A little more agreeable, though no more mellow, Sykora gestured to Zevon’s cardigan. “You’re always too careless with your own well-being. I take care of you. The fringe is a homing grid.”
Zevon touched his sweater, then gazed at her in what could only be adoration. “How kind…”
BZZZZZWAP!
Phaser stun! No mistaking that sound!
The Pojjana troopers sprang like stricken cats and flopped to the ground, only an instant before a third beam struck Sykora and she was pitched into a convulsion that left her unconscious in a crotch of stone.
Zevon gasped in anguish and scrambled to his wife’s side, but there was nothing to be done for her but wait for the effect to wear off. The tables had turned again.
Over the crest of the ridge appeared a beautiful sight—Travis Perraton leading a landing party that included the evil twins, a handful of security trainees, and Dr. Leonard McCoy.
“We heard the trouble,” Travis said. “Ambassador Spock cued his comm link and we heard everything. You all right, Eric?”
“Why? Am I bleeding?”
“Some blood on your neck there.”
“I’m okay, Trav, thanks.” Stiles accepted a service phaser and looked at the handiwork. “Round up those three and stuff ’em into the equipment locker.”
“Even the lady?”
Stiles met Zevon’s hopeful eyes, but he had certain decisions to make and certain dangers to consider. “That’s no lady. That’s a subcommander.”
“Uh-huh. Got it. Lock her up, boys.”
The Bolt brothers assisted Dr. McCoy down a fairly stable rock incline, where he stopped before Zevon and gave the Romulan prince a good looking over.
“Good evening,” he said. “I’m Count Vladimir McCoy. I vant your blod.”
“Orsova.”
“Again? What do you want now! I tried to put that poison in Zevon, but he’s gone!”
“They have escaped through the root swamp. I will give you the coordinates of their spaceship. You still have a chance to bring them to me. The doctors and Zevon. Alive if you can. Dead if you cannot.”
“How can I chase them if they go into space? I have no spaceships.”
“You ask too many questions. You will have my ship. I will arrange for you to be close to Zevon. Prepare yourself. You are about to become a spaceman.”
Chapter Twenty-four
AS THE TWO POJJAN guards were heaved off into the waiting CST by the crewmen, Zevon hurried to his wife’s side and knelt beside her, touching her face. “I will not even speak to you about this unless you treat her first.”
“She’ll recover,” Stiles complained. “It’s just phaser stun.”
“No, she’s ill. Like you when you were trapped here, we have no way to treat her on this planet. She’s not Pojjana. Their medicine has been working only poorly for her since—”
“Uh-oh,” McCoy preempted, and immediately came to Sykora’s side.
“Better check that.”
Stiles glanced at Spock. Were they too late? Did Sykora have the royal family thing? He scrubbed the conversation they’d just had to see if there’d been any mention of Sykora’s bloodlines. Had he missed something? Did she have this plague that had everybody so worked up?
While McCoy scanned the unconscious woman with some kind of double-built medical scanner, Stiles turned to Travis. “Go back on board. Get ready to lift off.”
“Aye aye,” Travis said.
“I’ll be right there. Go on.”
Over the fallen form of the Romulan woman, McCoy let Jason Bolt pull him back to his feet. “She’s not royal family. No trace of their DNA at all. She’s got hyperplexic myelitis. I’ve only seen it twice before in Vulcanoids.”
Fearful just at the sound of that, Zevon looked at him beseechingly. “Is it dangerous?”
“Eventually, it would be fatal.”
“Can you stop it?”
“I need to get her on a table.”
The noncommittal answer clearly frightened Zevon.
Stiles watched him. The whole Romulan royal family was sick and dying, and all that meant anything to Zevon was this one woman. He parted his lips to utter some words of assurance, but never got the chance. As the ship sat ducklike on its landing struts, the skin of the CST crackled with an electrical surge that threw sparks all over the people standing on the ridge. For an instant Stiles thought something in or on the ship had exploded; then the culprit came into view. Over the resting form of the CST rose a hovering craft of unfamiliar design, made of dark blue metal and etched with white bolts in an industrial pattern of hull plates. Against the darkening sky, the blue ship was nearly invisible except for the pinpoint etchings of white dots that appeared almost like free-floating constellations.
