by David Mack
Even in the rarefied air of the planet’s upper atmosphere, the wind that tore past Sarai roared like an avalanche, making it hard to hear the rest of her away team checking in via their helmets’ transceivers. They were on the night side of the planet, which meant they were plunging through pitch-darkness without visual contact. She increased the gain on her own transmitter to compensate. “Away team,” she hollered over the noise, “sound off again—after Kershul!”
She strained to hear as the remaining five members of her team answered in alphabetical order: “Kyzak, check!” . . . “Modan, check!” . . . “Sethe, check!” . . . “sh’Aqabaa, check!” . . . “Sortollo, check!” It was a relief to know her people were accounted for. The moment the Breen had scrambled the Titan’s comms and sensors, she had known they wouldn’t be able to rely on help from Rager and Radowski to beam them out of the runabout ahead of the Kulak’s attack. That was when Sarai had given the order to abandon ship.
The evacuation had been swift and orderly. All of the Nechako’s science modules had been swapped out for chaff cannons to foul the Breen’s sensors. Sarai had triggered the diversionary cloud of debris, then depressurized the runabout’s interior before ejecting the cannons, leaving the middle section of the runabout unencumbered. Seconds later, after she and the others had moved into position, she had blown open the lateral access hatches and launched herself and the away team out of the wide-open egress points on both sides of the ship.
Now they all were plummeting like missiles toward the planet’s surface, piercing like arrows through towers of gray vapor. A warning light flashed on her faceplate’s holographic display—an alert that the runabout had been destroyed. She rolled in midair to look back. High above her, the remains of the Nechako scattered like a fiery wound across the heavens.
If the Breen think we’re dead, maybe they’re done jamming signals. Sarai switched her transceiver to an encrypted channel to hail the ship. “Sarai to Titan, do you copy?”
She had never before been so happy to hear Vale’s voice. “We read you, Number One. What’s your status?”
“Away team is clear and free-falling toward the target. ETA, three minutes, ten seconds.”
“Roger that,” Vale said. “Check in with a sit-rep as soon as you touch down.”
“Understood. Going quiet for a few. Sarai out.”
Dropping out of the clouds into clear air, Sarai rolled to face the ground and switched her faceplate to its night-vision setting. A quick look around accounted for all the members of her team. At a distance she couldn’t tell them apart with her eyes, but their transceivers reported their positions, headings, speeds, and vital signs. So far everyone seemed to be unhurt and on target.
Below them, a vast expanse of sharp-peaked mountains and arboreal wilderness stretched away in every direction to the horizon. Directly beneath the away team was a broad plateau, one whose surface was so uniformly level that Sarai surmised it most likely had been engineered.
A large, squat hexagonal structure dominated the plateau. Its roof, unlike the land around it, was angled and crowded with subspace transmitters. Sarai adjusted her visor for a closer look at the facility’s rooftop. At maximum magnification she noted that its edges were crenellated, like teeth in a gear laid out flat. Conical towers stood atop each corner of the hexagon.
She opened a channel to her team. “Everyone aim for the rear of the smaller building. Watch your grouping, don’t get tangled up. Don’t release until I give the order.”
Projected onto her faceplate was the drop countdown. During the free fall it displayed its diminishing time in yellow. When they reached optimal altitude for chute opening, it would turn green. If they missed their narrow window it would turn orange and then red as they neared calamity. “Kyzak, do a quick sweep of the ground. Any sign of the Breen?”
“Negative,” Kyzak said. “Either they’re shrouded, or we’re the first ones here.”
“No way we’re getting that lucky. My money says they’re on the roof of the main building.” Sarai checked the free fall countdown. “Stand by to deploy chutes on my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark!” She activated her main chute with one press of the control pad on the chest of her suit. The black chute erupted from its compact shell on her back and shot upward, expanding like a mushroom cloud of high-strength synthetic fabric, until it filled with air and jerked taut the carbon-fiber guide ropes connected to her suit’s harness. The violent lurch left Sarai feeling like her vital organs all had been crushed into her stomach, and the momentary rush of her blood toward her legs left her dizzy and light-headed.
