by Greg Cox
She swept the lance around and the gravity beam as well. The hovering rubble flew away from Sulu and crashed like a swarm of meteors into a nearby line of Crusaders, bowling them over. An avalanche of debris rained down on them. Spread out more thinly than it had been above Sulu, the barrage was still enough to put multiple soldiers down for the count. They moaned and whimpered on the pearly tiles. Slabs of concrete and chunks of marble pinned them as effectively as any gravity beam.
“No!” Sokis gaped in disbelief. “You belonged to the Truth!”
She turned the lance toward Sokis. “If I were you, I would shut up fast . . . before I do something that, frankly, I wouldn’t really regret.”
Sulu was impressed by her restraint. He would have been tempted to crush Sokis beneath his own debris, especially after the way the Crusade had hideously warped her mind.
“I don’t understand,” Sokis murmured. Backing away fearfully, he stumbled over a broken tile and toppled backward onto his rear end. “This cannot be happening!”
Sulu didn’t understand either, but he assumed the Enterprise had something to do with his miraculous stay of execution.
Thanks, Uhura. I owe you one.
By now, the other converts were following Yaseen’s lead and tossing away their own masks in revulsion. Sulu guessed that they had needed more time to recover since they had been brainwashed longer. Dozens of discarded masks hit the pavement. Rows of identical silver faces were replaced by a colorful panoply of diverse humanoid countenances. Confused and disoriented expressions gave way to various degrees of guilt, dismay, and anger.
“Oh my God.” A handsome silver-haired human woman gazed at the ravaged campus in horror. “What have we done?”
“You mean what did they make us do,” a middle-aged Andorian corrected her bitterly. His antennae twitched in rage. He unhitched a type-1 phaser from his belt. “Time to teach them a lesson or two!”
Tabus, who had escaped the barrage of rubble, tried to rally the remaining Crusaders, who were outnumbered at least seven to one. “To arms, brothers!” He drew his baton and targeted the rebellious mob. His comrades did the same. “Weigh down the heretics!”
The Crusaders moved to subdue the uprising.
Nothing happened. The unmasked mob remained upright.
“Sorry,” Yaseen said, smirking. The teardrop-shaped head of the lance spun so quickly that it blurred. A jade radiance flashed along the length of the spear. “It’s good to be the High Brother.”
Within moments, the outnumbered Ialatl had a full-scale insurrection on their hands as the liberated Ephratans turned on their former brothers. The Crusaders fought back, wielding their inert batons like truncheons, but the odds and numbers were against them. Scientists, historians, artists, and administrators ganged up on the invaders who had violated their most precious commodities: their minds. An irate Tellarite, huffing and snorting, charged into battle like an Antarean devil-hog, swinging a shovel at a Crusader’s head. A lithe green Orion woman pounced on Tabus from behind and twisted his tentacles until he screamed. A hissing Caitian slashed at the Ialatl with his claws. The Andorian security chief wielded his phaser with pinpoint accuracy, stunning Crusaders into unconsciousness.
“Silver bastards!” he snarled. “You’re lucky we’re civilized here!”
Video recorders darted about, capturing the melee. Fallen masks crunched beneath boots, hooves, and falling bodies. Still pinned to the ground, Sulu found himself in danger of being trampled as well.
“Excuse me!” he called out to Yaseen. “Over here?”
She spotted his predicament. “Oops,” she said, blushing slightly. “Be right on that.”
She swung the lance his way. It keened and flashed.
The emerald aura evaporated, taking the paralyzing weight with it. Sulu sprang to his feet, still mildly amazed that he wasn’t just a pulped red smear on the pavement by now. “That’s more like it.”
“You done lying around, d’Artagnan?”
He gave her a courtly bow. “At your service, milady.”
“Then make yourself handy,” she said. “We’ve got some serious payback to dish out.”
And then some, he thought.
