Текст книги "Precipice"
Автор книги: David Mack
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“Your medallion,” the man said, gesturing with his chin toward the mandala resting on Pennington’s chest. “It is quite unusual. How did you acquire it?”
The manner in which the man asked his question made Pennington uncomfortable. “A friend gave it to me.”
“Odd,” the man said. “Such rarities are usually bequeathed only to family members.”
Pennington broke eye contact and tried to sidestep the Vulcan. “You must be mistaken.”
Blocking his path, the Vulcan said, “It comes from the commune at Kren’than, does it not?”
At the mention of T’Prynn’s native village, a technology-free retreat populated by mystics and ascetics, Pennington froze. He suspected the man was not really interested in the medallion. Facing him, Pennington was wary as he said,
“Yes, it does.”
“As I thought,” the man said.
The Vulcan handed him a scrap of fragile parchment that had been folded in half. As soon as Pennington took hold of it, the stranger walked away at a brisk pace and blended back into the earth-toned sea of robed Vulcans crowding the spaceport.
Pennington unfolded the note.
There were three things written on it: a set of geographic coordinates, a precise time, and a date exactly three weeks in the future.
He folded it and put it in his pocket.
Other
Star Trek: Vanguardbooks
Harbinger
by David Mack
Summon the Thunder
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Reap the Whirlwind
by David Mack
Open Secrets
by Dayton Ward
STAR TREK ®
VANGUARD
Precipice
DAVID MACK
Based upon Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that It was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”
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Art by Doug Drexler
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-4391-3011-7
ISBN 978-1-4391-6651-2 (ebook)
For my brother:
thanks for always being on my side.
Historian's Note
This story takes place in 2267, beginning in early January and concluding at the end of December, a few weeks after the events of the second-season Star Trekepisode “A Private Little War.”
Good and bad men are each
less so than they seem.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830
Precipice
PART ONE
Such Deliberate Disguises
1
January 3, 2267
Disruptor pulses thundered against the unshielded hull of the Starfleet transport U.S.S. Nowlan.
On the Nowlan’s bridge, Diego Reyes clenched his jaw and winced. The forward bulkhead blasted inward. Reyes ducked behind the command chair as shrapnel flew past and pattered to the deck around him. Fine, metallic dust rained down on his shoulders and into his thinning steel-gray hair.
He looked up from behind the chair and peered through bitter smoke to see the ship’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Brandon Easton, lying on the deck, his gold uniform tunic torn by jagged bits of metal and stained heavily with blood. The dull, unfixed quality of Easton’s stare was one Reyes had seen far too many times: the man was dead.
Reyes looked aft for Lieutenant Ket, the Bolian security officer who had escorted him from the brig to the bridge minutes earlier. To his dismay, Ket was also gone, the victim of a wedge of duranium lodged in his left temple.
At the forward console, two figures stirred.
The first was the female human navigator and helm officer. She had been lying on the floor, apparently stunned rather than dead. Lucky gal,mused Reyes. If she’d been on her feet, she’d have a faceful of shrapnel right now. Sitting up from behind the flickering console, which housed the helm and navigator’s station on the left and the sensor controls on the right, was the sensor officer, a human man with crew-cut blond hair.
The two shaken officers, both dressed in black trousers and gold command shirts with lieutenant stripes on their cuffs, looked at Reyes with desperate expressions. “Sir?” said the woman, pushing her curly brown hair from her eyes. “What do we do?”
Years of command experience snapped Reyes into action. He nodded at the two officers. “Take your posts.” He brushed the grit from the seat of the command chair, then settled into it. “What’re your names, lieutenants?”
“Paul Sniadach.”
“Bronwen Hodgkinson.”
For a moment, Reyes almost forgot that just five weeks earlier he had been convicted in a Starfleet court-martial, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to ten years in a penal colony. All it had taken was a surprise attack by an unidentified and heavily armed pirate vessel to remind him of who he’d been before being branded a criminal:
A starship captain. A flag officer. A leader.
“Hodgkinson, set an evasion course, full impulse. Sniadach, find that ship, and get the shields back up.”
