T’Pring did not even flinch, but calmly reached out and placed a hand on the junction between Stiles’s shoulder and neck.
Pike stepped out of the turbolift and onto the bridge just in time to witness the Vulcan security officer grabbing John Stiles’s neck and dropping him like a sack of oats.
“What in hell?” T’Pring turned, along with the rest of the Enterprise officers, who were all on their feet in the center of the bridge. The captain circled around the raised deck, stepped down to where Stiles lay, and checked his pulse and his breathing. Once he determined both were present and steady, he lifted his head and fixed his glare on the Vulcan woman.
“He is merely unconscious,” T’Pring said, as if starship officers swooned all the time. “He should revive in approximately five to ten minutes.”
“‘Should’?” Pike echoed as he stood up again, both knees popping in protest.
The woman tilted her head, looking almost thoughtful. “Naturally, I have never used the nerve pinch technique on a human, but…”
Pike turned and impatiently punched a button on the arm of his command chair. “Bridge to sickbay: I have a man down, in need of medical attention.”
“On my way,” McCoy answered.
Pike closed the circuit, then turned on T’Pring. “You, off my bridge.” His pointing finger then snapped toward his bloodied, disheveled first officer. “Kirk, you’re rel—”
Pike was cut off by the sound of an explosion reverberating through his ship, and a sudden lurch that pitched everyone forward. The inertial dampers quickly kicked in, and the flickering lights came back to full intensity, supplemented by flashing Red Alert signals. “Report!” Pike shouted.
Kirk jumped into Stiles’s navigator’s seat and started stabbing buttons. “It’s the Romulan ship!” he said. “Bearing 1-9-8 mark 2-0-8.”
“Return fire!” Pike ordered. “On viewer,” he added, and the on-screen visual switched from a forward to a reverse view. The saucer-shaped ship was rising up from the surface of a Jupiter-type planet, trailing hydrogen plasma, making it appear that the large raptor painted on its hull was aflame. He watched as the Enterprise’s phasers struck amidships, resulting in a brilliant flash of expanding plasma.
“Careful!” Pike shouted. “We just want them disabled!”
Another flash erupted from the Romulan vessel. “Hard to port!” Pike ordered. He felt the artificial gravity plates straining under his boots to maintain the illusion of a steady deck, even as he gripped his armrests to keep himself upright. The Romulan torpedo detonated less than ten meters off the starboard hull, sending a shudder through the defensive shield system.
“The feeling isn’t mutual,” Kirk deadpanned.
“Target their shield generators,” Pike ordered at the same time that Doctor McCoy, accompanied by a blond nurse Pike did not recognize, arrived and carried Stiles off to the side of the bridge. They tended to him as unobtrusively as they could, even as the Enterprise was forced to make several more abrupt evasive maneuvers, and took another hard hit.
“Their shields are gone!” Masada reported from his station. “I’m reading power fluctuations throughout the ship—all systems, including life support.”
Pike fought the urge to smile. Even though they bested the enemy, if T’Pol perished aboard that ship, all would be for naught. “Mister Leslie, prepare to move in on the Romulan vessel,” he instructed the helm, then called over his shoulder. “Ship-to-ship, Lieutenant.”
“Hailing frequencies open, sir,” the communications officer confirmed.
Pike straightened in his chair and said, “This is Captain Christopher Pike of the United Earth Starship Enterprise. We’re standing by to beam your survivors aboard our ship.”
“No.”
Pike spun his chair around toward that voice. Subcommander T’Pring had not left the bridge, but stood in the small alcove before the turbolift doors. Pike was about to bellow at her, but there was something in the Vulcan woman’s eyes that brought him up short for a moment. She took advantage of that to tell him, “That is not their way. They will destroy their ship and themselves before surrendering.”
Pike clenched his teeth hard as he glared at the maddening alien woman. One minute she was his ally; the next, she nearly killed one of his best officers. Now here she was offering what seemed like invaluable information, yet he could not read her well enough to truly trust her.
