by L. A. Graf
“The Orions would be better off to stay on one course,” Kanin observed, leaning across his console to watch Sulu’s maneuvers.
Sulu spared him a tight smile. “Don’t worry. They’ll realize that in a moment. And when they do—” He made one more course alteration, and this time saw no response from the Orion ship. His smile widened while he laid in the course he’d intended to follow all along. “Engineering, give me every ounce of speed you’ve got.”
“Affirmative!”
The Shras slowly accelerated, moving away from the Orion cruiser. It took the pursuers several long moments to realize this wasn’t just another evasive swing, and by then, the Shras had flashed out of torpedo range. The image of the Mecufi dwindled behind them, disappearing when the scanners hit the end of their range.
“That should keep them off our backs for a while.” Sulu set the ship’s scanners around to the front, then glanced over his shoulder at Pov Kanin. “I’ve set our course to three forty-nine mark four.” The Andorian’s bony face slid from relief to worry when he recognized the heading. “I don’t think you want to be brought up on desertion of battle charges when you get back to Andor.”
“But—” Kanin’s dark pink eyes narrowed in honest dismay. “But we rescued you!”
“And then abandoned our ship, not to mention our friend in the shuttle. Saving our lives isn’t going to make us grateful enough to forget about that.” Sulu glanced over at the navigation board, watching the coordinates roll back to familiar numbers as they drew closer to the Enterprise. Faint flickers in one corner of the viewscreen showed the starship still battling with the Orion destroyer Umyfymu. “We’re within hailing distance of the Enterprise now. Uhura, can you run the comm and cover Haslev at the same time?”
“No, but I can make Haslev run the comm for me.” Uhura nudged the Andorian physicist toward the communications station, waving the technician there out of his seat. “Come on, get moving.”
“But as soon as we start broadcasting a signal, the Orions will know where we are!” Haslev protested.
“No, they won’t. We’ll use a coded tight-beam channel to the Enterprise. The Orions will never even know we sent it.” Uhura prodded him again, this time with the phaser. “Hurry up. We’ve got to let Captain Kirk know who we are before the Enterprise fires at us.”
“Oh, this is just great. If the Orions don’t manage to kill us, your friends on the starship probably will.” Haslev sat down with a theatrical groan, antennae drooping in dismay. “Why did I ever think it was a good idea to stow away on a Starfleet ship?”
Uhura gave him an exasperated look. “Probably because anyone else would have killed you by now, just to shut you up. Now, start calling.”
“Captain!” Goldstein’s excited voice cut across the tense hum on the Enterprise’s bridge. “I’m receiving a coded message on Federation frequency! It’s being sent tight-beam, sir.”
Kirk swung his command console to face the viewscreen, trying not to hope for too much. “Put it on-screen, Ensign.”
An unfamiliar bridge, stark with battle lights, shimmered into focus at the lower corner of the viewscreen. The edges of the picture glimmered with coding static, ensuring that no one could break into the channel.
“This is Captain James T. Kirk of the—” The captain stopped himself as soon as the picture steadied on familiar Starfleet environmental suits and equally familiar faces. “Sulu, Uhura—where are you?”
“On the Andorian Reserve Fleet ship Shras.” Sulu’s face was tense and slick with sweat, his hair ruffled from being recently inside an environmental suit helmet. Behind him, a slim Andorian in the uniform of a planetary reserve captain fidgeted in a command chair near Uhura, looking unhappy to be there at all. “Our current heading is three forty-nine mark four, approximately twenty thousand kilometers from you and closing.”
“That corresponds with the position of our sensor ghost, Captain,” Spock said quietly from behind Kirk. “And if my readings are correct—”
The Enterprise rocked with the force of a nearby torpedo burst, and Kirk swore as Mullen looked up nervously from the weapons console. “Damage to the aft phaser banks, Captain.”
Too close, too close. “Alter course to one sixty mark six,” Kirk snapped at the helmsman. “Bring our port phasers into range. Fire!”
“—the Shras was recently attacked by the Orion cruiser Mecufi, and driven away,” Spock finished calmly.