“Course set,” Hodgkinson replied. “Engines not responding.”
Sniadach coaxed his stuttering, half-shorted-out panel back into service. “Hostile vessel bearing one-three-eight-mark-seventeen, coming about at quarter impulse.”
Reyes thumbed a comm switch on the armrest of his chair. “Bridge to engineering! We need aft shields! Respond!”
Static was all he heard over the open audio circuit. Engineering had been one of the first sections hit, and a coolant leak had likely forced a temporary evacuation of the deck while the crew struggled into environment suits.
“The enemy vessel is scanning us,” Sniadach said. “Closing to ten thousand kilometers.” Swiveling his chair to face Reyes, he added with surprise, “They’re powering down their weapons.”
“Are they hailing us?”
“No, sir,” Sniadach said, checking his console.
“Just like pirates,” Reyes said with disdain. “They don’t even have the courtesy to tell us we’re being boarded.” He got up from his chair—and belatedly remembered it wasn’t really hischair. “Prepare to repel boarders,” he said, grateful they weren’t facing the Klingons, who’d put a price on his head after the Gamma Tauri fiasco. He kneeled beside the slain Lieutenant Ket and took the security officer’s phaser from his belt. “Arm yourselves. We’re about to have company.”
Hodgkinson got up and sprinted to a panel on the port bulkhead. She opened it, revealing four phasers. The brunette took one for herself and lobbed another to Sniadach.
Reyes adjusted the setting of his weapon. “Heavy stun,” he said. “Let’s not go blowing holes in our own ship.”
His order received overlapping replies of “Aye, sir.”
An alert tone beeped twice on the sensor console. Sniadach glanced down at the board and confirmed Reyes’s suspicion. “Transporter signals,” the lieutenant said. “All decks.”
“Here they come,” Hodgkinson said, readying her phaser. Sniadach did the same as Reyes stepped back between them to form a skirmish line.
A low, eerily musical drone emanated from the aft section of the cramped compartment. A few meters in front of the two Star-fleet officers and their prisoner-turned-commander, a compact shape sparkled into view.
It was a fat cylinder about as long as Reyes’s hand.
“Down!” shouted Reyes, anticipating the worst.
They ducked behind the forward console. The transporter effect faded, and silence fell upon the bridge.
Then came the soft hiss of gas spewing into the air.
Pale blue mist jetted from one end of the canister and swiftly filled the command deck.
Sprinting toward the emergency equipment, Reyes snapped, “Oxygen masks!”
Hodgkinson and Sniadach were close behind him.
Reyes felt as if he were running on rubber legs. His head spun and his stomach heaved. He pitched forward to the deck. The masks were only a meter away but behind a panel at waist height and out of his reach. He struggled to pull himself forward, but his eyes crossed against his will and left him seeing the world as if through a kaleidoscope.
All his strength ebbed at once, and he collapsed to the deck, rolling onto his back as he fell.
Once more the unearthly siren song of a transporter rang in his ears. Reyes saw several figures dressed in environment suits—or was it one figure multiplied by his blurred vision?—materialize on the bridge. No, it was more than one person; they weren’t all moving the same way…
One of them checked a scanner and pointed at Reyes.
Another one leveled a disruptor at Sniadach and shot him in the back of the head, bathing the bridge in crimson light. Then he dispatched Hodgkinson with the same cold precision, another ruby flash illuminating an innocent woman’s execution.
Two other intruders kneeled beside Reyes. One pressed a hypospray to Reyes’s neck.
As his vision dimmed and his hearing dulled, Reyes reflected bitterly that he should have expected something like this. Ten years in prison? I knew I’d never get off that easy.
He gave up his breath and sank into darkness.
2
February 18, 2267
The situation was on the verge of spinning out of control, and Bridget McLellan was standing in the middle of it.
She was just one among dozens of nameless faces huddled around a weak fire in the middle of a ramshackle shelter. Outside, a frigid wind wailed in minor chords and pushed icy drafts through gaps in the scrap-metal walls.
Everyone’s attention was on Scalzer, the grizzled, fearsome leader of this multispecies rogues’ gallery. McLellan didn’t know the name of Scalzer’s species, but she’d seen his three-fanged, ridged-headed, black-haired kind a few times before, when she’d been closer to Federation space.
