to find the gouges in the ground; he could feel them, even with his torn-up fingertips.

  “There’s something under this rock,” he said. “A door.”

  Braddock was at La Forge’s shoulder, eyeing the scrapes.

  “I bet they used volcanic rock ’cause it’s lighter,” Braddock said. “Easier to move.”

  “A logical assumption,” T’Eama said.

  “We need to move this thing,” La Forge said.

  Braddock shook his head. “It may be lighter than other rocks, sir, but it’s still a rock. And a mighty big one.”

  “Stand back,” T’Eama said. La Forge turned to see she had pulled her rifle from its sheath. She fired before he could tell her not to. The weapon gave off a low hum as its ruby-colored beam quickly and neatly sliced through the porous, low-density stone like a knife cutting a loaf of bread. Guiding the beam in slow, evenly spaced horizontal passes, she cut the huge rock into thin layers. She finished by cutting four vertical lines through the boulder. She gave the pile a swift kick, and the stack of diced rock collapsed before her.

  “Divide and conquer,” she said.

  “Nicely done,” La Forge said, then began chucking aside the now manageably sized rocks. Braddock and T’Eama joined him, and in less than a minute they had uncovered a recessed trapdoor hatch and a set of antigrav tracks on which the boulder had rested. After scanning the trapdoor, Braddock deactivated its security sensors and phasered through its lock. La Forge pulled it open while the security officer stood ready to blast anything that might pop out.

  “All clear, sir,” Braddock said.

  Beneath the trapdoor was a ladder, which descended four meters to a landing at the top of a narrow stairwell. Braddock slung his weapon and climbed down first, then kept lookout for Tezwan security while La Forge and T’Eama climbed down. “Back door,” Braddock whispered.

  “More like an emergency exit,” La Forge said. “Take point.” Braddock sidestepped down the stairs in a half-crouch, leaning over the railing to watch and listen for approaching personnel. La Forge and T’Eama stayed close behind the security officer, stepping lightly, with their own weapons braced against their shoulders and muzzles pointed down.

  Three flights down, Braddock stopped at an access door. “Ops should be through here, left down the corridor, then right.” Looking up, he frowned. “Door’s wired. Give me a second.” Fishing through his suit’s free-fall-secure pockets, he found the tools he was looking for. He worked with swift, practiced ease and bypassed the door’s security before phasering through the lock bolt. “Ready, sir.”

  La Forge nodded his assent. Braddock cracked open the door and peeked through the sliver of space. Opening the door wider, he slipped through, dark and quiet as smoke on a moonless night. Creeping along in Braddock’s footsteps, La Forge could almost hear crucial seconds ticking away.

  As they neared the corner to ops, the sharp snaps of booted footsteps echoed off the walls, moving toward them. The middle of the corridor offered no cover, no other doors to duck into. Even if they pressed themselves against the wall and stayed silent as the grave, the hallway simply wasn’t dark enough to conceal their presence. There wasn’t enough time to retreat to the emergency stairwell.

  La Forge confirmed his weapon was set for stun, lifted it to firing position, and held his breath. Braddock and T’Eama mirrored his actions, and readied their weapons.

  Four Tezwan security officers, all carrying plasma rifles, turned the corner. The two in front blocked any kind of easy shot at the two behind. In less than a second, the two point men spotted the strike team and raised their weapons.

  La Forge fired first, knocking the first security officer on the left backward onto the man behind him. Braddock and T’Eama fired in unison, stunning the two guards on the right. Sprinting forward, La Forge snapped off a quick shot at the pinned-under Tezwan, then rounded the corner into the hallway outside ops. He heard T’Eama and Braddock keeping pace behind him.

  Tumbling past the open doorway of the ops center, La Forge felt the hairs on his neck and arms stand up as plasma bolts flew past him, searing hot scars onto the wall and floor. Braddock and T’Eama stopped on the other side of the doorway.

  La Forge heard distant, run
ning footsteps. Silent alarms had definitely been tripped, and Tezwan reinforcements would be here any second. Unless he and his team could capture ops in the next thirty seconds, this mission was about to meet a grisly end.

  Setting his rifle to rapid-pulse fire, he quickly blasted all the light fixtures in the corridor, showering himself and his comrades in sparks and hot phosphors. Inching the muzzle of his weapon around the corner into the ops center, he squeezed off another few seconds of pulsed phaser shots at the ceiling. The corridor was now completely dark, and the only illumination in ops was the glow of its computer consoles.

  Rolling to a prone position in the doorway, he gambled that the Tezwans’ eyes would be unable to adjust to the rapid loss of lighting as well as his cybernetic eyes could. The three Tezwans opened fire in his direction, but all the plasma bolts passed nearly a meter above him. He returned fire with a quick strafe of phaser pulses that traced a path across the Tezwan officers, who fell backward and tumbled to the floor.

  “C’mon,” La Forge said as he scrambled to his feet and moved into ops. Finding the master-control screen, he reset it to Starfleet’s default interface and initiated a base lockdown.

  From the corridor outside, he heard grunts of pain and shock as Tezwan personnel, no doubt responding to the silent alarm, collided with the invisible security forcefields he had just activated. Behind him, T’Eama and Braddock scrambled to other terminals and made their preparations.

  “The turbolift’s clear,” La Forge said. “I’ve opened a route to the targets. Go!”

  Braddock and T’Eama sprinted out of ops. Their footfalls grew fainter while La Forge began reprogramming the firebase’s identify-friend-or-foe software and executing the override commands on the nine guns this base now controlled.

  Seven minutes till the Klingons arrive, he realized, glimpsing the chronometer. He chuckled grimly. And I thought we were cutting it close.

  Chapter 49

  Qo’noS