by Kevin Ryan
“We’ll have to take the travel pod back to the ship,” Mr. Scott said.
“Absolutely not,” Brantley said. “Much too dangerous. The Klingons will blast anything that leaves this station. And you are the only one who can restart the warp core, Mr. Scott.”
Brantley gestured out the window, which showed the northern pole of the planet and the Klingon cruiser sitting just a few hundred meters away. The Enterprise was not in view. Clearly, the Klingons were keeping the station as [107] a buffer between themselves and the Enterprise, just in case the starship had any plans of getting into the fight.
Scotty nodded.
Though Kyle knew Scott outranked the security section chief and almost everyone else on the ship, Brantley was responsible for his safety. Thus, until they were back on board the ship, he was in charge.
“Can we find you another transporter?” Brantley said.
“Aye,” the chief engineer said. “The transporters on the station were all retrofitted. That means each unit or group of units will probably have their own circuits. Whoever made a mess of this one probably didn’t have time to get them all.”
Brantley turned to the starbase security officer, Briggs, and said, “Okay, Ensign, where is the nearest transporter?”
“Tha’ is a different model than this one,” Mr. Scott added.
Briggs thought for just a moment and then said, “Follow me.”
Up in the distance, Lieutenant West could see the intersection that told him they had come to the next “spoke” in the station’s layout. They would turn left and then be at the core in a few minutes.
The first hint of trouble came when they reached the edge of the intersection. It came in the form of a flash of light that passed less than a meter to his right.
He turned just in time to see one of the station security guards who had been practically next to him go flying backward. Snapping his neck around, he saw the young [108] man lying on the deck, a large hole cut in his chest.
A surprisingly detached part of his mind noted that the man was dead, and then he was moving to the left side of the corridor and flattening himself against the wall along with the others in the group.
The admiral called out for everyone to follow him, and headed left, toward the center of the station. The Klingon fire had come from farther along the curved corridor. The Klingons would no doubt be behind them shortly, but they would at least be heading in the right direction.
West was barely around the corner when disrupter fire came from up ahead of them. This time, no one was hit, but the admiral ordered them to change direction again. A moment later, the entire group was heading along the spoke and away from the central core. They encountered more fire when they crossed the intersection, and this time the admiral, the captain, and the others returned fire.
Then, almost on its. own, West’s hand swung his own phaser around. The Klingons there had all come far enough along the curved corridor to all become visible. There were perhaps a dozen of them.
West aimed at the center of the group and fired.
It was only later that he realized it was the first time in his life that he had fired a weapon at another living being.
Then they were out of the intersection and racing down the corridor toward the outer ring of the station. It was the wrong direction, but West saw that they had little choice.
They covered the distance to the station’s outer ring quickly and turned right. West figured they would try the next spoke and make a straight run for the control center.
[109] But West could feel the seconds ticking by. Even if they reached the central hub, there would no doubt be a concentration of Klingons there. The control center would be one of the first places they would seek out.
Another setback. Another obstacle to a task that already seemed impossible.
The situation must have seemed impossible to Admiral Justman at the Battle of Donatu V, yet he had prevailed.
West kept his eyes on the admiral and kept running.
The lieutenant calculated that they were about halfway around the next section of the outer ring when the first disrupter bolts came by.
This time, West dove for the deck and returned fire. The security officers next to him did the same, while the admiral and the captain fired from standing positions against the walls.
West could see the Klingon force from around the curve of the corridor. Just one or two would appear at a time to blast them, and then they would disappear out of sight. Thus, it was impossible to determine the size of the Klingon force there.
However, West knew that the Klingon force behind them was at least ten warriors strong. It would be more if the two forces that would have met at the intersection joined forces, which West thought was likely.
So they couldn’t go forward or back. And very shortly they would be caught in the crossfire of two heavily armed Klingon parties.
According to regulations, surrender was recommended in situations where Starfleet personnel were facing overwhelming force. But the Klingons did not take prisoners, [110] at least not for long. And West had learned enough about Klingon interrogation techniques to know that he did not want to learn any more—especially firsthand.
The Klingons had strong social taboos against being taken prisoners themselves; they had particularly little regard for foes who voluntarily gave themselves up.
The admiral called out a cease-fire order and West stayed his phaser. Then Kirk, Justman, and Crane and a few station guards were rushing across the corridor. West and the others on the floor rolled to the left side with them.
“Resume, keep them busy,” Justman said.
West and the three security officers carefully sent phaser fire in the direction of the Klingons, keeping it up constantly so the Klingons would not dare peek out from their cover.
Then he heard the admiral’s voice say, “Come on.”
West was on his feet in an instant and following the admiral and the others through a large door opening that had appeared in the left-hand side of the corridor.
