Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Xiong pocketed the wire ball and checked the settings on the transceiver. He needed it to create a field strong enough to contain the blast but small enough that he would be outside its area of effect when he climbed up into the pod’s corner. He made a few adjustments to its subspace field geometry, increased its power output to maximum, and calculated how long it would take the transceiver to power up and generate a subspace field.

The tricky part was that after reactivating the transceiver Xiong needed to be outside its subspace field; he also had to drop the wire ball from the correct height at the proper moment so that it would be inside the subspace field. If he dropped the ball too early, he would have no protection when the sarium krellide detonated; dropped too late, it would bounce off the subspace field—and because he would be unable to pierce the force field himself, he would be unable to shut it off to make a second attempt. If he dropped the ball off-target, he was dead.

He would get only one shot at this. If his math was off, or if his reflexes proved to be either too slow or too jumpy, his day would very soon take a turn for the worst.

Bending forward, he stretched his right arm down and forward toward the transceiver; he held his left arm above the power cell. Clutched in his left hand was the wire ball. Shaking with tension, he aligned his head above the power cell to fix his aim. Anxiety filled his gut with sick sensations.

Here goes.

His finger tapped the transceiver’s power switch.

He pushed off with his left leg, lined up his left hand, and let go of the wire ball. It began to fall in slow motion.

Turning away, he scrambled with his one powered leg and both arms to pull himself up into the corner. Handholds and footholds seemed elusive, his fumbling grasps desperate and clumsy. The top of the pod, which had seemed suffocatingly close this past hour, now seemed far away, unreachable.

A flash of white and a boom like the eruption of a volcano. An impact pinned him to the top of the pod, and a steady roar and a whoosh surrounded him in the darkness. He was moving, the pod was rocketing upward, the explosive exhaust of its searing high-pressure gases enough to push it off the ocean bottom. As quickly as it had started, it slowed and stopped, and the pod pitched to one side.

Water flooded in, boiled into a mad froth, and slammed against Xiong’s pressure suit, setting him afloat. Then he felt the pod pressing on him again, pulling him back down as it sank once more. If it hits bottom and traps me inside, I’ll be stuck for good. He fought his way across the inside of the pod, finding the water as hard to move through as the Tholian atmosphere had been. His gloved hands found the jagged edge of the blasted-open bottom. He pulled himself through the opening and pushed free of the pod. As soon as he was clear it fell away beneath him, swallowed into the night of the ocean bottom.

He was deep enough that he saw no light from the surface, but stray bubbles of gas rising past him showed him, aglow in the light of his helmet, which way to go. Pointing himself upward, he used the forearm controls of his suit to create a slow, steady expulsion of carbon dioxide from his rebreather. Chasing his own escaping waste gas, he ascended swiftly, reassured that the same systems that had protected him aboard the Tholian ship would keep him safe from pressure effects on his journey back to the surface.

Several minutes later he saw the first glimmers of light above, and soon afterward he crested the surface. He checked the passive sensor gauges on the underside of his suit’s forearm. The air tested as breathable and free of toxins; local gravity was just a few tenths of a percent greater than Earth standard. Bobbing along, he powered down the suit’s servos and activated its exchanger to replenish its air tanks from the atmosphere.

The sea was calm beneath a pale sky and sparkling with the peach-colored light of a breaking dawn.

Flotation sequence functioning, he noted with a glance at his gauges. Air supply increasing. So far so good. He lowered the shade on his visor and, confident that he was momentarily out of danger, decided that he’d earned a few hours of rest.

As he drifted off, he murmured to himself with weary sarcasm, “Well…that was fun.”

Theriault shivered awake. Her row of heated rocks had dimmed to a faint reddish hue, and only a faint aura of heat radiated from them. The shafts of amber daylight that had filled the cavern beyond her nook in the wall were gone now. Darkness had fallen.

She was unsure how long she had been asleep, but the fact that the rocks still had some of the heat she had phasered into them told her it could not have been long, perhaps a few hours. Early evening, she figured.