“Or ran away.” Kirk gave the Andorian captain an eagle-hard look and saw the man flinch with a lavender blush. He was definitely Shras’s commander, then, and not particularly proud of what he’d done. “I presume that was before you took over the helm, Sulu?”
“Aye, sir. The Orions are still chasing us, but we’ve managed to make it out of their firing range. I’m laying in a course that will make us look like a sensor ghost to them now.” Sulu took a deep breath. “Sir, Chekov is still on board the Hawking. Request permission to dock and remove him.”
“You left Chekov in the middle of a battle zone?” Kirk decided this wasn’t the time to tackle the question of what Chekov was doing on the shuttle to begin with.
Uhura and Sulu exchanged careful looks, and the helmsman shrugged as if to some question Uhura hadn’t asked. “We didn’t have enough environmental suits for everyone, sir,” the communications officer finally replied guardedly. “Most of them were pierced with shrapnel from the explosion—”
“—that destroyed the magnetic shielding,” Muav Haslev added from off-screen, his voice bright and helpful, “and left the warp core totally destablized.”
“Haslev!” Sulu glared to his right, apparently at the Andorian scientist, and Uhura hissed something sharp that Kirk didn’t quite hear.
“Hey,” Haslev complained, “just because you two are willing to die for your friend doesn’t mean I am, too.”
“Nor I!” The Andorian commander jerked his shoulders back, antennae rigid with outrage. “We are not going to dock with a ship whose containment field could explode at any moment!” He scowled across the channel at Kirk. “Captain, you cannot legally command us to engage in such a suicidal action simply to rescue one missing crewman.”
If he had one brave man for every coward he met in the line of duty, Kirk would reckon himself a very lucky man. “It’s true,” he said tightly, “I can’t command you to do it, Captain. I can ask—”
“And I can refuse!”
“Yes, you can.” Kirk swung his gaze to Sulu, seeing the helmsman’s eyes glittering with the same frustration Kirk himself felt. A distant bang shuddered through the Enterprise’s deck, and Kirk heard a flurry of alarms wail into life at the engineering station. There wasn’t even time left for talking, much less planning an unlikely rescue. “I’m sorry, Sulu. It doesn’t look like there’s anything we can do.”
Sulu clenched his teeth into his lower lip, but nodded stiffly. “Aye, sir,” he said in a wooden voice. “I’ll await your orders for battle deployment—”
“You mean we’re going to stick around and fight with the Orions?” Haslev demanded incredulously. He lumbered on-screen to tug at the Andorian captain’s arm, his own environmental suit looking two sizes too big for his effete frame. “Can he make us do that?”
The older Andorian’s eyebrows drew together in annoyance. “The Reserve Fleet’s first duty is to aid and support all actions of Starfleet,” he said unhappily. “The Shras will perform that duty to the utmost.”
“Well, I’d rather we didn’t,” Muav Haslev admitted frankly. The renegade physicist looked back at the viewscreen. “Kirk, let’s cut a deal. If I can save your crewman, will you let me out of the rest of this fight?”
“No,” Kirk snapped, appalled to even be asked. “But if you save him voluntarily, I’d have to mention that in my report to Starfleet. It might influence your trial.”
“Assuming I live long enough to get one!”
“It’s my only offer, Haslev.” Kirk braced himself while the Enterprise swung on swift
evasive action. The viewscreen flickered with radiance when a photon torpedo exploded harmlessly above the bridge, nearly overwhelming the incoming signal. “Take it or leave it.”
“You Starfleet people are all so adamant,” Haslev complained. “Oh, all right—it’s a deal.”
“How are you going to carry out your end of it?” Sulu burst out, obviously overwhelmed with skepticism. The look of painful hope on Uhura’s face helped Kirk understand the helmsman’s anger. “How the hell are you going to save Chekov?”
“You’ll see.” The renegade physicist clapped his hands together, blue face bright with satisfaction. “You’ll all see.”
“See what?” Kirk demanded.
Haslev took a deep, expectant breath, antennae quivering. “Exactly what the Orions paid me for.”
