by Greg Cox
“Spock.” A grin crossed Kirk’s face. “He knocked out their shields somehow.” Kirk immediately hailed the transporter room via the intership, hoping it wasn’t currently overrun with Orions. “Kirk to transporter room. Report.”
“Aye, Captain.” A familiar voice answered his hail. “Scott here.”
Kirk was confused. As far as he knew, Scotty had somehow managed to escort Seven to the shuttlebay.
“How did you end up in the transporter room?”
“By way of the cargo transporters, sir, from one transport platform to another . . . it’s a long story that I can share with ye later.” Disruptor blasts sizzled in the background, forcing Scotty to raise his voice to be heard. “Pardon the ruckus. I’m afraid we’ve got some unwelcome guests banging at the door. We’re holding them off as best we can, but they’re raising quite a racket. . . .”
Kirk signaled Uhura to dispatch reinforcements to the transporter room. “Never mind that right now. The O’Spakya has dropped its shields. Beam our people back!”
The besieged engineer instantly grasped the urgency of the situation. For all they knew, the Mavela might restore their shields at any time. Kirk wasn’t going to waste this window of opportunity. Spock and McCoy were depending on them.
“Aye, aye, sir!” Scotty answered. “I’m right on it!”
Kirk held his breath while he waited for the news from the transporter room. What if this was just another Orion trick? On the viewer, the Navaar was already beginning to right itself; Kirk doubted that Habroz was through with them yet. He leaned into the intercom receiver on his chair. Was that the faint hum of a transporter beam he heard in the background? “Are they there, Scotty? Did you get them?”
Another voice replaced Scotty’s. “Doctor McCoy and I are both safely aboard, Captain,” Spock reported with his customary lack of drama, although a hint of regret could be heard over the intercom. “I am sorry that I cannot say the same for Lieutenant Tang.”
“Understood, Mister Spock.” Kirk checked to make sure reinforcements had been deployed to drive the Orions away from the transporter room. “Hold tight. Security forces are en route to your position.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Spock said. “I look forward to resuming my post on the bridge.”
“It hasn’t been the same without you.” Kirk felt a load slip off his shoulders. With the surviving hostages back aboard the Enterprise, there was no further reason for them to stick around in the Neutral Zone. “Mister Sulu, get us the hell out of here.”
The helmsman didn’t need to be asked twice. “Music to my ears, sir.” Sulu backed away from the enemy ships. “Fasten your seatbelts, everybody.”
Not wasting any time, the Enterprise executed an old-fashioned Immelmann loop that sent it zooming back toward the border. A barrel roll tested the limits of the bridge’s inertial dampers. Kirk’s stomach turned and part of his breakfast came up again. An unsecured first-aid kit slid to the floor. One of the bound Orion prisoners lost his lunch. Apparently he was fond of raw lizard.
“Ugh.” Uhura wrinkled her nose. “That’s disgusting.”
Nobody objected to the roller-coaster ride. Everyone on the bridge was eager to put the Neutral Zone behind them.
Granted, they still had a mob of homicidal raiders swarming the ship, but maybe the Orion boarding parties would surrender once they found themselves back in Federation space. In any event, Kirk knew he’d rather fight them on his own ground than here in the Neutral Zone, where he had no allies and plenty of enemies.
“Full speed ahead, Mister Sulu. Warp factor eight.”
“Yes, sir!”
Stars streaked past on the viewscreen as the Enterprise slipped the bounds of Einsteinian space-time, achieving superluminal velocity. Kirk settled back into his chair, nursing the hope that maybe Habroz would call it quits now that capturing Seven was no longer an option. With the marauder needing serious repairs, Kirk could see the pirate captain deciding to cut his losses. Or was that just wishful thinking?
Apparently so.
“The Navaar is pursuing us, Keptin! Aft sensors show her closing fast.”
So much for a clean getaway, Kirk thought. “Show me.”
A rear view appeared on the screen, verifying Chekov’s report. The battle-scarred marauder was swooping through subspace after them like a bat out of hell. Disruptor beams shot from the Navaar’s cannons, forcing Sulu to resort to increasingly wild evasive maneuvers. Kirk tried to discern Habroz’s motives for taking up the chase. Did he want his boarding parties back or simply revenge? Kirk leaned toward the latter. Space had no fury like an Orion raider cheated out of his plunder.