“Someone in this room has decided to go into business for himself,” Scalzer said, casting an accusatory glare at the assembled smugglers. His right hand flexed on the grip of his holstered disruptor pistol. “Whoever did it, I admire your guramba. But when I find you, I will take your head.”
Nervous looks traveled from one pirate to the next as the members of the circle sought to evade blame by averting their eyes. Scalzer pivoted slowly, his ire palpable. “I will not ask the traitor to confess.” With his left hand, he reached under his jacket and pulled out a Starfleet-issue tricorder. “Your guilt will speak for itself.”
McLellan’s eyes widened as she saw the device in Scalzer’s hand. She had no idea how he had acquired it, but she knew she couldn’t leave it in his possession. Bad enough he might use it for crime,she reasoned, but if it falls into the hands of the Klingons …. Her hand closed around the compact phaser in her coat pocket. Can’t let that happen.
Scalzer activated the tricorder. McLellan watched him through faint licks of orange flame that let off black wisps of smoke. He fiddled with its settings and continued his slow turn as he aimed the device around the room.
One of his cronies shouted, “What is that thing?”
“Starfleet scanning device,” Scalzer said. “Very advanced. It will tell me who was the last among you to touch the missing tannot ore.”
A Tiburonian henchman just a few meters from McLellan protested, “That won’t prove who took it!”
Scalzer drew his disruptor, aimed at the man who had just spoken, and shot him in the knee. The hireling collapsed, writhing in agony and biting back howls of pain.
“Maybe not,” Scalzer said, holstering his weapon and stalking toward his fallen retainer. “But it will give me a good place to start.” The leader continued scanning, paying particular attention to the man curled up at his feet.
McLellan understood why Scalzer was in a hurry. He’d already agreed to sell to the Klingons his three hundred kilos of tannot ore—a primary ingredient in Klingon munitions that the smugglers had stolen from a Nalori mining colony several weeks earlier. The meeting was less than a day away, and there were few things more embarrassing for a thief than to admit to having been robbed of that which he’d stolen fair and square.
Looking up from the tricorder, Scalzer wrinkled his brow in confusion. “None of you shows recent traces of tannot isotope,” he said. “But according to this scanner … one of you is human.”
That was McLellan’s cue. Artificial skin pigment and a touch of synthetic pheromones had been enough to let her pass as an Orion and gain entry to the smugglers’ cove, but her disguise wasn’t going to fool a detailed scan.
She fired her phaser from inside her pocket, a blind shot. The blue beam sliced through her coat’s cheap fabric and lanced through the tricorder in Scalzer’s hands.
The device erupted in fire, sparks, and a plume of smoke. Scalzer fell backward, surprised but unhurt. Everyone else scattered away from him, widening the circle for a few moments until everyone logjammed at the exits.
Everyone except McLellan, who had prepared an exit strategy hours earlier. Triggering her encrypted emergency transponder, she rolled across the floor and through a wall panel she’d loosened that led to a snow-covered lane behind the building. Springing to her feet, she sprinted across a dark and narrow street and dashed into a meter-wide gap between two flimsy, jury-rigged structures.
She heard Scalzer bellowing orders. The moonless night echoed with the wet slapping footfalls of men running across muddy roads. Tinny voices squawked from two-way radios on either side of McLellan as she reached the end of the sliver-thin passageway.
Sneaking onto the surface of Amonash had been easy. Getting off it was promising to be a bit more challenging.
McLellan checked the corners ahead of her. Both directions looked clear. Brandishing her phaser, she darted into the street and straight toward the extraction point.
Bolts of charged plasma screamed past her head.
She ducked and returned fire on a wide-dispersal setting. The shots might miss their targets or not do much damage, but she hoped they would stun a few of her pursuers or blind them long enough for her to get back undercover.
A disruptor blast streaked past her, red and angry, as she somersaulted over a low stack of cargo crates. More shots flashed against the durable metal shipping containers as McLellan rolled to cover. Too close,she admonished herself, fleeing down another alleyway into the cold night.
