by Jerry Oltion
Sulu shoved his captive along ahead of him, happy to use him for a shield. Scotty followed close behind, Chekov's body slung over his shoulder in a fireman's carry; and Kirk brought up the rear, tugging the Stella android, which had still not recovered from the news of Mudd's death. She tottered along precariously, not resisting but not helping at all, only taking a step when Kirk's forward motion overbalanced her and she was forced to move in order to stay upright.
The noise and confusion worked to their advantage at first—nobody paid much attention to the aliens in their midst when they had deadly enemies to kill—but the closer they drew to the line of fire, the less that mattered. Disruptor fire ripped past on either side, some of it coming from behind as overeager Prastorians tried to get in lucky shots from cover. Sulu kept his head down and bulled on through, his skin crawling in anticipation of that one fatal shot that would find him amid all the others.
What he felt first, however, was the fiery heat and jolt of impact as his prisoner took an energy beam in the stomach. The Prastorian doubled over and fell to the pavement, exposing Sulu to more fire, but Scotty's surprised yell made him ignore his own danger and whirl around to help his crewmate.
Scotty seemed uninjured, but his eyes were wild and white all the way around. It took Sulu a moment to realize he wasn't carrying Chekov anymore. He looked down, expecting to see his friend's body on the paving stones, but Chekov wasn't there, either.
"He vanished," Scotty said, shouting to be heard over the cries of battle all around them. "Just…vanished."
"Are we out from under the shield yet?" Kirk demanded. "Maybe the Enterprise beamed him aboard."
Scotty glanced at his tricorder, left activated on his belt. "Not yet. We've still got fifteen feet to go." He looked up, his eyes widened, and he shouted, "Look out!"
He grabbed for Sulu's arm and tugged him to the side, but he wasn't quick enough. Sulu felt the searing fire of a disruptor charge rip through his right side. His breath left him in a convulsive scream, and when he tried to breathe in again he found that he could not. Either his diaphragm was paralyzed or his lungs had collapsed, he didn't know which.
He did know that he had maybe twenty seconds of consciousness left before he became another dead weight for Scotty to carry, so he did the only thing he could think of to help save his own life: He drew his phaser—awkwardly with his left hand when his right refused to cooperate—set it to maximum stun, and fired ahead to clear a path for him to run across the street.
He could hardly walk, much less run. He staggered ahead, his entire right side in agony, stumbling over the bodies of the dead and the people he had merely stunned.
But he had drawn too much attention to himself. Distrellians and Prastorians alike turned to see who was this new enemy in their midst, and he couldn't shoot fast enough to take them all down. He saw ten, twenty arms raise in unison, and from the disruptor pistol in each of them, white hot death shot forth and blasted him into oblivion.
Chapter Eleven
WHEN THE WEIGHT fell away from his shoulders, Scotty at first thought he had dropped Chekov, but it became instantly apparent that that wasn't the case the moment he turned to pick him up again. Chekov was gone, his body simply spirited away without a glimmer or a sound.
Scotty wondered if the Enterprise could have locked on to him and taken him on board, but he knew as soon as he thought of it that that wasn't the explanation. This was like no transporter beam Scotty had ever heard of. He had felt no confinement beam stiffen the body first, no residual heat from the scan, had seen and heard none of the flickering light or humming sound that normally accompanied a transport. Something else had happened to Chekov, and he had no idea what it was.
Sulu heard him cry out, and when he turned to see what was the matter, Scotty explained as best he could amid the din. "He vanished."
Kirk asked the same question Scotty had first asked himself, and just to make sure, he checked his tricorder, but they were still under the shield. He looked up again just in time to see a Distrellian woman firing her disruptor methodically in an arc from left to right in a path that would hit Sulu's exposed back with the next shot.
He shouted a warning, grabbed Sulu's arm, and pulled as hard as he could, but it wasn't enough. The beam caught Sulu in the side, its molecular dispersion charge blasting away his uniform as if it weren't even there and charring his ribs and arm black.