Regardless, he could afford to trust the Romulans even less. “Masada, scan their ship, isolate any Vulcan life signs you read over there.” If the Romulans didn’t want to be saved, he could live with that. But they weren’t going to kill T’Pol in the process.
The science officer punched a series of buttons and frowned into his viewer. “I’m getting some kind of interference,” he said. “I’m picking up twenty-seven humanoid readings, but I can’t get the resolution from the biosensors I need to differentiate between species.”
Pike crossed his arms and cursed under his breath. “All right. We’ll need to send a boarding party, find T’Pol, and get her out of there, fast.” He turned to communications. “Lieutenant, contact security section. Have them assign four tactical guards for an armed detail, and have them meet me in the transporter room.”
“Sir!” Kirk said, leaping out of the navigator’s seat and rushing to intercept Pike before he could reach the turbolift. “Let me lead the party.”
“You’re not even supposed to be out of your cabin!” Pike snapped.
“I know, sir,” Kirk said, dipping his chin slightly. “I’m responsible for all of this. That’s why you shouldn’t be the one to put yourself in harm’s way to set matters right.”
Pike considered Kirk’s sincere expression of guilt, and despite his better judgment, nodded and told him, “Go.”
Kirk had already taken hold of the control wand and directed the car to the transporter room before he realized T’Pring had entered the car with him. Kirk started and tensed.
“Is something wrong, Commander?”
“No,” he said, “I just don’t want you pulling that move you did on Stiles on me.”
“Stiles was hostile, violent, and uncontrollably emotional. He was—”
“He was being human.” A little too human, he thought as he touched the welt on the side of his face, but still… “For all your superior attitudes, the fact of the matter is, you Vulcans don’t understand us humans. You never have, and you never will.”
The turbolift opened, and Kirk exited, with T’Pring falling in step right beside him. “Where are you going?”
“Over to the Romulan ship.”
“The captain said nothing about—”
“Captain Pike agreed to cooperate with all Coalition efforts in investigating T’Pol’s disappearance. Logically, then, I must join your boarding party.”
Kirk wore a pained look as he realized the Vulcan woman had him over a barrel. They entered the transporter room, where the four security specialists, wearing mottled gray tunics that evoked the uniforms of the old MACO military, waited. All four of them, at the sight of the alien woman, moved their hands to their phasers.
T’Pring herself froze, eliciting a mildly amused grin from Kirk. “Welcome to the team.” To her credit, her face had not changed, nor did it as she nodded to the grayshirts and moved past them onto the transporter platform. After extracting a phaser from the weapons locker for himself, Kirk joined her and the four guards, then nodded to the engineer at the controls. “Energize.”
The Romulan ship was small and cramped; the transporter had needed to compensate by tightening the circle the team stood in when they rematerialized. Battery-powered emergency lights cast inconsistent illumination up and down the corridor they’d beamed into, creating suspect shadows at regular intervals.
Crewman Pavel Chekov, freshly graduated from Starfleet’s security and tactical training, took a slow deep breath through his nose and let it out silently through his mouth. This week had been a series of firsts for him: his firs
t assignment, his first time outside the Sol system, and now his first time putting his life on the line against murderous aliens. He scrutinized the unevenly lit passageway looking for aliens, even as it dawned on him that he hadn’t the first idea what a Romulan looked like.
Beside him, the unit’s leader, Lieutenant Commander Vinci, slightly loosened his grip on his phaser. “Clear,” he told the rest in a low voice.
“Clear,” Lieutenant Lester reported on her survey of the passageway’s opposite direction. Crewman March, the other junior team member, quietly concurred.
Chekov remained at the ready, though, even as Vinci holstered his weapon and opened the display console of his multicorder. It threw colored light into the dim space around them, though it kept silent as it ran through its scanning cycle. “Picking up life signs, Commander,” he told Kirk.
“Can you identify T’Pol’s biosignature?” the first officer asked.
“Negative. Still not able to distinguish between Romulan and Vulcan.”
