Death Count

by L. A. Graf

  “Aye, sir!”

  Phaser fire slashed across the viewscreen, and another impact rocked the bridge. Kirk almost expected the flooring to buckle from the blast.

  “They’re focusing their shots on the hull breach, sir,” the engineering lieutenant reported grimly. “We’re losing shield integrity there.”

  “Bhutto!” Kirk leapt forward to slap the back of the navigator’s chair. “Swing the ship around! Keep that area out of the Orions’ line of fire. Spock—” The science officer was already bent over his sensors. “Any sign of that second Orion ship?”

  The Vulcan’s eyes were the only thing that moved while he studied his screens. “Sensors detect a very distant warp trace in sector four fifty-nine, Captain.” He glanced aside to Kirk. “Either the Mecufi, or the unidentified sensor ghost we noted earlier. In either case, the reading shows no signs of approaching us.”

  “Keep an eye on it.” Kirk’s hands clenched rhythmically at his sides. “They could be waiting in reserve, hoping to join the battle when we don’t expect them.” He couldn’t help shooting a keen glance back at the viewscreen, asking Goldstein, “Any luck with that contact, Ensign?”

  “Coming through now, sir. I’ll inset it on the main screen.”

  A small block of light and color exploded in the lower right-hand corner of the starfield. Kirk recognized the thick jade features and woven beard of Umyfymu’s commander, his image glaringly backlit by a host of electrical fires. The Orion’s bejeweled teeth looked almost purple in the harsh lighting. “I presume you called to surrender, f’deraxt’la.”

  Kirk tightened his grip on the back of his command chair. “I called to remind you that firing on a Starfleet vessel is an act of war. The Federation will not tolerate Orion aggression against a defenseless starship—”

  “Defenseless!” The Orion’s grunt of laughter made his teethwork flash. “Not exactly defenseless,” he snarled, slamming a smoking panel with one hand. “Besides, little mammal, this is not an act of war—this is an act of punishment.”

  Kirk drew back, disgusted. “Punishment for what?”

  “You received stolen military technology from an agent of the Orion government! In Orion penal codes, such possession is classed as piracy.” The commander twisted his mouth into a grimace and leaned closer to the screen. “What does your government do to pirate ships, f’deraxt’la?”

  Kirk scowled. “Mostly, we chase them back across the Orion border.”

  “Really?” The Orion sounded genuinely surprised. “Well, we blow them up.” He jerked his attention aside, ears pulling back in what could only be Orion pleasure when a growl of excitement swelled from somewhere off-screen. “I understand your screens are failing across the spot of damaged hull,” he remarked, his smile growing as he turned back to Kirk. “Are you sure you don’t want to surrender?”

  Kirk bit off the first thing he thought to say, and made a chopping gesture behind his back at Goldstein. “Get him off my screen.”

  The Orion’s image shattered and dispersed to blend with the stars again.

  Spinning his empty command chair to face him, Kirk vented some of his frustration by slapping a hand on the intercom button. “Scotty.”

  “Engineering, Scott here.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do to shore up the screens across that breach?” On the screen, the Umyfymu swept around to begin another approach.

  As if he could see what faced Kirk so clearly, Scott said, “Not with the Orions pounding away at it, Captain.”

  Damn.

  “I’ve tried to keep the breach turned away, sir.” Bhutto kept her attention tight on her panel, plotting against the Orions’ position on the astrogator even as she spoke. “They move a lot faster than we do right now.”

  Kirk nodded, angry at himself for taking his frustrations out on his crew. “I know.” He dropped into the command chair and let momentum turn it to face the front of the bridge. “Ensign Mullen—how much power can we shunt to starboard phasers?”

  The ensign flicked a glance at his boards, lifting his eyebrows with a shrug. “As much as you want, sir. We’ve taken no damage in any of our phaser banks.”

  Kirk actually let himself smile. “Good.” He thumbed the intercom switch again. “Scotty, I want all the power you can spare directed to the starboard phasers.”

  “Whatever you say, sir.”

  “Ensign Mullen, cancel all commands to the starboard banks from your console—return fire with port phasers only.”

