A Time to Kill

by David Mack

  She holstered her rifle and carefully removed two ultritium charges from her chest pack. “Vale to Delta Team,” she said, keying her com. “I’m in position. Everybody confirm.”

  “Spitale, ready.”

  “Sakrysta, set.”

  “Fillion, good to go.”

  “Acknowledged,” Vale said. “Sakrysta and Fillion, you’re first. Go!”

  The two explosions sounded much closer than Vale knew they were, and she recalled that water was superior to air as a medium for propagating sound waves.

  “Spitale,” Vale said, “go!” Moments later, another rumble of watery thunder shook the ocean depths. She armed the fuses on her ultritium charges and released them into the shaft. She turned and swam away from the exhaust port as quickly as she was able. Moments later the cacophonous boom roared behind her, sending up a fiery rush of gas that dislodged the chimerium iris, which then sank into the ocean floor as the shaft imploded beneath it.

  “Vale to Delta Team, sound off.”

  “Sakrysta here.”

  “Fillion here.”

  “Spitale here.”

  So far so good, Vale congratulated herself. “Sakrysta, rig the airlock with a light charge,” she said, swimming with broad, strong strokes and kicks back to the now-flooding base. “As soon as the base personnel are out, blow the airlock so they don’t come back—but don’t compromise the sub itself.”

  “Aye, sir,” Sakrysta said. “I’m on it.”

  Vale checked her chronometer. If the Klingon fleet was punctual, the invasion would begin in fifty-two minutes. Her best guess was that it would take at least thirty minutes to flood the entire base and cut off the airlock access. That would leave twenty-two minutes to blast their way in, find the target points, plant the charges, help disable the Tezwan fleet, and reach minimum safe distance from which to blow up the base.

  She rolled her eyes in mute protest. Piece of cake.

  Chapter 37

  Tezwa—Mount Ranakar,

  1525 Hours Local Time

  LA FORGE DANGLED by four fingertips from the cliff face. He tried to ignore the rock-strewn ground, thirty-odd meters below his feet. Fumbling for his gauss gun, he was acutely aware of a steady downdraft that was thinning the fog. That was good news for T’Eama and Braddock, who would now be able to see far enough ahead to better plan their climb. Clearer conditions, however, would also increase the team’s risk of being spotted.

  The trio climbed more or less side by side—Braddock on the left, T’Eama in the center, La Forge on the right—linked by belaying lines connected to climbing harnesses. They had shed their bulky dropsuits in favor of lightweight, camouflage climbing gear. Even in Tezwa’s reduced gravity, every gram of encumbrance mattered. Even more critical, however, were flexibility and mobility. To navigate the perilous vertical ascent would demand agility, caution, and strength.

  Steadying his gauss gun, La Forge aimed for the underside of what looked like a fairly solid rock shelf fifteen meters above him. He fired and shot a slender, electromagnetically propelled piton through the ledge. Trailing behind the piton was a microthin line of duranium cable. His fingertips began to ache under the stress of supporting his weight. He thumbed the cable retractor. A few seconds later the line went taut as the piton—now expanded into a miniature grappling hook—caught and held fast on the other side of the ledge.

  Holding on to his gauss pistol, he used his free hand to play out some slack in his belaying line, then switched the cable retractor to its stronger setting. Locking both hands around the compact device, he shot upward as it towed him toward the ledge. As he neared the underside of the outcropping, he stopped the retractor and searched for a toehold. Spying one to his right, he wedged the front spikes of his crampons into it and locked his gloved hands around a tiny lip on the side of the rock shelf over his head. He keyed the gauss pistol’s hook release. The grappling hook folded neatly back into its shell and retracted into the pistol, which he holstered.

  Ignoring the burning pain in his triceps and chest, La Forge struggled to lift himself up onto the narrow ledge. Below him he heard the gentle fwup of Braddock’s gauss-pistol shot, followed by the crack of its slug punching through stone. La Forge laid his right forearm across the ledge and released his foothold as he prepared to steady his aim for the next shot.

  A brittle jangling of broken rock was his only warning.