She shook off her disorientation. I can’t believe some people do that for fun.
Tugs on the guide ropes enabled her to control her descent. Guiding herself into a slow spiral, she circled her designated landing point.
Then came the first shots from the main building’s roof.
Disruptor pulses flashed in the darkness and screeched past Sarai and the away team. A handful of shots turned into a flurry, and then into a storm.
She drew her type-2 phaser in her right hand and struggled to control her chute with only her left. Snapping orange blasts at the distant roof, she shouted over the comm, “Return fire!”
“At what?” hollered Sethe. “I can’t see anything!”
“Just make them duck,” sh’Aqabaa replied. “Make it harder for them to aim!”
Floating in chaotic circles, the fatally exposed away team fired back. Orange beams from their phasers crossed paths in midair with crimson pulses from the Breen’s disruptors. Bolts of energy caromed off the far rooftop’s crenellations. The away team’s retaliation made the Breen assault less precise, but even still a cluster of shots ripped into Blay, who dropped his phaser and went limp as he crashed onto the rocky ground, a dozen meters away from cover.
Sarai’s distance to the ground ticked down on her HUD, but she preferred to gauge her landing manually. As she reached the final meters of her jump she fired another round of suppressing fire at the Breen, then lifted her legs and bent her knees. Her heels made contact, and she jogged forward, fighting her momentum as she detached her chute.
Around her, the rest of the away team scrambled through their landings. Hectored by disruptor fire, they dashed for shelter behind the small outbuilding. As soon as sh’Aqabaa was out of the line of enemy fire, she began assembling her compression phaser rifle from the kit she had carried strapped to her left leg. Dennisar and Sortollo moved to the building’s corners, each of them loading a photon grenade into a short-range tactical launcher.
Sarai summoned her specialists with hand signals. As they hurried to her side, she began assembling her own phaser rifle. “We need to get inside that compound, right now. Ideas?”
Kershul pointed toward Blay’s body. “We have to try to help—”
“Forget him, he’s dead.” Sarai fixed the holographic targeting scope onto the top of her weapon. “We need to go forward. Ithiok, you’re the combat engineer. This is why I brought you. What’s your recommendation?”
The Tarkalean woman talked while assembling her own phaser rifle. “They have all the advantages right now: height, superior cover, and they’re playing defense. To attack, we’ll need to cross open ground, and that’s a suicide play.” Ithiok bit her lip while she concentrated. “And there’s more bad news. On the way down I saw the main entrance had been breached.”
Sh’Aqabaa scowled as she secured the shoulder stock of her rifle. “Which means the Breen are already inside the facility, possibly planting demolitions. Wonderful.”
“One problem at a time,” Sarai said, hoping to preserve what little esprit de corps her team had left. “Ithiok, I’m still waiting for your recommendation.”
“If the Titan wasn’t locked in a fight for its life, I’d say call down fire support from orbit. If we had more time, I’d say tunnel inside the bunker. But in this scenario, the best we can do is use photon grenades to generate smoke, then use it to cover our charge for the main entr
ance.”
The Andorian shook her head. “We’ll never make it. Those are Spetzkar. Their suits have enhancements that make ours look like toys. They’ll see right through the smoke and cut us down before we get ten meters from cover.”
Sethe interjected, “Sir, we might have something.” He and Modan were huddled around his compsheet—a portable computer in the form of a flexible sheet less than three millimeters thick, with a matte surface, transceiver links to the team’s suits as well as to their tricorders, weapons, communicators, and a subspace comm circuit for communicating with the ship. The Cygnian turned its display toward Vale. “We have determined that the transmitters on top of the main building are active—and capable of supporting two-way communication.”
Sarai stared at the complex jumble of alien symbols on the compsheet. She didn’t know what they said, but she knew they were Husnock. “Sethe, are you telling me that you’ve hacked into the computer network of the Husnock fleet command?”
“Not its core command systems, but possibly its top-level facility controls. Though I will need Modan’s help translating the interface.”
“Get on it, as fast as you can.” Sarai fixed the last part of her rifle into place and smiled. “Call me crazy, but I think our luck just changed.”
