by Diane Carey
“Gimme my phaser, pirate,” she demanded.
“Hm. I guess I love your big mouth too. Stand aside, woman.”
Tom Coates shifted his thick body decisively. “Give one to Lilian too.”
“Will I ever,” Mae vowed.
From behind both Michael and Tom, Quinn choked up, “And me.”
Michael met the men’s eyes, confirming what until now had only been theory, hot wind, wild proclamations, and hopes fueled by tall tales. They were about to make their own tall tale here, pioneers in the true sense, defending their prairie huts and fire pits.
Using the skeleton-key override shared by all commanders on the Expedition, Michael opened the phaser vault and handed his wife a fully charged phaser rifle, and Quinn a hand phaser. He shook Quinn’s hand and kissed his wife on the cheek. “Put them on heavy stun or you could punch a hole in the hull. Don’t switch to full disrupt until you absolutely have to. Call Captain Battersey and Mr. Chekov and tell her and him that the decks are armed. Do whatever Chekov tells you to do. And hide the kids. And don’t shoot the wrong people.”
“I won’t.” With the conviction of a mother lion, Mae shouldered the phaser rifle and clicked it to heavy stun.
Quinn, though, simply stared at the weapon in his hand, shaking to the bone. Michael turned to him, watching the unhappy communion.
Tom encouraged, “Shouldn’t we get to your ship?”
“Yeah, minute.” Michael reached for the phaser in his brother’s hands and clicked the weapon to stun. “It’s okay, Quinn. Killing the bad guys to protect your family isn’t against God’s laws. Do it if you have to.”
Quinn raised his eyes, passion and panic brewing together in them, drew strength from his brother’s example, and forced a nod.
Michael understood this kind of fear. Facing the unknown enemy was far worse than knowing what was coming. To fight Klingons, there was a way to do it. Romulans, pirates, Deltan raiders—there were known manners of approach, and even if they had rogues with crazy methods at least their technology wasn’t a mystery. Just as his lips parted to mutter a word of encouragement for Quinn, his communicator whistled.
He snatched it up and thumbed the activator. “What’s wrong, Troy?”
“Michael, get over there! Our glitches just went into high warp and they’re heading right at us! They’ll be here in eight minutes!”
Chapter Thirteen
“COME ON, Tu, move in, moron. Focus, focus . . . Uncle Billy’s doing his part. I’m still important to you—you get me out of here . . . are you reading me?”
Make a deal, see it through, make the appointment, expect the other guy to be in place when he said he would. Simple.
Up till now everything had been deadhead simple. A matter of playing to the soft side of suckers. The colonists had fallen into his grip with a couple of favors and a promise or two. He told them whatever they wanted to hear, they slurped it up, then did all the hard work themselves and gave him credit. They wanted to believe in something so much that all he’d had to do was step in and proclaim himself the thing to believe in. Hand them a carrot, and they tilled the field and thanked him for the sunshine. Suckers.
For a while it had seemed like a problem that Sledge Kirk had sent the Impeller to guard the Yukon. He’d warned Tu that the cutter was along. That made it manageable.
Now he was down to the wire.
In his hands Billy Maidenshore held the single-frequency transponder he’d been hiding for months. He had the gain turned up as high as it would go, a gradual process begun when the Yukon’s passengers had voted him their mayor.
“Mayor,” he uttered. “Mayor Maidenshore. As mayor of this fine city, I hereby order you morons to show up.”
He shook the transponder. Were they responding? Picking up the signal?
“Billy!”
Maidenshore flinched and pivoted around. “Jackass, I thought you were that stiff Chekov, spooking around like he does.”
Angus rushed to him and instantly did the only thing he did well—apologize. “Sorry, Billy, sorry, sorry! Are they here? Did you get the signal that they’ll beam us off before the trouble starts?”
“You’ll be taken care of,” Maidenshore told him. “But it’s your job to keep the organization tight, got it? Tell Mary and Dick and what’s-her-name with the ears that our deal’s about to come through. If they’re not ready, it’s their own problem.”
“Dick got the lung flu.”
“Idiot! We were supposed to take the medicine first, so we didn’t get it.”