One dead end after another forced McLellan to double back, risking capture—and who knew what else—with every step. Stumbling upon a downhill grade, she followed it, remembering that her ride off this miserable rock was waiting for her in a ravine near the bottom of the hill on which this abandoned town-turned-smugglers’ hideout had been built.
Behind a dilapidated warehouse she skirted the edge of an industrial yard that occupied the last patch of level ground above the ravine. Inside its low-walled perimeter, a labyrinth of pipes, stairs, ladders, and catwalks filled the gaps between dozens of rusted silos, which sat several meters aboveground on corroded metal stilts. Beyond the enclosure, the ground sloped sharply downward into the end of the narrow gorge below.
Ahead of her, at the far edge of the silo field and past the corner of the warehouse, was a road that led to a hidden trail into the dry ravine where her escape vessel lay.
Flashlight beams swept back and forth across that road. Searchers with palm beacons were closing in on her.
She turned back and walked a few steps before she heard more voices drawing near, then she saw more harsh-white beams slice through the darkness, cutting off her path of retreat.
Muttering low, vile curses in a smattering of alien tongues, she steeled herself for a fight.
A hand clasped McLellan’s shoulder.
She spun, lifted her phaser, and nearly shot her partner in the face.
He lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Ease up, Bridy Mac.” The lean, clear-eyed scoundrel was standing in a nook along the warehouse’s back wall. McLellan realized she must have walked past him moments earlier without seeing he was there. She had no idea how, when, or where he’d learned to hide himself so perfectly; for now, she added that mystery to the growing list of things she still didn’t know about Cervantes Quinn.
Lowering her weapon, she shook her head and rolled her eyes at the fiftyish man. “Dammit, Quinn, I nearly killed you.”
“Join the club,” he said, flashing a good-ol’-boy grin.
Recalling the mission profile she’d written for this op, she snapped, “I thought I told you to stay with the ship.”
“Yeah, an’ we both know how good I am at followin’ orders.” Nodding in the direction of her pursuers, he drawled with deadpan calm, “Looks like you got yerself a spot o’ company.”
“Looks like,” she replied.
“Lucky for you I poked my head out, then.” He pointed at the silo field. “Here’s my plan for savin’ your skin. We haul ass through here, shootin’ out them stilts as we go. These big-ass silos come down in a heap, coverin’ our backsides. We go up that last set o’ stairs, jump off that catwalk, and catch that rusty comm dish, which I reckon’ll break free when we hit it. Then we ride it down the slope and over the edge into the gorge. Play it right and we should have a fair-to-medium-soft snow landing.”
Despite knowing there wasn’t a drop of booze anywhere on Quinn’s clattertrap of a ship, she stared at him and wondered if he was drunk.
“You’re out of your mind.”
He smiled. “Guilty as charged.”
At the far end of the warehouse someone turned the corner, aimed a flashlight beam directly at Quinn and McLellan, and started yelling for reinforcements.
Quinn drew his stun pistol and dropped the distant shouter with one shot.
“So let me get this straight,” he said to McLellan. “My plan is so stupid, you’d rather take fifty-to-one odds on a stand-up fight?”
Armed men appeared at either end of the alley, on rooftops, and just about every other place in McLellan’s field of vision. She gestured at the silos with her phaser and said to Quinn, “I’ll take the ones on the left?”
“Deal.”
They hurdled over the low concrete retaining wall and sprinted into the iron maze of the industrial yard.
A chaotic firestorm converged upon them. Ricocheted plasma bolts kicked up sparks, and disruptor blasts cut like blades through the twisted old steel around McLellan and Quinn.
There was no point returning fire. She and Quinn would need all their luck and marksmanship to pull off his crazy plan. With their weapons set to full power, they vaporized struts under each silo as they ran past.
They didn’t have to hit all the struts—decay and gravity would do most of the work. Quinn and McLellan were just giving the silos a few nudges in the right direction.
Deep metallic groans preceded the whining of distressed iron, which within seconds became the screech of buckling steel. One by one the silos pitched sideways and slammed to the ground, splitting open and gushing forth their toxic contents.
