by L. A. Graf
command cover Haslev at the same time?"
"No, but I can make HasIcy run the comm for me." Uhura nudged the
Andorian physicist toward the communications station, waving the
technician there out of his seat. "Come on, get moving."
"But as soon as we start broadcasting a signal, the Orions will know
where we are!" Haslev protested.
"No, they won't. We'll use a coded tight-beam channel to the
Enterprise. The Orions will never even know we sent it." Uhura prodded
him again, this time with the phaser. "Hurry up. We've got to let
Captain Kirk know who we are before the Enterprise fires at
US."
"Oh, this is just great. If the Orions don't manage to kill us, your
friends on the starship probably will." Haslev sat down with a
theatrical groan, antennae drooping in dismay. "Why did I ever think it
was a good idea to stow away on a Starfleet ship?"
Uhura gave him an exasperated look. "Probably
because anyone else would have killed you by now, just to shut You up.
Now, start calling."
"Captain!" Goldstein's excited voice cut across the tense hum on the
Enterprise's bridge. "I'm receiving a coded message on Federation
frequency! It's being sent tight-beam, sir."
Kirk swung his command console to face the viewscreen, trying not to
hope for too much. "Put it on-screen, Ensign."
An unfamiliar bridge, stark with battle lights, shimmered into focus at
the lower corner of the viewscreen. The edges of the picture glimmered
with coding static, ensuring that no one could break into the channel.
"This is Captain James T. Kirk of the--" The captain stopped himself as
soon as the picture steadied on familiar Starfleet environmental suits
and equally familia faces. "Sulu, Uhura--where are you?"
"On the Andorian Reserve Fleet ship Shras. "Sulu's face was tense and
slick with sweat, his hair ruffled from being recently inside an
environmental suit helmet. Behind him, a slim Andorian in the uniform
of a planetary reserve captain fidgeted in a command chair near Uhura,
looking unhappy to be there at all. "Our current heading is three
forty-nine mark four, approximately twenty thousand kilometers from you
and closing."
"That corresponds with the position of our sensor ghost, Captain," Spock
said quietly from behind Kirk. "And if my readings are correct--"
The Enterprise rocked with the force of a nearby torpedo burst, and Kirk
swore as Mullen looked up
nervously from the weapons console. "Damage to the aft phaser banks,
Captain."
Too close, too close. "Alter course to one sixty mark six," Kirk
snapped at the helmsman. "Bring our port phasers into range. Fire!"
"--the Shras was recently attacked by the Orion cruiser Mecufi, and
driven away," Spock finished calmly.
"Or ran away." Kirk gave the Andorian captain an eagle-hard look and saw
the man flinch with a lavender blush. He was definitely Shras's
commander, then, and not particularly proud of what he'd done. "I
presume that was before you took over the helm, Sulu?"
"Aye, sir. The Orions are still chasing us, but we've managed to make
it out of their firing range. I'm laying in a course that will make us
look like a sensor ghost to them now." Sulu took a deep breath. "Sir,
Chekov is still on board the Hawking. Request permission to dock and
remove him."
"You left Chekov in the middle of a battle zone?" Kirk decided this
wasn't the time to tackle the question of what Chekov was doing on the
shuttle to begin with.
Uhura and Sulu exchanged careful looks, and the helmsman shrugged as if
to some question Uhura hadn't asked. "We didn't have enough
environmental suits for everyone, sir," the communications officer
finally replied guardedly. "Most of them were pierced with shrapnel
from the explosion--"
"--that destroyed the magnetic shielding," Muav Haslev added from
off-screen, his voice bright and helpful, "and left the warp core
totally destablized."
"Haslev!" Sulu glared to his right, apparently at the
Andorian scientist, and Uhura hissed something sharp that Kirk didn't
quite hear.
"Hey," Haslev complained, "just because you two are willing to die for
your friend doesn't mean I am, tOO."
"Nor I!" The Andorian commander jerked his shoulders back, antennae
rigid with outrage. "We are not going to dock with a ship whose
containment field could explode at any moment!" He scowled across the
channel at Kirk. "Captain, you cannot legally command us to engage in
such a suicidal action simply to rescue one missing crewman."
If he had one brave man for every coward he met in the line of duty,
Kirk would reckon himself a very lucky man. "It's true,"-he said
tightly, "I can't command you to do it, Captain. I can ask--"
"And I can refuse!"
"Yes, you can." Kirk swung his gaze to Sulu, seeing the helmsmati's,eyes
glittering with the same frustration Kirk himself felt. A distant bang
shuddered through the Enterprise's deck, and Kirk heard a flurry of
alarms wail into life at the engineering station. There wasn't even time
left for talking, much less planning an unlikely rescue. "I'm sorry,
Sulu. It doesn't look like there's anything we can do."
