STARTREK®: NEW EARTH - WAGON TRAIN TO THE STARS

by Diane Carey

  “You’ve never been able to track them down?” Battersey asked as she hurried from panel to panel, shutting down vulnerable systems that were still active.

  Chekov used the precious seconds to continue analyzing the spiderweb now burned into the skin of the Conestoga. “Orions keep to themselves, but from time to time ships from other civilizations disappear without a trace. No sign of wreckage, no emissions to track. They must tow their victims away. No one could figure out how they could capture powerful vessels without a fight. This is wonderful! Now we know!”

  “You don’t have to sound so happy about it,” Battersey complained. “We’re going to know, all right. Firsthand.”

  “How long was it before the burst made us shut down?”

  “Let me look . . . thirty-one seconds.” She groaned and shook her head. “I know what you’re thinking. We can’t get anywhere in thirty-one-second bursts. Unless we get that mesh off the hull, we’re caught.”

  “It’s burned in,” he reminded her. “Melted through the exo-hull and embedded. We did it with our own energy. It cost them nothing, and us everything.” He thumped his hand victoriously on the console, barely missing the enact buttons for the shield power grid. Didn’t want to hit that. “This is perfect! I can study this and stop the Orions from what they do!”

  Battersey stared at him. “Mr. Chekov, you’re delusional.”

  “Not yet, I’m not.”

  His mind spun with the chance to defrock the Orions of some of their sneak and mystery, perhaps shut down their slaving operation by giving potential victims a way to defend. This spiderweb conduction device was damnably simple, but no one yet had survived capture and escaped to tell about it. Victims simply disappeared. The very few persons, spies or traders, who had ever come out of Orion space had either not known how they captured their victims or hadn’t found advantage in telling.

  Or perhaps the truth was simpler still—perhaps the Orions fiercely guarded their secret. It was possible that even most Orions didn’t know how the slavers did their business.

  Never, never before had a Starfleet ship been captured by Orions. Never had the Orions dealt with trained Starfleet officers. Chekov vowed here and now to be the surprise of the sector.

  With Impeller’s crew working on the cutter and him aboard the Conestoga, there was a chance. He wished he knew Captain Kilvennan and the privateers better, knew what they could do, their talents, their shortcomings, their ship’s abilities. The gap in his knowledge gnawed at him. On the screen, the black-hulled privateer ship valiantly fired upon the Orion ships, until two Orions managed to get into position and spewed a mesh around the Hunter’s Moon.

  Chekov watched with voyeuristic curiosity as the privateer ship’s hull lit up with a crackle of energy—her own energy, being conducted directly back into her skin by the formfitting Orion mesh. The privateer’s black and green hull was suddenly veined with burns, and she was forced to shut down her thrust, emissions, and shields. He could hear in his mind Captain Kilvennan rasping the fatal orders that would put them all in the hands of the Orions.

  “They hit the Impeller’s bridge!” Ted Bishop’s call startled Chekov into turning sharply. “All the pressurization ducts are blown! I can see the twisted distribution pipes from here!”

  As he joined Battersey at the starboard monitor, the captain scowled at Impeller, lying nearly helpless now, tangled in the conduction mesh. “He had to drop his shields,” she said. “They hit her full out.”

  Yes, in place of Impeller’s bridge was a blackened and cracked dome, spewing atmosphere and flashing as emergency lights tried to come on in the impending vacuum.

  “Beam me over there!” Chekov flinched at the sound of his own voice. What idiot had said that?

  Battersey straightened sharply. “What? You’re leaving us?”

  “The Orions will not hurt the Conestoga, believe me.”

  “Are you crazy? They’re dead over on the cutter! We need you here!”

  Chekov raised a staying hand to her protests. “Repel boarders. Use thrusters. Move out of the way as much as you can.”

  “We’ll burn ourselves to ashes if we use the thrusters!”

  “Thirty seconds at a time.” He fed his own coordinates into the transporter relay and cued it for the wild maneuver of beaming from here to the Impeller’s transporter room. At red alert, the pads over there should be active enough to pick up a signal and zero in on his coordinates. It was only a little bit insane. “I’m ready. Activate transporter.”

