by L. A. Graf
wants them to go back to Orion, where they can all be charged with high
treason--"
Sulu cursed and slammed a sudden change' of course into the helm. The
Shras leapt into a jagged roll, kicking most of the Andorians out of
their seats.
"What are you doing?" Hasler squealed, staring up from the deck in
dismay. "The Orions were going to surrender!"
"No, they weren't." Phaser fire seared past them in a sheeting wave, as
painfully brilliant as a nova. Sulu twisted the hras into a banking
roll, trying to find a safe path through the destruction. "He wasn't
telling them to surrender--he was telling them to commit suicide!"
"Orions would rather die than be humiliated for firing on their own
ship. And, being Orions, they'll try to take us with them when they
go." Uhura's voice was almost drowned out by the sudden scream of damage
alarms. She looked up from her screen as the hras rocked with a second
glancing blow. "Orions closing fast. They've increased their speed to
warp five."
Sulu grunted and sheered away from an explosion of torpedo fire,
skimming the Shras so close to the crippled Hawking that he could see
the ominous glow of decaying fields inside. "They can't maintain that
speed for long," he said through gritted teeth. "It'll burn out their
core."
Kirk's voice cut through the wailing alarms, although no image disrupted
their screen. The Ente prise captain knew better than to transmit
visuals
during a battle. "Sulu, head for the Enterprise.t We can cover--"
An erupting shriek of subspace radiation broke the contact and burned
out the helm display in a shower of red-gold sparks. Sulu jerked his
head up to stare at the main screen, cold fear 'exploding through his
blood. He had just enough time to recognize the almost-invisible
shimmer of uncontained antimatter exploding toward them from the Hawking
before the shock wave slammed into their ship.
Chekov jerked erratically toward consciousness, catapulted out of
darkness on bright-edged thrusts of pain. He tried to catch his breath,
realized he was coughing, and spat his mouth clear of blood before
struggling up on one elbow. Not good, he thought as muscles along his
back and side clenched in anguished protest, not good at MI. Sheeted
with pain, the left side of his chest felt heavy and hot with
congestion; Lindsey Purviance sprawled across his lower half,
grotesquely pinioned with frost-burned shrapnel from the rear of his
skull to his knees. Behind Purviance, liquid nitrogen skated silver
rivers across the shuttle's floor and leapt into vapor shimmers wherever
they brushed the Orion's still-warm corpse. The dancing sheet of light
spilling upward from the remnants of the containment housing accompanied
a whine furiously similar to the Hawking's dying song. The explosion of
the engine housing wasn't powerful enough to have damaged the Enterprise
herself, but from the front of the shuttle, the computer droned, "Core
breach imminent. Estimated time to breach seven minutes fifty-four
seconds."
Chekov pushed weakly at the body on top of him,
afraid he could never dislodge it with a cluster of broken ribs and only
one useful hand. But he had to get out of this shuttle and tell someone
what had happened.
Authoritative pounding rumbled through the shuttle's small interior, and
Chekov stiflened with a startled gasp. "Open up!" a muffled voice
called from outside the forward hatch. "Starship security--let us in!"
Urgency gave Chekov the strength to heave Purviance aside with one hand
and one leg, and he rolled to end up on all fours, coughing again, while
the security guard outside shouted another round of warnings. For a
horrifying moment, Chekov was afraid his haste would kill him.. Then
the tit subsided, and he found he could sustain himself on shallow,
blood-tainted breaths long enough to stumble upright and make for the
outer hatch.
He reached the door just as the guard forced it open with a portable
override. "All right, I--Lieutenant Chekov!" Lemieux stepped back in
surprise, bumping into the engineer behind her. "Sir, I didn't know you
were here. We heard the explosion and came to find out what happened
to--"
"Get everyone out of here." Chekov pushed Lemieux away from the door and
climbed out into the bay. The closest undamaged shuttle still looked an
impossible distance away; he could almost feel the core explosion
building behind him. "That's an order!" he shouted, heading for the
other shuttle. "Evacuate the bay!"
Lemieux nodded curtly, brows still knit in confusion, and cupped her
hands to her mouth to bellow, "You heard the lieutenant! Everybody out
of the bay!
Move it!" Then she trotted away with the engineer in tow, hurrying along
anyone who hesitated for even an instant.
I hope I get the chance to commend her, Chekov thought as he keyed open
the next shuttle's door. The interior smelled perplexingly of sweat,
engine coolant, and burned polycarbons. Chekov realized the stench came
from him when a touch of his environmental suit glove on the helm
console left a smear of Orion blood behind. He paused long enough to
wrestle off the glove and pitch it into the compartment behind him.