Would’ve been pretty if it hadn’t been firing on them.
“On board!” Stiles shouted. “On board! On board!”
As Spock and two CST crewmen hustled McCoy down the other side of the ridge and Zevon hoisted his wife’s limp form over his shoulder, Stiles aimed his service phaser at the roaring newcomer and opened fire.
His phaser scored the body of the other ship with a great show of noise and sizzling, but the wounds were only superficial.
The blue ship fired again, but not at him. Instead its weapons scored the body of the CST as it had before, leaving steaming gashes on the nose and side of the big tender. As he skittered down the incline, he heard the CST’s impulse engines throb to power. In a few seconds, they’d be ready for escape velocity.
That is, if they weren’t fried right here on the ground. Gouts of smoke blew across the bottom of the ridge, blinding him to the people running in front of him toward the tender’s ramp.
“Keep going!” he shouted, and fired again.
A third time the lumbering blue ship screamed at them. Once more the deadly energy weapons scratched the body of the CST. If that beam hit the defenseless people running toward the ship—
A hard form—metal—slapped the bottom of his boot and tripped him. He skidded forward, almost dropping his phaser. The ramp! In the smoke he hadn’t seen how close he was!
“Travis, get us out of the atmosphere!” he called, scrambling on all fours up the treaded surface. “They can’t come after us!”
The ramp whined up behind him. He found himself on the midships deck, with Alan Wood pulling him out of the way of the closing ramp.
“Always an English butcher around when you need one,” Stiles choked, gagging the last of the smoke out of his lungs.
“Tea’s good for that,” Alan offered. “I’ll get you some. Want cake?”
“I want red alert!”
“Red alert, aye.” Alan swung him to his feet and Stiles raced through the hatches to the cluttered little bridge, where Zevon sat on the deck, holding his groggy but awakening wife. Beside them, Dr. McCoy had been planted firmly in one of the anchored chairs at tactical. Jeremy manned the science station, Travis was just ordering full power to the escape velocity thrusters, and the evil twins were at the helm and navigation. Spock was standing beside the helm.
Stiles skidded into place behind the helm and in front of his command chair, but did not sit. “You look good there,” he commented.
Spock seemed surprised that he’d even been noticed. “Comforting to know one is picturesque.”
Indulging in a nervous grin, Stiles watched the main screen, which showed the thinning atmosphere as the CST powered toward space, and the side monitors, which showed the blue ship with its constellation of white hull buttons moving deliberately after them.
Quite abruptly, the mist on the main screen parted with a nearly audible swoosh, and they broke out into the blackness of open space. Unlike the darkening evening on the planet’s surface, here it was once again day, bright and fierce, as they moved away from the protection of the planet with the sun on their port side.
“They’re following us!” Jeremy White gulped. “Coming right into space after us!”
Zevon
left his wife’s side, bolted to his feet, and grasped the edge of the helm and stared at the main screen. “Impossible!”
“Well, here they come anyway!”
The whole CST jolted then with a terrible butt-stroke from the pursuing ship, a blow that peppered the tender with hot energy.
Stiles glanced at Zevon, fielding a bitter distrust. “Shields up. Battle stations.”
“I’m not imagining things, am I?” Stiles asked. “That’s not a Pojjana ship, is it?”
“No!” Zevon insisted.
“Nor do I recognize it,” Ambassador Spock said. “I have never seen that configuration or those markings.”
“Neither has the computer,” Travis confirmed. “No cataloguing at all.”
“Increase speed as soon as you can,” Stiles said.
Zack Bolt frowned at his nav controls. “They’re hailing us through my nav impulses. Must not be compatible with Federation tech.”