  Mullen nodded shortly, a thin frown of incomprehension between his eyes, but he did as he was told. “Starboard banks locked out, sir. Portside ready to go.”

  Kirk swung to face behind him. Spock was already waiting, hands in lap, for his commands. “Mr. Spock, please program our starboard phasers for continuous wide-beam emission. Phase-shift their frequency to depolarize the Orion phaser strikes, and make sure you cover the area above the starboard phaser banks as well as the hull breach.”

  Spock offered his captain a look of dry reproach. “This is standard procedure when using phasers as a depolarizing defense system, Captain.”

  “I know, Spock, but it’s been a while since we tried this trick.” He quirked one corner of his mouth into a wry little grin. “I just wanted to make sure you remembered.”

  Spock, as expected, didn’t seem amused.

  A tense buzzing from communications caught Kirk’s attention even as Spock turned to his panel. “Mr. Goldstein?” He twisted an alarmed look over one shoulder. “Problems?”

  “Yes, sir—” Goldstein looked up with one hand to his earpiece, blue eyes bleak and uncertain. “We’ve just lost two of the suit locator signals, sir. We’re no longer in contact with the shuttle crew.”

  Alone on board the Hawking, Chekov shouted a string of pungent oaths, kicking a helmet in frustration after ten wasted minutes of trying to get out of his sling one-handed.

  The strap around his neck was twisted into a constricting rope by the time he fell into one of the empty passenger seats. McCoy, damn him, had been smarter than Chekov gave him credit for. Without being obvious, he’d strapped on Chekov’s sling so that it couldn’t be undone without a second hand. A belt across his chest pinned his arm to his side; he couldn’t reach the buckle to loosen that band, and he couldn’t lift off the neck strap unless he could raise his arm. Desperate fear burned through him again, and he kicked the seat in front of him for lack of anything more constructive to do.

  If he hadn’t given Sulu his phaser, he could have tried to burn through the chest strap with a low heat setting. As it was, he didn’t even have so much as a dinner knife with which to attack the webbing. Even the twists of shrapnel littered among the environmental suits were too brittle with nitrogen-cold to be useful. If only—

  He stopped, turning in his seat to frown at the wreck behind him. Silver-white pools of liquid nitrogen still drizzled from behind the environmental suit compartment. It boiled away with a secret hiss, kissing a hollow trail of frost along the deck where it passed. Reaching out with one foot, Chekov stepped gently on one of the ice-whitened scraps of metal, and it splintered into dust beneath his boot.

  True hope speared through him for the first time since the explosion. He bounded across the aisle to snatch up his jacket and loop it around his hand. It made an awkward bundle, but he could move inside it well enough to fumble a piece of shrapnel off the floor without freeze-burning his fingers. Jacket fabric crackled as it fought to equalize temperatures with the metal, and Chekov tried not to think about how quickly the cold would eat through to him as he squatted beside the cabinet door to scoop up a thin puddle of nitrogen.

  Contact with his body heat evaporated the liquid faster than it could run down the chest strap’s width. Glossy ice still hissed along the nylon fibers, though, and the ephemeral touch of nitrogen on his skin sliced across his nerves like a painless knife. A second meager dousing froze a band wide enough to form its own stress fracture; he barely had to twist the strap to
shatter the frozen fibers.

  Much as he appreciated the need for pampering his arm just now, Chekov still felt better once he’d struggled the sling over his head. Being strapped down made him feel too much like an invalid, too helpless in a situation already out of his control. He carefully rotated his shoulder joint while he scooted suit pieces around with his foot. He’d lied to Sulu, a little, at least; he could move the arm well enough, but it was weak and wouldn’t last long. The muscle across the back of his shoulder burned with fatigue after hefting nothing heavier than one of the intact suit torsos. So perhaps his justification had been only half a lie. After all, he probably wouldn’t be able to lift his arm at all by the time he’d cannibalized even one useful environmental suit.

  The torso he squirmed into was scarred across the front, a finger-deep gouge angling from shoulder to hip while still managing to miss the suit’s more vital functions. He felt comforted by the shell’s bulky weight, almost believing he could leave this floating deathtrap if he had to, maintain a minimal atmosphere, possibly even survive. Fitting the one good sleeve onto the body of the suit, he stayed gloveless long enough to kneel in the bottom of the locker and search for a repair kit not blown apart by the explosion.

