Star Trek: 24th Century Crossover - 018 - Section 31 - Disavowed

by David Mack

  “Almost. We’ll be ready to cross the dimensional barrier in ten minutes.”

  “Keep me posted. Every second counts. Command out.” He closed the channel and looked at Crin. “We’re almost home. Divert just enough power from the aft shields to fire four rounds of torpedoes from the aft launcher. Let’s see if the Enterprise likes a bloody nose.”

  “Yes, sir.” Crin slipped away to relay the order to Karn.

  Trom looked forward to seeing his harassers swallow a bit of their own medicine, but behind his brave talk, he knew he had nothing but bluster. His ship was only minutes away from being trapped by a vastly superior force. Unless Solt proved to be a genius without equal in the field of starship propulsion, Trom and his men were on the verge of annihilation.

  Victory was within his grasp, but already he felt it slipping like water through his fingers.

  * * *

  Suffocating force, scintillating light, and a wash of white sound all surrendered their hold on Bashir, who blinked to find himself free of the subspace transporter beam and standing beside Sarina, inside a remote compartment on the lowest engineering deck of the ShiKahr. They both had been rendered effectively invisible by their borrowed Memory Omega stealth suits, but to each other they appeared as ghostly green figures, a feature of the software built into the holovisors of their full-head masks.

  Sarina drew her phaser. Because it was coated with stealth materials that reacted to the ones in her gloves, the weapon was also invisible. “Which way?”

  “Forward to the main junction.” Bashir drew his own phaser and pointed down the passageway. “You cover the left, I’ll take the right.”

  Together they skulked forward. It amazed Bashir how perfectly quiet his and Sarina’s footfalls were, even in the close confines of the narrow corridor. Part of the credit was due to their genetically enhanced dexterity, which made them light on their feet when they needed to be, but he knew the stealth suits were doing most of the work. The soles of their shoes were padded with layers of material that absorbed sound waves and let them move like ghosts.

  The first intersection was on Sarina’s side. She signaled Bashir that she would aim high. He gestured back that he would duck in low behind her. He darted behind her as they reached the corner. They turned together, and he crouched as he pivoted on his leading foot.

  All was clear. Bashir moved ahead, taking point. Sarina fell in behind him as they hugged the right wall of the corridor until the next intersection. This time, he cued her with hand signals that he would aim high. She acknowledged with a nod and ducked low, close to his back.

  They turned as one. A dozen meters down the maintenance passage, a pair of Breen commandos were busy rearranging the internal components of some part of the ship’s engines.

  In the holographic heads-up display provided by his mask, Bashir noted the red targeting crosshairs that indicated precisely where his phaser shot would fall. A second set of yellow crosshairs informed him that Sarina was targeting the other Spetzkar trooper. He steadied his aim. Softly exhaled a deep breath. And fired.

  His single phaser pulse struck one of the Breen in his head. A fraction of a second later, Sarina’s head shot took down his partner.

  There was no time to check the bodies. He and Sarina were shooting to kill now, and time was short. They advanced, trading places again to let her take point to the octagonal main intersection. She hugged the left wall, and Bashir stayed close to the opposite bulkhead. They padded into the open junction. Four sides of the octagon were open and led away at ninety-degree angles—one main passageway running forward to aft and another that crossed the deck from port to starboard. On the other four sides of the octagon were turbolifts.

  “This is where we split up,” Bashir said. “Activating transceiver now.” He tapped the tiny device tucked into his left ear. Sarina did the same, switching on her own concealed transceiver. Speaking in a whisper, Bashir said, “Do you copy me?”

  Her hushed voice was intimately close thanks to the implanted device. “Loud and clear.”

  “All right. Promise me you’ll stick to the plan. We hit our targets and get out.”

  “I promise. It’s not as if we have time to do anything else, anyway.”