Her teeth chattered, and the flesh on her arms and legs was pimpled from a pervasive chill. She drew her phaser and extended her arm. Steadying her aim was difficult. Holding her breath helped slightly. A few short bursts per stone made them bright orange again, and when she’d finished, their soothing heat enveloped her once more. She tucked the phaser back onto her belt and retreated into the nook, ready to return to sleep.

As she lay basking in the ruddy glow, her thoughts turned to her ship and crewmates, and to her family at home on Mars…then she shuddered awake, fear animating her like an electric current. She was certain that she was not alone.

In the darkness beyond her glowing rocks, she saw only pale ripples of moonlight on the pond, heard only the susurrus of the waterfalls…but there was something else there, something intangible, moving like a breath in the night.

Hyperalert, she scanned the cavern, seeking out something that her fear told her could not be found against its will. Then a voice spoke to her without sound, its authority absolute, its form unseen but its presence undeniable.

Rest, it told her. Your wounds are deeper than you know.

Fear and pain put tremors in her voice. “Who are you?”

Sleep, the great voice said, and this time her body obeyed.

18

Despite being transmitted over a subspace channel across several light-years, Klingon Ambassador Lugok’s rage was evident to Federation Envoy Akeylah Karumé. “The Klingon Empire will not let such a brazen act of aggression go unavenged!” Lugok bellowed, his fury verging on apoplexy. He was in as high a state of dudgeon as Karumé had ever seen.

For all of Lugok’s raw volume, Ambassador Jetanien seemed entirely unimpressed. “Ambassador,” the Chelon said with an air of disdainful hauteur, “has it escaped your notice that within hours of your team being attacked, a Starfleet survey team was slaughtered less than a hundred kilometers away? Or that more than three dozen civilian colonists fell victim to an almost identical mass homicide less than fifty kilometers from your people’s own encampment on Gamma Tauri IV?”

“So you claim,” Lugok said. “They could be the victims of an accident. Our people were cut down like beasts!”

Ignoring the instructions she had received from Jetanien before entering his office for the unofficial, “back-channel” meeting with Lugok, Karumé entered the verbal fray. “Quit your posturing,” she berated the Klingon. “There’s no one on this channel but us. What do you really want?”

“We want your people off that planet!”

Jetanien made some low clucking noises inside his beak. “I’m sure that you do.”

Unfazed, Lugok continued, “We want justice for our dead!”

“What, in your estimation,” Jetanien asked, “would constitute justice under these circumstances, Mr. Ambassador? No, wait. Don’t tell me. Public beheadings? Perhaps something more old-fashioned, like a communal stoning?”

Lugok’s face became a twisted grimace of disgust. “You mock me,” he said. “You mock our dead. Have you no honor?”

Karumé shot back, “Have you no common sense? All the evidence points to one attacker for all three incidents.”

“The Federation would not be the first to make a false-flag attack on its own to hide a strike against another,” Lugok said.

Puffed up with indignation, Jetanien boomed in reply, “Preposterous! Your ship in orbit has monitored every being in a Starfleet uniform on the planet since it arrived. How could we have perpetrated such an atrocity without being detected?”

The portly Klingon shook his index finger angrily at them. “Absence of evidence is hardly proof of innocence. Who else had a motive to attack our troops? If it wasn’t your people, it was the colonists!”

“With what weapons?” asked Karumé. “They have barely enough small arms to outfit a handful of peace officers.”

A bitter smile brought no levity to Lugok’s manner. “So you’ll do nothing to punish your colonists?”

“Technically, it’s not our colony,” Karumé said. “It refused the protectorate treaty, so we have no jurisdiction.”

Lugok harrumphed. “The presence of your Starfleet vessel robs that claim of credibility.”

Beside her, Jetanien made some dry scraping sounds with his beak. It was an affectation that she had learned was used to express annoyance. Whether he was irked at her, at Lugok, or at both of them, she had no idea.