It should have been as easy as a training exercise. The Starfleet team had been slow targets without shields, tracing circles in midair. They had all but painted targets on themselves.
But the orders from Chot Braz had said to be on the lookout for enemy personnel beaming onto the platform, and that was what Laar and his comrade Spetzkar had been doing. Crouched among the crenellations on the roof of the Husnock High Command bunker, all of them invisible thanks to the shrouding circuits in their armor, they had watched the plateau, their senses keen and searching for even the faintest shimmer of a transporter beam.
Then came flutters of wind against fabric and a stirring of shadows in the sky. Black figures betrayed only to the degree that they obscured the stars with their passage. By the time Laar and his platoon realized that a Starfleet strike team was dropping out of the sky, the enemy had nearly reached the ground, and half the unit had been in no position to fire on them.
“At least we got one of them,” said Yahn, the commando manning the gap to Laar’s left. “And we’ve got the rest pinned down. They’re going nowhere.”
Watching from the gap to Laar’s right, Geel seemed less confident. “I still don’t understand. Why didn’t they show up in our visors?”
“Because we were set for infrared,” Laar said to the platoon’s newbie. “Their orbital dive suits are insulated to protect them during atmospheric entry and absorb excess heat as energy. If we’d been set for ultraviolet, we might have seen them sooner.”
Yahn adjusted his firing stance without taking his eye off the outbuilding. “Maybe in the future we should have half the squad set IR, half on UV. Cover all our bases.”
“That’s a good note, Yahn. Tell me when you plan to present it to Chot Braz. It’s been a while since I saw him tear a grunt limb from limb.”
The ribbing turned Yahn defensive. “I’m not saying we second-guess the chot, I’m just saying maybe we implement the change on our own, as a precaution.”
“Much smarter,” Laar said, burying his sarcasm in deadpan dryness, despite knowing that by the time his words were scrambled by his vocoder and then unscrambled by Yahn’s, all of his inflections would be stripped anyway. “When the chot says use infrared, you set UV on your own initiative. I’m sure when you save the day he’ll give you a medal for original thinking.”
Yahn turned his head toward Laar just for a split second, then resumed peering through his weapon’s targeting scope. “Have I mentioned how much I hate you?”
“Only twice since morning chow. You’re slipping.”
“You’re right, I’ll work on—” He tensed. “Movement, both sides.”
Across the rooftop, Spetzkar sharpshooters readied themselves to repel a Starfleet assault. Laar hunkered down and adjusted his own holographic targeting system, then opened a channel to the rest of his platoon. “Look sharp. Shooters on the flanks, watch for anyone with tactical launchers. We can’t let them put a photon grenade on the roof.”
From down the line, someone announced, “Here they come!”
Orange light slashed the darkness above Laar’s head. He tracked one beam’s source and tried to lock in a target. Then a photon grenade exploded—in the middle of the open ground between the bunker and the outbuilding.
Geel shouted, “They’re just making smoke!”
“Engage your haze filters,” Laar said. “If they think smoke’s going to help—”
Another blast, a deafening thunderclap that knocked the Spetzkar shooters away from the crenellations. Laar found himself on his back, his ears ringing and his guts feeling bruised. He scrambled back to his post. “Hold the line! Suppressing fire!”
He unleashed barrages of disruptor pulses at any sign of movement in the open, any flinch of motion near the outbuilding. Cool night air flowed through his helmet’s damaged filter, thick with the reek of ozone and the bite of smoke and hot dust. Worst of all, however, was the tinnitus. Laar could barely hear his own weapon discharge, and reports coming in through his helmet’s transceiver sounded like echoes from a light-year away.
Which was why he didn’t so much hear the machines coming alive around him and his men as he felt a vibration in the rooftop. Before he had a chance to determine what was causing it, his holographic visor fritzed along with his comms. Then, in spite of his suit’s insulation, a galvanic prickling stung the back of his neck—
Right before a searing flash of green light erased him from existence.