"Bridge to shuttle Brahe." Kirk's voice demanded. attention across a
radio panel of blinking lights. "What's going on down there?"
Chekov woke up the Brahe's small engines, then reached across the
console to punch a stud in reply. "Bridge, this is Brahe."
"Chekov?" The honest surprise in Kirk's voice almost made the lieutenant
smile. "How in God's name did you get back on board?"
"I'm not exactly sure." He bent double over the helm to try to ease the
torture on his ribs while the. engines warmed. "Sir, we don't have much
time. There's a field breach on one of the interstellar shuttles--I have
to get it outside before it explodes." When this was over, he was going
to crawl down to sickbay on hands and knees and beg Dr. McCoy to take
him in.
"We can dump the bay atmosphere and open the doors," Kirk said. Chekov
could almost picture the captain signaling the engineering station.
"Unless you fly it out the door, though, I don't know how you're going
to get it outside."
The helm signaled ready, and Chekov sat upright to take hold of the
controls. "If you can get those doors open, sir, I can get the shuttle
outside."
"For all our sakes, I hope so." The air in front of Brahe's viewscreen
rippled and thinned as the bridge initiated bay launch procedures. "Good
luck.""
Luck's about all that can save us. Chekov thought it best not to voice
that out loud, though. After all, if the shuttle exploded while still
confined within the Enterprise's deflector screens, the great ship's
warp nacelles might still be forfeit. That could prove just as
disastrous as suffering the explosion in here. He lifted Brahe neatly
off the deck and started her into a lumbering turn. Best not to think
about variables he couldn't affect. First order of
business was to get
this time bomb outside; they could worry about how to either detonate or
defuse it later.
The shuttle that came into Chekov's view looked placid and undamaged
despite the core spikes washing across Chekov's sensor display. Elegant
red script spelled Clarke across its blunt nose, and Chekov noticed for
the first time that it was one of the lighter interstellar shuttles, one
of only a few dozen tons. Perhaps not as impossible to push outside as
he'd first feared He idled Brahe around the rear of Clarke by agonizing
inches, all the while flicking glances up at the closed shell doors,
willing them to trundle open.
Brahe shuddered dully when her nose bumped Clarke's rear bulkhead.
Chekov felt his shuttle's frame tremble, felt its impulse engines growl
with strain as he eased the throttle gently upward. When the moment of
inertia broke, stress clanged throughout Brahe's structure as the two
shuttles leapt forward, and Chekov was jolted back in his seat with an
involuntary bark of pain. Clarke stuttered and scraped across the deck,
the silent vibrations of its resistance translating through Brahe's hull
into a deafening wall of thunder. Shivering like heat ripples outside
the shuttles' trembles, the bay doors reared high and imposing. And
stayed closed.
"Open, damn you," Chekov groaned. He didn't dare take his hands from
the controls, or he would have pounded the helm in frustration. "Open.t"
A black rift sliced up the center of the big doom. The band widened
steadily, and Chekov realized it was his wished-for exit just as Clarke
danced sideways
and skip ped off the end of Brahe's nose.
"Govno.t,'
He fought the impulse drive into reverse, sicwing Brahe around in a
desperate attempt to keep from skating past Clarke and into open space.
"Chekov?" Kirk cut sharply across his attention, sounding tense and
distracted. "Chekov, report."
Chekov ignored the captain's intrusion, and realigned the attitude
controls as quickly as he could right-handed.
"Is the shuttle clear?"
"No!" Brahe caught itself with a fluid bump, drifting to half-face
Clarke. "No, sir," Chekov said again, more evenly. "I'm working on
it."
"We haven't got much time, Mr. Chekov."
"I know, sir." His shoulder burned with fatigue if he so much as flexed
his fingers, and pain ate into his breathing in deep, steady stabs
whenever he moved. If he'd had to do more than bumble a shuttle around
the hangar bay on impulse, he'd never have been able to control the
craft, and he wasn't all that confident he'd accomplish what he needed
to anyway. Not for the
first time, he wished Sulu were with him--to pilot, and to just be
there, so Chekov wouldn't feel quite so alone.
He wondered forlornly if Sulu and Uhura were Safe, outside the Hawking's
blast range and close enough to rescue. It seemed an eternity ago that
he'd witched them leave the aifiock.