Climbing to his feet, Chekov stood for a moment in the Hawking’s cluttered aisle, torn between clambering up front to verify the computer’s report on the warp core, and running for the airlock wearing only half a suit. Death was suddenly a very real presence and not just a frightening possibility. He looked to the airlock door, and his blood ran as crystalline as the nitrogen trails around his feet. Technically, he had the minimum suit required to survive a limited vacuum exposure. He could lock down the joints that should have serviced the suit’s legs and left arm, and that would preserve an atmosphere inside the torso and helmet—enough to service his internal organs and brain, although he’d surely lose the unsuited limbs to cell damage and freezing. What was the point of abandoning the shuttle if that were the best he could look forward to?
No! He moved to poise his hand above the airlock controls, trembling. Living was worth any price. For him, it always had been, and always would be. Surviving at all would be miraculous—he couldn’t afford to be stingy about the details. Punching the controls to cycle air back into the lock, a sudden rigidity along his muscles startled a gasp from him and locked him immobile. Then, panic was smothered by joy when a familiar silver spray engulfed his vision, and the itching thrill of the transporter beam erased the walls around him.
The new room shimmering into being around him wasn’t the Enterprise’s transporter room, though. Walls threatened too close on either side, the transporter’s fading whine was too loud and close in his ears—and he materialized with only one foot on solid deck. He toppled heavily to his right, unable to catch himself under the weight of the half-suit when his foot came down in some smooth, rounded basin, and he flipped to fall face forward over the edge.
If it hadn’t been for the hard shell of the suit, the fall would have knocked the wind from him. As it was, his face plate cracked against black marble without breaking, and he hung there a moment, fighting to regain his bearings. The deck was a Starfleet deck—another shuttle, he realized, just as he pushed up on one elbow and recognized the molded marble basin beneath him.
“Sulu’s lily pond—?”
All other questions were knocked from his mind by a powerful jerk on the back of his suit. He slammed against the far wall without even touching the ground, and his head snapped against the back of his helmet with a silent thunder of pain. Sagging into half-darkness, he gasped when a powerful fist caught the front of his suit and heaved him into the wall again.
“How?!”
Chekov grabbed blindly at the bellowing mammoth in front of him, locking both hands on a forearm that he couldn’t even fit his fingers around.
“How were you able to use it?” Lindsey Purviance pressed so close to Chekov that the rust-orange blood from his torn left side smeared the environmental suit like rotten oil. “Tell me what you carry that lets you use the trans-shield anode, f’deraxt’la, or I’ll snap every bone in your body trying to find it.”
Chapter Seventeen
SULU STARED INTENTLY up at the Andorian viewscreen, trying to catch Hawking’s fugitive patch of darkness among the stars. He found it hovering in the lower left corner of the viewscreen, overshadowed by the distant white fires exploding between the Enterprise and the Umyfymu. At this distance, there was no way to tell if Chekov was still aboard.
“What is our position relative to the Orion police cruiser?” Captain Kanin demanded for what must have been the third or fourth time.
Sulu checked the intersecting isopleths on his helm panel, rubbing at the frown of concentration that had gathered between his eyes. He had to maintain a fragile piloting balance: staying inside transporter range of the Hawking but out of its probable blast radius, all the while mirroring the Mecufi’s course so closely as to look like a sensor ghost to the Orions. The police cruiser was prowling slowly around the section of space where their warp trail had ended, trying to flush them out with random phaser shots through the interstellar darkness.
“We’re still about seven thousand kilometers away from the Orions.” Sulu lifted his gaze back to the viewscreen, wishing he could somehow tell from the Hawking’s shadowed exterior whether Muav Haslev’s new technology had worked. It seemed as if the physicist had been down in the transporter room with Uhura for hours, but Sulu knew better than to trust his sense of time in a crisis.
Kanin shifted nervously in his command console. “And our distance from the other ships?”
“Almost fourteen thousand kilometers.” Sulu’s head jerked around when he heard the unmistakable metallic scrape of bulky environmental suits against the access shaft. Haslev’s flaxen head emerged from the ladderway first, antennae waving triumphantly.