A Crusader, grappling with a tripedal Edosian academic, bumped into him. A well-aimed karate chop took the distracted Ialatl out of the fight, and Sulu claimed the Crusader’s baton. It wasn’t a rapier or a cutlass, alas, but it would have to do. Another Crusader, armed with a truncheon of his own, faced off against Sulu. A black eye and a split lip indicated that some Ephratan had already gotten a few licks in. The alien soldier didn’t seem happy about it.
“Yield, heretic!”
“You know,” Sulu said, “I’m really getting tired of that word.”
He tossed his baton back and forth between his right and left hands. The Crusader’s black eyes tracked the weapon, trying to anticipate the direction of the attack.
“Think fast!” Sulu said.
He tossed the baton into the air above them. The Crusader’s eyes instinctively turned upward, giving Sulu a chance to spring forward and deliver a solid elbow strike to the soldier’s jaw while simultaneously pushing aside the arm holding the baton. The Crusader stumbled backward, dazed, and Sulu followed up with a rapid-fire combination of kicks and punches. He already had the man on the ropes as he reached out and caught his own baton on the way down. One last swing to the head was enough to lay the Crusader out cold. A staccato laugh escaped Sulu’s lips.
That was a pretty smooth move, he thought, if I do say so myself.
He hoped Yaseen hadn’t missed it.
Several meters away, an older woman, whom Sulu now recognized as Elena Collins, climbed onto an empty pedestal, taking the place of whatever statue had been torn down by the Crusaders. She waved her arms, shouting to be heard above the fracas.
“No killing!” she hollered. “Remember who we are! What we stand for!”
A stray Crusader rushed to dislodge her. “You stand for lies!”
She took advantage of her elevated position to kick him solidly in the jaw. He staggered backward into the melee, where a number of Dr. Collins’s colleagues jumped him and dragged him to the ground.
“That’s open to debate,” she observed.
Yaseen, finding herself momentarily clear, scanned the square for a new target. Her dark eyes zoomed in on the dimensional rift, which shimmered at the center of the square, less than twenty meters away. She swung the lance toward it.
“Wait!” Sulu shouted. “What about the captain and Spock?”
According to Sokis, Captain Kirk and Mister Spock had been sent through the rift to the Ialatl’s own dimension. It might become necessary, Sulu knew, to seal off the portal for the sake of the Federation, but for the time being he wanted to give Kirk and Spock every chance to make it back to the Enterprise, no matter what might have befallen them on the other side of the rift.
Lord knows the captain has beaten the odds before, Sulu thought. Like that time in the Tholian web.
“Right!” Yaseen agreed, lowering the lance. “Got a little carried away there.” She joined up with him at the fringe of the battle. A screeching Crusader tackled her at the waist, but she took the fight out of him by steering his head down into her knee. She shoved him aside without a second glance. “So what now, Lieutenant?”
That was an easy one.
“The gravity cannon,” he reminded her. “The Enterprise pulled our butts out of the fire. I think it’s time we returned the favor.”
Abandoning the lopsided battle in the square, which the Ephratans appeared to have well in hand, they raced across the campus to the observatory building. A small complement of guards, dutifully manning their posts despite the tumult in the square, were shocked to discover that their batons had lost their mojo. A wave of Yaseen’s lance yanked the guards to the ground.
“Apostates! Turncoats!” a downed Ialatl cursed them. “We should have let your miserable universe perish! You don’t deserve our Truth!�
��
“You’re right,” Yaseen said. “We don’t.”
She kicked him in the ribs as she rushed past him.
Sulu couldn’t blame her.
They headed into the building. The bottomless pit carved out by Sulu’s mishandling of the High Brother’s lance had been roped off for safety’s sake, but they could still hear the gravity cannon thrumming twenty stories above. Taking the fire stairs two steps at a time, they ran up to the observation deck on the top floor. Sulu was winded by the time they reached their target, but adrenaline and duty kept him going. Yaseen was breathing hard, too.
Only a handful of technicians were tending to the cannon. They gasped in surprise as the Starfleet duo burst into the chamber, especially when they spied Sokis’s lance in Yaseen’s grip.
“Clear out!” she ordered them. “Now!”
