STAR TREK: TOS #86 - My Brother's Keeper, Book Two - Constitution

by Michael Jan Friedman

  The second officer considered the viewscreen, where the alien vessel was growing larger by the second. “Keep at it,” he told Rawitzer, not knowing what else to say. “Kirk out.”

  It was just about then that the mother ship decided to unleash its considerable firepower. Its weapons ports belched blue-white fire at the Constitution, threatening to tear it apart.

  But it was only the alien vessel that was firing, not its satellites. That made its directed-energy barrage a good deal easier to elude. As Medina pulled the starship hard to starboard, the second officer watched the blue-white blaze slide away from them on the viewscreen—leaving the Constitution and her crew unscathed.

  Kirk leaned forward. “Return fire! Target engines and weapons batteries—phasers only!”

  “Aye, sir!” Masefield called back.

  A moment later, the ship’s phaser beams jabbed at the enemy’s vital parts. Unfortunately, they were unable to pierce the bigger vessel’s defenses, though the attack went a long way toward weakening them.

  The second officer would have liked to punch away at some other parts of the mother ship, some places where an energy strike might do more damage. However, he held himself in check.

  [239] The whole reason for this run was to rescue his landing party. It wouldn’t make sense for him to do anything that might destroy the vessel before Gaynor and the others were recovered.

  “They’re coming back for another shot at us!” Gary reported.

  “Rear view,” said Kirk.

  The image on the viewscreen changed. Once again, he found himself looking at the dark bulk of the aggressor ship as it came about and aimed its weapons ports. A moment later, the aliens unleashed another blue-white burst of destructive energy.

  But as before, Medina was ready for them. This time, the helmsman brought the Constitution’s nose up sharply, allowing the enemy’s barrage to pass harmlessly beneath them.

  “Return fire!” the second officer called out. “Keep in mind the same parameters, Mr. Masefield!”

  “Acknowledged, sir,” the weapons officer responded.

  As Kirk looked on, he saw his vessel’s phaser beams test the mother ship’s defenses again. And though the enemy’s shields protected her, the assault rendered them even more fragile than before.

  They were winning, the second officer told himself—and more important, they were buying the time they needed for Rawitzer to get a lock on the landing party. So far, the acting commander’s decision looked like a good one.

  Then it all changed.

  His friend the navigator cried out that the enemy was powering up something new—some weapon they [240] hadn’t seen before. Before Kirk could respond, before he could even think about responding, he saw a blaze of yellow brilliance fill the viewscreen.

  The next thing he knew, he was lying on the deck, the metallic taste of blood strong in his mouth. The engines were droning insistently at him; he could hear them in his bones.

  Get up, they urged him. You’ve got to finish what you started.

  Picking himself up, the second officer looked around to get his bearings. It was then he realized he was sprawled beside a peripheral station, outside the orange rail of the command center.

  The other bridge officers had been wrenched from their seats as well, Kirk observed. A groaning Wooten was stretched out near the turbolift. Gary was sitting at the base of the center seat, shaking his head. And Masefield had been dumped unceremoniously in front of the viewscreen, where he was only now beginning to stir.

  Only Medina seemed to be missing. Grabbing the rail and using it to pull himself up, the second officer looked around for his helmsman. Finally, he located him. Medina was lying facedown on the other side of the bridge, by the science station.

  He wasn’t moving a single muscle.

  Kirk swallowed hard. No, he insisted. I won’t accept it. No more deaths, dammit. No more ghosts.

  Circumnavigating the rail, ignoring half a dozen painful bruises and worse, he made his way past Wooten and the turbolift. Then he got down on his knees beside Medina and checked the man’s pulse.

  [241] It was still reasonably strong. But there was a trickle of blood from the helmsman’s ear, signifying a head injury. He needed medical attention—and he needed it now.

  The second officer turned to Wooten, who was only just then dragging himself back into his seat. “Contact sickbay,” he told the communications officer. “Have Dr. Velasquez send a team up to get Medina.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Wooten, and got to work.