“It worked!” The renegade physicist pointed both his thumbs together at Pov Kanin, who stiffened in his chair. Sulu guessed it was an Andorian gesture of contempt. “The beaming technique all your stupid admirals said would never be feasible—I made it work!”
“You think you made it work,” Uhura corrected, climbing up onto the bridge after him. “We won’t know for sure until we get confirmation from the Enterprise.” Despite her guarded words, an underlying note of optimism warmed the communications officer’s voice.
“You managed to beam Chekov in through their shields?” Even as he asked the question, Sulu felt the same quiver of disbelief that he’d experienced when Haslev first told them what he’d made for the Orions. Of all the lessons drilled into you in Starfleet Academy, one of the most basic was: never transport anything through a ship’s defensive shields. The problem wasn’t the ability of the beam to go through, but the mess that came out at the other end. Sulu swallowed hard, remembering the red smear that had been Sweeney and Purviance and Gendron.
“I think we got him through.” Uhura ducked past Haslev and headed toward the ship’s unmanned communications station. “I’m going to contact the Enterprise on a tight-beam channel to be sure, but I made Haslev test it on one of our spare suit batteries before we sent Chekov over. The control panel reported coherent reception of the beam at the trans-shield cathode—”
“Trans-shield anode,” Haslev corrected her sharply. “You have to call it an anode because it attracts the subspace bosons of the transporter beam the same way an anode attracts electrons. That’s why the beam can pass through—”
“Did you bring the battery back, to see if it was all right?” Sulu demanded, breaking into the physicist’s lecture without ceremony. “Before you sent Chekov over?”
“No,” admitted Uhura, tapping open a hailing frequency to the Enterprise. “I was afraid to wait too long—it took Haslev forever to reprogram the transporter, and then we had to patch in an extra power unit to make the beam strong enough to go through.”
“And furthermore, the technique doesn’t work that way!” Haslev snapped, giving Sulu an annoyed look. “The anode device can only receive a transporter beam, not create one. To get the battery back, we’d need another trans-shield anode on this ship. And right now, the only one in existence is on your ship.” He lifted a finger and aimed it at Sulu. “In your cabin.”
“In my cabin?” Sulu’s eyes widened when he remembered the multiple break-ins. “So that’s why you kept trying to get in there!”
H
aslev looked indignant, but before he could reply, Uhura swung around from the communications panel. “Sulu, I’m not getting any response from the Enterprise,” she said, frowning. “Not to my hailing, not to my questions about Chekov, nothing.”
Sulu glanced up at the screen, trying to find the spider-web explosions of light that marked the distant battle between the Enterprise and the Umyfymu. “Try scanning all open Starfleet channels,” he suggested.
“Scanning.” She ran one hand across the communications board, listening intently to the monitor in her ear, then gasped in alarm, “Oh, my God! All I’m getting is the automatic distress signal from the computer—it says it’s lost all communication with the bridge!”
The stars burned away as a flare of subspace static seared across the Enterprise’s viewscreen. Kirk shot a startled glance upward as the bridge lights dimmed and every alarm on every station screamed. “What in God’s name?” He couldn’t even hear himself above the howl.
Spock’s hand closed on his shoulder from behind. “We appear to have been hit by another subspace radiation pulse,” the Vulcan shouted, mouth close to his ear.
“How?” Kirk half-stood, turning so that Spock could read his lips if nothing else. “Where did it come from?”
Spock shook his head. “Unknown, Captain. All controls have been rendered inoperable.”
Kirk broke away from his first officer to lean over the helmsman’s shoulder. The navigation deflector alarm nearly deafened him, and Kirk reached across to deactivate it even as he shouted, “Do we have helm control?”
The pilot only shook his head, struggling with his own blaring panel.
Other alarms died, one by one, leaving Kirk’s ears ringing wildly. “Cut impulse drive!” he ordered engineering, just as a phaser hit staggered him against the forward console. “Dammit! Do we still have shields?”