“Ambassador,” said Jetanien, “I propose we end this charade. We both know what attacked our survey teams and the colonists.”

“What I know,” retorted Lugok, “is that the battle cruiser veS’Hov is on its way to discourage any further acts of aggression by Starfleet—or its pathetic civilian proxies.”

Adopting an equally combative tone, Jetanien replied, “Then it’s only fair to warn you that the Starship Endeavour will be arriving at Gamma Tauri in less than twenty hours—to discourage your people from taking any rash actions.”

“Splendid, more guns,” Karumé interjected, shaming both ambassadors to silence. “That’ll solve everything.”

Captain Kutal marched onto his bridge with long strides and a short fuse. “Enough excuses,” he snapped at his first officer. “Ohq’s had six hours to make repairs. Are we ready or not?”

Commander BelHoQ left an auxiliary tactical station to fall in beside the captain. “We have the backup sensor array func—”

“Yes or no?” Kutal glowered at BelHoQ. “Are we ready?”

BelHoQ struggled to suppress the snarl that was tugging at his mouth. “We can navigate,” he said.

“That’s a yes,” Kutal said, dropping into his chair. “Helm, contact spaceport control. Tell them we’re leaving.”

As the helm officer began the departure protocol, BelHoQ stepped closer to the captain and advised him in a low voice, “Our main sensor array is still down, sir. We’ll be at a disadvantage if we go into battle without it.”

Regarding him with narrowed eyes, Kutal asked, “How long to get it working?”

“At least fifteen hours,” BelHoQ said.

Kutal growled and faced forward. “We have to go now. Fix it on the way.” At the forward console, the helmsman turned his chair to face the captain, who barked, “What is it?”

“The dockmaster reports a malfunction clearing moorings,” the young pilot said. “Docking clamps have lost power on the station’s side, and the supply umbilicals won’t release.”

The captain ignored his first officer’s accusatory stare and issued orders quickly. “Tell them to release the clamps manually. Have Ohq send teams EVA to clear the umbilicals.”

Lieutenant Krom, the second officer, turned from the ship’s status console to report, “Pressure spike in umbilicals three, four, nine, and eleven, Captain. Power surge in life support.”

Immediately, the overhead lights flickered, then paled. The gentle hum of the ship dropped to a low moan and then went silent. Kutal’s jaw clenched as he waited for someone—anyone—to speak. “In the name of Fek’lhr,” he shouted, “someone report!”

The first officer joined Krom and watched the console light up with warning signals. “Multiple pump malfunctions,” he said. “Reflow valves jamming open…” Both sets of doors at the aft end of the bridge slid open. “Portals opening ship-wide—”

“Seal off the cargo deck,” Kutal ordered, to prevent the lower decks of the ship from being vented into space.

BelHoQ answered, “Only interior hatches are opening, sir. Outer doors secure.”

Kutal decided he’d had enough. He slapped the button on the arm of his chair and opened a channel. “Bridge to engineering!”

Ohq’s reply squawked from the speaker. “Engineering here!”

“What’s going on down there?”

The chief engineer sounded terrified and irritated. “Power spikes, probably a computer virus or—” He stopped. Over the comm Kutal heard Ohq talking in angry whispers to someone else before he finished, “Overpressure in the main recycling tank!”

The bridge crew traded confused looks. Kutal directed a questioning glance at BelHoQ. “Overpressure in the what?”

He got his answer in the form of a deep boom followed by a low whoosh—and a gag-inducing stench. In the stuttering light he saw a cascade of dark sludge rush out of the lavatory in the port corridor. From the starboard head came a putrid spray of liquid-chemical waste and fluid excrement. It was a steady eruption: twin geysers of fetid slime coating the deck ankle deep and pouring down the passageways into every compartment, including the bridge.

Overpowered by the grotesque odor, Kreq and Krom doubled over and added their emesis to the deepening mess that defiled the bridge of the Zin’za. Tonar turned his back on his comrades and vomited across his tactical console.

