by L. A. Graf
By the time he saw the big bay door at the end of their hike, Kirk thought it might be a good idea, too. This was no flimsy Orion bulkhead, meant only to [199] keep out a few primitive natives with stone knives and wooden spears. This was the same sort of state-of-the-art installation found on the Enterprise’s shuttle bay, with all the attendant check systems and safeguards.
“Get to work,” he told his father and Giotto. Then he tossed a grin at Chekov and the Russian’s sledful of crates and loose metal equipment and supplies. “I can see they must have had Boy Scouts back in Moscow.”
He was surprised when he got a wry half smile in return. “Be prepared.”
They stacked up a wall waist-high and twice that deep, lining the exterior with the more irregularly shaped pieces of heavy equipment and leaving the relatively smooth, even sides of the metal crates on the inner surface closer to the big bay door. Kirk wasn’t sure how much protection the barricade would actually afford them if the Orions returned with anything more powerful than gauss rifles, but it kept them busy and out of the security officers’ way.
Sulu helped Chekov wrestle the now-empty grav-sled through the gap they’d left in the barricade for that purpose. “Once we find this ship,” he asked Kirk quietly, “are we sure we can actually get it out of here?”
If he’d meant the soft pitch of his voice to keep George or his son from overhearing, he was apparently unsuccessful. “Oh, it’ll get out, all right,” George said without looking away from his work on the door. “Every one of these stashes has at least one [200] small escape vessel for the head Orion poobah, with a launch tube leading out to the surface.”
“How small?” That was one element of their plan Kirk hadn’t considered when George first reported a warp core available for hijacking at the end of this tunnel. “Will it be big enough for all of us?”
George still didn’t turn around, and Kirk couldn’t tell from the pause before his father answered whether George also hadn’t thought about that particular detail, or whether he’d simply hoped it would end up not being an issue. “I don’t know,” the older man finally admitted. “The size of the ships varied in the other stashes. But don’t worry—” He looked back at Kirk and the others with grim resolution. “We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”
Which was a laudable sentiment, Kirk thought, but didn’t necessarily mean everyone would be leaving the same way.
Turning to help drag crates across the last narrow opening, Kirk asked Sulu quietly, “What exactly is the plan for getting the rest of us out of here?”
The other captain gave him a rueful look. “Just what your security chief said—he was supposed to stay linked with the alien transporter device so that Mr. Spock could use him as a focal point to bring you back through.” He nodded across at Chekov, who continued arranging the last level of barricade in grim silence, as though he wasn’t even part of their conversation. “Pavel and I were going to stay behind and make sure the boy got out of here to grow up safely.”
[201] “But Mr. Giotto lost his link to this transporter, which means Spock lost his link to us. What was Plan B?”
Sulu picked up his gauss rifle and turned it over to check its charge. “We were working with limited resources. There was no Plan B.”
“Gentlemen,” Kirk said gently, “Mr. Spock always has a Plan B.”
Chekov turned from dropping the last crate into place, and Kirk thought for an instant that he glimpsed what almost looked like regret or despair in the older man’s lean face. Then the tearing whistle of a gauss rifle’s projectile crashed through the top edge of the barricade from outside, spraying blood and splintered metal across them all.
She couldn’t watch the viewscreen anymore.
Uhura swung the captain’s chair away from the ugly metamorphosis that was taking place on Tlaoli. An hour ago, the ancient planet had glowed in darkening shades of copper, garnet, and rust as the curving arc of sunset crept across its dusty sky. Now, what was left of its dayside looked like a cataract-blinded eye floating in space. The Shechenag must have completed the rest of their protective satellite barrier before discovering the hole Spock and Sulu had punched through to the Janus Gate. Now that they were repairing that hole, one satellite at a time, their force field had brightened and coalesced from spider-silk strands to a thick, opalescent shroud. The [202] blanched planet reminded Uhura a little too much of the eerie swirling aura of Psi 2000 just before that doomed planet had exploded. She knew Tlaoli wasn’t going to do anything so drastic, but if the landing team couldn’t escape before the planetary defense shield was completed, the results would be far more catastrophic than the mere destruction of a planet.