  Braddock’s target surface had collapsed under his weight, and now was falling down toward him. T’Eama gripped the cliff wall in front of her and braced herself. The belaying line that linked her to Braddock snapped taut. He swung beneath her like the weight at the end of a pendulum. The tumbling rocks, of course, fell straight, and missed him as he swung clear.

  La Forge was ready to exhale a relieved sigh when T’Eama’s handhold crumbled under her fingers. Now she and Braddock both were plummeting, and depending on La Forge to be their anchor. Realizing he had no time to snap off another shot with his gauss pistol, he locked his arms around his meager chunk of real estate and braced for the inevitable.

  Their combined weight wrenched him downward. Jagged edges along the ledge bit into his arms and ribs. His spine felt like it was being stretched in some medieval torture device.

  Where his ledge met the cliff, a hairline fracture formed. Dust escaping from the crack stung his sinuses. He glanced down. T’Eama and Braddock scrambled to find purchase on the cliff. Clawing with her slender fingers, T’Eama found a narrow sliver of flat ledge. She latched on to it and pulled herself up. Now she was supporting Braddock’s weight, and the knifing pain in La Forge’s shoulder and lower back subsided.

  By the time La Forge had driven a new piton into the cliff, affixed a carabiner to it, and transferred the slack from his harness, Braddock had found a new path up the cliff and resumed his ascent. T’Eama kept pace beside him, and both of the junior officers showed greater caution in securing their lines before releasing their hand-holds. It took them nearly five minutes to recover their lost ground, and another five to climb until they were once again level with La Forge.

  “You two okay?” La Forge said while the pair fastened new pitons of their own into the rock face.

  “Yes, sir,” T’Eama said, checking her carabiner lock.

  “Shook up, but yeah,” Braddock said, securing his line.

  “We have to pick up the pace,” La Forge said. “We’re less than halfway up, and the Klingons’ll be here in forty minutes.”

  “Sir,” Braddock said. “Even if we reach the top in time, how are we supposed to get inside the base?”

  “Just climb,” La Forge said. “Let me worry about the plan.”

  “Yes, sir,” Braddock said, and began looking for his next avenue of ascent.

  La Forge stared up the next hundred-plus meters of barren rock and was grateful that one of the privileges of command was keeping one’s own counsel—because he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do when they reached the top of the cliff.

  Chapter 38

  Tezwa—Mokana Basin,

  2328 Hours Local Time

  FROM BENEATH THE MUDDY SWAMPWATER, Razka saw the lone Tezwan sentry glowing like a ripe piece of fruit in the sun. The young man’s body was bright with heat radiation, warmer than most humanoids the Saurian security officer had encountered.

  Undulating and twisting through the thick vines that choked the swamp bed, Razka swam slowly closer to the patch of dry ground where the guard paced through his lonely midnight vigil. The storm that had doused the strike team earlier had ended as quickly as it had begun, leaving a musky humidity in the air and thick mud covering the ground.

  Biding his time, Razka observed the sentry’s pattern. The man never lingered at either end of his short patch of clear soil. He carried his rifle with its stock tucked against his left shoulder, barrel down, ready for combat. Judging by his twitchy response to every random noise that trilled from the tropical darkness, he wasn’t at ease in this wild place.

  Behind the
soldier was a field maintenance station for the firebase’s powerful shield emitters. The station was well camouflaged, to most humanoids’ unaided eyes. But to Razka the blocky, four-meter cubic structure shone like a bonfire. When the guard, bright as he was to Razka’s thermal vision, passed in front of it, he was all but a silhouette by comparison.

  The sentinel stopped at the farthest end from Razka, scanned the night with unseeing eyes, then walked back toward him, one squishing step after another. Razka plucked a pebble from the swamp bed and gently extended his leathery, scaled hand out of the water. With a quiet flick of his fingers, he sent the rock soaring into the brush beside the maintenance station. The tiny stone landed with a rustle and a clatter.

  The guard spun toward the sound and aimed his rifle at nothing. Razka exploded from the water behind him.