  He couldn’t find one.

  The alloy patches from countless suit repair kits peppered the floor; two-part sealant pooled among them and was already hardening where both parts had run together. Smoothing out a tear between unsteady fingers, he scooped up a gobbet of sealant and smeared it thickly on the suit trousers laid out beside him. It took two patches to cover the tear, and another fingerful of sealant to fix it all into place. The next hole was even bigger, though, and he was only halfway down its length before the puddles of sealant on the floor had thickened beyond the point where he could scrape them up. Then he had to crawl away from the cramped workspace to scrub his hand clean on the remnants of his sling. He didn’t have enough sealant to finish fixing even one environmental suit; the last thing he needed was to glue his fingers together, as well.

  A shriek of sirens tore past him from the front of the ship. Jerking upright, fear bolting through him like lightning, he listened to the computer’s dispassionate singsong without being able to breathe. “Core temperature one thousand seven hundred degrees Centigrade. Containment decay irreversible; core breach imminent. Estimated time to breach: twenty-three minutes forty-three seconds.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  SULU SPUN AROUND, blinking as his eyes tried to adjust from interstellar space to the sudden glare of arc lights. He found himself confronting a circle of uniformed and blue-visored forms, and pressed his phaser firmly to Haslev’s helmet. “If you try to beam us away, I’ll shoot him,” he warned through his external suit communicator.

  A ripple of ironic laughter answered him instead of the Orion growls he expected. “Feel free to do so,” a dry voice said. “It will save us the trouble of arresting him and taking him home for trial.”

  Sulu jerked in surprise, realizing that what he’d taken for visors were actually bright blue faces. He heard Muav Haslev’s agonized groan across the helmet channel.

  “You’re Andorians!” Sulu reached up with his free hand to unlock his helmet and tug it off his shoulders, so they could see his Starfleet collar. “Is this a Federation ship?”

  “Passenger transport Shras, currently on paramilitary assignment with the Andorian Reserve Fleet.” The nearest Andorian stepped forward, bowing with the old-fashioned courtesy of his race. He was a tall man, with a long and bony face. “I’m Captain Pov Kanin.”

  “Good.” Sulu swung toward the technician sitting behind the transporter console. “We left a Starfleet officer stranded on that shuttle out there. Beam him over at once.”

  “Please.” Uhura lifted off her own helmet, a flare of hope lighting her eyes. “If you heard our distress call, you know it’s urgent.”

  The Andorian glanced uncertainly at his captain. “Sir?”

  “Starfleet officers hold automatic command authority over all planetary reserves,” Captain Kanin told him, one antenna flexing in gentle reproof. “Of course, we will oblige the lieutenant commander’s request. Scan for the shuttle’s coordinates, and lock—”

  Sulu’s feet kicked out from under him without warning, staggering him back against the transporter chamber’s wall. He saw Uhura catch at Haslev when he stumbled onto his knees. Bulkheads groaned around them with the recoil from a photon torpedo strike, and the crew of the Shras broke into shouts of alarm; several scrambled for the exit.

  “Captain!” A nervous voice crackled across the ship’s intercom. “We’re being fired on by the Orion police cruiser Mecufi!”

  “Shields up! Take evasive action immediately!” A second thunderous blow rocked the Shras, and Pov Kanin let out a hissing curse. “How did they find us?” he demanded, turning on the gray-faced officer next to him. “I told you to plot a course that would make us look like a sensor ghost!”

  Sulu struggled to his feet, made clumsy by the rigid metallic fabric of his suit. He pushed himself off the shuddering wall toward Muav Haslev. “Take off your helmet!” he ordered, slapping at the release buttons on his shoulders. “As long as you’re using the suit ventilator, its distress signal is still going out—”

  The alien yelped in dismay and flung the helmet away. His face was ashen with distress. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I had other things on my mind.” Sulu swung around in time to see the Andorian captain stride through the doorway with his crew, obviously headed for the bridge. The helmsman’s mouth hardened with determination. “Come on. Let’s see if we can still convince them to rescue Chekov.”