He was one of the last ones in and watched as Lieutenant Crane punched in a security code in the door panel.
“They won’t get through here, at least not for a while,” she said. “But it won’t take them long to figure out where we went.”
She turned to two of the starbase security guards and told them to shut the doors to seal off this sector.
“They will be able to access this area from either side, and the doors dividing the airlock sectors are not as strong,” she said.
West understood why. To their left were a series of [111] airlock doors separated by windows that looked out into space and over the planet below. They were on the very outside of the outer ring of the station. The corridor they were in also functioned as a large airlock space.
The heavy door that now protected them from the Klingons outside protected the station from the void of space in case of decompression in one of the smaller airlocks.
Approaching the nearest window, West could see travel pods and work bees attached to the outer airlock. He could also see the Klingon cruiser hanging what seemed like a few hundred meters away from the station and just below them.
“Does the command center have an emergency airlock that we can access with a work bee?” the admiral asked Crane.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “But I don’t know how far we will get with the Klingon cruiser outside.”
Then West heard the sound of disrupter fire pounding against the outside door.
“We’ll have to chance it,” Justman said. “We won’t last long in here. If we split into two groups, we can double our chances of at least one of us getting through.”
“We could disable the work bee’s acceleration governors,” Kirk said. “That would make them more maneuverable and harder to hit.”
The captain studied the Klingon ship for a moment as it hung outside the window and then said, “We’ll be most vulnerable when we disengage from the station. But as
you can see, the Klingon ship has placed itself on a diagonal opposite the Enterprise with the station in between. If [112] we can skim the top of the outer ring to the nearest spoke and then travel along the top of the spoke, the Klingon ship won’t have an angle of fire unless they move the ship. By then we’d almost be at the central hub and they might not want to risk a full-power disrupter blast so close to the station with so many of their people inside.”
The door shook behind them and started to glow red in the center.
The admiral studied the scene himself for a moment and said, “We’ll release the other pods and work bees in this sector to give them more targets to track.”
West watched in amazement. He was with two of the best tactical minds in the service. A few moments ago, he was wondering how much longer they would have to live. Now he was certain that—between the captain and the admiral—it was the Klingons who were running out of time.
“I think we should split you and Admiral West up,” Lieutenant Crane said to Captain Kirk.
“No,” West found himself saying forcefully.
The others looked at him in surprise. A moment later, Crane asked, “Why?”
“I doubt anyone in this room is as highly rated a command pilot as Captain Kirk. The admiral will be safest in his pod.”
“Surviving this trip will have as much to do with luck as anything else,” Justman said.
“I agree with Lieutenant West, Admiral,” Crane said.
The admiral seemed about to protest when Captain Kirk said, “Best not to argue, Admiral. We don’t have much time.”
The admiral nodded. West knew the admiral was right. [113] It would take more than piloting skill to keep the slow travel pods out of the way of Klingon disrupter fire. On the other hand, it would not hurt. And West was now convinced that the Federation needed Admiral Justman more than ever—for today and for the months to come.
They quickly divided into two groups. The admiral, Kirk, West himself, and two security guards in one pod, and then Crane and four other guards in another. Two of the station guards had technical training and they were immediately put to work disabling the travel pods’ acceleration governors.
Then the admiral and Kirk ordered everyone into their pods as the two men ran in opposite directions setting travel pods and work bees to auto-launch.
West waited until the admiral was on his way back to step through the outer door of the small airlock that led into the travel pod. Before he stepped through the inner door and into the pod itself, he spared a look at the main door to the corridor.
The door was glowing red almost all over and a dangerous-looking purple and even white in some places. The door was still holding back the Klingon attack force, but barely.
They had less than a minute, perhaps only seconds. Then Kirk and the admiral were jumping into the pod.
“Governor’s disabled,” one of the security officers said. And Kirk was immediately at the controls.
“Admiral,” West said, pointing his phaser at the outer door of the pod’s small airlock. “I have an idea.”
The admiral immediately understood and said, “One moment, Captain,” as West adjusted his phaser.
[114] Aiming carefully at the outer door’s top metal hinge, West fired. The hinge blew off the door immediately. Then he did the same to the bottom hinge with the same results.
Without even checking to see if the door to the corridor was holding, West shut the travel pod’s door.
The instant the seal indicator light turned green, the admiral said, “Now, Captain!”
Then West felt a sudden jolt as the travel pod seemed to leap from the station. It slammed his forehead against the rear of the pod, but he barely felt it.
West was certain that his plan had worked. The airlock door that West had blasted open began evacuating the atmosphere of the launch area as soon as the pod launched. When the Klingons burst in from the corridor, they would be sucked into the vacuum created there.
And any Klingons in the corridor for at least a few hundred meters in each direction would be caught inside the safety forcefields that would contain the effect of the hull breach.