No--no time for other worries now. Easing Brahe back into the main bay,
he readdressed Clarke's listing form, framing it on his viewscreen
between the open hangar doors. Clarke presented its side to the starry
outside, having turned a full one hundred eighty degrees in Chekov's
first attempt to push it out the doors. He crept Brahe up to it again,
this time aiming for the center point of Clarke's squat profile. The
first bump of shuttle against shuttle skidded Clarke awkwardly sideways;
Chekov pulled back immediately; adjusting Brahe barely a meter to
starboard before driving forward again. This time, the two crafts met
with a deep, mating clang, and Clarke shuddered as though struck to the
core while Brahe powered it the last long distance across the hangar bay
and out into lightless vacuum.
Chekov felt the thunder of friction release them the instant Clarke
dipped past the Enterprise's gravity field and into free fall. He
pushed up the acceleration without looking down at the helm. He didn't
want to rely on readouts--he needed to see Clarke rush toward the stars
ahead of him, needed to count the seconds in his own mind. It had been
years now, but he'd been a ship's navigator once; he could feel where
the screens sat like he could feel his own skin, having honed that sense
over countless hours of commanding their distance, configuration,
intensity, and use. Driving Clarke ahead of him, he increased velocity
to as
far from the bay as he dared, then slammed Brahe into reverse and left
Clarke to continue its sublight tumble away from the Enterprise. If the
starship's screens were still in action, Chekov wanted to be as far from
Clarke as possible when the little shuttle impacted the deflectors and
exploded.
He dragged Brahe straight back along their original escape course,
aiming for the still-open hangar. Readouts flashed across the helm
panel, and Chekov trusted their guidance as much as he dared. Twice, he
switched the viewscreen aft to verify that the ship still hung behind
him, but he didn't dare look away from Clarke for long. Not that he
could have done anything more to save himself, or the Enterprise. He
just wanted to face whatever was coming, whenever it happened; he
couldn't stand not to know.
Still, the bloom of brilliant white that flashed across his screen when
Clarke exploded caught him by surprise. He ducked his head without
wanting to, and the first wave of raw energy knocked him out of his seat
and bucked Brahe nose upward, rocketing them back into the bay.
Oh, God, Chekov thought, his mind crowded with fearful images of Brahe
plowing through the bay's rear bulkhead. He struggled to his knees and
slapped at the helm controls, trying to equalize engine output and kill
the shuttle's momentum. The first telltales of deceleration sprang to
life on the control board just as they crashed into something huge and
unyielding out of sight behind the shuttle. Chekov had time for one
only dismal thought--/ hope the captain got the screens down in
tirne--before Brahe careened over onto her side, and everything around
him slammed down into darkness.
Chapter Nineteen
"Stu?" Hands patted gently at his cheek, as though afraid he'd break
under too much force. "Sulu, can you hear me?"
Sulu groaned and dragged his eyes open to the twilight blue of low-power
lighting. Moving figures blurred around him, but he focused on the only
one he recognized. "Uhura?"
"Don't move." Smoke misted around Uhura's concerned face as she leaned
over him, and Sulu's stomach knotted in alarm. He struggled up onto his
elbows despite her effort to stop him.
"What happened to the ship?" he asked, searching the dim reaches of the
Andorian bridge for the cascading whiteness of a ruptured nitrogen line
or the smolder of burning electronics.
"The electromagnetic surge from the shuttle explosion blew out our
control systems." More mist appeared when Uhura spoke, and Sulu realized
it was
only her frosted breath, dissipating into the cold ship air. "We've<
br />
lost helm control, shields, and communications. Ventilation is running
off emergency power, but we don't have heat or lights."
Sulu groaned again, rubbing the sore spot where his jaw had met some
unyielding object. "What happened to the antimatter flare from the
Hawking?"
"It washed out about fifty kilometers short of us." Uhura's eyes
glimmered with the beginnings of a smile. "You were too busy cracking
your chin on the helm console to notice."
"Too bad." Sulu managed to sit all the way up, then waited for his head
to stop buzzing before he eraned it toward the main viewscreen. The
unpowered panel was frustratingly blank. "What happened to the Mecufi?"
Uhura shook her head, her fine-boned face turning grave. "It was almost
a thousand kilometers closer to the shuttle than we were. Our sensors
showed an antimatter flare eating a hole right through its hull. The
ship broke apart after that." She raised a thin eyebrow at him. "Your
Russian roulette maneuver worked."
"I'll have to remember to thank Chekov when I see him." Sulu used
Uhura's offered hand to haul himself to his feet, then noticed the
subtle thrum of the deck under his feet. "Hey, we're moving!"
Uhura nodded and scrambled up beside him. "The Enterprise has us in a
tractor beam. Mr. Scott says they're going to pull us into the shuttle
bay for repairs."
"Mr. Scott says?" Sulu blinked at her, wondering if his groggy brain
had misconstrued the words. "I thought you told me we lost
communications?"
"We lost ship communications." Uhura bent with