  Uhura threw him a puzzled glance as the Andorian ship shuddered under a third glancing blow. “But the shields are up! There’s no way we can beam Chekov on board now.”

  “No, but we can dock and pick him up.” Sulu tossed the phaser over to her. “Here, you take this. We might still need to use it on Haslev for bargaining.”

  “You can’t do that!” Haslev’s pale antennae quivered with apprehension. “You heard what they said—they’ll let you shoot me!”

  “You’d better hope they were joking.” Sulu stepped off the transporter pad and headed for the door. Uhura prodded Haslev with the phaser, forcing him to follow.

  Outside the transporter room, one narrow corridor ran along what looked like the entire length of the ship, anchored at either end with manual access shafts instead of turbolifts. Sulu guessed the passenger transport had been modeled after a Starfleet courier: perhaps five decks high and only wide enough for two rows of cabins on its passenger decks. He pounded past silent doorways to the forward access shaft, feeling the ship shiver as it was pushed to its highest warp capability.

  “They’re trying to run away!” Uhura crowded Haslev into the access shaft, and pushed him to climb up the ladder rungs behind Sulu. “They’re going to leave the Enterprise to fight the Orions by herself!”

  “Why not?” Sulu asked breathlessly, pulling himself up past another empty passenger deck. He heard Haslev’s reluctant footsteps climbing after him. “You heard the Andorian captain say he’d been hiding from us as a sensor ghost. No one can accuse him of abandoning a battlefield if no one knows he was there in the first place.”

  Uhura’s voice echoed in the ladderway. “But we know he was there.”

  “Exactly what I’m going to point out to him.” Sulu heaved himself up the last of the rungs and out onto a long teardrop-shaped bridge. A small cluster of uniformed Andorians milled about near the main viewscreen, ignoring their posts to watch something there. Otherwise, the bridge, like the rest of the ship, looked deserted.

  Sulu reached down to pull a panting Haslev out of the shaft, then stepped back when Uhura scrambled up after him. “Looks like they only brought a handful of crew on this trip,” he commented.

  “And a worthless handful at that.” Uhura used her phaser to push Haslev away from the access shaft, her dark face carved with determinat
ion. “Let’s go. We don’t have any time to waste.”

  Haslev turned reluctantly toward the front of the bridge. “You know, it might already be too late.”

  “Shut up.” Sulu strode past him, staggering a little when another photon torpedo exploded near the Shras. He scowled. “One of the Orions must be chasing us—that was too close to be a miss on the Enterprise.”

  “Then what is everybody doing standing around?” Uhura toggled her suit’s external speaker, lifting her amplified voice across the chaos of shouts and ship alarms. “All hands to battle stations! Repeat, all hands to battle stations immediately!”

  The Andorian crew members scattered like fragments from an exploding nebula, clearing the space in front of the viewscreen. Sulu saw Pov Kanin swing his captain’s console around to stare at them in astonishment. Behind him, the curving viewscreen was dominated by the sleek, predatory shape of the Orion police cruiser Mecufi. Sulu’s scowl deepened. The steady angle of the sensor image told him that the Shras was simply trying to outrun her pursuer.

  “Is this what you call evasive action?” Sulu crossed to the helm panel in two strides and yanked at the shoulder of the Andorian manning it. “I’m a Starfleet pilot,” he snapped, stripping off his bulky gloves. “Let me take this helm before we get blown to Sigma One!”

  The crew member threw a quick look at her captain, then scrambled out of her seat. Sulu slid in behind the panel, scanning its layout, then tapping in a swift series of flight maneuvers. The Shras slewed abruptly sideways.

  “What—” Kanin’s voice broke off as another photon torpedo exploded brilliantly across the screen, far off the port side of the ship. The Shras barely quivered in response. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting us out of torpedo range, I hope.” Sulu glanced over at the navigation panel, not trusting the gray-faced navigator to give him an accurate estimate of distances. The Mecufi had overshot them when they turned, and was now turning herself to cross over her previous path. Sulu waited until she’d found her new heading, then spiraled the Andorian ship off on a completely different course. The Mecufi shifted again and again while Sulu continued the random corkscrew motions, each time losing ground in the chase.