  She sounded calm and professional, but he knew what would happen if she let her emotions take over. All he could do was hope she stayed in control this time. He walked to his turbolift, and she walked to hers. They pressed their respective call buttons, and both sets of lift doors opened to reveal waiting pods. He stepped into one, and she entered the other.

  Looking diagonally across the intersection at her, he gave her a small salute with his phaser. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

  She returned the valediction with the same forced aplomb. “See you when I see you.”

  The doors of their turbolifts closed, and Bashir hoped their farewells would amount to more than just wishful thinking.

  * * *

  When the doors of Sarina’s turbolift slid apart on Deck Four, she had her back against the side of the lift pod, to the right of the door. As she had expected, a Breen commando who had been posted to guard the deck from intruders leaned inside the pod to investigate.

  She snaked her invisible right arm behind his back and over his shoulder. Then she seized his chin with her right hand and braced her left hand against his back as she twisted with all her enhanced strength. The commando’s neck broke with a wet crack. His body went limp in her grasp, and she struggled to lower him to the floor of the pod without making any noise. Then she pulled him the rest of the way inside, stepped over his corpse, and slipped out into the corridor.

  Her hand was on the grip of her phaser, ready to draw if it turned out the dead trooper had a partner waiting in the passageway, but there was no one there. Ever cautious, she treaded lightly and kept her back to the wall as she snuck toward the entrance to the ShiKahr’s computer core. Every few steps, she threw a quick look back, to make sure her six was clear.

  Avoid unnecessary confrontation. That had been Saavik’s advice to Sarina and Bashir before they had beamed over. There were more than a hundred Breen on this ship—far too many for Bashir and Sarina to face alone in combat, no matter what advantages they had received from their genetic augmentations or Memory Omega’s high-tech equipment. Evasion and diversion would be her and Bashir’s best hope of finishing this mission and living to tell about it.

  Two sections shy of the computer core, a Spetzkar marched down the center of the corridor. He carried his rifle tucked against his left side, the barrel angled downward, his finger hovering beside the trigger rather than in front of it. He moved with a strong and even stride, and his gaze swiveled slowly while he walked, taking in everything around him. He glowed frost-blue in Sarina’s visor, which suggested he was concealed by his armor’s shrouding circuits.

  Sarina sidestepped, pivoted, and put her back to one wall—all without making a sound. She held her breath and remained motionless as the commando stalked past her.

  He stopped.

  She stared at him, her breath still caught in her chest. What’s he doing?

  The Breen kneeled down and ran his gloved fingertips over the deck where Sarina had just walked. He looked away, down the path from which she had come.

  What if their masks see infrared? What if he can see my heat signature?

  He turned back and looked directly at her.

  If he saw Sarina’s invisible blade before she thrust it into his throat, he didn’t have time to stop her. She plunged the stealth-coated knife of Tholian obsidian deep through the flexible neck guard of the Spetzkar’s armor, and then she twisted the blade and forced it up into his skull. His gurgling death rattles were muffled by his mask.

  Can’t just leave him here. Sarina looked over her shoulder. A bulkhead tag identified the compartment behind her as unassigned quarters. Good enough. She unlocked the door, which parted with a soft hiss. As quietly as she was able, she dragged the dead Breen inside, dumped him to the
left of the entrance, and cleaned his blood off her blade by wiping it on the legs of his uniform. She sheathed the knife, then paused to verify the corridor was still empty. Satisfied, she locked the compartment behind her on her way out, to prevent an accidental discovery of the dead trooper.

  Fast, light steps carried her to the entrance to the ship’s primary computer core. A pair of Breen stood guard just inside the doorway, which someone had apparently locked open. Sarina squatted low and crab-walked along the wall of the corridor opposite the entrance, using her lower vantage to see more of the towering open space on the other side of the doorway.

  Five Breen technical specialists were moving around the computer core, tampering with various systems as they went. The two guards paid the techs no mind and talked to each other, as if they were bored with their assignment.

  If it’s excitement they want, I’m happy to give it to them.

  It was all going to be about timing.