Freeing her gaze from the progress of the Shechenag starship on the viewscreen also served to free Uhura’s mind from the decision-making quandary that had kept her torn between action and inaction for the past hour. With only thirty minutes to go before the Shechenag completed their defensive shield, she could no longer simply wait for the shuttle to appear. She would have to assume that it wasn’t going to get out in time, and react accordingly.
“Lieutenant Hadley.” Uhura could tell from the way the junior communications officer spun around to meet her gaze that he was ready and waiting for the orders he expected her to give. Her next words made his reaching hand freeze in midair, however. “Call Lieutenant Kyle to the bridge at once.” Before he had time to do more than look disconcerted, Uhura added with a smile, “And put the ship on yellow alert.”
“Aye, sir.” Hadley resumed the gesture he’d interrupted, and an instant later yellow alarm lights began to strobe across the bridge. With his other hand, he opened the intraship channel that would connect him to the Enterprise’s most skilled transporter [203] technician. “Lieutenant Kyle, report to the bridge immediately. Repeat, report to the bridge immediately.”
There was a way all good communications officers had of packing a wealth of meaning into the standard ship hails without ever sounding dramatic or unprofessional. Uhura had used those subtle changes in voice, pitch, and tonality so many times herself that they had become almost subconscious. Hearing them now in Lieutenant Hadley’s unfamiliar male register made her suddenly aware of why Starfleet still insisted on having a human communications officer instead of assigning that work to the ship’s main computer.
Hadley swung back around toward Uhura, his gaze slipping past her and up to the viewscreen, as if Tlaoli’s swirling pallor was just too strange to look away from. Uhura had to clench her hands around the armrests of the captain’s console to keep from glancing back herself. “Lieutenant Kyle’s on his way,” the junior officer said. “Lieutenant, should I hail the landing party now?”
“No,” Uhura said flatly. “If Commander Spock hasn’t left the planet yet, it’s because Captain Kirk isn’t back yet. And a communication from us saying that the satellite shield is closing won’t make the Janus Gate work any better or any faster. All it will do is warn the Shechenag that someone is using it.” Uhura turned toward Karen Tracey at the science station. “What we have to do is make sure that shield doesn’t close until the shuttle is on its way back to us. And for that, we’ll need the best fix on the Janus Gate [204] that your long-range scanners can give us, Lieutenant.”
“Aye, sir.” The technical officer ducked back over her display screens.
Uhura swiveled back toward the helm, keeping her gaze on the two men there rather than on the ominous pale crescent that hung on the viewscreen above them. “Riley, I need you to keep track of that Shechenag starship on a meter scale if possible. Can you do that?”
“Aye, sir.” All of the self-consciousness had left the young navigator’s voice as he manipulated his instruments to triangulate on a moving target rather than a distant lodestone star. “Got it, sir.”
“Send the coordinates over to helm and engineering. Tracey, your coordinates for the Janus Gate need to go to the same two bridge stations.” Uhura suspected Captain Kirk wouldn’t have given the crew his directions
all helter-skelter like this, but her mind was racing so fast that it was two steps ahead of her voice. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to think through her next series of commands before she gave them. “Lieutenant Alden, I want you to line the ship up with both Riley’s and Tracey’s coordinates.”
“Aye, sir.” The pilot’s reply was confident enough, but the sidelong glance he gave her betrayed a little confusion. Uhura took a deep breath, realizing that this was the point at which she had to share her strategy with the rest of the crew, and see how they reacted to it.
“I don’t want to engage the Shechenag ship in battle unless that’s our very last resort,” she said. “What [205] we’re going to do is obstruct their work so they can’t finish their defensive network. It won’t be anything fancy, like Commander Spock and Lieutenant Sulu did with the satellite network, but if we can place the Shechenag ship exactly in line between us and the Janus Gate, I think we can manage to disable her in a way that won’t seem like it’s coming from us. Can you keep the Enterprise on that station, Lieutenant Alden?”
