“Is there a problem with me using a transmitter?” Picard said crossly. He was running out of diplomacy. As impossible as his mission might be under current conditions, until the Romulan civil war actually started, he refused to give up.
Virron looked apologetic and actually answered him this time. “Ah…communications within the home system are…erratic, Picard.”
Picard was beginning to get the man’s measure: He was a senior bureaucrat with no power to agree to anything.
“That’s not the only thing that’s erratic,” Picard said. It was definitely time to be forceful, to push Virron into going to the next in command—someone who could make decisions. “My friends and I came to this system to visit Romulus. Instead, we were ‘escorted’ to Remus, held on orbit, viciously attacked by unknown intruders, then held captive in a mining compound, until Norinda somehow rescued us and brought us here, where we still feel like prisoners.”
All three Romulans looked appalled by the anger Picard displayed.
“As a Federation citizen, I demand the right to contact the consulate on Latium,” Picard added for good measure.
“And that is where you give yourself away, Captain.”
At the sound of Norinda’s voice, Picard felt all anger leave him. He didn’t need to contact Will. He didn’t need to call for the Titan’s assistance. He didn’t need to find Jim and McCoy and Beverly and Scott. He didn’t even need to stop the Tal Shiar from provoking a Romulan civil war that would engulf the galaxy.
There was only one desire that filled him.
Picard swept Norinda into his arms, crushed her lips against his, felt himself melt into her embrace, losing himself, losing—
Picard gasped with sudden pain as La Forge’s fist slammed into the side of his ear, crushing the cartilage. He spun around to see his chief engineer and three cowering Romulans staring at Norinda.
“Stop it!” La Forge shouted.
Norinda faced La Forge calmly, opened her arms to him, and even through the pain of his mashed ear, Picard felt a terrible pang of jealousy.
“Stop what, Geordi?” she asked.
Picard couldn’t understand how anyone could be so angry with Norinda. Didn’t La Forge understand? But all he seemed to be doing was blinking rapidly, as if resetting his vision, over and over.
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” La Forge yelled out, no sign of his outrage abating. “Telepathy, pheromones, direct stimulation of the amygdala—I don’t care what you’re doing, just stop it now!”
“Geordi…Geordi…” Norinda crooned soothingly.
Picard stared in fascination as her sheer white gown evaporated, leaving her exposed and achingly beautiful as she offered herself to La Forge. And then his fascination became unease as her straight black Romulan hair moved as a living thing, changed to brown and took on waves and grew longer to spill enticingly over her naked shoulders, as her flawless skin kept its perfection, but deepened slightly in shade, and her pointed ears rounded and her forehead grew smaller until Picard knew he was looking not at Norinda, but an exact, idealized replica of Doctor. Leah Brahms, the woman La Forge had long loved from afar.
La Forge pressed his fingers to his temples as if contending with severe pain. His eyes watered, as if crying. But he did not look away from the vision before him. Neither did he move toward it.
“Forget it!” he screamed. “Deal with us as we are or let us go! No more deception!”
By now, the three Romulans were on their knees, fists to their chests, eyes averted, murmuring as if reciting prayers, urgently and repeatedly.
The creation that had been Norinda, that was now Leah Brahms, shifted again, to become the slender Jenice from Picard’s memory, then Beverly, as she’d been when he’d first met her, and fallen so desperately, improperly, and completely in love with her.
With a force of will that seemed to spring from that Vulcan echo of Sarek still within him, Picard followed La Forge’s lead and raked his nails down his aching ear. The shock of pain brought tears to his eyes and his stomach knotted into nausea, and though it had been a day since he could last remember eating, he brought up bile and gagged.
But when he could look up again, there were no more visions to torment him. Instead, before him stood a gray-skinned, large-eared Reman female whose eyes were hidden behind a visor of solid black. Her long leather cloak shimmered with iridescent colors like the shell of a scarab.
