by L. A. Graf
"I know, Spock, but it's been a while since we tried this trick." He
quirked one corner of his mouth into a
wry little grin. "I just wanted to make sure you remembered."
Spook, as expected, didn't seem amused.
A tense buzzing from communications caught Kirk's attention even as
Spock turned to his panel. "Mr. Goldstein?" He twisted an alarmed look
over one shoulder. "Problems?"
"Yes, sir--" Goldstein looked up with one hand to his earpiece, blue
eyes bleak and uncertain. "We've just lost two of the suit locator
signals, sir. We're no longer in contact with 'the shuttle crew."
Alone on board the Hawking, Chekov shouted a string of pungent oaths,
kicking a helmet in frustration after ten wasted minutes of trying to
get out of his sling one-handed.
The strap around his neck was twisted into a constricting rope by the
time he fell into one of the empty passenger seats. McCoy, damn him,
had been smarter than Chekov gave him credit for. Without being
obvious, he'd strapped on Chekov's sling so that it couldn't be undone
without a second hand. A belt across his chest pinned his arm to his
side; he couldn't reach the buckle to loosen that band, and he couldn't
lift off the neck strap unless he could raise his arm. Desperate fear
burned through him again, and he kicked the seat in front of him for
lack of anything more constructive to do.
If he hadn't given Sulu his phaser, he could have tried to burn through
the chest strap with a low heat setting. As it was, he didn't even have
so much as a dinner knife with which to attack the webbing. Even the
twists of shrapnel littered among the environmental suits were too
brittle with nitrogen-cold to be useful. If only-
He stopped, turning in his seat to frown at the wreck behind him.
Silver-white pools of liquid nitrogen still drizzled from behind the
environmental suit compartment. It boiled away with a secret hiss,
kissing a hollow trail of frost along the deck where it passed. Reaching
out with one foot, Chekov stepped gently on one of the ice-whitened
scraps of metal, and it splintered into dust beneath his boot.
True hope speared through him for the first time since the explosion. He
bounded across the aisle to snatch up his jacket and loop it around his
hand. It made an awkwa bundle, but he could move inside it well enough
to fumble a piece of shrapnel off the floor without freeze-burning his
fingers. Jacket fabric crackled as it fought to equalize temperatures
with the metal, and Chekov tried not to think about how quickly the cold
would eat through to him as he squatted beside the cabinet door to scoop
up a thin puddle of fiitrogen.
Contact with his body heat evaporated the liquid faster than it could
run down the chest strap's width. Glossy ice still hissed along the
nylon fibers, though, and the ephemeral touch of nitrogen on his skin
sliced across his nerves like a painless knife. A second meager dousing
froze a band wide enough to form its own stress fracture; he barely had
to twist the strap to shatter the frozen fibers.
Much as he appreciated the need for pampering his arm just now, Chekov
still felt better once he'd struggled the sling over his head. Being
strapped down made him feel too much like an invalid, too helpless in a
situation already out of his control. He carefully rotated his shoulder
joint while he scooted suit pieces around with his foot. He'd lied to
Sulu, a little, at
least; he could move the arm well enough, but it was weak and wouldn't
last long. The muscle across the back of his shoulder burned with
fatigue after herting nothing heavier than one of the intact suit
torsos. So perhaps his justification had been only half a lie. After
all, he probably wouldn't be able to lift his arm at all by the time
he'd cannibalized even one useful environmental suit.
The torso he squirmed into was scarred across the front, a finger-deep
gouge angling from shoulder to hip while still managing to miss the
suit's more vital functions. He felt comforted by the shell's bulky
weight, almost believing he could leave this floating deathtrap if he
had to, maintain a minimal atmosphere, possibly even survive. Fitting
the one good sleeve onto the body of the suit, he stayed gloveless long
enough to kneel in the bottom of the locker and searob for a repair kit
not blown apart by the explosion.
He couldn't find one.
The alloy patches from countless suit repair kits peppered the floor;
two-part sealant pooled among them and was already hardening where both
parts had run together. Smoothing out a tear between unsteady fingers,
he scooped up a gobbet of sealant and smeared it thickly on the suit
trousers laid out beside him. It took two patches to cover the tear,
and another fingerful ofsealant to fix it all into place. The next hole
was even bigger, though, and he was only halfway down its length before
the puddles of sealant on the floor had thickened beyond the point where
he could scrape them up. Then he had to crawl away from the cramped
workspace to scrub his hand clean on the remnants of his sling. He
didn't have enough sealant
to finish fixing even one environmental suit; the last thing he needed
was to glue his fingers together, as well.