  Unfortunately, Kirk told himself, he couldn’t linger alongside Medina. He had work to do. Making his way back along the rail, he regarded the viewscreen. The alien vessel depicted there was coming about—no doubt in preparation for another pass at them.

  It didn’t seem to be in any great hurry, though. Its commander probably believed he had taken the fight out of the Constitution with his crushing and unexpected assault.

  And maybe he had, the second officer reflected. He had never seen a weapon like the one the enemy had brought to bear, nor had it been mentioned in the satellite’s database. More than likely it was something new, something developed after the satellite was programmed.

  Something Kirk hadn’t taken into account when he made the decision to try to recover his landing party. And what had his oversight cost the Constitution? How bad a setback had it been?

  “Report!” he called out.

  “It was a muon burst,” said Masefield, as he bent over his console to decipher the event. “At least, that’s [242] what the sensors say. But I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Muons, Kirk thought. The aliens’ weapons technology was even more advanced than he would have guessed.

  By then, Gary had regained his seat as well. “Shields down ninety-two percent,” he noted. His console trilled as he worked. “Damage to Decks Four, Six, Eight ... almost everywhere. Repair teams have been dispatched.” As he consulted his monitors further, he shook his head ruefully. “And the warp drive is offline.”

  “Casualties?” Kirk asked, dreading the answer.

  “Plenty of them. But no deaths, apparently.”

  Kirk heaved a sigh. He was grateful for that, at least.

  But ... no warp drive? He considered that for a fraction of a second. In the short run, it might not hurt them, since the battle was currently being fought at impulse speeds. But in the long run ...

  He watched the enemy vessel face them, its weapons ports gaping wide with the promise of further devastation. It seemed to the second officer that they were in desperate need of a helmsman. Luckily, he knew just where he could find one.

  Plunking himself down beside his friend, Kirk took control of the helm controls. Before the enemy could pummel them again with its secret weapon, he threw the Constitution into a pattern of evasive maneuvers.

  It would be safer, of course, to retreat altogether—to make the hard decision that Gaynor and Gary both [243] seemed to believe in. Certainly, no one would be able to argue with that course of action.

  But he wasn’t giving up on his landing party. Not after I’ve come this far, he resolved. Not after I’ve risked so much. I’m going to hang in as long as I have to.

  He waited for the mother ship to fire at them, to rake them with its weapons. He waited for it to go after them.

  But it didn’t do either of those things. It just sat there as they twisted away, as if it knew they had to remain just inside the limits of transporter range.

  “I don’t get it,” the second officer thought out loud. “Why aren’t they trying to—?”

  And then he saw the answer outlined in red on his helm monitors.

  A moment later, Gary must have seen it, too, because he gave it a voice—and a relieved one, at that. “That monster blast depleted their energy supplies, Lieutenant. The enemy has barely got enough juice to keep his deflector shields up.”

  It was true, Kirk reflected. The aliens’ sensor profile showed they were running o
n reserve power. They couldn’t have attacked again if their lives had depended on it.

  At least until their engines generated some more power—and there was no telling how long that might take. A minute, maybe? Several?

  As the second officer pondered the question, he heard the turbolift doors whoosh open behind him. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that it was [244] Velasquez herself and one of her nurses with an antigravity stretcher, responding to his call for medical assistance.

  “What was that?” the doctor asked as she helped lift Medina onto the stretcher. Her expression was one of disapproval. “We’ve got people down all over the ship.”

  “Lieutenant Kirk!” Wooten blurted suddenly. “I’ve gotten word from Rawitzer in the transporter room—he’s got a lock on the landing party!”

  As the doctor left the bridge with her latest patient, the second officer felt a new sprit of optimism. “Target the enemy, Mr. Masefield. I want to punch a hole in those shields.”

  “Aye, sir,” said the weapons officer, fingers flying.