Sulu reacted instantly, whirling around and firing back at the woman who had shot him. But no, that wasn't it—he kept firing, mowing down Distrellians and Prastorians alike like grass under a scythe, and Scotty realized he was trying to clear a path. He was using the last of his strength to give Scotty and Kirk a chance to escape, even though it would cost him certain death.
"Don't do it, lad!" Scotty yelled, but it was too late. At least a dozen disruptor beams converged on Sulu, the first ones blasting him backward and knocking Scotty, Kirk, and the Stella android down like dominoes before the combined charges completely vaporized him.
Could they have done that? Even as he struggled to rise, Scotty looked for the telltale signs that should have been there. A boot, a ring, a lock of hair—something should have been blown free after a blast like the one Sulu had taken. He had seen nothing like that. Just the scintillating brilliance of the energy discharge, then nothing. Gone without a trace, just like Chekov.
He didn't get a chance to search for clues. The captain pulled him back down before he had managed to do more than lift his head, and said in Scotty's ear, "Stay down. Our only chance now is to play dead until they forget about us."
Scotty saw the wisdom in that. Sulu's frontal assault hadn't lasted more than a second.
He felt a hollow, numb feeling wash over him as it finally sank in that Sulu was gone, Sulu and Chekov both, snatched away in the prime of life like pawns on a chessboard struck by an angry, capricious hand. As Scotty waited for the tide of battle to sweep past, he knew he would be a long time overcoming their loss.
If he got the chance. The battle wasn't over yet. They had another fifteen feet to go before they were out from under the shield, and it was the worst fifteen feet yet. People were dying right and left, and more people pushed their way forward to take their turn on the front line. They should have been stacked dozens deep by now, but as Scotty watched sideways with his head on the ground, his arms protecting him from being trampled, he saw body after body flicker away just as Chekov and Sulu had done. A momentary hope rushed through him as he thought that maybe some kind of emergency medical system was in operation here, beaming away the critically wounded before they died, but he knew even as he thought it that that wasn't the case. Chekov had died on Scotty's back—Scotty had felt him shudder and go limp—and Sulu had taken enough hits to blow up a shuttlecraft. No amount of medical intervention could bring him back. And Scotty saw a clear pattern among the bodies around him: those with any sign of life remained untouched. Only the unmistakably dead were removed.
He realized with disgust that this wasn't an emergency medical system he was seeing, only a sanitary way of dealing with the corpses.
The battlefront wasn't going to move on. Nor did it seem likely to stop any time soon. The individual fighters seemed to have forgotten the aliens in their midst, at least as long as they remained on the ground, but even so, Scotty knew another run for the far side of the street would just be suicide. And waiting where they were would be little better; one of those wild disruptor beams was bound to hit them sooner or later.
"Captain," he said, turning his head toward Kirk. "We've got to fall back."
"We can't go back, Scotty," Kirk said. "We've got to get out from under this shield."
An energy bolt sliced past overhead, spearing a man just behind them. Scotty turned away and said, "Aye, that's true enough, but we aren't going to make it this way."
"Have you got a better suggestion?" Kirk asked. He wasn't being sarcastic; Scotty could hear the hope in his voice.
That was the problem w
ith pulling their fat out of the fire so many times before, Scotty thought. People started counting on you to do it again. But maybe, just maybe he could do something here. It would certainly be worth a try. He rolled over a bit so he could free his tricorder, then used it to scan for the shield's energy pattern. Some of the readings had seemed unusual to him when he'd scanned it after they first arrived, but he had chalked it up to alien technology and not given it another thought. Now he wondered. . . .
The shield, like many energy barriers, was essentially a series of polarized waves. The generator sent focused pulses outward thousands of times per second, their high energy and high frequency supersaturating the target space at the quantum level so that incoming energy beams were reflected back to their source. But this shield pulsed more slowly than most that Scotty had seen, and that suggested a weakness.