“He was afraid to,” Angus said. “Should I give it to him now?”
“Let him die. It’ll be a lesson.”
“Okay, Billy . . . somebody armed the passengers, did you know that?”
“Armed? You mean phasers?”
“Yeah! Somebody gave them phasers!”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who! Musta been the captain, right?”
“No, I mean who’s got the phasers? Security?”
“No, no, the passengers! The families, like the women and men and the teenagers, they got phasers now somehow. Are you working that thing right?” He seized Maidenshore’s elbow. “They gotta come and get us out!”
“Get your hands off.” Maidenshore slapped him back. “They should be sending me a confirm blip. Keeping their promise to beam me off as soon as they got here. Otherwise, I’ll be stuck on this crap heap with the suckers when things get hot.”
Though the room they were in was small, a cool-storage bunker for extra gangway hatches, inertial damper plugs, and scrubber-filters, he found the room to pace away from Angus’s simpering face.
“All these people,” Maidenshore began, “scrambling from day to day, trying to convince themselves they have reasons not to shoot themselves in the skull, trying to forget they’re one more day closer to dying . . . even though they’d given the past five years to Evan Pardonnet, I sold them some snake oil and they swallowed it. Sheeple . . . just as happy believing in Fairies as believing in God. Half of them think their cats are telepaths.”
He drew a long breath and sighed it out, enjoying his success and the ease with which he could manipulate weak minds. If they’d just been a little stronger, he’d never have gotten so far, so fast. What happened to them was their own fault for being so spineless.
“Might have to wide-stun the whole herd,” he contemplated. “Knock them silly and ship them out iced. That’ll be a mess. Quieter, though . . . no screaming. Yeah, I kind of like that better. You tell Mick and Charlotte and their boys to start the process. Just stun the grownups. Kick the kids into the hold or lock ’em in their quarters. Heavy stun can kill a kid. They’re worth more than the grownups.”
“What about the crew?” Angus asked. “Can I do the crew myself? I always wanted to slug that lady captain ever since she—”
“Do whatever you want, but soon. Tu’ll be here any minute and all hell’s breaking out. He’ll be beaming me off first thing.”
“You’re beaming off?” Angus asked. “What about the rest of us?”
“What do you think? If everybody’s stunned, somebody’ll have to drive this hulk while somebody else puts restraints on the sleeping beauties. That’s you and Mick and Charlotte and the whole gang.”
“We’ll be here?” Angus frowned, suddenly more nervous than usual. “We’ll be on Yukon when Tu takes us into his space? And you’ll be over there on his ship with him? Billy, I don’t know if the boys’ll go for—”
“What am I hearing?” Maidenshore interrupted. He cupped a hand to his ear and leaned toward Angus. “Are you saying you don’t trust me? Is that the thanks I get? Keeping you by my side all these months? Making you rich?”
“Oh, no, Billy, it ain’t that. . . .”
“I think I better hear something else pretty soon.”
“Thanks, thanks, Billy, for keeping me and making me rich. Thanks for—”
Angus clapped his hands over his ears as the security alarm drowned
him out.
Maidenshore looked at the door panel as if some signature might appear there to tell him—“Who’s that?”
Angus’s face turned to plastic. The pounding sound grew louder, then abruptly stopped and became the howl of a security codebreaker.
“Angus,” Maidenshore began again, “waxbrain . . . did you screen for tracking signals before you came around me? Moron? Did you?”
“Yes, I did, I swear it!”
“Well you didn’t do a good job of it, did you? Now we gotta do things the hard way.”
The locked panel creaked, strained, and cracked open from the other side. In a swipe, the bunker suddenly filled up with unwelcome visitors, led by Captain Battersey herself and Lieutenant Chekov. Behind them were Mae Kilvennan, Lilian Coates, Expedition Chief of Security Barry Giotto, and six security thugs with Impeller patches on their sleeves.
“Don’t move!” Giotto snapped.
Moving forward instantly, Battersey snatched the transponder out of Maidenshore’s hand and held it up to a tricorder for analysis, which was over in about three seconds. “You were right, Mr. Chekov,” she said. “This signal is going out in the direction of the incoming phantoms.”