How many Klingon lives? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?
At one time West had made a vow never to take another life. Yet he found now that he felt only satisfaction that he had helped, that he had contributed somehow.
He turned forward, carefully grabbing the rear wall to keep on his feet.
Ahead, he could see a work bee in front of them—no doubt one of the empty ones that Kirk and Justman had set for auto-launch.
One moment he saw the small maintenance craft flying in a straight trajectory. The next moment, there was a green flash and the full-power blast of a Klingon [115] disruptor tore through the small craft and there was a brief explosion. Then West could hear small pieces of debris pelting the outside of their work bee.
There was another explosion nearby but West could not see anything but space as Kirk put their craft through a gut-twisting series of maneuvers that West was sure the vehicle’s designers never intended.
Then they were skimming the surface of the spoke toward the central hub.
“Justman to Crane,” the admiral said.
“Crane here, sir. We’re right behind you,” said Crane’s voice.
“Glad you made it, Lieutenant,” Justman said. “Just one more tricky maneuver and we’ll see you on the other side of the central hub. You break to the right and we’ll break to the left.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied. “We’ll see you on the other side.”
The pod moved with surprising speed close to the surface of the station. Still, the seconds ticked by slowly and West knew that the Klingon cruiser might be changing position now to take aim at them. There was no way to tell for sure. The pod did not have sensors and the only window was forward.
If the Klingon ship targeted them, they would have no warning. They would simply disintegrate under its fire.
Yet when the central hub began to loom larger and larger West began to relax. They would make it
Perhaps the Klingons suspected some trick and thought they were trying to draw it out in the open—into the line of fire of the Enterprise.
Whatever their reason, no disruptor fire came.
[116] “Hold on,” Kirk said. “We’re going to maneuver around the hub now. The Klingons will be able to target us for a few seconds at most.”
By that time, West knew, they would be just a few dozen meters from the station’s central hub. The Klingons would hardly risk a full-power disrupter blast so close to the station’s core. If they hit the station, they would lose warriors and possibly the crystals they sought as well.
“Now,” Kirk said, and West felt the pod lurch to one side, twisting into a new arc and shooting upward.
“Admiral—” Crane’s voice said over the com system.
Then West saw something impossible on the far right of the window as the travel pod banked right. Another pod, which could only be the one carrying Crane and her team, shot forward tumbling end over end.
Then there was a flash of green energy. It shot out a few meters to the side of the pod, but moved quickly toward the small craft, finally striking it dead-on as it tumbled through space.
For an instant, West was surprised to see that the pod was still intact, then he realized why.
The Klingons would not risk a full-power disrupter blast so close to their prize, but it would take far less than a full-power blast to destroy an unshielded, unprotected travel pod.
He heard shouts from inside the pod on the com system and watched in horror as the craft came apart with what seemed like agonizing slowness. As the audio abruptly died, the pod split into a few large pieces, and for one terrible moment West could see people struggling in the vacuum of space.
[117] “They’re gone ...” someone said.
Then Kirk executed one of his violent maneuvers and their travel pod shot around the station’s central hub.
; West sensed they were safe, but felt the sight he had just witnessed embed itself in his stomach like a solid mass.
Seconds later he felt the travel pod snap into an airlock. Then the green indicator light above the door said it was safe to exit.
The admiral hit the button and both inner and outer doors opened. West felt himself being ushered out and was on a catwalk that overlooked a dome below them, perhaps two meters away.
The lieutenant knew that bridges and control rooms often had a double-hull design. The travel pod had just connected with the outer hull and he was now looking down into the inner hull.
They had reached the control center. Amazed, West realized that the whole trip had taken just minutes.
But they had paid a high cost, West realized—Lieutenant Crane and her people. A quick glance at the others told him that they were all having the same thought at the same time.
Then he heard the admiral’s voice—its calm but firm tone shaking him out of his thoughts.
“This is far from over. Down the ladder,” he said.
West watched the two security guards head down the access ladder that would take them to the control room’s floor level less than ten meters below them. When the two men were on the ladder West reached for it and began climbing down.
Chapter Eleven
“KLINGON SHIP FIRING DISRUPTORS,” the science officer said.
“Give me visual,” Uhura said.
The viewscreen showed an angle down on the starbase. The Klingon ship was obscured by the station, which was no accident, Uhura knew.
The Klingons no doubt thought they were dead in space, but the Klingon commander was not stupid. He did not want his ship in the Enterprise’s line of fire. The Starfleet vessel would have to move first. Thus, the Klingons would have warning before they did. It would prevent the starship from taking advantage of the Klingon cruiser’s vulnerability when it lowered its shields to transport warriors to and from the station.
“Sensors!” she called out.
