Battlestations!, page 21
“You know better than that,” he warned, and he was right.
I turned to Scanner. “Are there oxygen masks on board Rex?”
“You mean portable ones? Nope. Just the kind that have to stay tied into the wall units. Quit lookin’ at me like that, Piper, I didn’t design the damn things.”
“We’ll have to use the emergency masks aboard Enterprise.”
“Beaming in one at a time? We’ll never get the chance.”
“We’ll have to make the chance. Sarda—”
Without a pause Sarda answered, “Six minutes, twelve seconds left.”
“There’s our alternative.” I led the way aft toward our tiny transporter alcove. “Sarda, how long to beam five people from one pad?”
Calculating on the run, he called, “A total of one minute, thirty-three seconds if we beam consecutively, including recalibration time for each beaming, plus preset time for the operator.”
“I’ll operate it,” Scanner volunteered. “I know this unit like the inside of my mouth.”
“Get it ready. Merete—”
She was beside me in an instant, and we were both looking down at the Klingon disruptor she held. “It’s basically the same as a phaser,” she said. “This word indicates the force ray, the kill/disrupt setting. That doesn’t leave a body. This is kil/intact/heat. It does leave a body. These are stun settings one, two, and three, one being the lightest strike. Three is the worst; it causes instant viral rotting of living tissue. It’s technically a stun setting, but the victim isn’t meant to live long. And this toggle gives you narrow beam, wide field, or microbeam.”
“Got it.” I slipped the disruptor into my belt again and handed Sarda his own, repressing a shudder of disgust at having to use weapons of such calculated cruelty. “Merete, Dr. McCoy.” I addressed. turning in the narrow passage as Scanner set the coordinates, “you go first. Don’t wait for us. As soon as you materialize, put on the nearest emergency masks. Then head for sickbay and get that antidote process going.”
“You bet we will,” McCoy said with a thorny nod.
“Good luck.”
“Good luck. Piper,” Merete echoed solemnly as McCoy maneuvered her onto the pad first.
I scowled and nodded my best response, which wasn’t much considering the circumstances. It was definitely a yeah-right-get-going acknowledgment, but I just had to hope she understood. Certainly she deserved better from me.
“Energize,” I said, and Merete dissolved into a pale spectrum. “Hurry, sir,” I told McCoy instantly, “you’re next.”
The transporter hummed once again, flushing us all with the faint nausea common to nearby dissolution, and McCoy was gone.
“Sarda,” I said with a terse motion.
“I prefer—”
“No arguments. Go.”
Logic, thankfully, told him I was right. He pressed his lips flat and moved into the cavity, where, a second later, he buzzed into nonexistence.
Scanner busily reset the mechanism, working with calm assurance.
“You go next,” I said. “Captain’s last off the ship and all.”
His hair flopped over one eye as he shook his head. “Not this time.”
“Scanner—”
“Nope.” He nodded toward the chamber. Then he grinned. “No arguments.”
I was relieved that I could still smile.
A touch of regret surged through me with the first sensations of dissolution, to be leaving my first command vessel behind and derelict. Rex’s rumpled inner hull blurred around me, disintegrated, and reassembled into the clean white bulkheads of Enterprise’s hangar deck.
“Good choice, Scanner,” I mumbled as the last quivers of dissolution faded and reality became whole again. The hangar deck was the emptiest place on the ship, and the biggest single space, thus the hardest to fill with any kind of gas. Sarda stood a few feet away, plainly relieved to see me materialize. Per orders, the doctors were already gone.
I stepped immediately away from the beaming area; Banana Republic’s transporter was just about old enough not to have the safety devices that modern equipment had, and I had no particular desire to merge molecules with Scanner. Sure enough, he hummed into being only three seconds later, exactly where I’d been standing. True to his word, he was fast with that geriatric transporter.
“Masks?” I blurted.
“Yonder.” Scanner led the run across the hangar deck to what he knew was the nearest emergency-provisions locker. Of the three of us, he had served longest on Enterprise in a true crewing capacity. For Sarda, the starship had been a science assignment, drawn only shortly before I too had found myself unexpectedly Enterpriseing.