“Captain Kirk was the one who was right,” Chekov said. “We have been watching you.”
“How?” Maidenshore asked. “Never mind. I know how.” With the heel of his hand he shoved Angus two feet back into a wall. “Incompetent moron.”
“He might be a moron, but it’s not his fault.” Chekov pushed Angus out of the line of ire and nosed his phaser into Billy Maidenshore’s face. “Captain Kirk told me to watch you. I’ve been tracking your two-band communicator.”
The unit came up between them as Maidenshore shook it. “You can’t track this! It’s impossible!”
Chekov indulged in a swagger. “Maybe impossible for you.”
“I checked it myself!”
“You didn’t check with me. All right, you, who is it coming at us?”
Bottling his rage, Maidenshore poked Chekov’s chest with a defiant finger and returned the swagger. “Listen . . . I won. You can’t change that. Before long it won’t matter to you one way or the other who they are. You’ll never be able to report back to your captain. Your days speaking that excuse for English are over as of about ten minutes from now. Get your hands off me and maybe I’ll tell my buddies out there to let you keep your feet after they cut out your tongue.”
Chekov kept his eyes on Maidenshore, but tilted his head toward Captain Battersey. “We don’t have time to move him to Impeller. Can you put him in your brig?”
Battersey fought a tumbling stomach. “We don’t have a brig.”
“Will he fit in a locker?”
“If we fold him.”
Maidenshore shrugged one shoulder. “Put me wherever you want. Pretty soon, I’ll be steaming in a hot tub on Aldebaran II and you’ll be on an auction block.”
“Auction block?” Mae blurted. “What does that mean!”
“It means Orions,” Chekov snarled. He looked at Battersey, then at Mae. “Slave traders.”
Mae’s respiration accelerated to heaves so violent it seemed they might crack her narrow chest. “Slavers? Why! Why would they do that!”
“Orions do lots of things. They starve people by millions, force the survivors to work, deplete self-confidence, rule through terror . . . the usual.”
“But why?” Mae asked again.
“And how do you know so much about it?” Maidenshore asked.
Chekov felt his throat grow tight. Revulsion set deeply under his skin. He thought his eyes would boil as he looked at the man who had caused all this.
“It’s a Russian invention,” he said.
His words evoked a shock of physical chill for everyone who heard them. All at once, reality burned itself a hole in their hopes.
“He was going to sell us?” Mae’s big eyes got somehow much bigger. She charged forward toward Maidenshore, held back only by Barry Giotto, who stuck out an arm at the last moment. Though another guard clutched her phaser and wrenched it out of her hands, nobody doubted her ability to claw Maidenshore’s face to ribbons with her bare fingers if she got any closer. Her voice escalated to a shriek as she squalled, “Sell me? Michael? Our children? Kids who call you ‘uncle’? Four thousand of your own people?”
“ ‘My own people,’ ” Maidenshore mimicked. “Hey, I kind of like that. My people. Like my dog, my cigar. My shoes. Say it again, honey, so I can suck on it awhile.”
“Unbelievable! I don’t believe it!” She started to lunge at him, but at the last second veered to one side and clawed at Chekov’s phaser. “Give it to me!”
“No, no, down, down, down—” Chekov held her back with one extended arm while raising his phaser hand high in the air. She almost got it. He had to turn full about twice, with this harridan digging at his shoulders, before he managed to press her back.
“Guards,” Mr. Giotto ordered, and handed Mae Kilvennan off to one of the uniforms. “Go back to your family, Mrs. Kilvennan, or I’ll have to restrict you to your habitat deck.”
“Fine,” Mae said, steaming at Maidenshore. “I’ll still find some way to poison his soup!”
“Put him in an EVS locker,” Giotto added to the two guards who had custody of Maidenshore. “Then round up his network. Start with this weasel.”
“Don’t hurt me!” Angus wailed. “He was gonna leave me here!”