A shriek of sirens tore past him from the front of the ship. Jerking
upright, fear bolting through him like lightning, he listened to the
computer's dispassionate singsong without being able to breathe. "Core
temperature one thousand seven hundred degrees Centigrade. Containment
decay irreversible; core breach imminent. Estimated time to breach
twenty-three minutes forty-three seconds."
Chapter Sixteen
SuLu svtn nROtn, blinking as his eyes tried to adjust from interstellar
space to the sudden glare of arc lights. He found himself confronting a
circle of uniformed and blue-visored forms, and pressed his phaser
firmly to Haslev's helmet. "If you try to beam us away, I'll shoot
him," he warned through his external suit communicator.
A ripple of ironic laughter answered him instead of the Orion growls he
expected. "Feel free to do so," a dry voice said. "It will save us the
trouble of arresting him and taking him home for trial."
Su!u jerked in surprise, realizing that what he'd taken for visors were
actually bright blue faces. He heard Muav Haslev's agonized groan
across the helmet channel.
"You're Andoriansl" Sulu reached up with his free hand to unlock his
helmet and tug it off his shoulders,
so they could see his Starfleet collar. "Is this a Federation ship?"
"Passenger transport Shras, currently on paramilitary assignment with
the Artdorian Reserve Fleet." The nearest Artdorian stepped forward,
bowing with the old-fashioned courtesy of his race. He was.a tall man,
with a long and bony face. "I'm Captain Pov Kanin."
"Good." Sulu swung toward the technician sitting behind the transporter
console. "We left a Starfleet officer stranded on that shuttle out
there. Beam him over at once."
"Please." Uhura
lifted off her own helmet, a flare of hope lighting her
eyes. "If you heard our distress call, you know it's urgent."
The Artdorian glanced uncertainly at his captain. "Sir?"
"Starfleet officers hold automatic command authority over all planetary
reserves," Captain Kanin told him, one antenna flexing in gentle
reproof. "Of course, we will oblige the lieutenant commander's request.
Scan for the shuttle's coordinates, and lock--"
Sulu's feet kicked out from under him without warning, staggering him
back against the transporter chainher's wall. He saw Uhura catch at
HasIcy when he stumbled onto his knees. Bulkheads groaned around them
with the recoil from a photon torpedo strike, and the crew of the Shras
broke into shouts of alarm; several scrambled for the exit.
"Captain!" A nervous voice crackled across the ship's intercom. "We're
being fired on by the Orion police cruiser Mecufi.t"
"Shields up! Take evasive action immediately!" A second thunderous blow
rocked the Shra& and Pov
Kanin let out a hissing curse. "How did they find us?" he demanded,
turning on the gray-faced officer next to him. "I told you to plot a
course that would make us look like a sensor ghost!"
Sulu struggled to his feet, made clumsy by the rigid metallic fabric of
his suit. He pushed himself off the shuddering wall toward Muav Hasler.
"Take off your helmet!" he ordered, slapping at the release buttons on
his shoulders. "As long as you're using the suit ventilator, its
distress signal is still going out--"
The alien yelped in dismay. and flung the helmet away. His face was
ashen with distress. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I had other things on my mind." Sulu sWUng around in time to see the
Andorian captain stride through the doorway with his crew, obviously
headed for the bridge. The helmsman's mouth hardened with
determination. "Come on. Let's see if we can still convince them to
rescue Chekov."
Uhura threw him a puzzled glance as the Andorian ship shuddered under a
third glancing blow. "But the shields are up! There's no way we can
beam Chekov on board now."
"No, but we can dock and pick him up." Sulu tossed the phaser over to
her. "Here, you take this. We might still need to use it on Haslev for
bargaining."
"You can't do that!" Haslev's pale antennae quivered with apprehension.
"You heard what they said--they'll let you shoot me!"
"You'd better hope they were joking." Sulu stepped off the transporter
pad and headed for the door. Uhura prodded Haslev with the phaser,
forcing him to follow.
Outside the transporter room, one narrow corridor ran along what looked
like the entire length of the
ship, anchored at either end with manual access shafts inst ead of
turbolifts. Sulu guessed the passenger transport had been modeled after
a Starfleet courier perhaps five decks high and only wide enough for
two rows of cabins on its passenger decks. He pounded past silent
doorways to the forward access shaft, feeling the ship shiver as it was
pushed to its highest warp capability.
"They're trying to run away!" Uhura crowded Hasler into the access
shaft, and pushed him to climb up the ladder rungs behind Sulu. "They're
going to leave the Enterprise to fight the Orions by herself!"