Her fierce tone and expression brooked no argument. Sulu backed her up, smacking his captured baton against his palm. He mimicked a surly Starfleet MP breaking up a gang of unruly cadets.
The techs beat a hasty escape, leaving Sulu and Yaseen alone on the observation deck. He glanced warily at the gaping chasm he’d accidentally created hours ago, then at Yaseen’s newly acquired lance.
“You really know how to use that thing?”
“The virtues of a solid religious education,” she quipped. “You should have tried it.”
She took aim at the cannon.
“Hold on a second.” He remembered how panicked that one tech had become when he’d tried this same stunt before. He wasn’t sure exactly what the frantic Ialatl had been afraid of, but Sulu didn’t want to trigger a gravitational “disruption” that might turn the Institute into a crater or a wormhole or God knows what. “Hitting a gravity cannon with a gravity beam sounds dicey to me.” A better idea occurred to him. “How about you take out the floor beneath it instead?”
She shrugged. “Works for me.”
The spinning head of the lance dipped. An emerald beam targeted the floor, which collapsed under its own weight, taking the massive cannon with it. The corrupted subspace telescope tore loose from its moorings and crashed over twenty stories to the basement. A near-seismic tremor shook the building to its foundations, throwing Sulu and Yaseen off balance. The cannon’s emerald gravity beam vanished from the night sky. Sulu assumed that meant the Enterprise was no longer in danger.
You’re welcome, he thought.
Unfortunately, the cannon’s spectacular collapse proved too much for the already damaged building. The walls shook as the entire building began to give way beneath them. Alien machinery plunged through the crumbling floor. The restored viewer shattered once more. Jagged chasms opened up across the floor, zigzagging toward Sulu and Yaseen and cutting off their escape routes. Sparks erupted from severed cables. Noxious vapors billowed from broken pipes.
“A little bit of overkill, don’t you think?” A tremor threw Sulu against Yaseen. “I thought you said you knew how to work that lance.”
“It was a crash course,” she replied. “Sue me.”
The floor disintegrated around them. Cascades of falling tile and masonry ate away at whatever shrinking footing still remained. Sulu and Yaseen backed away from the expanding chasms. With nowhere else to go, they climbed up onto the console facing the viewscreen. Strobing warning lights and spinning gauges indicated that the control panel was having a cybernetic breakdown. Sulu’s boots trampled over random switches, buttons, and dials, none of which were likely to do any good at the moment. He fought to keep his balance atop the quaking workstation, while peering down at the mangled remains of the gravity cannon several stories below. The trembling observatory felt as if it was only moments away from coming apart altogether. A deafening roar nearly drowned Sulu out.
“Nice knowing you!”
“Not so fast!” She grabbed him, wrapping her arm around his waist. “Hold on tight!”
She aimed the lance at the doomed console, and a beam of negative gravity propelled them upward through the open gap in the roof of the observatory, only seconds before the devastated building collapsed beneath them. Twenty stories pancaked on top of each other, burying what was left of the gravity cannon and the exotic alien equipment. A billowing cloud of dust and debris rose from the wreckage. Frightened Ialatl soldiers and technicians ran for cover. The booming crash echoed like thunder off the surrounding hills.
That’s the second time I’ve escaped being pulped today, Sulu realized. Maybe somebody is looking out for me.
Hundreds of meters above the smoke and dust, hanging in the cool night air, Sulu and Yaseen drifted above the campus. From their sky-high vantage point, he saw that the Ephratans had already reclaimed their Institute. Sokis and his Crusaders were lined up on the ground, at the mercy of their former converts, while campus security, armed with phasers, stood guard over the portal, watching out for reinforcements from Ialat. Looking closer, he saw that there were still a few pockets of fighting going on here and there around the campus, but the outcome was hardly in doubt. The Crusade no longer controlled Ephrata IV.
Sulu hoped the folks on the Enterprise were enjoying the show.
“What was that you were saying about overkill?” Yaseen asked.
He gazed down at the collapsed observatory. He guessed that all of the mysterious Ialatl technology had been crushed beneath the weight of the fallen building. Chances were, Starfleet engineers would find very little to salvage or study—which was possibly just as well. The last thing the quadrant needed right now was a gravitational arms race.