  From a small utility pocket on the belt of her stealth suit, she took a miniaturized smoke bomb. The device was as small as a marble, and according to Saavik it was designed to arm when it was thrown and to detonate a few seconds after its initial impact on any surface.

  Sarina edged up next to the doorway to the computer core and lobbed the smoke charge down the corridor. It struck one bulkhead, then rolled away, around a curve in the passageway.

  At the first click of contact, one Breen asked the other, “Did you hear that?”

  The two guards charged down the corridor. One of them pointed in the direction that Sarina had thrown the smoke marble. “It sounds like it’s coming from—”

  A low boom echoed in the tight space of the corridor. Green smoke billowed from the detonation and created an impenetrable wall. The Breen in charge moved to the far wall and kneeled down while barking orders: “Cover me! Switch to UV, it’ll cut through the haze.”

  His subordinate dropped to one knee on the other side of the corridor—right in front of Sarina. She silently retrieved another Memory Omega implement from her suit’s utility belt: a stealth-coated monofilament wire with a fist-sized grip at either end. Or, as it was more commonly known in the jargon of espionage tradecraft, a garrote.

  With a single pull she released an arm’s length of slack on the monofilament. Then she crept forward, looped it over the junior Breen guard’s head, lowered it in front of his neck, and violently yanked the two ends together.

  She neither felt nor heard the monomolecular wire slice through the Breen’s armor and flesh. All she knew was that his head, once solidly connected to his neck, was now falling to the deck, trailed by a spray of fuchsia blood.

  In the split second it took the Breen’s severed head to fall and strike the deck, Sarina let go of one side of the garrote and drew her phaser. The other guard turned at the unexpected thud of a helmeted head clattering against the deck plates—just in time to see the phaser beam that punched a scorching hole through his own visor.

  No time to lose now. The sound of the phaser shot would have the techs inside the core on alert. She couldn’t risk them warning the rest of their company of her presence. She pivoted and marched through the doorway, her eyes keen to every movement.

  She froze: none of the technicians were anywhere in sight.

  They took cover. Smarter than they look.

  There was nothing to gain by letting them set the rules of engagement or summon reinforcements, so Sarina moved deeper inside the five-level compartment. Circular platforms, all with waffle-grate deck plates, ringed the twenty-meter-tall main core, creating a vertiginous sense of open space above and below. Sarina took soft steps and utilized the sparse cover afforded by the control panels that were set at regular intervals around the center level.

  She stopped at the nearest companel and logged into the core using an administrator’s override code that Saavik had shown her while she had been suiting up on the Enterprise. The panel’s interface changed from lockout crimson to full-access green.

  Time to muzzle the techs. She ramped up the Cochrane distortion coil inside the core far beyond its rated maximum. The CDC’s principal purpose was to enable the core to execute computations in a holographic matrix at many multiples of the speed of light. Faster-than-light processing was an essential element in most starship computers—but it had limits. If one generated too powerful a Cochrane distortion field inside the computer core, any number of onboard systems would suffer as a result—chief among them, communications.

  That ought to do the trick.

  Her next task was to swap out one of the panel’s isolinear chips. To her chagrin, there was no quick way to do so without attracting the commandos’ attention and giving away her position. If she wanted the freedom to finish her sabotage, she would have to deal with them.

  She locked the console back down. Then she stalked forward to the staircase, scanning above and below for any sign of her quarry. Just before she reached the stairs, she saw them. The five Breen had split up. Two had climbed up two levels and were lying prone, their rifles aimed downward. Two were backed up against the walls on the level beneath her, with their rifles aimed upward. The last one was crouched on the steps, one level above her, his head on a swivel, looking for a target.

  She respected their expertise. They were ideally placed to defend one another and concentrate their response to any assault. She couldn’t attack any one of them without betraying her position to the others. Her only advantages lay in the facts that her stealth camouflage was superior to theirs and that she had cut off their communications with one another as well as with the rest of their company.