But Habroz had lost his hostages as well, which made this a whole new ballgame. Kirk didn’t have to hold back anymore.
“Discourage him, Mister Chekov. Fire at will.”
“Aye, sir,” the Russian blurted. He jabbed his firing controls. “Photon torpedoes away.”
A salvo of missiles shot from the rear of the Enterprise, targeting the Navaar. Moving too fast to evade them, the marauder met the torpedoes at warp speed. Blinding photonic discharges blossomed against the Navaar’s forward deflectors. Kirk grinned wolfishly. He hadn’t liked having his hands tied before.
“Don’t let up,” Kirk instructed Chekov. “Show them who they’re messing with.”
Chekov looked like a kid who had just been allowed to open his Christmas presents early. “Absolutely, sir!”
He followed up the torpedoes with a blistering phaser assault. Crimson beams slammed into what was left of the Navaar’s shield. Phasers and disruptors collided with each other in the shrinking gap between the ships. A second wave of torpedoes tested the marauder’s deflectors and plating. Brilliant detonations lit up subspace, causing minute ripples in the continuum. Shock waves buffeted the Enterprise.
“She’s backing off, Keptin!” Chekov gloated. A second glance at his readouts muted his enthusiasm to a degree. “But she’s not giving up. They’re still coming after us.”
Kirk could see that for himself. The Navaar remained on their tail, only farther back, just out of firing range. At least we taught them not to tailgate, he thought. “Estimated time to border?”
He was used to Spock providing such information at once. It took a little longer for Chekov to calculate the answer. “Approximately eighty-five minutes, Keptin.”
Kirk assessed their strategic situation. The Galileo II had knocked the wind out of the Navaar and probably weakened its offensive capabilities as well, but with her own shields still down, the Enterprise could not outfight even a damaged marauder. They would have to rely on speed, not strength.
“That’s not good enough,” Kirk said. “Mister Sulu, increase warp speed, beyond recommended safety limits.”
The helmsman nodded. “Yes, Captain. Going to maximum warp.”
A sudden burst of acceleration shoved Kirk against the back of his chair. The streaking stars on the viewer grew even more energetic. An unsettling vibration shook the bridge, rising up from the floor in the very marrow of his bones. A coffee mug rattled atop one of the aft consoles. Chekov cast a nervous look at the throbbing bulkheads.
He wasn’t the only one.
Scotty’s not going to be happy about this, Kirk thought. He could readily imagine the engineer fretting over the unfair demands being placed on his beloved warp engines, but there was no point in sparing the engines if they ended up losing the ship. He just hoped the Navaar was the only ship after them.
“What about the O’Spakya?” he asked. The last thing they needed was a second hostile vessel at their heels. One angry bloodhound was bad enough. “Any sign of them?”
“Negative, Keptin.” Chekov looked away from the viewer to check on the Mavelan merchanter. The bone-shaking vibration added a warble to his voice. “Long-range sensors show the O’Spakya accelerating in the opposite direction. They’re heading deeper into the Neutral Zone.”
Thank heaven for small favors, Kirk thought. It seemed Papa Yela had chosen the b
etter part of valor; apparently he was more interested in preserving his own ship than in assisting the Orions. Habroz was on his own.
Kirk could live with that.
“The Navaar is closing again,” Chekov alerted him. “Coming within firing range.”
Kirk had to applaud Habroz’s persistence. The pirate wasn’t giving up.
“Mister Sulu, you know what to do.” He opened an all-ship bulletin. “All hands, brace for evasive maneuvers.”
“Yes, sir,” Sulu respond. “Everybody hold on.”
Working the helm like a virtuoso, Sulu put the Enterprise through a high-speed stress test. He banked from side to side to side, zigzagging in three dimensions in order to baffle the Navaar’s targeting scanners. Abrupt, unpredictable changes in pitch and yaw tossed captain and crew back and forth. The port armrest smacked into Kirk’s side, bruising his ribs. Uhura held on to her console for dear life, while upright security officers and engineers grabbed safety rails, chair backs, and consoles. A portable deflector unit toppled over. The bound Orions swore obscenely as they bounced against each other. Kirk regretted not having them gagged.