  Battersey grimaced and shouted, “Ted, emergency beam!”

  Wondering what Jim Kirk would do and getting the feeling this wasn’t it, Chekov sucked one breath to sustain him. As if he could hold his breath in a vacuum—in his mind he heard Spock placidly explaining that such effort would only hasten the inevitable rupture of his lungs, etc., etc., Mr. Chekov. There might be no air left when he arrived on Impeller. As he dematerialized, Captain Battersey’s bitter glare followed him into confusion.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Starfleet Cutter Impeller

  “CAPTAIN MERKLING, where are you!”

  His cry leaped instantly into the open gulf leading to space, sucked out with the hissing atmosphere left on the bridge. Life-support systems screamed around him. In minutes, they would fail, beaten by the enormity of space.

  Overhead, the ruptured bridge dome gaped like a lanced boil, lips peeled away, edges seared by weapons fire. What was left of the air stank and fumed. Life itself fleeted before him as Chekov physically pushed the bridge door panel out of his way and squeezed through the demolished frame. Beneath the shriek of spraying damage and the murdered life-support system, he heard a cough. The single plaintive noise gave him power to continue.

  A cutter was not a starship. Finding his way here from the tiny transporter room had been mostly luck. He’d simply kept climbing, veering up. Chekov hadn’t been aboard a cutter for years. Decades—was it so long? Had he been a teenager? And only a visit then. Ridiculously he found himself counting the years one by one as he dug through collapsed matter, twisted wreckage that scarcely resembled pieces of a ship. Nymphs of smoke nearly blinded him, racing for the ruptured dome. He had seconds, not minutes.

  His heroic effort landed him flat on his face, his right cheek scorched by a glowing piece of metal. If he’d hit the jagged edge, he might’ve lost his head. Luckily, instead, he found something. The body of the first officer. Now on his hands and knees, he crawled forward against the sucking force from above. He began to count seconds. Three. Five. His eyes stung.

  Another body—this one alive! He felt upward along a leg, a hip. Female, for sure. The sleeve—a midshipman. Engineer.

  “Wake up!” he snapped, grabbed a handful of hair, and shook the girl’s head. She moaned, then began gasping short breaths. “Get up! Your cabin pressure is dropping! Crawl that way! Open the tube!”

  In a swirling gray fog he saw the flash of a fearful eye, but the girl pulled her legs under her and made her way past him as ordered. As Chekov crawled forward around the circular edge of the bridge, he heard the tube hatch creak open behind him.

  Suddenly the helm stopped him. The helm, up here on the raised deck! What an impact it must have been!

  He found two more bodies, though living or dead he could not tell yet. His fingers dug into their uniforms and he pulled for all he was worth, dragging them across the tilted deck toward the general area of the tube that led through the repair trunks to Deck Two. Smoke choked his brain. He could barely think. Should he go back? How many people were in the bridge crew of a cutter?

  A blur of hissing, of dragging, and a final entanglement in arms and legs—a tumble down the tube into near darkness made his decision for him. The tube’s ladder disengaged itself and thumped freely, tempting him to go back up to the nearly airless bridge.

  Pulling himself up on the tilted deck, Chekov blinked his tortured eyes. Trembling fingers found the wall panel and punched the hatch closure. Overhead a loud
clack, a sucking sound, and finally terrible silence broadcast the automatic shutting of the hatch. Locked. The bridge, and anyone left lying there, would find a cold fate.

  “Mr. Chekov!”

  Through his watering eyes Chekov strained to see, to confirm that the voice he heard was Captain Dan Merkling himself and not an illusion of damage noise. As Chekov’s vision fought its way back, Merkling staggered out of the darkness into the tiny flicker of an emergency worklight, supported by the midshipman Chekov had slapped awake and a young lieutenant with a sooty face.

  The captain’s blond hair actually smoldered, his face reddened and blistered on the left side. He grimaced in pain and couldn’t open his eyes.

  “Orion Cossacks!” Chekov blurted simply.

  “What are they doing out this far?” the captain complained, almost as a side note.

  “It was Billy Maidenshore,” Chekov informed. “Captain Kirk was right to have us monitor his activity.”