McLellan and Quinn kept shooting and sprinting across the sprawl of cracked cement while looking over their shoulders at the surge of caustic acid lapping at their heels.
They reached the last staircase half a step ahead of an acid bath. A barrage of enemy fire pierced the metal avalanche they’d left in their wake and pinged off the catwalk railing and the wall behind their heads.
Running side by side, the duo leaped off the end of the catwalk toward a huge comm antenna. As Quinn had predicted, it broke free of the narrow stand on which it was mounted. Clutching the feed horn in the center of the parabolic dish, they rode it in free fall to the snowy slope below.
The convex side of the dish slammed against the ground, and they raced downhill at a perilous speed.
Plasma bolts and disruptor beams peppered the hillside around them, kicking up steam and dirt. McLellan volleyed a few shots back at the smugglers, despite there being no way for her to aim with any accuracy during the bumpy slide down to the ravine. She was rewarded by the sight of a few sizable explosions lighting up the night sky behind her.
“Here comes the fun part,” Quinn said.
McLellan turned back in time to see the ground come to an end beneath their improvised sled. They were back in free fall, plummeting more than a dozen meters to a curving slope of windblown snow that filled the end of the ravine.
Their bone-jarring landing made her feel as if she were about to cough up her stomach. They spun and slid down the snowdrift, turning McLellan’s world into a sickening blur.
The comm dish scraped over sand and slowed. It ceased spinning and came to a halt in front of the open aft gangway to Quinn’s beat-up old Mancharan starhopper, the Rocinante.
“All aboard,” Quinn said. He staggered to his feet and stumbled up the ramp into the mottled gray cargo ship.
It took McLellan a few seconds to regain her balance and stand up. As she climbed the aft ramp into the ship, she heard alarmed voices coming from the wooded cliff high above the ship’s port side. “Quinn? Company on the left flank!”
“Copy that,” Quinn called back from the cockpit.
Seconds later, a series of emerald-hued flashes lit up the woods above the ship’s left wing. Thunderous explosions split the air half a second later. Then all was quiet.
“That oughtta do it,” Quinn hollered over the rising whine of the Rocinante’s engines. “Seal the hatch. We’re outta here.”
McLellan closed the gangway and moved forward through the main cabin to the cockpit. As she settled into the copilot’s chair, Quinn guided the ship to a swift liftoff. By the time McLellan put up her feet, they had cleared the atmosphere and were starbound.
She asked, “You mined the woods above the ship?”
“Seemed like a wise precaution.” He adjusted some settings on the helm, then shot her a rakish grin. “So admit it. Not a bad bit o’ rescuin’, right?”
“It had its moments,” she said, not wanting to puff up her partner’s ego any more than he was already doing for himself.
For the past year they had worked together in the Taurus Reach as covert operatives of Starfleet Intelligence, gathering information, seeking clues to the ancient and dangerous race known as the Shedai, and disrupting the activities of criminals and Federation rivals throughout the sector.
SI had recruited McLellan shortly after the return of the U.S.S. Sagittariusfrom the now-vanished Shedai world known as Jinoteur. As the second officer of the Sagittarius,McLellan had experienced the transformative power of the Shedai firsthand. That, coupled with her expertise in flight ops, combat tactics, and computer science, had made her an attractive recruitment prospect for SI.
As for why SI had sought Quinn’s services, she imagined it might have had something to do with the fact that he’d risked his ship and his life to save the downed Sagittariusby bringing a replacement antimatter fuel pod to it on Jinoteur. But sometimes she wondered if maybe he’d been hired by mistake.
She asked, “Did you get all the tannot ore?”
“Every kilo,” he said. “We’re gonna make a fortune selling this stuff when we get home.”
“We can’t sell it,” she chided. “It has to be impounded.”
“I don’t think you appreciate the market value of—”
“If you sell it, it’ll be used to kill people.”
He sighed. “Right. Sorry. Old habits.” Casting a sly sidelong glance in her direction, he said, “Seein’ as I did kinda save your life back there, maybe tonight we could tie our hammocks togeth—”
“Just fly the ship, Quinn.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