“Very well,” the Reman said. Her voice was harsh and guttural. But even then Picard knew she was Norinda. At last in a guise that elicited no unwanted response. “Ask your questions, Picard. Whatever you want to know, I will tell you.”
18
PROCESSING SEGMENT 3, CARGO TERMINAL, STARDATE 57486.9
Kirk had been prepared to launch a full assault on any Romulans outside the airlock, but the presence of Remans made him reconsider.
One Reman would be challenging. But three of them—when he was handicapped by an environmental suit? Rushing out, fists flying, no longer seemed appealing. So Kirk changed tactics on the fly. Quickly motioning to McCoy to stay put, he marched up to the first Reman, gave the Romulan salute, and then, because he knew that saying anything in Federation Standard would give the Remans reason enough to attack, he began cursing them out with every word Joseph had brought back from Quark’s holosuites on Deep Space 9, heavy on the references to Tellarite anatomy, and taking great pains to growl in the back of his throat on the appropriate Klingon syllables, all the while waving the green-metal cane.
The unorthodox approach had the proper effect. The Remans remained in position, making no move against Kirk or McCoy. Their helmets had no visible visors at all, but from slight changes in their posture, Kirk could see that they were all engaged in a conversation, though on a com channel his helmet wasn’t picking up.
Successful as the tactic was, Kirk knew it was vulnerable to a more forceful set of orders from the Assessors on the other side of the airlock. It was time for his next diversion.
He fell into the rhythm of the swinging cane, keeping it flashing hypnotically, he hoped, until he raised his other hand and the cane became his bat’leth. Without missing a beat of his recitation of words Joseph was not allowed to say, Kirk slashed the curved handle of the metal cane into the helmet of the first Reman in his best approximation of the k’rel tagh stroke of major severance.
The first Reman staggered back, gloved hands on his helmet, and even as the second Reman began to lunge for Kirk, he used the momentum of his first strike to deliver a partial k’rel meen blow to the second Reman’s chest, knocking him off balance.
Then, in a move that had no name in the catalogue of ritual bat’leth combat, Kirk let the cane slide through his glove until it was at full extension, and used the curved handle to catch the second Reman’s boot and yank it forward, making him fall back into the third Reman.
The need for caution gone, Kirk yelled at McCoy to run, then spun the cane up into a rifle grip, and used it like a pole to punch the first Reman in the gut, forcing him into a crouch, making it easy for Kirk to swing the cane around and bring it down like a club on the back of the Reman’s helmet.
The last Reman standing dropped limply to the metal deck beside his struggling companions, and Kirk saw self-sealing pressure foam bubble up from a hairline crack in the helmet.
Surprised at first that he had been able to crack a vacuum helmet with only the strength in his arms, he realized a moment later that Remans would not necessarily be outfitted in the most robust of equipment, the result of some Romulan Assessor’s cold and cruel calculation of the balance between the worth of a Reman slave’s life and the cost of a properly reinforced helmet. At least the helmet had a self-repair capability.
Kirk swung at the other Remans with all his might, until they too, remained on the deck, pressure foam swelling to encase their own damaged helmets.
Less than a minute after the airlock door opened into the rock chamber, Kirk tossed the metal cane to McCoy and togeth
er they rushed out into the crater itself.
In the distance, red-suited Remans and yellow-suited Assessors stopped their individual activities—staring at the two interlopers who had suddenly appeared on the crater floor.
But Kirk was still confident of reaching the spacecraft he’d already selected as his first choice. The Remans and Assessors were just far enough away that he and McCoy still could make it.
The small transport shuttle with an attached warp pod was only one hundred meters distant, and it was still unguarded. Kirk had seen the craft from the observation window, parked in a landing ring marked with the Imperial emblem, connected to power and air umbilicals.