“If I can’t, sir, you better demote me to shuttle pilot,” the helmsman replied resolutely, and Uhura felt the Enterprise’s impulse engines surge as she came around to her new heading.
The turbolift doors hissed open, and Lieutenant John Kyle strode onto the bridge. His bony face wore its usual deadpan expression, but the shrewd blue eyes were alert. “Lieutenant Kyle reporting to the bridge, sir. Do you need me to relieve the helm officer?”
“No, Lieutenant. I want you at engineering.” Now that the critical part of her operation was at hand, Uhura found that she couldn’t remain seated in the captain’s chair no matter how hard she tried. She scrambled to her feet and went to join Kyle at the bridge’s engineering station. Watkins, the on-duty engineer, was already vacating his station and heading for one of the auxiliary bridge monitoring stations so he could continue his work of coordinating bridge control with engine room response. “I want you to route the main transporter controls through here so we can aim and fire them like a weapon. The [206] angle of the beam relative to the Enterprise may change, but the vector will always remain oriented toward the same spot on the planet’s surface.”
The transporter technician glanced down at the spatial coordinates that had been sent to the engineering station by Riley and Tracey. When he looked back up at Uhura, his pale eyebrows had curved into a distinctly dubious arc. “We’re arming the transporters at that Janus Gate area again?”
“Yes.”
Kyle cleared his throat gingerly. “Forgive me for asking, Lieutenant, but have you cleared this with the chief? If we’re going to risk losing all the ship’s power, I think he’d like to know about it in advance.”
Uhura frowned at the skeptical tone of Kyle’s voice, but she knew better than to reprimand him. As one of the ship’s main transporter technicians, he reported directly to Montgomery Scott, and right now he was just doing his duty as an engineer. She said over her shoulder to Hadley, “Contact Lieutenant Commander Scott in his quarters and tell him I need to clear a bridge operation with him.” Then she glanced back up at Kyle. Her awareness of how fast time was running out for the landing party put a sharp edge in her voice that even she could hear. “While we wait, Lieutenant Kyle, I suggest you transfer controls and aim the transporter beam. You’ll need to make sure it just grazes the edge of this first set of coordinates—” She pointed at the flickering column of spatial data that was Riley’s fix on the slowly moving [207] Shechenag starship. “—then hits the Janus Gate as directly as possible.”
“Aye-aye, sir.” Whatever doubts he may have had, Kyle must have recognized from the intensity of Uhura’s voice that there wasn’t much leeway for delay. He seated himself at the engineering station and began programming it to take control of the main transporter beam, his long fingers not even hesitating over their work.
“I’ve got Lieutenant Commander Scott, sir.” Lieutenant Hadley offered the frequency monitor to her, as if he’d already guessed that she’d prefer her conversation with Montgomery Scott to be semiprivate. As she crossed the bridge back to her old station, Uhura made a mental note to place a commendation for initiative in the young officer’s personnel file. “He wants to know if you need him up on the bridge.”
“I don’t need you, sir,” Uhura said into the transmitter. “I just need to clear a maneuver before I risk it.”
“Whisht?” said a sleepy, Scottish voice in her ear. “I mean, what is it that you’re wanting to do, lass?”
“The Shechenag are almost ready to place the last satellites in their defensive array. I have the Enterprise positioned so they’re directly between us and the Janus Gate. I want to aim the main transporters to graze the Shechenag ship, as if we were trying to beam some of its hull down to the Janus Gate.”
There was a short—and no longer sleepy—silence on the other end of the channel. “You’re trying to get the Janus Gate to latch onto that alien ship and drain [208] its power, the same way it bollixed us up when we connected to it?”
“Yes, sir. Do I have your permission to try?”
The chief engineer blew out a gusty breath in her ear. “How much longer do we have before the shield closes up completely?”
Uhura glanced up at the planet on the viewscreen. Its opalescent glow was definitely brighter than before. “We’re not sure, sir. Probably less than thirty minutes.”