“Having fun, Mister Sulu?”
“A bit, sir,” the helmsman confessed. “My flight instructor would be having a heart attack right now.”
“Good,” Kirk said. “Keep it up.”
Sulu’s barnstorming tactics did what they had to: keep the Enterprise one hairpin turn after another away from the Navaar’s disruptors, but at a cost. The ship’s circuitous flight path prolonged their escape from the Neutral Zone, with every random zig and zag resulting in another momentary detour. Kirk judged that they were still heading in roughly the right direction, but they were hardly making a beeline for the border. Then again, considering Sulu’s enthusiastic efforts to keep them out of the marauder’s sights, it was impressive that the overworked helmsman was still managing to steer toward their destination at all.
But how much longer could Sulu pull this off?
Emerald beams shot from the Navaar’s gunports. Kirk didn’t need any sensor readings to know that the disruptors were getting way too close.
“Keptin!” Chekov shouted. “They’re targeting our nacelles. That last beam missed us by only forty-six meters!”
He’s just trying to disable us, Kirk realized, not destroy us. Habroz apparently wanted his men back, or maybe just the Enterprise. Capturing a Federation starship would go a long way toward recouping his losses, but that was going to take some tricky shooting on the Orions’ part. No wonder they haven’t nailed us yet.
Kirk knew he was pushing his luck, though. Not even Sulu could duck those disruptors forever, and they were still several light-years from the border. They couldn’t risk being crippled by a lucky shot.
The captain pounded the intraship. “Engineering. Where the devil are my shields?”
As if on cue, a trio of transporter beams manifested on the bridge. Attentive security officers, anticipating another sneak attack, drew their phasers on the shimmering columns of energy, only to relax slightly as the energized silhouettes resolved in the familiar figures of Spock, Scotty, and McCoy.
The Vulcan first officer apparently had heard Kirk’s intemperate query.
“Allow Mister Scott and me to remedy that situation, Captain.”
Thirty
Spock had returned to the bridge just in time.
He walked briskly to the science station. A few dried green bloodstains on his collar hinted at what he had endured aboard the O’Spakya. Cozzone stepped aside to surrender the post to Spock. The captain estimated that the ship’s odds of making it out of the Neutral Zone had just improved significantly.
“Can you get the shields up, Mister Spock?”
“That is my priority, Captain.” Spock analyzed the relevant data, his remarkable mind instantly bringing him up to speed on the current status of the repair operations. “The primary deflector grids remain inoperative, but it may be possible to simulate their effect, at least temporarily, by heightening the polarity of the structural integrity field by a factor of approximately forty-eight-point-six-five.” His fingers moved across the controls without hesitation. “I am attempting to augment the graviton flow through a tertiary relay.”
Kirk assumed Spock knew what he was doing. “Concentrate your efforts on the aft and upper lateral shields. The Orions are gunning for our warp nacelles.”
“I anticipated as much,” Spock said, “and will prioritize accordingly.” Without lifting his gaze from his work, he called out to one of the other new arrivals. “Mister Scott, I am encountering a severed field conduit at Deck Sixteen, wave junction two-one-zero-eight-beta.”
“Leave that to me,” Scotty declared. Hurrying across the bridge, he bounced a hapless ensign from the main engineering station, then opened a channel to the lower decks. “Palmer, Scott here. I know ye and your crew have your hands full fightin’ off a great muckle load of pirates, but I’ve got one more task that ye need to see to, pronto.” He forwarded the specs to his besieged assistant. “Get that SIF conduit fixed in a jiffy!”
Kirk trusted his crew to get the job done. He turned to McCoy for an update on another situation. “The transporter room?”
“You mean that battleground we beamed into?” McCoy sounded like his usual exasperated self, despite the flecks of dried blood visible on his ears. With no designated post on the bridge, he joined Kirk in the command well. “For a second there, I thought we’d jumped into the proverbial skillet, but then those reinforcements of yours turned up, loaded for bear. They sent the Orions running.” He snorted in disdain. “Those green-skinned carpetbaggers are probably pillaging the mess hall by now.”