BelHoQ looked down at the ship’s status monitor, then back at the captain. “Every lavatory on every deck, sir.” He coughed and struggled to breathe. “Apparently, the spaceport’s waste system is backing up into ours.”

Though Kutal was seething with a blood fury unlike any he had ever felt before, his voice was deathly quiet as he said to BelHoQ, “Seize the port. Find the saboteurs. Kill them. Now.”

“I thought you said we didn’t have time,” BelHoQ replied.

Kutal shot him a murderous glare. “We’ll make the time.”

The Klingon soldiers’ boots were still coated with foul-smelling wet filth as they stormed through the Borzha II spaceport, rounding up anyone and everyone who wasn’t one of their own.

BelHoQ was in charge of the siege, and he orchestrated it with brutal efficiency. His men left no compartment unsearched, no locker unopened. A skeleton crew had been left aboard the Zin’za with the captain, freeing most of the ship’s more than four hundred personnel to place the facility under control.

“Please,” mewed Bohica, the spaceport’s pathetic weakling of an administrator. “There’s no need to hold all these people, is there? The galley staff hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“I’ve eaten in your commissary,” BelHoQ said. “I assure you, they have done many things wrong.”

Scores of civilians were dragged past, kicking, protesting their innocence, and cursing the Klingon troops. There was no way for BelHoQ to know which ones were speaking the truth—at least, not until the beatings commenced. Hidden details would no doubt come to light once more coercive methods of interrogation were initiated. Until then he would let his men continue to gather evidence and segregate the suspects.

So far the search process had consumed nearly four hours of his time. More than eight hundred people lived and worked aboard the spaceport, and few had come willingly when his men had begun rounding them up in the cargo bay for mass detention.

Content to direct the operation from the administrator’s office, BelHoQ was having second thoughts about permitting Bohica to remain as a fair witness to the proceedings. For one thing, the man was an inveterate whiner. “This is outrageous,” Bohica complained, standing in front of what had been, until four hours ago, his own desk. “This was not part of our agreement! If even one of my people is harmed, my world will have to rethink its decision to let you use our port!”

BelHoQ looked up from Krom’s latest report and scowled at Bohica. “Was that supposed to be a threat?” Before the effete Borzhan could answer, BelHoQ picked up the heaviest knick-knack on the man’s desk and threw it at him. The lumpy block of glazed ceramic caromed off Bohica’s broad forehead, knocked his spectacles off his face, and dropped the man unconscious to the deck. BelHoQ waved over two of his soldiers and pointed at the administrator. “Take him below.”

The warriors obeyed without speaking. As they dragged the Borzhan out of his office, Lieutenant Tonar walked in. “We have them, Commander. Three saboteurs.”

He bared his fangs with anticipation. “Where?”

“They were in a secured docking bay, trying to sneak aboard an impounded ship.” He walked to one of the office’s security monitors and switched it to a different internal feed. An image of the docking bay appeared, showing the three prisoners and the heavily armed squad of Klingon troops that had captured them. “We checked their identities,” he said as he walked back to the desk. “All three are wanted criminals who worked for the man who owned that ship.” Tonar handed a printed report to BelHoQ, who looked it over. “Our men found evidence that the suspects have been living aboard the impounded vessel, in scan-shielded hidden compartments under the deck plates.”

“Broon,” said BelHoQ, reading the name of the ship’s proprietor, a reputed arms dealer and interstellar racketeer who had been arrested several weeks earlier for possession of a stolen Imperial Klingon deep-space probe—one that had been deployed to chart the Jinoteur system. “Interesting,” the first officer said, thinking aloud. “It seems that Broon—or perhaps whatever criminal syndicate he works for—has an interest in the Jinoteur system. And they feel strongly enough about it to risk sabotaging our ship.” He cast a pointed stare at Tonar. “We have linked them directly to the sabotage, yes?”