“And neither hide nor hair of Mr. Spock’s shuttle to be seen?”
“No, sir.”
This time, the sigh that echoed through the frequency monitor was much more resigned. “Then we’d better do something, hadn’t we? Go ahead and try your maneuver, Lieutenant. You’ve got Kyle at the transporter controls, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” In the distance, Uhura could hear the telltale hiss of a microfoam mattress decompacting as weight was removed from it. “Tell Kyle to shut the beam down at the first sign of a voltage fluctuation on the main access lines,” Montgomery Scott ordered. “I’ll head down to the engine room and make sure the warp core is shunted off from the ship’s power circuits. Just in case the lad’s aim with the transporter beam is as bad as his aim with darts,” he added dryly. “Scott out.”
Uhura handed the frequency monitor back to Hadley, and relayed the chief engineer’s instructions [209] to Kyle. He nodded, then added a few more lines of code to his rerouted transporter controls. “Do you want me to wait to make sure Commander Scott has time to get to the engine room?” he asked when he was done.
Uhura could hear the almost inaudible twitch of nervousness that lay beneath Kyle’s question, probably because she was so nervous herself. Before she could be tempted to agree, she made herself turn and look up at Tlaoli. The dayside of the shielded planet was now a phosphorescent bone-white, while the nightside shimmered in the darkness of space like a drop of molten pearl.
“No,” Uhura said sharply. “Mr. Alden, are we on station?”
“Right on station, sir.”
“Mr. Riley, do we still have a precise fix on the Shechenag spaceship?”
“Down to one-tenth of a meter, sir.”
Uhura would have liked to have taken a deep breath, but her abdominal muscles had locked so tight with tension that she couldn’t manage it. She drew in a short, shallow breath instead, and hoped it didn’t sound too much like a gasp. When she spoke, however, her voice didn’t shake or quiver in the slightest. Uhura blessed her years of communications duty for that.
“Lieutenant Kyle, engage the transporter beam.”
“Aye-aye, sir.” The transporter technician’s voice cracked with the tension Uhura had managed to hide, [210] but to his credit he didn’t hesitate. “Transporter beam engaged.”
Unlike the phasers, there was no way to see the transporter beam shoot through space, and the lack of lights on the massive Shechenag starship made it hard to tell if any of its hull had been displaced by the beam. But Uhura knew the instant their beam hit
the aliens’ defensive shield. A bloom of fiery blue-white light erupted from the impact, then mushroomed across the opalescent surface, dissipating as it spread.
“What just happened, Mr. Kyle?” Uhura snapped.
The transporter technician tapped a query into his station desk. “It looks like the carrier wave never reached the planet, much less made a connection back for us to send anything along it.” He threw a stymied look back over his shoulder at her. “Sir, our transporter beam just got completely absorbed by that defense shield out there.”
Chapter Nine
UHURA STARED UP AT Tlaoli on the viewscreen. Beyond the massive silhouette of the Shechenag starship, there was still a visible smudge of shadow on the fiery white crescent of the planet’s dayside, marking the place where Spock and Sulu had blasted through the aliens’ defensive array. But the repairs that had already been done to the satellite network had stitched enough of that hole closed to make it look more like a puckered seam than a puncture. And most of the remaining darkness lay far to starboard of the Shechenag’s slow-moving ship.
“There’s still enough of a gap left for the shuttle to come through,” Uhura said, thinking out loud. “That means there should be enough space for us to shoot a transporter beam through, too.”
[212] “But we’re not in the right place to make that angle, sir,” Kyle pointed out. “We can line up the Enterprise, the Shechenag, and the Janus Gate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be shooting through the widest part of—”
“I’ve got it calculated, sir,” Riley broke in abruptly. “We need to be about a hundred kilometers closer to the planet and almost over its northern pole to make the shot.”
“Then let’s get there.” Uhura seated herself back into the captain’s chair in case the course correction was more than their inertial dampeners could easily handle. “Send those coordinates over to the helm, Mr. Riley. Estimated time of arrival, Mr. Alden?”