“Can you make it so we can hear it?”
“Well…attempting.” He poked at his controls, and a moment later a completely unexpected sound burbled from the other ship.
“Surrender. You have no chance against this fighting spaceship. Turn back now and you will live.”
Rage boiled up in Stiles’s head till he thought his hair would blow off. He pounded the right button.
“Orsova! What are you doing in that ship! Where’d you get a thing like that!”
“Surrender now or be killed. We have more speed and more weapons. I will kill you before I let you leave the sector.”
“Cut him off!” Stiles roared. “I don’t want to hear his voice again! He can’t want me back that badly—he can’t care about me that much! Travis! What’s the gasball got?”
Travis bent again over the tactical scanners. “High shielding…full warp capacity…strike-force shields…weapons are—” He paused and shook his head in worried admiration. “It’s a fighting warship, Eric. We’re completely outmatched.”
“Twins, get us out of this stupid solar system!” Stiles ordered. “Full impulse as soon as you can. Travis, you take weapons yourself. Transfer all the reserve from the cutting phasers and find some distance power. Get ready to use the welding torches if they get too close. I want to skin that bastard!”
At the nav station, Zack Bolt turned to look at him. “We’re a combat support tender, not a battleship! We can’t beat that thing!”
“We don’t have to beat it. He wants us alive for some reason.”
Everybody looked at him as if he’d grown feathers.
“You’re gonna have to explain that one,” Travis said.
“If he wanted to kill us,” Stiles told them, “why would he shoot at the CST instead of nice bald helpless people on the ground?”
Unsure of that, Spock tightened his brow and waited for more explanation, so Stiles gave it to him.
“That gives me an advantage. It means I should run harder than I fight. Getting away is more important than beating them. All we have to do is knock ’em down long enough to get away.”
The CST hummed and cranked its way toward full speed, chased easily by the constellation ship with Orsova impossibly aboard. Against the pure blackness of night, the enemy ship’s blue body nearly disappeared and its hundreds of white plate bolts didn’t, so that it looked indeed like a set of stars rushing freely after them in space. But every few moments the other ship made its solid presence known with a full-power blast that shocked the CST to its bones and made everybody grab for something to hold onto.
“How’re we doing?” Stiles asked when he thought enough time had gone by.
“Not an inch,” Jeremy sourly reported. “In fact, they’re closing.”
His teeth gnashing, Stiles growled at the side screens. “Maybe if I give myself up, he’ll be happy and leave the rest of you alone.”
Even in the midst of rocking and rolling, Spock found a way to face him gracefully. “No, Mr. Stiles. That is one decision I will not allow.”
“You can’t tell me what to do, with all due respect, sir.”
“I know. Orsova has no ship like that. Someone is either supporting or manipulating him. That power must have farther-reaching goals than being entertained with your capture. And,” he added, rather gently, “once in a lifetime is enough to sacrifice yourself to that man.”
In spite of everything, Stiles smiled at the sentimental reminder that Spock knew all the mistakes he’d made, and liked him anyway.
A javelin of weapon power struck the CST and backhanded it across space. The engines screamed. The crew and passengers were throttled, bouncing off the equipment around them. Stiles tried to stay on his feet, but ended up sharing a chair with Jason Bolt at the helm as the ship went howling on its edge through space.
While Jason struggled to recover, Jeremy called, “That was our port engine! We can’t make top speed anymore, Eric!”
“Can we have emergency warp?”
“If you don’t mind a complete meltdown.”
“That’s it. No more running. Get ready to turn and fight.”
From the glances of the crew, he might as well have ordered them to cut off their hands and throw them in a pot. They were brave enough going into battle situations when necessary to repair the important ships, but it wasn’t often that they were the center of the battle—the thing actually being shot at on purpose.
He saw it in their faces. Turn and fight? Fight that warship coming at them at flank speed?