Scanner pulled himself to a halt on the locker’s handle and yanked it open. There were small fire extinguishers, but the hooks for four oxygen masks were empty. “Dang! Mornay musta had her people go round and collect ’em in case the captain got away from her.”
Sarda shifted as though he was about to explain the illogic of that, then changed his mind when he remembered that Ursula Mornay had plenty of illogic to go around.
“There’ve got to be others, Scanner!”
He glanced around the hangar bay, then made a decision. “Right. And I know where. Come on.”
Since we were already on the starboard side, we dashed with him to the small hangars where the Arco attack-sleds were stored. Had we been closer to the port side of the hangar deck, the big Galileo and Columbus shuttlecraft would have provided perfect protection and plenty of masks, but this was much faster at a moment when time was crucial. Mornay undoubtedly knew we were on board by now, and would soon take action against us. We had to be ready.
Sarda got the hangar door open and Scanner squeezed through immediately, scrambling to the top of the nearest sled and forcing its hatch open. That was when a telltale hiss in the vents told us that Dr. McCoy had been completely right. Gas!
“Scanner, the gas!” I shouted.
His arm disappeared up to the shoulder and he grimaced with effort, but soon pulled out a mask. He straightened and tossed it to me, then buried himself deeper in the Arco’s hatch, searching for another mask. Above him, ghostly pink fog shot from the ceiling vents.
“Scanner, put your own on!”
In a moment he resurfaced and glanced up at the pink gas, then called, “Sarda! Here!” A second mask flew.
“Scanner, hurry!” I called.
He was still digging deep into the attack sled when the gas started to spread around the sled. He finally came up with a third mask securely in hand, and struggled to balance himself on the slippery hatch bracings. Had he been at floor level, he might have had a chance. But there were ventilators directly over his head, spewing gas. It spread ungodly fast.
“Judd!” Sarda’s voice was muffled by his mask.
Scanner wavered. He made a final effort to bring the mask to his face, but his muscles flagged and he collapsed onto the lid of the hatch as it drifted shut beside him. He slid onto the solar wing with a hollow bump and sagged into our arms. Though he was already unconscious as we eased him down, his hands clutched at our clothing. He was still fighting. His sheer determination affected us both, perhaps Sarda even more than me. He supported Scanner’s head and gripped one limp hand, but there was nothing we could do.
Sarda’s brows knitted in anguish as he put his hand on Scanner’s chest, then looked at me. “He took a full dose. His heartbeat is too slow.”
My fist struck the Arco’s photon sling to vent a burst of rage. “We can’t help him. I just hope the doctors made it to sickbay. It’s up to them.” In the next seconds, I made one of the hardest decisions of my life—and for someone who was only twenty-five years old, I’d had too many of those. I stood up and said, “We have to leave him. Mornay’ll be sending her guards down here. Let’s be gone by then.”
Sarda forced himself to agree, and we crossed the hangar deck at a run.
The corridor shocked us with the sight of a dozen crewpeople collapsed in midstride. They were pale and pasty, as though phasered down. Sarda quickly knelt among them, checking pulses. “These people are barely breathing,” he said, unable to keep the heaviness of disgust out of his voice. “This midshipman’s already dead.”
One, and counting. I thought of Scanner. Dead. What a word.
The hiss of a turbolift door down the next corridor drove us quickly up the nearest deck-to-deck spiral crawlway. We barely made it, and I had to draw my feet up, out of sight, while several of Mornay’s hired lizards ran past the opening toward the hangar deck.
I listened until there was nothing left to hear of their footsteps. Above me, Sarda climbed a few rungs, then stopped. I felt his concern.
“It’s not likely that they will move him, Piper,” he said, keeping his voice down.
Until he said it, I hadn’t been sure of what I was thinking. I squinted upward into the brightness of the tube. “I guess you’re right.”