  “I can’t see,” Merkling choked. “Chemical spray. Fire retardant, from the smell of it. You saved our lives,” he pointed out, almost casually. “Did you come with a boarding party?”

  Abruptly inadequate, Chekov flopped his arms. “I am the boarding party. How many are here?”

  Merkling sighed fitfully. “I don’t know—”

  “Five of us,” the young male lieutenant filled in. He looked at Chekov. “Burnell, sir, life sciences.”

  Merkling nodded toward the young man. “Burnell pulled Grenski down the hatch after you got me and Molyneaux out. They hit us with some kind of armor-piercer. Luckily I’d already ordered an evac of the damage-control team. This young lady is Molyneaux. Grenski’s on the deck—” Over his shoulder he called, “Verdicchio! Is he dead?”

  Out of the dimness another youthful voice called, “He’s unconscious. Breathing’s normal, but he’s not awake.”

  “Then it’s just the four of us,” Merkling said. “Mr. Chekov, I only have a crew of a eighty to start with, and we’ve had fifty-one casualties already. Bridge is gone, life-support is on standby systems, my first officer’s dead, I’m blinded—Molyneaux, was auxiliary control ruptured?”

  “Not before we were hit, sir,” the girl gasped.

  “Are you the communications officer?” Chekov asked her.

  “No, I am,” Burnell spoke up. Oh, yes—a clear speaker’s voice, deep in spite of his age, nearly perfect enunciation, with an English accent.

  “I’m an engineer’s mate,” Molyneaux told him, “spectroscopy apprentice. Are they going to sell us into slavery?”

  Her voice squeaked, but her eyes never wavered in spite of the stinging fumes. She was a tiny thing, the perfect opposite of the six-footer Burnell, and despite the French name she was obviously very Asian. They were both hardly more than teenagers, both waiting for the officers to make decisions.

  A moment later, another young one popped up behind Burnell. This would be—

  “Verdicchio, biochemistry,” the skinny boy reported. “Are they gonna kill us?”

  “Don’t worry,” Chekov told him. “I have them right where they want us.”

  Was there nothing but children in Merkling’s crew? Or had only the children survived so far? Sometimes that happened—senior officers tended to move to the front of ship action during times of emergency attack and were often the first to die. It was a strange hearkening back to the ancient ways of charging on horseback to meet an enemy, the days when huge numbers of officers fell first, leaving their youngest recruits to fend alone.

  “The Conestoga’s mule power and shields have been compromised by the conductor mesh,” Chekov said, knowing it was his turn to report. “So has the privateer. We can’t move more than twenty-five seconds at a time.”

  “Where do you get twenty-five seconds?” Merkling asked.

  “It takes thirty seconds for the conduction to build up enough energy. I believe we can move in twenty-five-second leaps.”

  “And go where?” Molyneaux squeaked. “A hundred yards here and there?”

  The skinny boy added, “It’s not enough to get away!”

  “It’s not enough if you want to get away,” Chekov pointed out. “We want something else.”

  Now he waited for the captain’s decision. A half-wrecked ship, a half-dead crew, insurmountable odds. As the only Starfleet ship, the most considerable threat, the Impeller would be targeted for destruction, not spared to be sold. Her trained crew would not be allowed to survive into slavery. They were too much a threat. Knowledge could be a curse. The Orions would see it that way.

  The children gawked and swiveled to their captain, expecting an argument. Captain Merkling waved a hand before his injured eyes, tried and failed to blink, then shook his head. “I can’t choreograph a battle if I can’t see it.” He turned more or less toward Chekov. “Go down to auxiliary control. If the ship’s maneuverable, take command. Most of the functional crew is below—I’ll go to engineering and make sure you have power. I don’t need eyes for that, all I need is hands.”

  “I will, sir!” Chekov promised.

  “Molyneaux, Verdicchio, Burnell, go with Mr. Chekov,” Merkling confirmed. “Do anything he says, no matter how crazy it sounds. Grenski, get me down to engineering. Mr. Chekov, ship’s luck!”

  “Don’t worry. The good part about being doomed is it can’t get any worse.”

  The children looked at him when he said “kint gettany verse” and took a second to digest his accent.

