Dreadnought!

by Diane Carey

  And run we did, right into a handful of unarmed technicians in white insulated engineering suits. We all skidded to a halt and stared across the corridor at each other, but before anyone had a chance to think I pushed my three on past and said to the technicians, “Up against the wall.” They looked at my phaser, so I waved it. “Come on, fellas, it’s no joke.”

  They lined up and I instructed them to face the wall, resetting my phaser for light stun, wide field. Maybe it was a weakness, but I still remembered the pain of heavy stun and couldn’t do it to a bunch of techs who happened down the wrong alley. “Sarda, go on ahead. I’ll be right there.”

  Scanner started toward me. “I could stay with you.”

  “Just do what I say, will you?”

  “Yeah … okay. I don’t have to like it, do I?”

  Sarda herded Merete around a corner and sternly called, “Speed is imperative, Judd.”

  “Right behind ya, Points.”

  When they were nothing but footsteps, I aimed my phaser and fired. The techs crumpled in a heap. “Sorry, guys.” At least they wouldn’t be alerting anyone about us for a few minutes. I jogged on down the corridor.

  “Phasers down!”

  The deep, gruff order came from around the corner, instantly followed by sounds of fighting. Sheer numb panic drove me on faster, and I skidded headlong into a burly security guard Sarda had just thrown aside. I sidestepped and knocked his phaser from his hand, but he scrambled up and dove at my knees. Before going down I caught a horrible glimpse of my team tangled with at least five more guards.

  My shoulder slammed to the deck under the guard’s weight. Somehow I kept hold of my phaser as he was grabbing for it. With a grunt I flung it hard, and sent it sliding down the corridor. I turned into the fight, grappling with the guard’s helmet. I found its edges, clutched, and twisted. Inside the faceplate his features gathered in a grimace of anger and pain, but he kept his arms locked around my shoulders. Behind him flew arms and helmets, shoulders and phasers. I thought I saw two guards go down under Sarda’s Vulcan pinch, and I definitely saw Scanner crash into a bulkhead. Merete disappeared behind my opponent’s raised visor and drew my attention back to home plate. All I had going for me was leverage, while he had raw muscle and weight. I squeezed my legs up under him, making my body into a knot, then used the floor beneath me as a brace. More fear than power gathered in my legs. Like a coiled spring my body unfolded and the guard’s grip broke. He hurtled backward into the corridor wall.

  Something leaped over me. Merete.

  By the time I rolled to my knees she had reached the guard’s phaser, snatched it up, and drew it on him. I stumbled toward her. “Merete, don’t fire!”

  Red-orange shafts streaked toward the guard, engulfing him in a sickly yellow annihilation. He screamed and writhed, but in seconds only the scream remained. Then it too echoed away.

  Horror whitened Merete’s face.

  The other guards spun around in surprise, and Sarda and Scanner moved in. With phaser stun and Vulcan pinch, they cluttered the deck with security.

  Merete stared at the grisly empty air before her, and at the guard’s phaser as it lay warm in her hand. Her fingers began trembling. The phaser wobbled and fell. I caught it before it hit the deck.

  “Why …” she gasped. “Why was it … set on kill …?”

  “Merete, you didn’t know. It’s all right. It’s not your fault.”

  “I killed him….” She sank to her knees despite my effort to keep her up.

  Scanner limped to us and knelt beside her. “They’re out to get us, Doc. Like Piper says, it ain’t your fault.”

  “I killed.” Now her whole body shook, tremors wracking through her, bone-deep.

  “Get her up,” I said, forcing down empathy. Sharing Merete’s pain, a pain that surprised me, could only cripple me now. Both Scanner and Sarda had to help her move down the corridor, where we found a cramped two-person service lift and squeezed into it.

  “Destination?” the computer requested.

  “Hangar deck, emergency priority.” I told it as I lowered my defenses long enough to brush short platinum strands out of Merete’s swelling eyes.

  “Thank you.”

  I didn’t know if it would give us emergency priority without authorization, but the gratifying speed soon proved my guess right. Computers made wonderful monkeys if you asked the right question.