“I take it back,” he said.
He held on to her for dear life as an autumn breeze wafted them above the campus. They clung together tightly, slow dancing through the sky.
“You know,” he said, “I could get used to this.”
She turned her face toward him. He decided he liked it much better than the silver one. She smirked at him with her own, natural lips.
“Watch the hands, d’Artagnan.”
SEVENTEEN
The revolution was being televised.
Live images, conveniently provided by the Crusade, gave Uhura a front-row view of the uprising on Ephrata IV. Cheers erupted spontaneously on the bridge as Sulu escaped execution—and Yaseen sent the arrogant “High Brother” tumbling onto his holy derriere.
“Yes!” Chekov exclaimed. He high-fived Fisher. “That’ll teach those Cossacks to try to flatten our friend!”
Uhura didn’t begrudge him his outburst. She felt like cheering as well.
“Well done, people,” she praised the bridge crew. The jamming signal had obviously turned the tide on Ephrata, just as they had hoped. She turned toward Maxah, who was still seated beside Charlene Masters at engineering. “Thank you so much for your help.”
“I did what I could,” he replied. “What had to be done.”
His own reaction to the images on the screen was notably more subdued than Chekov’s or the rest of the crew’s. His silver face bore a somber expression as he quietly watched the Ephratans take back their home. Uhura thought she understood; despite his passionate opposition to the Crusade, he had to have profoundly complicated feelings about betraying his own kind. Those were his former comrades being assaulted on the viewer.
“No regrets?” she asked.
“Only that my people forced my hand, and may not soon understand why I did what I did.”
“Well, my people will not forget,” she promised. “And neither will I.”
Then, without warning, the excess gravity went away. Her spirits lightened, along with her flesh and bones, as the gravity on the bridge abruptly reverted to normal. Excited chatter and gasps of relief, coming from all around her, suggested that she wasn’t the only one who felt a whole lot lighter all of a sudden.
“The gravity beam has been shut off!” Ferrari confirmed. “It’s gone completely!”
“Music to my ears,” Uhura said. Although she couldn’t be sure, she suspected that they had Sulu and Yaseen to thank for this hig
hly welcome development. “The Enterprise is not being held in place anymore?”
“No,” Ferrari said. “We’re free.”
Uhura resisted the urge to jump for joy now that she finally could. It seemed that she had brought the ship safely through the crisis after all.
“Shall I break orbit, Lieutenant?” Fisher asked from the helm.
Probably a good idea, she thought. From the looks of it, the Crusade was being routed down on the planet, but it couldn’t hurt to put some distance between the Enterprise and Ephrata IV until they knew it was safe to return for Sulu and the others.
“Roger that, helmsman. Take us out of orbit, but not out of the system.” She leaned toward Maxah. “What exactly is the range of that gravity cannon?”
Before he could reply, Palmer called out from communications.
“Lieutenant! We’re being hailed from the planet.” A grin broke out across her face. “It’s Mister Sulu!”
“Are we certain?” Uhura wanted to believe it, but she remembered how Maxah had tricked them before. “Do we have visual and/or verbal confirmation?”
Palmer dispelled any doubts. “It’s really him, sir. I’d stake my stripes on it.”
“Not necessary,” Uhura said, satisfied. “Just pipe him through.”
The hopeful mood on the bridge went up another notch as Sulu appeared on the main viewer, replacing their view of the fighting down on the planet. He looked a bit the worse for wear, but he was beaming jubilantly, as was Ensign Yaseen, whose bright smile was no longer masked by a face not her own. The interior of an office could be seen in the background; Uhura assumed that the landing party (or what remained of it) had commandeered the Institute’s communications system. She only wished that Captain Kirk and Mister Spock were with them.
Just be thankful that Sulu and Yaseen are all right, Uhura thought. One upset victory at a time.
“Good to see you, Lieutenant, Ensign,” she addressed the screen. “Looks like you’re having some excitement down there.”