"Why not?" Sulu asked breathlessly, pulling himself up past another
empty passenger deck. He heard Haslev's reluctant footsteps climbing
after him. "You heard the Andorian captain say he'd been hiding from us
as a sensor ghost. No one can accuse him of abandoning a battlefield if
no one knows he was there in the first place."'
Uhura's voice echoed in the ladderway. "But we know he was there."
"Exactly what I'm going to point out to him." Sulu heaved himself up the
last of the rungs and out onto a long teardrop-shaped bridge. A small
cluster of uniformed Andorians milled about near the main viewscreen,
ignoring their posts to watch something there. Otherwise, the bridge,
like the rest of the ship, looked deserted.
Sulu reached down to pull a panting Hasler out of the shaft, then
stepped back when Uhura scrambled up after him. "Looks like they only
brought a handful of crew on this trip," he commented.
"And a worthless handful at that." Uhura used her phaser to push HasIcy
away from the access shaft, her
dark face carved with determination. "Let;s go. We don't have any time
to waste."
Hasler turned reluctantly toward the front of the bridge. "You know, it
might already be too late."
"Shut up." Sulu strode past him, staggering a little when another photon
torpedo exploded near the Shras. He scowled. "One of the Orions must
be chasing us--that was too close to be a miss on the Enterprise."
"Then what is everybody doing standing around?" Uhura toggled her suit's
external speaker, lifting her amplified voice across the chaos of shouts
and ship alarms. "All hands to battle stations! Repeat, all hands to
battle stations irnrnediately.t"
The Artdorian crew members scattered like fragments from an exploding
nebula, clearing the space in front of the viewscreen. Sulu saw Pov
Kanin swing his captain's console around to stare at them in
astonishment. Behind him, the curving viewscreen was dominated by the
sleek, predatory shape of the Orion police cruiser Mecufi. Sulu's scowl
deepened. The steady angle of the sensor image told him that the Shras
was simply trying to outrun her pursuer.
"Is this what you call evasive action?" Sulu crossed to the helm panel
in two strides and yanked at the shoulder of the Andorian manning it.
"I'm a Starfleet pilot," he snapped, stripping off his bulky gloves.
"Let me take this helm before we get blown to Sigma One!"
The crew member threw a quick look at her captain, then scrambled out of
her seat. Sulu slid in behind the panel, scanning its layout, then
tapping in a swift series of flight maneuvers. The Shras slewed
abruptly sideways.
"What--" Kanin's voice broke off as another pho
ton torpedo exploded brilliantly across the screen, far off the port
side of the ship. The hras barely quivered in response. "What are you
doing?"
"Getting us out of torpedo range, I hope." Sulu glanced over at the
navigation panel, not trusting the gray-faced navigator to give.. him
an accurate estimate .. of distances. The Mecufi had overshot them when
they
turned, and was now turning herself to cross over her previous path.
Sulu waited until she'd found her new heading, then spiraled the
Andorian ship off on a completely different course. The Mecufi shifted
again and again while Sulu continued the random corkscrew motions, each
time losing ground in the chase.
"The Orions would be better off to stay on one course," Kanin observed,
laning across his console to watch Sulu's maneuvers.
Sulu spared him a tight smile. "Don't worry. They'll realize that in a
moment. And when they do--" He madeon.e more course alteration, and
this time saw no response from the Orion ship. His smile widened while
he
laid in the course he'd intended to follow all along. "Engineering,
give me every ounce of
speed you've got."
"Affirmative!"
The Shras slowly accelerated, moving away from the Orion cruiser. It
took the pursuers several long moments to realize this wasn't just
another evasive swing, and by then, the hras had flashed out of torpedo
range. The image of the Mecufi dwindled behind them, disappearing when
the scanners hit the end of their range.
"That should keep them off our backs for a while." Sulu set the ship's
scanners around to the front, then glanced over his shoulder at Pov
Kanin. "I've set our course to three forty-nine mark four." The
Andorian's
bony face slid from relief to worry when he recognized the heading. "I
don't think you want to be brought up on desertion of battle charges
when You get back to Andor."
"But--" Kanin's dark pink eyes narrowed in honest dismay. "But we
rescued you!"
"And then abandoned our ship, not to mention our friend in the shuttle.
Saving our lives isn't going to make us grateful enough to forget about
that." Sulu glanced over at the navigation board, watching the
coordinates roll back to familiar numbers as they drew closer to the
Enterprise. Faint flickers in one corner of the viewscreen showed the
starship still battling with the Orion destroyer Urnyfymu. "We're
within hailing distance of the Enterprise now. Uhura, can you run the