  “Merete,” I ventured softly, daring to interrupt the torture in her eyes with hope of venting it, “it’s all right. You couldn’t have known their phasers were set on kill. Do you hear me?”

  Scanner nodded. “It scares the curl right outa my hair that they’d break regulations like that.”

  I took Merete’s face in my hands, forcing her to look up. Her eyes were apple green, making a crescent of tear moisture appear verdant. “Do you hear me?”

  She shivered. “How can I explain to a mother and father,” she began painfully, “that I killed their son? There was no reason…. How can I tell those he loved? He was only doing his job … following orders …”

  Instead of excellent healing words, I had nothing adequate to say at all. How could I help her? Her feelings were only fair toward the dead security guard, only right awarenesses at the senseless taking of a life. Should I tell her to whoop in victory instead of grieving? How could I tell her the pain was more unjust for her to feel than if we could inflict it on Rittenhouse, who had ordered those phasers set on kill—an unforgivable rupture of Fleet policy.

  I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her, and that comprised my whole gift for solace. She murmured, “They won’t even have a body to cremate … I’m a doctor … a doctor …” She said it as though her special calling should have prevented the phaser from firing. The guard had felt little pain—only the momentary shock of dissolution, and perhaps a brief searing sensation—but Merete felt all the pain for him. Over and over again as I felt the waves of it pass through her body and into mine. I hoped I could give as much strength as I received of her sorrow. Her pain was difficult to accept through my anger toward Rittenhouse, and for her sake I nulled the urge to slap regret from my friend at her expense. Revulsion for taking life, even one’s own life, had to come second to some things—yes … I believed that. Today I would begin living it.

  The lift door breathed open, dragging us back to the immediate danger, and the four of us piled out at a dead run for the hangar deck. For the first several strides I pulled Merete along, soon to realize she accepted the need to run and was motivating herself. That too could be a kind of therapy. Her tears were dry by the time the hangar deck access doors opened. Luckily Rittenhouse hadn’t thought to depressurize the deck. Good—that showed he didn’t expect us to escape this way, and right now I’d buy advantages by the ounce from a street vendor if I found one.

  Wooden Shoe appeared undisturbed. Its two-person capacity scrambled through my mind as we ran toward it to the echo of four pairs of boots. Could we all fit inside? Instantly I knew such cramming was impossible. Three, maybe, but never four. I scanned the hangar bay and spied the closed hangars on the port side, ideas forming. “Scanner! Can you pilot?”

  “Twist my arm. I’ll take a shot at it.”

  “He’ll never get the chance.” A chilling voice, deep and gently sinister, slimed around Wooden Shoe. We spun, and faced phasers. That voice would be forever burned into my memory. “Sorry to disappoint you, Miss Piper,” Rittenhouse said, charming but serious. No typical sneer accompanied his victory. Only a greyness of complication discolored his confident blue eyes and drew the cottony brows more closely together.

  I grabbed Scanner’s arm, yanked him hard to me and whispered a fast order into his ear—only a few words before Rittenhouse snapped, “Break it up! Move aside. You, all of you, move off.” The two guards behind him kept aim on my friends as we put a few steps of white deck space between us. “You’re bright, Piper,” the Vice-Admiral said. “I’d prefer to have you on my team. You’d have been a stron
g asset. As it is, I can’t chance letting you go. You’re no longer just a hindrance to me. You’ve become a serious hazard.”

  “And you’re a menace,” I told him, still running on the fuel of anathema. As angry at myself as at him, I balled my fists at my own predictability. Kirk wouldn’t do something this expected. I would have to learn to be unpredictable too, instead of applauding myself for moving along to the next easiest thing and assuming nobody else would think of it. The intricate blue glare on me now proved what experience could do.

  “I don’t have time to discuss ideology with you,” he said, “though I’ll bet you’re handy at it.”

  “I guess we’ll never know, sir.” I filled my hand with Sarda’s communicator and pulled it out of my pocket. “You must be a betting man, Vice-Admiral, or you’d never have tried anything so speculative.”

  “You have a point, of course. Or are you going to fire on me with a communicator?”