He pulled off the uncomfortable mask and attached it to the communicator belt under his uniform shirt. “Where are we going?”
Nice handy ladders … empty tube … big ship … I stripped off my own mask, hooked it to a belt loop, and shrugged. “Up.”
And yet, a more specific destination kept turning in my mind, no matter how I tried to apply logic to the situation. Sarda had surmised that Mornay, Perren, and Boma wouldn’t try to install the transwarp device until they reached a comfortable location where they were totally in charge. They wouldn’t be in Engineering, then. No point in going there. The doctors didn’t need my incompetence in medicine to help them find the antidote for the narcotic gas, so no point in going that way. Besides, Merete and McCoy weren’t the people I needed to see right now. I had prevented any hope Mornay might have of taking the starship out of the solar system on warp power, and surely they knew by now that nothing but several weeks in spacedock would realign Enterprise’s delicate nacelle balance. They wouldn’t bother trying to repair such wild damage. All that sounded perfectly logical, and I was ready in case Sarda asked, but my real motivation was nothing more than a subliminal echo deep in the least logical corners of my thoughts. It was an irresistible call. Rotating and growing ever stronger in my mind was a single word: bridge.
The Enterprise was as quiet as a floating coffin. Each entry into a new deck, a new corridor, chilled us with the sight of collapsed crewpeople dropped in their tracks by Mornay’s ruthlessness, then mashed together on the starboard side because of our little trick with Rex. The starship was worse than empty. It was cataleptic.
And traveling through it, thanks to me, was like a maze of dead ends. Everywhere we turned, doors refused to work or were jammed partially shut, turbo-lifts scraped and rasped in their tubes, or refused to open for us at all because they were simply too damaged to allow passengers to trap themselves between decks. The ship’s automated maintenance system was fully enabled, cutting off many access routes through the ship that were now dangerous.
Even worse—I couldn’t feel the presence of Captain Kirk. Common sense told me he was here. I’d seen him and Spock beamed on board. But I couldn’t feel him. Where was he? Had Mornay, in some fit of unpredictability, beamed him somewhere else to complicate any bid he might have for freedom and the welfare of his ship and crew? Might she have gassed him and Spock along with their crew, in case she needed to impress Star Fleet with the caliber of her hostages?
As we wended our way through the innards of the great ship, I kept trying to find Captain Kirk with my intuitions. I clamped my mouth shut when the inclination arose to tell Sarda my feelings. Vulcans already thought humans were a little short of a harvest, and I didn’t need to throw more fodder on that field.
Finally we were spared any more sights of the crippled crew when we reached a direct turbolift to the bridge. We stood side by side and looked at it as though there was no lift inside and we’d just fall away into eternity if we stepped in.
“Disrupters,” I uttered, clueing us simultaneously in to the missing element. As with a single motion, we drew the weapons from our belts.
“Set for light stun?” Sarda asked.
“Heavy stun.”
He looked up. “Not the third setting.”
“No. Second.”
I looked at my weapon after setting it, unable to pull my eyes or thoughts away from the dial. I knew Sarda wondered why I was hesitating, but I had no clear answer yet. My fingers moved like separate beings on the disruptor dial. An extra three clicks. And a lock. Kill! disrupt.
“Kill?” he asked. Whether he was surprised or disappointed, I couldn’t yet tell. He hadn’t been with us when Captain Kirk made me believe in the urgency of the situation—that any single life was expendable, even my own. The time had come to act on that sour truth.
Sarda left his own weapon on stun; I was glad he did. It fit into my plan.
Even through the conviction, his question made me think twice, forced me to make the awful decision a second time. “I have to be taken seriously,” I told him. “It’s imperative.”
Neither of us liked it very much. Only that, the evenness of our regret for what we had to do, kept Sarda from controverting my decision. That, and other things between us that still defied definition.
With a sigh of commitment, I stood up. Fortified against my own decision, I led the way back to the bridge turbolift.
There were no words between Sarda and me as we rode to the bridge, flattened against the sides of the lift. Words had lost their value. And my mind was already on the bridge.