“Yes, sir,” Tonar said. “A search of their ship uncovered several spare parts like the ones used to damage our sensor array—including some in the process of being disguised and a few failed pieces that look like early attempts.”

BelHoQ nodded with satisfaction. Hard evidence and solid indication of premeditated action. He couldn’t have asked for more, especially in so short a time. “Well done,” he said.

“Do you or the captain wish to question them?” asked Tonar.

“No,” he replied. “We’ve lost enough time as it is. File a complete report—and make sure you record the execution.”

The distant shrieks of disruptors echoed in the corridors.

“Sounds like Broon’s boys just got dusted,” said Delmark, a nondescript Orion man with dark hair, a lean physique, and a complexion of an especially deep hue of green.

His two comrades walked with him in a corridor above the hangar deck. Tarris, an Elasian woman with caramel-colored skin and snow-white hair, asked, “What if the Klingons keep investigating?” Her large, almond-shaped eyes harbored anxiety. “It won’t take a genius to realize those three couldn’t have accessed the station’s sewage-treatment system.”

“The Klingons won’t even think of that,” said Laëchem, a fair-haired Zibalian man with brilliant indigo and vermilion facial tattoos. “They have someone to blame, and now they have a schedule to keep. As long as we don’t hit them again, we should be in the clear.”

Delmark nodded. “I agree. It’s time to lay low.” Glancing out an observation window at the Klingon battle cruiser Zin’za, he added, “How long do you think it’ll take them to swab out the lower decks?”

“Weeks,” Laëchem said with a smirk.

All three accomplices chuckled. They stifled their mirth as a squad of Klingon warriors double-timed past them, on their way back to the ship. Tarris remarked, “Looks like they’re almost ready to go.” She checked her chrono. “Only eleven hours late…. Ganz won’t be happy about that.”

“It’s the best we can do,” Delmark said. “Besides, I think he’ll forgive us when he hears that one of his biggest rivals is both down for the count and taking the heat for our handiwork.”

Much to Captain Kutal’s relief, the Zin’za cleared moorings without further incident and navigated swiftly clear of commercial traffic in the Borzha system. Less than an hour after BelHoQ had imposed a much-deserved death sentence on the saboteurs, the Klingon warship was hurtling through space at maximum warp toward Jinoteur.

A disgusting reek permeated every compartment. Officers throughout the ship were much more vigilant than usual for any sign of insubordination. Any error, no matter how slight, by enlisted personnel would be sufficient excuse to put someone on a punishment detail. On every deck, teams of grumbling enlisted men moved about on all fours—scraping, scooping, scrubbing, spraying one menIqam at a time in what seemed like a futile effort to cleanse the ship of its repugnant stench.

The officers, at least, had the benefit of raiding the medical supplies for help. Each of the senior officers wore a smear of white ointment under his nose. The sharply medicinal salve was used by the ship’s surgeon principally for blocking the smell of decay while he performed autopsies. Now that the interior of the Zin’za smelled like something that had crawled up the back end of a targ and died, the ointment had become the most popular substance on the ship.

As successful as the salve was in blocking the ship’s pervasive stink, it also obliterated desirable odors. As Kutal and several of his top officers sat down in the mess hall, he expected his evening meal to lack much of its normal flavor.

Then the food slots opened, the officers saw their meals, and in unison Kutal and his men howled with rage.

Platters were heaped with spoiled Pipius claws, rotting bregit lung, and mold-covered heart of targ. Steins overflowed with sewage-tainted warnog. Dishes of rokeg blood pie crawled with bugs. Skewers of zilm’kach melted into orange slag.

The gagh was dead.

Kutal’s men hurled their trays of inedible food against the walls. The crashing trays were not loud enough to drown out the chorus of Klingon vulgarities echoing through the ship.

Picking up a fistful of the expired serpent worms, Kutal looked at the ruined delicacy and shook his head in dismay at this final insult. “Who would be so ruthless?”