Sulu clenched his teeth into his lower lip, but nodded stiffly. "Aye,
sir," he said in a wooden voice. "I'll await your orders for battle
deployment--"
"You mean we're going to stick around and fight with the Orions?" HasIcy
demanded incredulously. He lumbered on-screen to tug at the Andorian
captain's arm, his own environmental suit looking two sizes too big for
his effete frame. "Can he make us do that?"
The older Andorian's eyebrows drew together in
annoyance. "The Reserve Fleet's first duty is to aid and support all
actions of Starfleet," he said unhappily. "The Shras will perform that
duty to the utmost."
"Well, I'd rather we didn't," Muav HasIcy admitted frankly. The
renegade physicist looked back at the viewscreen. "Kirk, let's cut a
deal. If I can save your crewman, will you let me out of the rest of
this fight?"
"No," Kirk snapped, appalled to even be asked. "But if you save him
voluntarily, I'd have to mention that in my report to Starfleet. It
might influence your trial."
"Assuming I live long enough to get one!"
"It's my only offer, Haslev." Kirk braced himself while the Enterprise
swung on swift evasive action. The viewscreen flickered with radiance
when a photon torpedo exploded harmlessly above the bridge, nearly
overwhelming the incoming signal. "Take it or leave it."
"You Starfleet people are all so adamant," Haslev complained. "Oh, all
right--it's a deal."
"How are you going to carry out your end of it?" Sulu burst out,
obviously overwhelmed with skepticism. The look of painful hope on
Uhura's face helped Kirk understand the helmsman's anger. "How the hell
are you going to save Chekov?"
"You'll see." The renegade physicist clapped his hands together, blue
face bright with satisfaction. "You
'll at/see."
"See what?" Kirk demanded.
Hasler took a deep, expectant breath, antennae quivering. "Exactly what
the Orions paid me for."
Climbing to his feet, Chekov stood for a moment in the Hawking's
cluttered aisle, torn between clambering up front to verify the
eomputer's report on the
warp core, and running for the airlock wearing only half a suit. Death
was suddenly a very real presence and not just a frightening
possibility. He looked to the airlock door, and his blood ran as
crystalline as the nitrogen trails around his feet. Technically, he had
the minimum suit required to survive a limited vacuum exposure. He
could lock down the joints that should have serviced the suit's legs and
left arm, and that would preserve an atmosphere inside the torso and
helmet--enough to service his internal organs and brain, although he'd
surely lose the unsuited limbs to cell damage and freezing. What was
the point of abandoning the shuttle if that were the best he could look
forward to?
No! He moved to poise his hand above the airlack controls, trembling.
Living was worth any price. For him, it always had been, and always
would be. Surviving at all would be miraculous--he couldn't afford to
be stingy ab0ut the details, Punching the controls to cycle air back
into the lock, a sudden rigidity along his muscles startled a gasp from
him and locked him immobile. Then, panic was smothered by joy when a
familiar silver spray engulfed his vision, and the itching thrill of the
transporter beam erased the walls around him.
The new room shimmering into being around him wasn't the Enterprise's
transporter room, though. Walls threatened too close on either side, the
transporter's fading whine was too loud and close in his ears--and he
materialized with only one foot on solid deck. He toppled heavily to
his right, unable to catch himself under the weight of the half-suit
when his foot came down in some smooth, rounded basin, and he flipped to
fall face forward over the edge.
If it hadn't been for the hard shell of the suit, the fall
would have knocked the wind from him. As it was, his face plate cracked
against black marble without breaking, and he hung there a moment,
fighting to regain his bearings. The deck was a Starfleet deck--another
shuttle, he realized, just as he pushed up on one elbow and recognized
the molded marble basin beneath him.
"Sulu's lily pond--?"
All other questions were knocked from his mind by a powerful jerk on the
back of his suit. He slammed against the far wall without even touching
the ground, and his head snapped against the back of his helmet with a
silent thunder of pain. Sagging into half-darkness, he gasped when a
powerful fist caught the
front of his suit and heaved him into the wall again. "How?.t"
Chekov grabbed blindly at the bellowing mammoth in front of him, locking
both hands on a forearm that he couldn't even fit his fingers around.
"How were you able to use it?" Lindsey Purviance pressed so close to
Chekov that the rust-orange blood from his torn left side smeared the
environmental suit like rotten oil. "Tell me what you carry that lets
you use the trans-shield anode, f'deraxt'la, or I'll snap every bone in
your body trying to find it."