  The long-limbed Tezwan was faster than he expected, and turned almost completely around before Razka could strike.

  The agile Saurian batted aside the barrel of the guard’s rifle, sending its burst of sizzling blue energy into the jungle canopy. Continuing his fluid forward motion, Razka rolled his left arm around the guard’s rifle and slipped inside the Tezwan’s inner perimeter of defense. He slammed the palm of his right hand up into the sentry’s chin.

  The guard’s feet lifted from the ground as Razka’s blow sent him sprawling backward, limp as an over-cooked loka leaf. His rifle remained locked in Razka’s arm as he thudded, empty-handed and unconscious, against the maintenance station.

  Razka removed the power cell from the Tezwan’s weapon, tossed it aside, then checked the sentry’s pulse. Satisfied the man was alive and would recover, he keyed his com.

  “Razka to Alpha Team,” he said, clearing the camouflage from the maintenance controls. “I’m here. What’s your status?”

  “We’re just outside the shield perimeter,” Riker said. The first officer sounded like he was out of breath. “Pretty heavy activity out here.”

  “Acknowledged,” Razka said. “Stand by.” He checked his chronometer. Alpha Team was on schedule, with a comfortable forty-five-minute window of opportunity before the Klingon fleet was expected to arrive. He accessed the maintenance station’s manual override circuits and began modifying the shield emitter’s field geometry. Lucky for us these weren’t concealed properly, Razka mused. Looks like someone didn’t follow all the directions when they put this place together.

  He finished programming his changes to the shield emitters’ field geometry, set it for a five-minute delay, and slipped back beneath the murky water for his return to the strike team’s standby position. He rejoined them in the heavy foliage north of the firebase’s protected zone just in time to see his work come to fruition. With a shimmer like heat distortion, the defensive shield—normally a convex shape above the base—inverted and enveloped the Tezwan patrol gathered outside the base entrance.

  Some dropped instantly. A few of them twitched first, then collapsed. Exactly ten seconds after the shield inversion occurred, it reversed itself. The night reverted to normal, albeit a little bit quieter than before.

  Razka noted with pleasure that when he was debriefed later by Lieutenant Vale, he would be able to tell her without prevarication that the Tezwans hadn’t seen it coming, and they hadn’t felt a thing.

  He activated his tricorder and confirmed that the shock pulse had also disabled the remote security devices outside the base entrance. “All clear,” he said to Riker.

  “Okay,” Riker said. “Let’s move up.”

  Razka was disquieted by the fatigue he heard in Riker’s voice. The first officer was moving a bit less confidently than he had just an hour before; his body language had changed, as if he were concealing an infirmity. Blinking his thermal iris into place, Razka saw that Riker’s body temperature was higher than normal. Of particular concern was the glowing-hot pinpoint wound on the back of Riker’s neck.

  Not wanting to alarm Tierney or Barnes, he moved closer to Riker and kept his voice down. “Sir,” he said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes,” Riker said, a bit too defensive for Razka’s comfort. “I’m fine. Why?”

  “Your neck, sir,” Razka said. “You’re injured.”

  “It’s just a bug bite,” Riker said.

  “Sir, may I suggest—”

  “Razka, take point,” Riker said, raising his voice in what Razka deduced was an effort to mask his pain and sound more like himself. “Clear a path to the operations center.”

  “Aye, sir.” Razka knew that as long as Riker remained coherent, no good would come of arguing with him. In more than a century of service to Starfleet, Razka had never been guilty of insubordination. Until the first officer’s ailment became incapacitating, he was still in command.

  Using a combination of brute force and high-tech tools, the cunning Saurian bypassed the security panel for the firebase’s door. The portal slid open to reveal a short staircase leading down into a narrow, dark corridor. Though his thermal vision revealed no sign of Tezwan troops in the corridor, his olfactory receptors caught their distinctive scent. Three, possibly four, he reasoned as he distinguished the intermingled odors. Probably in concealed positions. A second line of defense. Overlapping fields of fire, if they’re smart. He sniffed the air from the corridor again. Definitely four of them. A veritable death trap.