As the guards, criminals, and angry passengers flooded out, Pavel Chekov shook his head warily, his mind going in ten different directions. Soon he was left in here with Captain Battersey, and out loud he complained, “We track eight different suspects, and still can’t find the real trouble until he broadcasts a rogue signal. I’m losing my touch.”
“Orions . . . they never come out this far. I guess the prize was worth it.” Linda Battersey stared at the tiny sensor screen on the Orion transponder. Ugly blue blips crawled swiftly toward them at a speed they could never challenge. “Look, Mr. Chekov, I’m a great ferry captain. I can move anything from here to anyplace else. I can tow, lead, pilot, chart, load, trim, rig, and raft with the best of them, but I’ve never been in a battle in my whole career. Every transit’s always been in protected, patrolled space. I don’t have the first idea how to deal with Orions!”
Having no way to empathize with a private captain after spending his entire life in Starfleet, Chekov barely kept himself from an insulting shrug. “Put up your shields, keep your narrow profile to them, and always be moving.”
“According to my license, I can’t relinquish command to you.”
“I don’t want command,” he chafed. “If I take it, I can’t go around freely. I’m your tactical advis—”
“My crew’s never done this before!”
He took her arm. “I will help you. Go, go!”
By the time Pavel Chekov and Linda Battersey reached the Conestoga’s bridge, low in the nose of the people-mover, disaster was already striking outside. Five Orion Plunderers were roaring in on full impulse, spreading out to circle the Conestoga and her escorts. The Impeller and Hunter’s Moon were trying to move between the Orions and the Yukon, but there was no good way to do it. What two mismatched fighting ships could do against five fanged serpents, no one could yet guess. Certainly they couldn’t physically protect a dormitory ship several times the volume of either of them. Chekov stared at the multi-screens and tried to imagine whether there was enough junior Jim Kirk in him to really change what was about to happen.
If only he knew what was about to happen. . . . Billy Maidenshore had sold them out—or just sold them. What would Orions do to cash in their purchase?
Clearly the Conestoga was the prize. Already the cutter Impeller was taking the brunt of Orion scatter-cannons broiling their shields and returning the blows with phaser fire. But space was big, and two of the Orion Plunderers broke through between the cutter and the privateer.
“They threw another one on the Impeller!” Bishop
pointed at the starboard screen. His voice was steady, but his face was a matte of pure fear, as if a dead man were still doing his job.
Slavers. By now, the whole ship’s complement knew. Word spread all over, instantly. Chekov hadn’t tried to stop the passengers from knowing exactly what they were facing. To know the horrors awaiting them would make these people fight fiercely. Shielding them from the truth was no favor. If the Conestoga was boarded by Orions, the people would have to fight in the corridors.
“Keep moving,” Chekov recommended. “Ignore the mesh.”
Battersey glanced at him, then ordered, “Full about. Keep us turning, Ted.”
Ten seconds. Fifteen. Twenty.
Chekov held his breath as the Conestoga turned and the Orion ships, for some reason, moved out of the way. Why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they move in to attack, just as they were firing on the Impeller?
“And why not the Hunter’s Moon?”
“What?” Battersey asked.
He waved a hand. “I’m thinking. I don’t like something about this. . . .”
His words were overrun by sharp snapping under his left hand. Chekov winced backward in time to see electrical blowouts erupt all over the bridge, driving the crew away from their controls.
“It’s charged!” Bishop reported over the noise. “The mesh is charged somehow. Energy surge all over the ship—the shields are overloading!”
“Keep them up,” Battersey ordered.
“No!” Chekov shouted irreverently. “Shut down, quickly!”
“Why?”
“Look at your gauge!”
“My God—shut down the shields!”
“What is it?” Bishop craned to see what Chekov had showed his captain, and his expression curdled when he saw how close they had just come to frying in space. Before Battersey could repeat an order she shouldn’t have to repeat, Chekov pushed Bishop aside and hammered the shield controls. Instantly the Conestoga was without protection, but the snapping electrical assault fell off.
“The mesh must be some kind of conductor,” Chekov decided as he bent over a sensor readout. “It turned our energy directly to heat! Of course! We’re forced to power down, can’t use our shields or thrust. . . . So that’s how they capture ships! We have always wondered!”