“It’s me he wants,” Zevon spoke up. He came around the helm to face both Stiles and Spock. “I am the key to his control, Eric, not you. Let him take me. Then you and your ship can go.”
“I can’t let you go, you know that,” Stiles said. “We need you. Your blood—”
“I hate the Romulan ruling family,” Zevon claimed bitterly. “I hate the government that flagrantly caused the Constrictor. I hate the relatives who abandoned me. I deride the stupidity of a system that allows birth connections to command important missions. I hate those of my heritage, and now I am told I must go save them? I have no interest in saving my philosophical enemies.”
“Travis, keep firing on that ship,” Stiles ordered. “Just fire at will, any chance you get to hit ’em.” That done, furious and frustrated, he barked at Zevon. “So it would be better to go back there and serve a system that allows a scumsucker like Orsova to end up in control of a whole planet? What’s the matter with you?”
“My husband is a genius!” Sykora rose from the deck, still pale from the phaser stun, her face a mask of defiance. She moved forward and steadied herself by gripping the back of the command chair. “He has designed a spaceborne barricade that will funnel the Constrictor waves around the planet. If we help you, will the Federation come and build our barricade in space? No! You will go your way and let the Pojjana planet crumble behind you!”
As enemy fire rocked the CST again, the real challenge was right here, right now.
“Why should I trust the Federation?” Zevon confirmed. “After I save the Romulans, you will leave again as you did before.”
“We can help the Pojjana,” Spock firmly told them both, “but they must be receptive to our help.”
Zevon spun to him. “Why should I trust you? Why were you not more persistent? When you saw your presence was good for them, why did you leave?”
“The Pojjana asked us to leave.”
“But you left!”
Spock seemed to be searching for a way to explain when Stiles took over. “Never mind, Ambassador. Until today, the only Federation citizen Zevon’s ever spoken to in his life was me. He doesn’t get it.” Fixing his glare on Zevon, he forced himself to ignore the pounding the ship was taking. “You’re going. I didn’t go through this for nothing! We need you to go. If the Empire falls, the whole sector is going with it. Like it or not, you’re the last royal family member with unadulterated blood and you’re coming with us.”
“No, Mr. Stiles. He is not.”
Spock’s announ
cement, without a hint of doubt or question, took Stiles completely by surprise. Everyone else, too, from the looks on their faces.
Digesting the words from his idol as quickly as he could, Stiles jabbed a finger toward Zevon. “But he’s wrong!”
“He is wrong according to us,” the ambassador contradicted evenhandedly. “He has that right.”
“Why did we come all this way! Why didn’t you say something down on the planet!”
“I entertained the hope that you might be able to convince him.”
Setting aside annoyance at being used, Stiles argued, “The Romulans are attacking the Federation for something we didn’t do!”
Spock offered only a nod in limited agreement. “I will not force any individual to act against his will.”
“Even if it means a war?”
“If that is the price of freedom…so be it.”
“They’re almost in phaser range,” Jeremy White reported, a thread of fright rising in his voice.
Stiles didn’t blame him a bit. The sight of that dark ship with the white buttons all over it streaking toward them with the posture of an angry bumblebee—it scared him too.
“Jeremy,” he ordered, “tell me the two biggest differences between us and them.”
With something specific to do, Jeremy concentrated on his instruments while everyone else waited through the tension.
“Their weapons…”
No surprise there.
“And shields. Way better than ours.”
Unsatisfied with the lack of specificity, Spock leaned over Jeremy’s shoulder at the readouts. “High-intensity plasma-fed shielding with direct warp feed. At least four times the power of ours. I must assume their speed capacity and weapons are comparably advanced.”
Stiles leered at him. “Situation hopeless?”
“So it seems,” Spock said.
“All the odds against us?”
“Correct.”
Stiles eyed him. “This is one of those ‘leap of creativity’things, isn’t it?”
Spock clasped his hands behind his back in a ridiculously casual posture. “That is my hope.”