"What I'm thinkin,'" he told the captain, wincing from a close disruptor detonation beside his leg, "is that if we can't get out from under the shield, maybe we can move the shield off from over us."
"How?" Kirk asked.
"Well, if I use my tricorder to monitor the shield pulse rate, and connect it to my phaser so it'll modulate the energy output slightly out of phase with the shield, I might be able to set up a feedback loop that could overload the shield in an area big enough to beam us up through."
"You might be able to?" Kirk asked.
Scotty nodded. "It depends on how strong the shield generator is."
"And what happens if it's too strong?"
Scotty shrugged. "It'll overload the phaser instead."
"I see." Someone tripped over the android, caught his balance by stepping squarely on Kirk's left leg, and leaped over Scotty—straight into the path of a disruptor beam. As he toppled to the ground, Kirk said, "How good are the odds?"
"Do I look like Spock, Captain?" Scotty asked. "I haven't got a clue. From what I see here, I'd guess a phaser with two power packs linked in parallel would be able to overload it, but I can make no guarantees."
Another energy beam lanced past just over their heads.
Kirk said, "It looks like we'll have to take that chance, Scotty. Back to the wall." He scooted around on his side and began to do an infantry crawl, tugging the compliant Stella android along beside him. She seemed to be recovering somewhat; at least she kept crawling on her own once Kirk got her started.
There was a gap of maybe twenty feet now between the crowd and the wall. A few Prastorians ran back and forth in the open space, trying to find a better vantage from which to fire at the Distrellians, but they gave little heed to the three figures who emerged from the crowd and took what cover they could behind a stone planter barely big enough to hide one of them.
Scotty immediately got to work. Exposing the phaser's klystron modulator was the easy part; connecting it to his tricorder was a bit trickier, since he didn't have any patch cords with him, but he solved that easily enough by stripping a pair of leads from the unneeded data-storage lines and patching them into the output bus, then running those over to the phaser. The extra battery pack proved the hardest connection to make, simply because of the amount of power that had to flow through the leads. Scotty settled for holding it in his hand and pressing the contacts into the charging port for the other pack, knowing that it would overheat and probably burn his fingers, but he couldn't think of a better way. If it worked, Dr. McCoy could regenerate his hand.
And if it didn't, he wouldn't be needing the hand much longer anyway.
Kirk had taken out his communicator and was filling in the Enterprise on their situation while he worked. He heard Spock say, "Has Mr. Scott taken into account the secondary harmonic vibrations that will undoubtedly be set up by his actions? There is a thirty-five-percent probability that the phaser will overload when they begin."
"Aye," Scotty said loudly toward the captain's communicator. "A fat lot o' difference it'll make knowing about it, 'cause there's nothing I can do about it with this setup, but if you get us out of here quick enough we'll be long gone before it gets out o' hand."
"What about innocent bystanders?" Spock asked.
What indeed? Scotty hadn't even considered that until now, but Spock's words cut him to the core. How quickly a person could forget the niceties of civilized behavior when his own life was on the line. But Spock was right; they couldn't endanger anyone else with this, even if they were all busy killing themselves off just across the street. He said, "We're maybe twenty feet away from the nearest one and behind a heavy stone planter. And by the time it blows, there won't be very much energy left in the power packs. I'll drop the whole works the moment we've broken through, and when you beam us aboard it'll blow up back here where it won't hurt anybody. Who knows, maybe it'll even distract 'em from killin' each other for a few seconds."
Another disruptor bolt slashed through the crowd and blew rock chips off the wall overhead.
"And maybe it won't," Scotty muttered, shoving the phaser's intensity setting all the way up to Kill. "I'm ready, Captain."
"All right, do it. Stand by, Spock."
"Ready here," Spock said.