  My voice turned hoarse. “Don’t bet against it. I’m wondering if you’re willing to risk your venture on the bet that you could phaser me down before I could close my thumb on this button. It’s keyed into the selfdestruct mode of this attack sled. I don’t have to describe the explosion to you, or the chain reaction through Pompeii, do I?”

  A curtain of mild surprise came over him as his gaze dropped to my bone-white hand and the communicator in it. I doubted I could push the button at all, so frozen were my fingers, but I had to convince him otherwise. “We’re getting off this ship, sir. I’m sorry, because I think you really believe your system would improve the galaxy for its peoples and you think you can keep the system pure, but—I’m not bluffing, damn it! I see what you’re thinking! I’ll do this, Vice-Admiral, I’ll kill us all right here if I have to. Don’t push me. I’m too young and scared and my thumb’s shaking on this button.”

  My tone chilled even me with its finality. Rittenhouse saw it, felt it too. I longed for Vulcan telepathic power as his subdued eyes narrowed and his mind clicked and whirred just beyond reach of my intuitions. Soon the mysterious dam broke and he said, “You would, wouldn’t you? Yes. All right, Lieutenant, I won’t call your bluff. Go ahead. Get in your little insect and fly away,” he said, nearly whispering, “and we’ll blow you out of space.”

  “Scanner,” I barked. Behind me footsteps shuffled and faded in a tapping run toward the hangars. In a moment a one-man Tycho fighter taxied into launch position. I never took my eyes off Rittenhouse. “Merete, get in with Scanner. Tell him to stay on the Arco’s tail no matter what.”

  I felt her nod, though I didn’t look, and heard the Tycho fighter creak as she boarded. Sarda, reading my mind—figuratively speaking—had boarded Wooden Shoe and powered her up.

  “Go on, Piper,” Rittenhouse urged in a tone without the taunting I might have expected, free of the smugness I’d always imagined in men with Caesar dreams. This polished mask had hidden his intentions and given him the time he needed for his creeping cancer to appear harmless.

  I backed up slowly. Climbing into Wooden Shoe proved difficult while keeping a wary eye on Rittenhouse and his men, but once inside I couldn’t be hurt by hand phaser through Wooden Shoe’s hull. I stumbled into the seat beside Sarda.

  “The Vice-Admiral and his men are leaving the hangar bay,” he told me while the sled’s engine whined behind us.

  “Depressurize,” I said, but he was already threading that order through to the bay controls.

  “Of course, he will fire on us as soon as we clear the destroyer. You recall that Mr. Scott’s sabotage still leaves Rittenhouse with a few phaser shots before the system overloads.”

  “I don’t intend to give him the chance to fire on us. There are advantages to being small. I only hope Scanner can stay with me.”

  “I have plotted and laid-in the most direct trajectory away from the destroyer. It is the most logical escape path.”

  “Yeah … that’s why we’re not going that way.”

  “This ship has no shielding. We cannot succeed.”

  I hit him with a glare as potent as a physical slap. “Don’t ever say that to me.”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Please.”

  “You may pilot with more accuracy if you put the communicator down now.”

  “Oh … right.”

  The controls were cool beneath my fingers. The sled rose and hovered, rocking slightly on its underbelly thrusters. Behind us the smaller Tycho also floated just to one side, so it wouldn’t be scorched by our rear thrusters’ exhaust. In my aft viewer buoyed the Tycho’s name: Polliwog. Scanner was ready.

  “Okay,” I whispered as I engaged thrusters and the great black funnel of space opened before me. “Here’s to us.”

  Chapter Eight

  ON PROXIMA WE had twelve-gilled sharks with leopard-mottled skins so iridescent they rippled in the water like mother-of-pearl. All the lakes and oceans on Proxima glowed green in the light of our opal sun, and those sharks, echoes of the megalons from Earth’s prehistory, roamed our brackish waters in peace and silence. Along their streamlined bodies skimmed remorae, delicate suction fish endlessly vacuuming their hosts’ skin, taking nourishment and returning freedom from parasites.

  I had no such favors for Pompeii. But the remorae provided me with a plan. The instant Wooden Shoe cleared the destroyer’s hull, I vectored back along the skin of the ship that moments ago had been our prison, and steered a deathly close course along the hull. Behind us, Scanner hadn’t expected such a sudden hairpin turn and lost me for a moment, but soon reappeared in my aft viewer.

