Death Count

by L. A. Graf

  “It wasn’t nothing.”

  Chekov turned at Sulu’s tone of gentle surprise. “What did they gain?” he demanded. “They didn’t even get the damned nacelles blown free! Now, their ship might be irreparable, over one hundred of their crew are dead—my God! Core heat burned them out of existence before they even got close enough to see the lock! Tell me what you think they gained!”

  Uhura dropped a hand to Sulu’s arm when the helmsman opened his mouth to protest. The worried crease between her brows struck Chekov with a guilt almost strong enough to override his anger. “Would you rather they never tried?” she asked him, head cocked. “Believing there might still be people in there, would you rather they had taken the safe route and waited to prepare a shuttle?”

  “I would rather they hadn’t died at all.” Even as he said it, he knew it was stupid.

  Neither of the others laughed, though. Sulu only ducked his head in quiet sympathy, and Uhura asked, “What if they’d jettisoned the nacelles and saved those people? Your friend still would have died, wouldn’t he?”

  Being that close to an engine in flux? Undoubtedly. Chekov nodded.

  “And would that have made a difference? Would you feel any better knowing he’d managed to accomplish something by what he did?”

  Chekov stared at her, all sorts of conflicting answers roiling about inside him. It was the pointlessness, yes; the fearful suddenness, too. Underneath all that, though, he was tortured with a fear of dying badly, of staying on in a career where his own life might end just as cheaply.

  He opened his mouth, not sure what answer he was willing to give, just as darkness gripped the little room, and the song of the shuttle’s warp engines died.

  “Oh, what now?” Sulu groaned.

  As if in answer, a clap of brittle thunder pealed through the rear of the shuttle, kicking the little ship to its heart and slamming them all to the floor.

  “Isn’t there anything I could do to help?”

  “No, Mr. Kelly.” Kirk glanced at the auditor, waiting patiently near the rear of the turbolift. “I appreciate your offer, but you’d really do best to keep out of the way.” You also shouldn’t follow me up to the bridge, he didn’t add. But I don’t know where else to send you.

  Kirk had spent the morning filling in for Chekov as security chief, unwilling to leave a crew of ensigns in charge of catching the saboteur while their lieutenant had his shoulder reconstructed. It was a job the captain had hoped would be well over by now. Instead, one frustrating blind alley had followed another, and he’d finally had to leave Deck Seven for the bridge. At least there, he could make things happen, get things done.

  “I just know I have a lot to be grateful for,” Kelly volunteered as the turbolift began its vertical climb for the command center. “If Lieutenant Chekov hadn’t shown up when he did, that saboteur would have killed me—he nearly killed the lieutenant. I just want you to know I appreciate that.”

  Frustration eased a little of its iron grip. Apparently, being a Federation auditor didn’t mean you’d had all of your humanity beaten out of you, after all. “Thank you, Mr. Kelly.” Kirk nodded somewhat graciously, but still couldn’t bring himself to smile. “Why don’t you see if the relocation teams need help on Deck Three? We’ve got a lot of crew needing new cabin assignments.” And it seemed the sort of thing an auditor just might be able to streamline and still stay out of trouble.

  Kelly flashed a boyish grin. “Thank you, Captain.” He stepped back against the rear bulkhead as the turbolift doors flashed open. “I’ll do that.”

  Kirk hoped someone would be on Deck Three to appreciate Kelly’s help. “Mr. Bhutto,” he called, stepping clear of the turbolift and trotting down the steps. “Any sign of our Orion friends?”

  Bhutto glanced up from her navigation panel, shaking her head. “No, sir. No ships detected within sensor range.”

  Kirk pursed his lips. “Then they’re slower than I thought.” He paused by the command chair, studying the empty viewscreen as though his eyes might detect enemy approach before sensors could. “Spock, have we had any luck using the ship’s internal systems to find our saboteur?”

  “Negative, Captain.” Spock straightened from his science station, rotating his chair to meet Kirk halfway when the captain turned to face him. “I suspect the saboteur has taken refuge in an area of enhanced heat flow on the ship, to conceal his own physiological temperature from our instruments.”