Scotty aimed both tricorder and phaser upward. When the tricorder locked on to the energy barrier's modulation signature and began outputting a counterwave into the phaser, he pulled the trigger. A bright but noticeably flickering beam shot upward, and where it struck the shield, a circle began to glow.
"It's working," Scotty said, but the moment he said that he realized he'd spoken too soon. The energy readings began to fluctuate, and the phaser grew uncomfortably hot.
Not the power pack, but the phaser itself.
"The shield frequency is changing," Spock said through the intercom. "Can you compensate?"
"I'm trying," Scotty said, adjusting the tricorder sensitivity with the side of his thumb. He needed a third hand here, but it was too late to ask for help. In fact, Scotty watched with mounting horror as the fluctuations grew even more intense, and before he could counteract it the tricorder's energy reading went off the scale.
He let off the phaser's trigger, but it had already gone critical. Its emergency overload beeper went off, the piercing tone warning of imminent explosion. And he knew from experience that there was no stopping an overloaded phaser.
"Get back, Captain!" he cried out. "She's gonna blow!"
"Get rid of it!" Kirk yelled, and Scotty looked for someplace to throw it, but there were people everywhere. The beeper rose in pitch, keeping time with the angry whine that now issued from the phaser. Scotty whirled around with the fiery hot weapon in his hand, rejecting target after target. Not in anything; the containment would just magnify the blast. Not over their heads, for he couldn't know just when the phaser would blow, and if he misjudged it would fall right into their midst. Not behind the planter, for the captain and the android were still there. There was no place, no place, no—
No time. Scotty felt the phaser begin to melt and knew he had less than a second left. He couldn't have thrown it away now if he had wanted to; the molten polymer had fused with his hand. He had just one option left: he could save the captain's life, and he did it without hesitation. He jumped away from Kirk and curled himself around the phaser so his body would absorb the blast.
The roof, he thought suddenly, knowing that his last inspired moment had come an eternity too late. I should have thrown it on the roof.
Chapter Twelve
"No!" KIRK SCREAMED, reaching out toward Scotty just as the phaser blew. The entire power pack discharged through the weapon at once with a detonation that shook the ground and tumbled Kirk backward over the android.
He struggled to his feet again, pain and anger burning through every fiber of his body, but when he saw the foot-deep, five-foot-wide crater in the ground where Scotty had been, that heat turned to the icy, ultra-calm rage of a man pushed beyond his limit of endurance. He had watched Chekov, then Sulu, and now Scotty die within the space of a few minutes. And for what? To prevent this mechanical monstrosity—this…this ca
ricature of a human being—from stopping the war that had killed them. He should have let her do it. Hell, he should have helped her do it. He should have done it himself from orbit, raining hellfire and destruction down on these insane creatures until they understood what war was.
He should have…what? Where in the long chain of regrets that led to this moment did he really have a choice? Like every great failure in history, each of his actions had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Now he had only one last person to save: himself. It hardly seemed worth the effort, but Scotty had given his own life to protect Kirk's; if nothing else, Kirk owed it to him to make sure he didn't die for nothing.
"All right," Kirk said to no one in particular. "Let's try this one more time."
His voice seemed flat, and he realized that he could hardly hear the crowd around him now. Everything not conducted through bone to his inner ear had to compete with the ringing from the blast.
He looked up to judge what he was up against, and realized that he had an audience. The explosion had drawn the attention of Prastorians and Distrellians alike, and for a moment, anyway, they had paused from their killing spree to see what he would do next.
What could he do next? He had a few seconds at most before they started shooting at one another again…unless he could keep them distracted somehow without antagonizing them. But how could he do that? He had exactly two things to work with: a phaser and an android woman in the electronic equivalent of shock. He didn't even have his communicator anymore; that had been torn from his grasp in the explosion and was nowhere to be seen.
Drawing the phaser would be suicide; Sulu had already proved that. That left the android. But how could he use her to get out of here?