Chapter Seventeen
SULU stared intently up at the Andorian viewscreen, trying to catch
Hawking's fugitive patch of darkness among the stars. He found it
hovering in the lower left corner of the viewscreen, overshadowed by the
distant white fires exploding between the Enterprise and the Umyfymu. At
this distance, there was no way to tell if Chekov was still aboard.
"What is our position relative to the Orion police cruiser?" Captain
Kanin demanded for what must have been the third or fourth time. Sulu
checked the intersecting isopleths on his helm panel, rubbing at the
frown of concentration that had gathered between his eyes. He had to
maintain a fragile piloting balance staying inside transporter range of
the Hawking but out of its probable blast radius, all the while
mirroring the Mecufi's course so closely as to look like a sensor ghost
to the Orions. The police cruiser was prowling slowly around the
section
of space where their warp trail had ended, trying to flush them out with
random phaser shots through the interstellar darkness. "We're still
about seven thousand kilometers away from the Orions." Sulu lifted his
gaze back to the viewscreen, wishing he could somehow tell from the
Hawking's shadowed exterior whether Muav Haslev's new technology had
worked. It seemed as if the physicist had been down in the transporter
room with Uhura for hours, but Sulu knew better than to trust his sense
of time in a crisis. Kanin shifted nervously in his command console.
"And our distance from the other ships?"
"Almost fourteen 'thousand kilometers." Sulu's head jerked around when
he heard the unmistakable metallic scrape of bulky environmental suits
against the access shaft. Haslev's flaxen head emerged from the
ladderway first, antennae waving triumphantly. "It worked!" The renegade
physicist pointed both his thumbs together at Pov Kanin, who stiflened
in his chair. Sulu guessed it was an Andorian gesture of contempt. "The
beaming technique all your stupid admirals said would never be
feasible--I made it work!"
"You think you made it WOrk," Uhura corrected, climbing up onto the
bridge after him. "We won't know for sure until we get confirmation
from the Enterprise." Despite her guarded words, an underlying note of
optimism warmed the communications officer's voie. "You managed to beam
Chekov in through their shields?" Even as he asked the question, Sulu
felt the same quiver of disbelief that he'd experienced when Haslev
first told them what he'd made for the Orions. Of all the lessons
drilled into you in Starfleet Acade-
Chapter Eighteen
Mu^v H^SLEV SWUNG AROUND as Shandaken's image faded from the Andorian
viewscreen, leaving the sleek silver menace of the Mecufi in its place.
"You can't send me over to them!"
"Not with all our shields up," Sulu agreed, settling the Shras into a
less jarring orbit while the Orions' phaser fire ceased momentarily. "At
least, not real successfully." He shot a speculative look at the
physicist. "You know, I don't think the Orions quite understand how your
trans-shield anode works, HasIcy."
The Andorian squirmed a little in his seat. "It's so hard to explain
complicated technologies to non-scientists--"
Uhura lifted one eyebrow. "Especially, when you have to tell them their
expensive new transporter device will send a radiation pulse through
their ship every time they use it?"
"That's only a temporary problem--" Haslev jumped at the sound of the
Orion's hailing whistle, then put an unsteady hand out to transfer it to
the main screen.
"Time's up," Shandaken said without ceremony. "Are you going to beam the
weasel over, or do you prefer him to be annihilated along with--"
The inset viewscreen image shivered into static as a stronger signal cut
into the channel, cutting off the Orion's growling voice. When the
image resolve d again, it showed the familiar determined face of Captain
James T. Kirk.
"Mecufi. "The confident ring in Kirk's voice sent a surge of relief
through Sulu. He knew it meant his captain had taken control of the
situation. "This is the USS Enterprise. The Orion destroyer Urnyfyrnu
has just agreed to a cease-fire with us. I advise you do the same."
"Impossible? Shandaken's image was gone, but his voice sounded shaken.
"Orion military officers do not negotiate with criminals and traitors!
You're lying, f'deraxt 'la.t"
"Am IT' Their abbreviated view of the bridge swung dizzily when Kirk
turned toward the communications station. "Mr. Goldstein, patch in the
Orion commander."
Once again, the viewscreen image rippled, this time replaced by the
smoke-blurred image of an Orion in military bronze and black. The
captain's medallion that dangled from the Orion's ear dripped bright r
orange blood onto one burly shoulder.
"Shahtaken, dgr'xt en," he snarled. "K'laxm f'dactla en str'in
axltr'dn. Pr'dyn dgreilt jarras'tla en
axm b ' rerr-- "
Sulu glanced over at Uhura, seeing her eyebrows
tighten with concentration while she listened to the growl of Orion
speech. "He's telling them to give up," she translated. "He says he