  As before, he sent a stream of phaser fire at the mother ship’s engines and weapons batteries. But this time, it wasn’t a short burst. It was a prolonged assault on the vessel’s defenses.

  And in time, it had the desired effect.

  “Their shields are down!” Gary cried out triumphantly.

  Kirk saw it on his monitors. “Drop deflectors!” he commanded.

  He knew the loss of her shields would leave the Constitution as helpless as the aggressor ship, but he also knew he had no choice in the matter. After all, this was the opening he had been waiting for.

  As Gary complied with his order, the second officer punched in a channel to the transporter room. “Mr. Rawitzer,” he snapped, “energize!”

  [245] The response was reassuringly crisp and instantaneous. “Aye, sir!” said the transporter technician.

  As the comm link subsided, Kirk looked to the forward viewscreen again. To his naked eye, nothing looked any different. The alien vessel was still hanging in space, waiting for its weapons to recharge so it could reduce the starship to atoms.

  But somewhere on board, there were a handful of Constitution crewmen—people who had risked their lives to disable the ship’s connection to its satellites and succeeded—and if luck was with them, they were being whisked to safety at that very moment.

  At least, that was the second officer’s hope—and not just his, he knew, but that of his colleagues on the bridge and, indeed, that of everyone on the ship. They were all pulling for Gaynor and his team to make it back alive, to return to the Constitution the way they had left her.

  Seconds passed, feeling more like hours. Kirk could feel the perspiration collecting in his hands and in the small of his back. Finally, he couldn’t stand the waiting any longer.

  He glanced in the direction of the communications station. “Did we get them?” the second officer asked.

  Wooten didn’t answer right away. He just pressed his headpiece to his ear and scrunched his features with concentration. Finally, he looked up and turned to face Kirk.

  “Well?” asked the second officer, not at all certain he wanted to hear the man’s answer.

  “We got them, sir!” Wooten reported excitedly.

  [246] That was all Kirk needed to hear. Turning in his helmsman’s seat, he faced the viewscreen and the dark aggressor ship depicted on it with a renewed sense of purpose.

  “Shields up!” he barked.

  “Shields up!” his navigator confirmed.

  “Target the enemy!” he told his weapons officer.

  “Targeted,” said Masefield, his voice taut with anticipation.

  The second officer glowered at the alien vessel, remembering how casually it had obliterated its own satellite with Lynch and Jankowski and his two security officers aboard. Four human beings—dead, just like that. It made what he had to do a little easier to contemplate.

  “Sir,” said Gary, “the enemy’s shields are going back up!”

  Kirk swore beneath his breath. Obviously, the aliens’ power was coming back—and quickly. If he didn’t end the battle now, the Constitution would eventually be exposed to another wave of destruction like the first one—and this time, it might not survive the encounter.

  “They’re powering up their weapons, sir!” called Masefield.

  The second officer didn’t wait to find out which ones. He called back, “Target phasers and photon torpedoes, Lieutenant—maximum intensity and full spread!” Then, as he gunned the impulse engines for a strafing run; he added, “Fire at will!”

  The weapons officer did as he was told. As his fingers darted across his control panel, highly focused [247] phaser emissions and yellow-white photon torpedoes erupted from all the Constitution’s weapons ports, scalding the fabric of space en route to their intended destination.

  The phaser beams struck first, shredding the mother ship’s returning shields and ripping a hole in her sleek, dark hull. Then the torpedoes plunged into the breach. For a moment, the second officer held his breath, wondering if there were some angle he had missed, some defensive system he hadn’t counted on that would deny him his victory.

  Then the enemy vessel exploded in a conflagration of staggering proportions, filling the viewscreen with a blinding, white light. Kirk brought his hand up to shade his eyes from the glare. When he brought it down again, there was nothing left of the aggressors’ vessel except a few twisted pieces of debris spinning outward from the focus of the blast.