“Assuming the target is even still alive,” added Lester. In the brief time Chekov had been aboard Enterprise, he had decided that she was the most pessimistic person he had ever met.
Vinci, being far more used to Lester’s negativity than he, simply ignored her and continued his report: “The majority of the crew is concentrated in two areas of the ship—the bridge and engineering.” He gestured down the passage he and Chekov had just visually reconnoitered. “Forty-seven meters down that way, I pick up a group of four, plus a pretty strong independently generated energy field.”
“Their brig,” said March.
“There would be little logic in assigning three keepers to a single elderly woman.”
Chekov’s eyes flicked in annoyance toward the Vulcan interloper. In keeping with the pattern of his week, she was the first extraterrestrial he’d ever personally encountered. Yet she was exactly as he expected from years of hearing how Vulcans had held back human achievement, suppressing the work done at the Baykonur Kosmodrom and the Russian Academy of Sciences in developing a warp-five engine, back when Henry Archer was still in short pants.
“And how many would they assign to interrogate and torture her?” Lester hissed at the Vulcan woman, and without pausing to wait for an answer, turned to the new crewman. “Chekov, take point.”
He nodded, and started his way down the corridor, holding his phaser out steadily as he made closer inspections of the dim niches and closed doorjambs he led the team past. Behind him, the first officer asked Vinci, “Any indications of a self-destruct sequence in progress?”
“Negative,” he said. “No indication of an active integrated self-destruct system.”
“Which isn’t to say they couldn’t destroy themselves—and us with them—at the drop of a hat.”
Thank you for that cheery thought, Chekov thought at Lester. He took another deep breath and forced himself to stay focused.
“It does look like all intraship communications is off-line,” Vinci continued. “And all the emergency bulkheads on the ship have been sealed shut.”
“Hull breaches?” March asked.
“No, none,” Kirk answered, which was somewhat of a relief to Chekov, as they had just reached one of those sealed bulkheads. Though, given the choice of finding a room full of angry Romulans or the vacuum of space beyond the sealed doors, it was a toss-up.
Chekov slowly and carefully pried the cover off the hatch control panel, while Vinci, using a series of silent hand gestures, laid out the plan for their assault. Kirk and the security contingent all nodded and took up their positions. Meanwhile, Chekov identified the locking circuit, took one more deep breath, and pulled it loose. He looked to the first officer, who gave him a sharp nod, and then yanked the manual release lever down hard.
There was a loud clack, and the doors slid apart. He ducked and leapt through the widening gap, firing his phaser at the pair of figures at the far end of the wide-open room, scrambling for cover before they could respond in kind.
Chekov found a computer bank to hide behind. On the opposite side of the doorway, he saw March crouch behind a desk of some sort, his face twisted in determination. Between them, bolts of tightly focused colored energy blazed from the passageway as Kirk, Vinci, and Lester lay down covering fire.
Chekov watched where the return shots were coming from, then peered around the edge of his concealed position and aimed for their source. He fired and hit something round and shiny gold, realizing as it snapped backward that it was the helmeted head of a Romulan guard. The man went down, but before Chekov could feel too good about himself, a return shot struck the device he was using as his shield. Though the beam itself did not penetrate, the explosion of its inner workings was powerful enough to blast a hole through the back side and blow thousands of bits of microscopic shrapnel into Chekov’s face. He screamed as white hot needles pierced his eyes and ripped his skin. He doubled over, hands to his face, and fell into a tight ball, keeping just enough presence of mind to maintain his cover.
“Chekov!” He lifted his head toward the sound of Commander Kirk’s voice, but all he could make out was a dark shadow hovering over him against the already weak light of the room. “You okay, kid?”
“Just a flesh wound,” Chekov said, or at least tried to. He spat out a glob of warm blood and phlegm, then said, slightly more clearly, “At least I took out one of the damned Cossacks before they got me.”