  He looked back at Riker and the two engineers. “Wait here,” he whispered with an evil grin. “I’ll be right back.”

  Chapter 39

  Tezwa—Linoka Forest,

  1931 Hours Local Time

  IT’S LIKE RUNNING a marathon on the sun, McEwan fumed.

  For nearly an hour and a half, Echo Team had been sprinting in circles, rushing headlong through walls of flame that burned white-hot and stretched thirty meters into the night sky, which was obscured by the mountain of mushrooming black smoke.

  Lieutenant Taurik had been correct when he told them their suits would protect them from the heat of the fire. What he had failed to mention was that their tricorders were not quite so resilient. His own tricorder had been reduced to worthless, sparking junk in less than twenty minutes, leaving them to find their way for the past hour without its guidance.

  Glad my rifle sheath is made from the same stuff as my suit, she thought. I’d hate to go to a gunfight without a gun.

  Also not addressed in Taurik’s marching orders were the countless other hazards that had awaited them—such as falling trees, winds powerful enough to hurl them about like leaves, or the complete lack of any visible point of reference. The only thing McEwan could see in any direction was more fire, another crash of sparks, a furnace blast of ash.

  Now, less than forty-five minutes before the grimly anticipated Klingon invasion, she was certain they were lost in the inferno, with their suits rapidly running out of power.

  She didn’t see that Taurik had stopped until she had all but slammed into him. Pulling herself up short, she flailed her arms to recover her balance. Rao came to a stop on her left, and Mobe stumbled to an exhausted finish on her right. She felt bad for the Bolian engineer, who seemed to be having the hardest time keeping up with their mad dash through the firestorm.

  “What’s wrong, sir?” McEwan said.

  Taurik turned to face her. “Nothing, Ensign. We are here.”

  Taking two steps forward through an inky curtain of smoke, she saw that they were standing directly in front of the main entrance to the firebase. The door was recessed into a small blockhouse meant to be camouflaged as part of a low knoll. Like soap removing a stain, the fire had scoured the structure of its disguise. The panel that opened the door was melted. “Controls are slagged, sir,” she said. “Permission to blast them.”

  “Granted,” Taurik said. “Rao, activate the signal jammer.”

  McEwan opened the polymer sheath on the back of her suit and drew her rifle. Figuring that the fire had done half her work for her already, she set her weapon to only half of full power. She steadied her aim and fired a
single, short burst.

  The control panel disintegrated. McEwan moved up to the door. Reaching through the white-hot gap where the panel had once been, she found the emergency release circuit and toggled it. The door opened with a pneumatic hiss, revealing a short stairway down to a small entry chamber, which was sealed off from the rest of the base by a second pressure door.

  Looking around the corner first to confirm the chamber was clear, she waved the rest of the strike team forward.

  Taurik entered the cramped space first, followed closely by the two engineers. McEwan stepped inside last and keyed the controls to close the outer door. Safe from the fire outside, Rao removed his tricorder from his shielded chest pack and scanned the room for a few minutes.

  “Thirty-one degrees Celsius,” the swarthy engineer said finally, closing his tricorder with a casual flip of his hand. “Suits are back to room temperature.”

  “Remove your pressure gear,” Taurik said. “From here we use stealth.” The team quickly shimmied out of the bulky, insulated pressure suits and recovered their tricorders, demolition kits, and weapons. They tossed their heavy boots by the outer door and kept only the lightweight, padded footwear they had worn beneath them. Taurik looked at the dim, pale-blue utility lights that lined the sides of the entrance chamber. “Mr. Mobe, disable these lights,” he said, then added, “Quietly.”

  Taurik and McEwan crouched at the inner door. Mobe cut the lights, plunging the pressure lock into darkness.

  “Open the door,” Taurik said.

  McEwan opened the control panel and disabled the maglocks. Wedging her fingertips between the door and its frame, she slowly pulled it open. The corridor beyond sloped downward. It was mostly dark, and illuminated by evenly spaced pools of harsh overhead light. A pair of sentries stood at the far end, near an intersection, talking animatedly.