  All I need to do is figure out how to neutralize all five of them at the same time. She rolled her eyes at her predicament. I hope Julian’s having better luck than I am right now.

  * * *

  Wild shots and screaming ricochets tore out of the open hatchway and kept Bashir pinned to the bulkhead, hoping that the next shot didn’t bounce back and cut him in half. He winced at another near miss. I hope Sarina’s having better luck than I am right now.

  A prompt blinked in his holographic heads-up display: ENGAGE ASSISTED TARGETING? He wasn’t sure what that included, but he reasoned that any advantage was better than none in his situation. He focused on the prompt and blinked twice to assent to the suggestion, which then changed to read ASSISTED TARGETING ENGAGED.

  An inset frame was superimposed over his field of vision. At first he was confused by it. The targeting function seemed to have done nothing more than magnify an area of the floor in front of him. He shifted his weight and saw that the inset frame moved oddly. It took him a moment to understand that his mask’s holovisor was giving him his phaser’s point of view.

  He kept his back to the wall and eased his weapon around the corner into the open doorway. A view of the upward-curving meter-wide walkway inside the ship’s ring-shaped jaunt drive filled his HUD’s inset frame. As soon as the software detected a potential target, it painted the Breen trooper with a blinking three-point yellow cursor. Bashir adjusted his aim until the cursor turned green and stopped flashing, then he pulled the trigger.

  A perfect head shot sent the trooper reeling. His comrade fired back a wild flurry of energy pulses that screamed past Bashir and filled the corridor around him with bouncing sparks and acrid smoke. He put an end to the mad barrage with another precise shot that punched straight through the Breen’s chest and dropped him dead beside his partner.

  The echoes of battle faded. Bashir’s enhanced hearing detected the scuffling of movement from a few sections away. He focused his attention and heard at least three people. No, four. They were trying to sneak up on him, but the Breen’s armor had been made for invisibility and resilience, not for stealth. Regardless, that was a fight for which he had neither the time nor the advantage. He moved inside the jaunt drive’s ring structure and hurried past the two dead Breen, eager to reach his assigned target quickly.

  Gravity inside the ring pulled one outward, away from the
main hull of the ship. Moving along the curved walkway reminded Bashir of early space stations, which had relied on rotating ring structures to simulate gravity. It also felt like orbiting a planet, always chasing the curve of the close horizon, and knowing it would forever remain just out of reach.

  His pulse raced as quickly as his thoughts. He had to keep track of his pursuers, whom he heard enter the ring far behind him; he noted the markings on the access panels on his left and stayed alert for any sign of hostile contact that might suddenly appear in front of him. Then his eyes fixed upon the panel he had been told to find. He keyed in the command override code that engineer Barclay had shown him in passing on the Enterprise, and as the panel unlocked and sprang open, he was thankful once again for his nearly flawless memory.

  The clatter of booted feet closed in on him from both directions. He pushed back against his fear and made himself see nothing but the delicate array of components in front of him. This, Barclay had told him, was the key to the entire jaunt drive: the chroniton integrator. It was a system that enabled a jaunt ship to collect sensor data from several seconds into the future—an almost prescient technology that was essential to hyperaccelerated faster-than-light propulsion, as well as to the generation and targeting of stable artificial wormholes.

  He entered the override code into the chroniton integrator’s main interface and unlocked its configuration panel. Don’t destroy it, the Enterprise’s chief engineer had warned him. Just . . . tweak it a little bit. Following that sage advice, Bashir nudged a couple of the device’s perfectly attuned calibrations a mere few billionths of a percent off kilter. Then he closed the configuration screen and shut the access panel, which locked automatically.

  Now all I need to do is get out of here alive.

  In front of him and behind him, the feet of two ghostly pairs of shrouded Breen crept into view. They had him boxed in. Even if they never saw him because of his stealth suit, within moments at least one of them was certain to collide with him on the narrow walkway.