  Kirk started to lower himself into the command chair, then paused and cocked a look at Scott. “Does that mean he’s hiding near the warp engines?”

  The engineer rocked back in his seat, arms crossed and chin high. “Captain, we’ve searched every nook and cranny in engineering—for bombs and for saboteurs.” He shook his head firmly. “I can guarantee you, he’s not in my engine room.”

  “The amount of heat flow needed to obscure the ten-degree difference between human and Orion body temperatures need not be large, Captain.” Spock lifted one eyebrow in his universal expression of thought. “Any unit of shipboard equipment that consumes a significant amount of power—for example, one of my sensor arrays—would produce enough Joule energy to accomplish the objective.”

  Sometimes, sorting through Spock’s explanations was almost as challenging as the problem at hand. “So,” Kirk paraphrased, settling into his chair, “he could be hiding anywhere on the ship.” At Spock’s nod, the captain dropped his chin into his hand, considering. “But wherever he is, he’s near some power source?”

  “That is what I would surmise.”

  That was something, then. Kirk rapped the intercom button with the side of his hand. “Kirk to security.”

  “Security. Lemieux here.”

  “Ensign Lemieux, focus your search teams on all ship sectors whose power consumption exceeds—” He glanced at Spock, throwing his hands wide for suggestions.

  “Fifteen kilojoules,” the Vulcan supplied.

  “—fifteen kilojoules,” Kirk went on, nodding his thanks to the science officer. “Contact engineering for specific equipment locations.”

  “Aye-aye, sir. Lemieux out.”

  “Captain!” The communications officer’s voice jerked Kirk around in his seat. “I’ve lost our tightbeam contact with the Hawking.”

  Kirk’s hands tightened on the arms of his chair. “Is the signal being jammed by an Orion ship?” he asked.

  The young lieutenant flicked anxious eyes across his boards, calling up readings with quick touches of his hands. “No, sir. The cause appears to be equipment failure on their end.” He lifted worried eyes to Kirk. “It could just be a malfunction, sir.”

  “It could be, Ensign.” Kirk pushed to his feet, suddenly unable to stay passively seated. “But considering how resourceful our saboteur is, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Scotty—” He roamed the edge of the railing until he could lean across to his engineer. “Can we engage warp drive yet?”

  “No, sir.” The engineer was emphatic. “We haven’t even got closure on the hull breach yet, much less reinforced it for warp stress.”

  “Well, how about impulse drive? How fast can we travel?”

  Scott’s brow knotted with concern, and Kirk knew the engineer could read his captain’s intentions as clearly as if Kirk had shouted them. “With incomplete shielding around the breach,” Scott said, “we’re limited to about 0.1 light speed. Any faster than that, and she’ll take damage from micrometeorite impacts, maybe even ruin what we’ve got of the repair.”

  Oh point one. Kirk drummed his hands against the railing, calculating Scott’s projected velocity against how long the Hawking had been gone. “Eighty-seven minutes before we could rendezvous,” he said aloud. He pushed off from the rail just to turn and lean back against it. “Dammit, that’s too long. If the Orions haven’t gotten here by now, something must have distracted them.” He glared at the empty viewscreen, stomach roiling. “And I have a very bad feeling I know what that something is.”

  Chapter Fourteen


  “WHAT WAS that?” Uhura’s voice crept out of the darkness, quiet with dismay. Beyond the sound of her voice, Sulu could hear the distant hiss of gas exploding out of a ruptured line.

  “It sounded like an explosion.” The helmsman kicked himself out of the cramped space between his chair and the instrument panel, already feeling the bone-deep shiver that meant they had fallen back into normal space. A quick glance at the warp-field monitor showed him the strobing red glare of failure lights. “Oh, God, not the magnetic containment housing—”

  “Are we going to lose control of the core?” Chekov asked.

  “I don’t know.” Sulu found the emergency light switch and slammed a hand down on it with a lot more force than it needed. The dim glow of self-powered spotlights showed Uhura already leaning over the communications panel while Chekov doggedly tried to free his loosened jacket from an instrument panel it had tangled with. “I’ll have to go back and look at it.”