“Better that than the armory,” Kirk said. “Or sickbay.”
A glance at various shipboard monitors suggested that the Enterprise’s crack security teams were finally managing to confine the roving Orion boarding parties to less essential decks of the ship. Starfleet training and precision was winning out over the raider’s undisciplined ferocity. At least onboard, the tide of battle seemed to be turning in their favor. Kirk hoped they hadn’t taken too many casualties.
This had been a costly wild goose chase.
Spock looked up from the controls. “I believe we have partial shielding, Captain. Thanks to Mister Scott’s timely assistance.”
Chekov confirmed Spock’s report. “Shields at thirty-four percent, sir!”
“Thirty-four-point-four-seven-nine, to be exact,” Spock clarified. “With a half-percent margin of error.”
Kirk chuckled to himself. “Good to have you back, Mister Spock.”
“And what am I?” McCoy grumbled. “Chopped liver?”
“You, too, Bones.”
Kirk welcomed the status update. Even at only thirty-four percent (plus or minus a half point margin of error), the improvised shields gave them a fighting chance to make it back out of the Neutral Zone. There was less likelihood that a single well-aimed disruptor beam would leave them dead in the water.
“Enough with the fancy flying, Mister Sulu,” he ordered. “Straight for home . . . as the crow flies.”
“Thank goodness,” the helmsman said, wiping his brow. He looked understandably relieved not to have to singlehandedly keep the Enterprise out of harm’s way anymore. “Setting a direct course for the border. Estimated arrival time: six minutes.”
The screech of ruptured metal violated the bridge. A security chief, Luz Hernandez, shouted at Kirk from the sealed gangway doors. “Captain! The Orions are breaking through. We can’t hold them back anymore.”
Kirk had been expecting as much. The bridge had been designed to be impregnable, but no security measures were perfect, especially when dealing with an assault force that really wanted in; he always had assumed that the relentless pirates would bust through the barricades eventually. “Are we ready for them?”
“Yes, sir!” Hernandez reported. Under her supervision, a squad of field techs was hastily finishing up some creative adjustments to
the floor paneling in front of the embattled emergency entrance. The bridge’s built-in barricades had bought its defenders time to rig a little surprise for the stubborn Orions, one that wasn’t in the standard Starfleet playbook. A perspiring tech, his sleeves rolled up, laid down one last plate and snapped it into place. Hernandez gave the tech’s work a quick onceover, then she granted it a thumbs-up. “All right. Fall back, everybody.”
The techs retreated behind a line of armed security officers. Noncombatants cleared out of the area, leaving behind empty consoles. Hernandez gave Kirk a worried look. “You might want to take cover, Captain.”
“Forget it,” Kirk said. No way was a band of would-be hijackers going to send him into hiding on his own bridge. He confidently occupied his chair. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Easy for you to say,” McCoy muttered. “I’m the one who has to keep patching you up.”
Kirk shrugged. “Think of it as career security.”
“More like a textbook case of terminal pigheadedness.”
An explosion at the gangway interrupted their banter. Reinforced steel buttresses snapped in two. Mangled blast doors caved in, crashing to the floor only a few meters away from the viewscreen. Multiple disruptor blasts shredded the defensive force fields. The supplementary deflectors shorted out; fiery orange sparks erupted from the portable field generators. Flying shrapnel scarred the walls and ceiling. A glowing blue screen shattered.
“Hold your fire!” Kirk shouted over the clamor. One last force field, held in reserve, shielded the security team. Their phaser rifles were set on stun. “Wait till you seen the greens of their eyes!”
The force field collapsed. Whooping boisterously, like a mob of J’smorru dervishes hyped up on godweed, more than a dozen Orions stormed the bridge, their disruptors blazing. “Seize the ship!” a scar-faced raider exhorted his comrades. A bandolier across his chest held multiple pistols, knives, and photon grenades. Gripping a disruptor pistol in each hand, he fired wildly at the defenders. “No mercy!”
Kirk delayed until the first wave of invaders was all the way through the breached doorway. Disruptor blasts ricocheted off the flickering force field, generating bursts of bright blue Cerenkov radiation. Kirk didn’t even flinch at the flashes.