  “Stay with me, Scanner, tightly.”

  “I got the idea now,” squawked the com.

  There wasn’t time to respond. Pompeii’s grey-white hull spread before me, much bigger than I’d expected, yet curved enough to make steering dangerous as I maneuvered at breakneck speed along the engineering hull. Star Fleet code lettering, each letter taller than our entire ship, rolled away beneath us, dizzying me. I blinked dribbling sweat out of my eyes and leaned into my task. Viewports blinked by us, faster and faster. I increased speed.

  “Piper!”

  Sarda’s warning magnified my error. A nacelle strut loomed before us. I cranked the sled hard over, just missing the main wall of the nacelle. Bamp—our aft fin grated on exterior fibercoil.

  “Too close,” I rasped. I fought for control of the rocking sled. Sarda soon gave up trying to help and gripped his arm rests in helpless tension. Polliwog swayed and bobbed, careening after us despite the transsonic velocity and the smack we’d taken.

  Now Pompeii’s hull plates blurred into a single curving grey landscape marked only by flashes of space lights and utility ports. Our engines shrieked as I forced Wooden Shoe into impossible twists along the underside of engineering, skimming the sensor dish in a concave arch and surfacing directly on the starboard phaser pod. Without even taking a breath or reducing speed I punched our photon sling control and fired two blue bulbs straight into their weapon pod.

  Sparks and light spattered all around us, but we were gone. Wooden Shoe shuddered into a somersault, belly-up, and pivoted backward in a mutation of the Ringgold’s Pirouette I’d learned from Kirk. The retroflexion pushed us up against our safety harnesses. Polliwog writhed into a swerve behind us. Somehow Scanner found us through the ion smoke now billowing from the destroyer’s phaser pod. Ignoring the piloting computer, I steered Wooden Shoe straight out into space, staying inside the cone of space made safe by my destroying that phaser port. By the time Rittenhouse found us and recalibrated another phaser, we’d be out of range. (I hoped.)

  “Engage full power,” I said, my voice cracking. “Drop the solar wings. We can draw energy from that binary system at zero-mark-seven-four.”

  A whirring sound followed by a click told me Sarda had done it and our wings were down, replacing the energy we’d lost with that photon shot.

  “We have full power,” he said.

  “Accelerate to point-eighty light speed.�
�

  The engines’ stridor increased.

  “Warp point-eight,” Sarda confirmed.

  Only after seeing that Polliwog still clung to our tail did I breathe freely again. Then I tensed and looked again. “When Scanner stays close, he doesn’t fool around. I swear he’s not even two meters back! Tell him he can fall off a few lengths.”

  “Impossible. When we hit the strut our communications packet shook loose.”

  “Try to pull it in with the service claw. I’ll set a course for Star Empire.”

  “We are not returning to Enterprise as ordered?”

  “Rittenhouse expects us to head for Enterprise.”

  He seemed to understand.

  He worked silently with the service claw for several minutes as I watched the energy residue flare and die at Pompeii’s starboard pod. They had locked down the leak, but hadn’t been able to turn fast enough to fire on us with another pod, and we were away, rocketing toward the dreadnought once again.

  Suddenly there was nothing for me to do. I coiled my arms around myself as a shudder ran through me. Nothing to do but cross space.

  “Communications reestablished,” Sarda informed me as he rebuckled his harness and settled in. “However, our beam is weak enough that Rittenhouse is blocking us from contacting Enterprise.”

  “Can we talk to Scanner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we talk to the Star Empire?”

  “Checking. Negative … until we are much nearer.”

  I punched the com. “Scanner, this is your front end speaking. Wanna back off a centimeter or two?”

  “Hey, when Judd Sandage follers orders, he don’t fool around.”

  “Fall back. My nerves are shot as it is.”

  “Backing off.”

  “How’s Merete?”

  “Lady Her Honor Specialist First Class Doctor AndrusTaurus is jes’ peachy.”

  “Good. Thanks, Scanner. Follow and stand by.”