  “I’ll go.” The security officer tore the cloth loose with a sudden fierce jerk and rolled to his feet.

  “No, you won’t.” Sulu grabbed Chekov’s good arm to stop him. “You need two arms to get down the access tube—”

  “I can manage—”

  “We’ve lost subspace radio capability.” Uhura broke into their argument without ceremony, looking up from her board with a frown. “I’ve activated the emergency distress beacon, but even at light speed, the Enterprise won’t receive our signal for another hour.”

  Sulu cursed and thrust Chekov into the pilot’s seat. “Our impulse engines should still be functional. Reverse our course—get us back to the Enterprise at maximum impulse velocity.”

  For once, Chekov didn’t argue, merely punching commands into the helm computer with single-handed determination. Sulu spun past Uhura and ran for the back end of the shuttle.

  Ice-cold mist met him when he ducked out of the cockpit, rising from crystal rivulets of liquid nitrogen spreading across the shuttle’s floor. Sulu felt his boots stiffen as he sprinted through the superchilled fluid, occasional droplets splashing up to burn through the cloth of his trousers. Space is about two hundred degrees colder than that, his mind reminded him bleakly. He gritted his teeth and tried not to think about it.

  The nitrogen fog cleared away at the back of the passenger bay, burned off by darker curls of smoke snaking through the opened emergency locker in the rear bulkhead. Sulu skidded to a stop, staring at Muav Haslev. The Andorian had somehow worked himself free of his wrist restraints and was already sliding into one of the shuttle’s orange-and-gray environmental suits.

  “About time you got here,” Haslev complained, then yelped in alarm when Sulu shoved him aside and yanked open the door to the engine compartment. More nitrogen fog billowed out, carrying the smell of scorched metal with it. “Hey, don’t do that! If the radiation shielding is ruined, we could die!”

  “Shut up.” Sulu dove into the narrow access tube leading back to their miniature warp core, coughing at the smell of burnt metal and melted wiring that clogged his throat. The trickle of emergency lighting showed him the dark bulk of the toroidal magnetic lens, wrapped around the warp core to focus its antimatter drive. As Sulu wriggled closer, he could see the effect of the explosion: a fist-sized hole blown through the housing’s thick outer shell, with shattered metal petaling away from the impact site. Gashes in the tunnel walls showed where the rest of the exploded metal had gone. A cascade of liquid nitrogen poured out from broken coolant lines inside the magnet, forcing him to straddle the center line of the access tunnel to avoid it.

  Sulu’s pulse hammered in his throat while he leaned forward to peer through the breach, trying to see if the core shields inside the housing had been destroyed by the blast. The dim gleam of transparent aluminum was barely visible through the silvery fog, but the phosphorescent fire on its inner surface told him it was still intact. He slumped back against the tunnel wall in relief, then cursed when something blunt and metallic smacked into his back.

  “Hey!” Chekov’s voice echoed down the tunnel from the passenger bay, sounding furious. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Getting ready to evacuate.” The tinny sound of Haslev’s reply told Sulu the Andorian had already donned his suit helmet. “I figured when I heard the phaser—”

  “Phaser? What phaser?” Chekov’s voice rang down the access tunnel. “Sulu, do you see a phaser inside there?”

  “I think I just found it.” Sulu wriggled around to tug at the object that had poked him. Tape tore away from the corrugated metal wall and the familiar shape of a phaser pistol fell into his hand. Under a crystal film of ice, its power indicator was dead black. Sulu tucked it into the belt of his jacket and crawled back out to the passenger bay.

  He emerged to find Uhura and Chekov staring at him through the mist with identical expressions of fierce concern. “Don’t worry,” he said at once. “The shielding’s still intact. There’s no radiation leaking out.”

  The fine lines around Uhura’s eyes smoothed out with her sigh of relief, but Chekov’s worried frown didn’t fade. “What about the containment housing?” he asked.