  Chekov plunged into the auxiliary control at a run and skidded into the secondary helm. He snapped his fingers at the skinny boy. “You—Verdi—what is your name again?”

  “Verdicchio, sir!”

  “Ah . . . I think I will call you ‘Scotty.’ Do you know how to steer?”

  “Steer? The ship? I’m a biochem—”

  “What about weapons?”

  “Oh, I, I, uh—maybe I—”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two, sir.”

  Chekov put his hands on his hips and scowled. “What are you doing on a fighting ship at such an age? Are you in a bridge crew or not?”

  Verdicchio’s narrow dark eyes flitted like a bird’s. “I was delivering a Hollister assembly and helping install it.”

  “Hm. Wrong place, wrong time, eh? Sit at the weapons. Shoot when I tell you. Burnell, can you steer?”

  They were looking at him the way he used to look at Captain Kirk. He ignored them as he keyed in the manual overrides and made sure all the systems they needed were getting power. Molyneaux blinked her feathery eyes and scoured the controls, trying to make sense of them. Burnell did better than the others, slipping into the chair behind the aux helm and activating it, though he couldn’t bring himself to respond verbally.

  Generally this was the least used place on any Starfleet ship. Auxiliary control was the ultimate backup bridge, small and unglamorous, double-shielded and not very comfortable. The forward screen was much smaller than the one on Enterprise’s auxiliary bridge, but there were four additional screens mounted on the starboard and port bulkheads to offer a wider continuous view of the crippled Conestoga Yukon, and the valiant fight going on between two Orion Plunderers and Kilvennan’s Hunter’s Moon.

  The privateer, befouled in conductor mesh and patterned with scorch marks, was losing. Yet Kilvennan continued to fire his phasers despite taking most of the impact right back on his own hull. Empathy winced through Chekov—the inside of that privateer must be damnation unleashed. Even from here he could see ruptures in main coils, venting atmosphere, spewing fluids, and the awful flash of systems failures. In spite of all that, Kilvennan was still trying to shoot his phasers in microbursts. Each time the phasers fired, the conduction mesh snapped viciously, sending jolts back into the privateer’s skin.

  The Impeller looked dead from outside. The Orions would move in for the kill any minute. He had to show them that the cutter wasn’t dead at all. He would do it by drawing the pack off Hunter’s Moon.

 
; Working the nearest panel, he tapped out a flash message to Kilvennan—Maneuver past us.

  “Come here—” Chekov grabbed Verdicchio and stuffed him into the weapons seat. “Put your hands over here. Push buttons. Very good. You look good there.”

  “If we fire, that net’ll fry us.”

  “No problem. It’s nothing compared to the time we went to the Old West.”

  “Vest?” The boy glanced up at him. “You’re taking this awfully well—”

  Chekov shrugged. “Been in worse spots. All power to weapons. Never mind the shields.”

  Verdicchio stared at the Orion ships, which raced past after having nearly incapacitated three Federation vessels. “Maybe we’ll have to surrender.” His fearful eyes glanced to Chekov to see whether his suggestion might be taken.

  “I have a plan,” Chekov said. “Don’t worry. Captain Kirk taught me everything he knows.” He pressed his hands to the photon-torpedo controls. “Which for this situation adds up to nothing. . . .”

  No point telling them the whole truth about Orions. Starfleet trained its young men and women to understand the possibility of death, but the prospect of lifelong slavery in some brutal tract never came into the mix of what to expect. Sneaky, shy, and expert at covering their tracks, Orions rarely toyed with the Federation anymore, having long ago found Starfleet too stubborn and unremitting a force. Billy Maidenshore must have coaxed them out here with the promise of a huge capture. Chekov now found himself burdened with the weight of keeping them from their prize.

  “Molyneaux, start counting seconds when we move the ship. When we get to twenty, make a noise. Verdi, get ready to fire phasers when I say.”

  Burnell looked at him, confused. “What are you doing?”

  “Arming a photon torpedo.”

  “A torp? With phasers? It’s suicide to use both at the same time without maneuverability!”

  “Do everything I say,” Chekov told him firmly. “I will call you ‘Bones.’ ”