Kirk gave Chekov’s shoulder a squeeze and said, “Don’t worry about it, kid,” suggesting Chekov had not been as coherent as he had thought. “You did good. We’ll take care of the rest; you just take it easy.”
That sounds like a good idea, Chekov thought as Kirk’s shadow grew and filled his entire failing field of vision with darkness.
Chekov was torn up pretty good, worse than anything Kirk’s field first-aid training could deal with, even if they weren’t still in the middle of a firefight. He pulled his communicator from his pocket and called for an emergency medical beam-out for the Russian kid. He thought to reach out and snatch Chekov’s phaser from his open hand—just in case—just before the crewman was caught in the transporter and dissolved away. He stuck Chekov’s phaser in the back of his pants and leaned out into the open with his own weapon held forward.
As he squeezed the firing stud and ducked back, he noted with satisfaction that the second of the three helmeted soldiers he’d counted was now kissing the deck. It occurred to him that the headwear had to be traditional or ceremonial, because it sure didn’t seem to have any practical defensive worth. Kirk’s own shot had just missed the one unhelmeted soldier in this security section—an officer, most likely, and a woman at that, with long dark hair and a shockingly short skirt. She also looked shockingly human; in another reality, Kirk would be offering to buy her a drink rather than trying to blast her through the bulkhead. She fired back at him while shouting some Romulan obscenity—which, he considered, might not have been an unexpected response to his offer of a drink, either.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Vinci jump up and fire, then heard what sounded like a third Romulan body collapsing on the deck. That left only one more—assuming, with communications down, the rest of the ship was unaware of what was going on down here, or else reinforcements were being slowed down by the emergency bulkheads. Neither of these was a particularly good assumption to make.
The female Romulan officer started shouting at them again in her own language. If the Romulan ship had a universal translator, it must have been off-line with the rest of communications. Whatever the woman said, though, she sounded damned confident. Kirk imagined she was assuring them more guards were on their way, they didn’t stand a chance, et cetera. He checked the power level on his phaser, and then checked Chekov’s. He had the idea of setting his largely drained weapon for a force chamber overload and using it as a grenade against the platoon of alien gunmen they were about to face…
Then the woman stopped talking, and even though he still couldn’t und
erstand the language, Kirk got the impression she had not reached the end of her thought. He looked across the way to where Lester and Vinci were, and they looked back, equally confused. Then they heard another voice from where the Romulan guards stood, this one male, and perfectly understandable: “I am unarmed. Please, do come forward.”
Lester slowly rose from her crouching position, her own weapon ready in case this was a ruse. When she fully straightened and hadn’t fired or been fired on, Vinci followed suit, as did Kirk. March, Kirk noted, did not rise, and never would again. He cursed silently as he drew a bead on the man who stood over the insensate body of the female Romulan—the same man who had deceived him by posing as the Vulcan councillor—his hands up, palms forward. T’Pring then entered the small chamber, and out of the corner of his eye, Kirk thought he saw a look of shock on her face as she got her first look at Councillor Sarek’s impersonator.
Once the entire boarding party had revealed themselves, the Romulan looked back over his shoulder, and from the now-opened door of a small cell behind him, the captive Vulcan woman stepped forward. “Lady T’Pol.” T’Pring stepped farther into the room. “Are you harmed?”
The older woman shook her head. “No. My treatment has been quite civil.”
“Give us your hostage,” Kirk ordered, his weapon trained directly at the Romulan.
“On one condition.”
Kirk very nearly pulled the trigger then, just to show the lying son of a bitch what he thought about his “condition.” But instead, he asked, “And what is that?”
The Romulan hesitated, then turned to look at T’Pol, almost as if for encouragement or willpower. Some kind of silent communication passed between them, and then the Romulan turned back and looked directly at T’Pring.
“I request political asylum.”
10
The Romulan was quickly removed from the transporter room to the brig by the security team, with T’Pring following directly behind. T’Pol watched them go, wondering how the Romulan would be received once his request was formally presented to the Coalition, or what Vulcan would make of him.
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