  Sulu shook his head, tossing the phaser at him. “The saboteur set this to blow a hole right through it. We’ve lost all the coolant in the torus. The magnetic field strength is probably decaying already.” He closed the door to the access tunnel, wishing he could shut away the lurking danger behind it just as easily. “It’s only a matter of time before the warp field goes out of control.” His gaze met Chekov’s through the filmy mist, seeing the grim knowledge darkening the other man’s eyes. “I don’t think we can make it back to the Enterprise in time. We’re going to have to evacuate.”

  “Well, I’m ready.” Haslev shrunk back a step when Chekov swung around to glare at him. “What’s the matter with you now?”

  “Did it even occur to you to call us when you heard that phaser?” the Russian demanded hotly. “We could have disarmed it before it damaged the housing!”

  Haslev grimaced. “And then continued with our voyage to Sigma One? No, thank you. I’m much happier with the situation as it stands.”

  “We’ll see how happy you are if the explosion catches us before we get outside the blast radius.” Sulu ignored the alien’s squeak of dismay, shouldering past him toward the opened emergency locker. Uhura was already there, sorting through the environmental suits stored inside. “How did you get free anyway?”

  The Andorian’s voice turned sulky. “It doesn’t take an engineering genius to figure out the principles behind a mechanical lock,” he pointed out. “Engineering geniuses can just do it a lot faster than other people.”

  Chekov snorted in disgust. “So can common criminals.”

  “What I can’t figure out,” Sulu said, waiting for Uhura to hand one of the orange-and-gray suits out to him, “is how the saboteur knew we were going to take this shuttle.”

  “I don’t think he did,” Chekov said grimly. “I think he was trying to sabotage the Enterprise. For all we know, he may have rigged every shuttle in the bay.” The security officer strode across the mist-filled aisle to join them. “A containment field breach in a core this size would be enough to take out the entire ship if it blew inside the hangar.”

  “We’ve got to get back to the Enterprise right away.” Sulu glanced down at the communications officer, puzzled by her sudden stillness. “Uhura, what’s the matter?”

  “This.” Uhura stepped out of the locker, face numb and dark eyes shadowed with dismay. She held out her hand to show Sulu the shard of bright-edged metal cupped in her dark palm.

  “That looks like shrapnel from the containment housing.” His stomach lurched with dread as he guessed what must be wrong. Behind him, he heard Chekov curse in soft, vehement Russian. “Oh, God. It didn’t explode into the suit locker, did it?”

  “It must have. I’ve found some of it embedded in every suit so far.” Uhura’s fingers curled around the metal fragment, tightening recklessly around i
ts arrow-sharp edges. “As far as I can tell, not a single one of them is space-worthy.”

  Chekov reached past Uhura to jerk one of the buried suits off its storage rack. Jagged slivers of metal shook loose from the tattered fabric, shattering around his feet in a nitrogen-cooled shower. He slung the suit across the aisle, diving in for another. “Pull them all out!”

  Discarding her own suit, Uhura turned to obey while Sulu pushed Haslev back from the locker to make more room. “What are you doing?” the Andorian asked Chekov.

  “The blast can’t have destroyed everything.” The lieutenant twisted free an undamaged sleeve and tossed it onto the seat behind him. “We can take pieces from all the different suits to make up a few good whole ones.” He threw another ruined piece aside. “You’ve got two hands—get in here and help us!”

  Pieces tumbled into unsteady piles on the deck as they sorted, the heap of shrapnel-littered wrecks rising higher than Chekov cared to think about. Still, he couldn’t help keeping mental tally of every unscarred sleeve and helmet, and despair sank deeper and deeper into his heart with every useless suit discarded. Before Uhura even crouched among the parts to count them out, Chekov knew they had only five sleeves, two trouser arrangements, eight breastplates and ten helmets to choose from.

  The communications officer looked up from her counting, eyes dark and tragic. “There’s only enough here for two suits.”

  “Three,” Chekov corrected her. He couldn’t believe how calm and certain his voice sounded. “Counting Haslev’s.”

  Sulu glanced darkly at the Andorian fidgeting by the airlock. “So what do we do now?”

  Chekov hefted a suit torso and shoved it into Sulu’s arms. “You suit up and get out.” When the helmsman turned to stare at him, Chekov bent to pass a breastplate to Uhura so he wouldn’t have to look at his friend.