The small craft’s warp pod was too small to contain a Romulan singularity drive, or hold enough antimatter for a trip to the nearest star, so the shuttle was most likely a VIP transport used to ferry Romulan inspectors to and from the homeworld in short bursts of warp speed. But as a VIP transport, Kirk was counting on it to be fully equipped. For what he had planned, the shuttle’s range was a secondary issue.
But as he and McCoy headed for the shuttle—McCoy’s breathing becoming more and more labored and his awkward cane-assisted gait threatening to topple him to the ground—Kirk saw he hadn’t considered the ramifications of one feature of the craft.
It was so small that, like a Starfleet shuttle, it had no airlock. But Kirk had not asked himself why it was parked in the open, deadly atmosphere.
The question and the answer collided in his mind as he saw the small transport slowly begin to descend into the crater floor.
The shuttle was parked on an elevator pad, one that would drop down to an airlock chamber. If he couldn’t reach the craft before the chamber roof closed over it, he and McCoy would lose their best—perhaps only—chance for escape.
Telling McCoy to keep moving as quickly as he could, Kirk broke into a sprint and forged ahead, challenged for breath himself by the twin burdens of Reman gravity and the bulky environmental suit.
By the time he reached the edge of the crater floor, the landing pad had dropped two meters.
Kirk knew he had no choice, and so he leapt without hesitation, fully aware that the extra mass of the suit would be no friend to him. Plummeting with unnatural speed, bending his knees and hitting the pad as if he were coming down on a fast orbital parachute descent, Kirk rolled onto his side to spread the energy of impact over the largest surface area he could.
Despite his best efforts, the landing was hard. So hard Kirk’s chest went into spasm and he couldn’t breathe.
But neither could he wait until breath returned to him. McCoy could never make that jump. And if the shuttle reached the airlock chamber below…Kirk knew he’d never be able to climb back up to the crater floor to try for another craft.
It was this shuttle, or nothing.
Black stars flickering at the edge of his vision, Kirk forced himself to his feet, scrambling for the shuttle’s hatch.
He pulled the release switch. The hatch wasn’t locked. It swung open in a cloud of normal atmosphere venting from within.
Kirk pulled himself inside, checked quickly to be certain there was no one in the passenger cabin, then forced himself into the pilot’s chair and at last gulped down air, able to breathe again.
The shuttle was powered up, the controls familiar. He had flown Romulan craft before and the basics remained the basics.
Kirk dispensed with any type of preflight check. Either this would work, or it would not.
He looked out through the main viewport. He could see the airlock chamber roof was at eye level, already beginning to close. He estimated he had twenty seconds. After that, the shuttle would have descended far enough that the roof could close over it.
Twenty seconds, Kirk thought rapidly. The plasma thrusters weren’t charged. The impulse engine was cold. There was no way he could get off the ground in time.
But there had to be a way.
The roof sections were above his eye level now, moving closer, coming together like a night-blossoming flower closing at dawn.
Kirk’s hands felt heavy moving over the controls. He had looked forward to adjusting gravity in this shuttle, so that—
The idea came to him at once, fully formed, and he didn’t stop to consider if it was even possible.
Kirk threw on the primary shields, and because they were designed to respond instantly to navigational hazards, there was no delay. The overlapping forcefields sprang to life around the shuttle, violently disconnecting the suddenly severed umbilicals, and forcing the shuttle to suddenly pop up a meter into the air. The shields were treating the landing pad as a navigational hazard to be avoided.
Kirk grinned as he threw more power to the dorsal shields, setting them at maximum deflection. The dorsal shields forced the shuttle straight up from the immovable deck, making it bob like a child’s toy on a string, twenty meters above the crater floor.
Then Kirk fired the RCS thrusters to make the shuttle spin around.
McCoy, at the edge of the open pit, stared up and waved at him. The Remans were seconds from reaching him.
Kirk swiftly adjusted the shields again, forcing the shuttle to roll toward McCoy, pass over him, and flip as if about to crash directly on the Remans charging for him.
The Remans scattered.
Kirk checked his controls again. The thrusters were charged.