The doors hissed open. With a shout of warning, I burst out, followed by Sarda, led by my disruptor. Several faces snapped around in shock. Weapons came up.
I picked a target and fired. A scream filled the bridge as one of Mornay’s mercenaries withered into gory lights and smoke. I turned my disruptor on Mornay, my readiness to kill confirmed by the leftover scent of incinerated flesh and bone.
The first voice was a distantly familiar one. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, and then only briefly, but it hadn’t been soon forgotten.
“You again!” Samuel Boma’s face flushed beneath its deep brown complexion.
Professor Mornay, gripping the handrail on the upper walkway, glared at him. “I told you someone had invaded the compound to get Sarda out,” she said roughly.
Boma drew in his brows and pointed. “You didn’t tell me it was her! I could’ve warned you!”
“Why? Who’s she in particular?”
Boma shook his head. “You don’t want to know.” It was hard to believe this was the man who had designed the dangerous dreadnought that was meant to put the galaxy on the edge of war, who had kept his cool enough to fool Star Fleet into accepting his help, and who had somehow managed to take a prime commander like Montgomery Scott by surprise and gas down the entire crew. I forced myself to remember those things and not slacken my guard.
By now I’d assured myself there was no one on the bridge but who I saw: Mornay, Boma, and three remaining mercenaries who were manning helm, navigations, and command intelligence stations. There was no sign whatsoever of the bridge crew—Mr. Scott, Mr. Sulu, Uhura … the bridge looked raw without them.
“Sarda,” I said, the order silently following.
He took careful aim, holding the disruptor in both hands, and one by one struck each guard with a stun bolt. Mornay and Boma had no choice but to watch and wait until the four of us squared off across the bridge from each other.
“Where’s Perren?” I asked. “Did you leave Argelius without him after all, Professor?”
She gave me a smug nod. “Keep guessing, hot spur.”
I battled against the quiver of my voice and demanded, “Where’s the captain?”
“Held tightly hostage, that’s where.”
“Those aren’t answers, Professor.”
“I don’t owe you answers. My guards are on their way up here. Do you think I’m foolish enough to let myself go unprotected? The instant you entered the bridge, my security forces were alerted. When the turbolift doors open, you’re dead.”
That word again. I ignored Sarda’s glance. I wouldn’t have known what to tell him anyway. I waggled the phaser at Mornay and Boma, who were standing near each other near the Engineering subsystems monitor. “Down there, please, both of you.”
Boma hesitated, but Mornay merely widened her weird little grin. Now what? What could I do if she wasn’t even intimidated by a Klingon disruptor set on kill?
“Gladly,” she said then. “Out of the line of fire.” She led the way down to the command module, stepping over the crumpled body of one of the guards. Boma followed.
I hated the fact that she was right; putting them down there made it easier for her marauders to fire freely at us when they appeared. “Sarda, can you jam that turbolift?”
He moved immediately to the communications station and placed his disruptor down on the console to free both hands. What I asked of him was no easy task. The turbolifts were especially designed to countermand any artificial jamming, to avoid trapping passengers anywhere on the ship. Sarda would have to reroute its programming both through the computers and through the engineering of the ship. If he had time. If, if, if. Another word, like dead.
When he had done what he could at Engineering, he crossed by me to Communications and started tampering.
I snaked sideways along the handrail past Sarda and down the gangway, trying to put myself in a position where my single disruptor could protect Sarda from whatever came out of the turbolift while still keeping a wedge of threat over Mornay and Boma.
“Hurry, Sarda,” I urged.
“Trying.”
The communications station clicked and whirred under his hands, but I could see in the tension of his jawline that he wasn’t succeeding against the automatic resistors of the turbolift system. That was confirmed when the turbolift doors puffed open.
Sarda rolled away from the station to give me clear aim. His disruptor, left on the Engineering console, was out of commission for us.
My finger flinched on the trigger, ready to kill again. The phaser that came out of the lift to aim at me was also quite ready to commit murder.