  Gary cast a glance at his friend. “Direct hit, sir,” he reported with a straight face.

  Even then, still charged with the urgency of battle, the second officer couldn’t help smiling a little at his navigator’s remark. “I gathered as much,” he replied.

  Now all he had to worry about were the satellites. After all, they were still the same deadly threats they had been before the arrival of the alien vessel, ready to fire on either the Constitution or the planet’s surface at the drop of a hat.

  Kirk consulted his console about their status. At that point, the satellites still seemed quiet. It occurred to him that they might be awaiting orders from the mother ship.

  [248] Orders that would never come, he reflected. What’s more, now that the alien vessel was out of the way, he believed he knew a way of dealing with the five remaining satellites—another product of the information they had downloaded from the first one.

  “Mr. Wooten,” the second officer said, “transmit the following code on a narrow beam to each of the line-of-sight satellites.” Then he gave the communications officer the code in question.

  Kirk waited until Wooten had a chance to do as he asked. Then he turned to his friend Gary again. “Mr. Mitchell?”

  “Aye, sir?”

  “Give me a view of the nearest satellite,” the second officer instructed him. “Maximum magnification.”

  A moment later, the viewscreen filled with the by-then-familiar image of an alien satellite. The blue-green sweep of Sordinia IV’s surface could be seen in the background.

  Kirk eyed the satellite as if it were a living adversary. “What’s its status now?” he asked the navigator.

  Gary checked his monitors. When he answered the question, there was a note of surprise in his voice. “It seems to have shut itself down, sir. Weapon and shield functions are offline.”

  The second officer breathed a sigh of relief. Once again, the aliens’ data had proven invaluable.

  His friend looked at him askance. “Begging your pardon, Lieutenant, but if you could disable the satellites with a code ...”

  Kirk knew what he was getting at. “Why risk a [249] landing party to sever the satellites’ link with the mother ship?”

  Gary nodded. “That’s what I was wondering, sir.”

  “Unfortunately,” the second officer explained, “the code only works when the satellites are on their own. When there’s a vessel overseeing them, it doesn’t do a thing.”

  The navigator
grunted. “I see,” he said.

  Kirk turned to his weapons officer. “Let’s take it out, Mr. Masefield. Target and fire.”

  A few moments later, a single lurid phaser beam speared the satellite. What’s more, it kept spearing it, until the thing exploded in a splash of fiery white light.

  Kirk nodded his approval. Good riddance, he thought. But what he said was “Mr. Masefield, I’m going to bring us in range of the other satellites, one at a time. We have some loose ends to tie up.”

  “Aye, sir,” the weapons officer responded with unconcealed eagerness.

  Kirk understood the man’s reaction too well. Neither Masefield nor anyone else on the bridge wanted to worry about the satellites any longer than was absolutely necessary.

  As the second officer worked his helm controls, it occurred to him that he had done it. He had saved his landing party and prevented the aliens from wreaking havoc on Sordinia IV.

  It gave him a distinct feeling of satisfaction. And maybe, in some small way, it made up for the tragic mistake he’d made back on the Farragut. At least, he wanted to think so.

  [250] As Kirk pondered that possibility, the turbolift doors opened behind him and someone came out. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw who it was—and couldn’t help noticing the newcomer’s expression. It was far from amiable, the second officer reflected.

  “Kirk,” growled Gaynor.

  The security chief came down past the rail and approached the second officer, his mouth twisted with animosity, his face livid with barely contained emotion. And, though Kirk hadn’t noticed it at first, the man still had a phaser planted in his fist.

  The second officer got up from his seat.

  “You were a whole lot luckier than you deserved to be,” Gaynor snarled menacingly. “You should have pressed the damned trigger when I told you to. You should have—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, Kirk drew his fist back and drove it hard into the man’s face. Gaynor swayed for a moment. Then his knees gave way and he hit the deck—at which point the second officer grabbed his wrist and wrested the phaser pistol from him.