He put his hands on the flight controls, and the shuttle was his.
Kirk eased the craft down beside McCoy. The hatch was still open and McCoy fell through it, wheezing with exhaustion.
“I have no idea how you did that,” he gasped, “but I’m glad you did.”
“Strap in,” Kirk told him. “Now it’s going to get rough.”
“Now?” McCoy said. But he dragged himself to a passenger chair behind Kirk’s, pulled the restraint web over his chest. “Strapped in.”
Kirk had already picked out his target.
He brought the shuttle around, flying on plasma maneuvering jets instead of the now available impulse drive, merely to spray exhaust and cause general confusion.
He flew over as many exposed spacecraft as he could, scorching their hullplates, and scrambling their ground crew, who ran for cover.
But the fun was almost over. Kirk saw other shuttles lifting off. At least two, he recognized, were military craft, likely outfitted with disruptor cannons.
Kirk assessed his resources. The small VIP transport shuttle had no weaponry. But it did have a warp drive, complete with a miniature warp core, perhaps less than half a meter in length. And warp cores could go critical at the touch of the proper button.
He sped for the inside wall of the crater, picking up speed, drawing the other shuttles after him.
A disruptor blast flashed over the small craft’s viewports, which meant the shields had held. Kirk gave thanks to the VIP who flew in this craft. The shields were probably several levels of power higher than usual for a standard transport this size.
A collision alarm began to sound as they neared the crater wall.
“Switching to internal gravity,” Kirk warned McCoy. He tapped the control that activated the shuttle’s artificial gravity, keeping it set for Remus normal so the change would not be abrupt.
Then, with gravity established and inertial dampeners online, Kirk engaged the impulse drive—in full reverse.
The plasma jets were no match for the impulse engine and the shuttle instantly shot backward, its gravity and dampeners keeping Kirk and McCoy from being thrown from their seats and through the hull with the violence of the maneuver.
But the pursuing shuttles were at a disadvantage. They didn’t have pilots with Kirk’s skill.
One pulled up so abruptly that it fishtailed out of control, rising in a spiraling motion, then stalling and plunging for the crater floor. Kirk guessed its operator had not taken the time to switch on dampeners, gravity, or impulse engines. The unfortunate result was what would happen in a primitive twentieth-century fighter jet. No hope of
making a ninety-degree turn.
Another shuttle didn’t pull up in time, and slammed into the crater wall, as if the pilot had hoped to duplicate Kirk’s maneuver, but wasn’t fast enough to activate the necessary systems.
Two other shuttles avoided collision and loss of control, and Kirk knew they’d be back on his tail in less than a minute. He was also certain that by now the Reman warbirds had been dispatched from their orbital patrols to deal with the hijacked shuttle.
“Not to be a backseat pilot,” McCoy said, “but wouldn’t this be a good time to think about getting out of here?”
“One last pass, Bones.” Kirk brought the shuttle around on its final approach. “We’re going to give them a little something to keep them too busy to come after us.”
Kirk activated the warp core.
Purposely, he set the fuel mix to maximum imbalance, and ignored the sudden flash of a green warning light and wail of a siren.
“What kind of alarm is that?” McCoy asked.
“Warp-core imbalance,” Kirk said. He held his finger over the emergency separation control, watching the Romulan numbers flash by on the warp systems status display.
“We’re going to warp this close to a planet?” McCoy asked.
“We’re not,” Kirk said reassuringly. “But that big ore hauler is.”
He pressed the separation control and the shuttle lurched gently as the explosive bolts holding the warp pod to the hull blew free. The pod tumbled toward a fully loaded ore hauler just rising from the crater floor.
Kirk pulled the shuttle into a ninety-degree climb, then touched the controls that brought imagery from the rear visual sensors online.
At first, the warp core was too small to be seen.
Then it exploded.
And then it ignited the fuel and engines of the ore hauler.
The crater terminal resembled a volcano, blazing with fire.
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