A wall of smoke blocked Sarai’s view of the bunker. Though she had no direct view of the six Husnock gun batteries, their deep buzzing roar felt like a drill chewing into her gut, and she saw the drifting fog of war set aglow by erratic flashes of green light.
Wind parted the gray curtain between Sarai and the bunker, revealing the Breen’s dire fate. Hounded from all sides by antipersonnel cannons mounted in the conical towers at the corners of the bunker, the Breen had nowhere to run. Every defilade that offered protection from one tower was exposed to another. A few Spetzkar jumped over the crenellations, only to be picked off in the air as they fell. Their bodies struck the rocky ground in smoldering pieces.
Kyzak crouched behind Sarai to peek around the corner at the carnage. He shook his head. “I almost feel sorry for those guys.”
“I don’t,” said sh’Aqabaa, who observed over his shoulder. “Not one bit.”
The massacre ended with a final staccato burst, followed by eerie silence.
Sethe poked at his portable compsheet, then angled it toward Modan for confirmation. The Selenean tapped at the screen, then nodded to Sethe. The computer specialist met Sarai’s expectant stare and nodded. “Roof’s clear, Commander.”
“So I’d gathered. But what happens to us when we approach the bunker?”
Ithiok leaned in to join the conversation. “If their targeting system sees us as friendlies, we’d be free to move in and out of the bunker. Can you teach it to accept our IFF transponders?”
“That would take at least an hour,” Sethe said.
Sarai shook her head. “The Breen are already inside the bunker, we can’t spare the time. What other options do we have?”
“I could just turn off the guns.” Sethe tapped the screen of the compsheet. “Like so.”
A sour mood settled over Kyzak. “Are you serious? Next time, lead with that.”
“Enough,” Sarai said. “Advance in pairs; I’ll be the odd man out. Fan out, in case they have a shooter inside the entrance. Regroup along the bunker’s wall to either side of the main door. We’ll make our way inside using standard two-by-two cover formation. Move out.”
The team darted away from the outbuilding, into the wide-open space that yawned between it and the bunker. Sarai sprinted a s
hort way ahead of the team to take point, her phaser rifle held in a low ready position. The meters separating her from the bunker felt stretched by her fear of running headlong into a trap. She was only partially encouraged by the knowledge that if the area in front of the entrance had been mined by the Breen, any hidden ordnance would have been detonated by Sortollo and Dennisar’s photon-grenade barrage minutes earlier.
Half a minute later she and the others all reached the bunker and pressed their backs to its outer wall while they caught their breath. Sarai was to the left of the entrance with sh’Aqabaa, Kershul, Ithiok, and Sethe. On the other side of the main door were Kyzak, Dennisar, Modan, and Sortollo. Sarai leaned forward to tell Ithiok, “Sensor sweep the first corridor.”
Ithiok pulled her tricorder from its pouch on the right leg of her dive suit. Because the device had been configured for combat operations, it was silent while she scanned. “I can’t get a clear reading past the door.” She pulled a small sphere from another pocket of her suit and lobbed the marble-like device to Sarai. “Roll that inside for me.”
Sarai pivoted around the corner and in a single motion gently bowled the tiny sphere through the cracked-open main portal. The orb made almost no sound as it rolled across the floor and disappeared inside the pitch-dark bunker.
Ithiok adjusted her tricorder. “Okay. Main corridor clear. Low-level signal dampening looks to be built into the structure. No sign of active interference.” She put away her tricorder. “Good news is, any Breen inside the bunker probably didn’t have contact with the ones on the roof. Bad news is, once we go past the first corridor, we’ll be cut off from the Titan—no comms or transporters can reach us in there. And if we want to stay in touch with each other, we’ll either need to maintain line of sight, or set up signal relays at every corner and level change.”
“Stay focused on the positive,” Sarai said to the group. “We’ll be on our own, but we’ll have the advantage of surprise. Let’s do whatever we can to make the most of that.” To Ithiok she added, “Make sure you scoop up that marble of yours on the way in. I get the feeling we’ll need it again as we get closer to contact with the enemy.” She turned the corner and prowled toward the entrance, her rifle braced against her shoulder. “Let’s go.”
