Star trek double helix, p.124
Star Trek - Double Helix, page 124
That wasn’t entirely true, actually. Vandelia was there, her body tilted back on the chair, blood trickling from her mouth. Calhoun could see from across the room that she was dead. God knew he had seen it enough.
Even so, he didn’t want to believe it was true. He approached her slowly, hoping against hope that somehow she would just get up, come back to life. That it was all some sort of a sick joke. Then he heard her voice, and she was whispering, “I wanted to dance…for just you…Mac…one more time…” And then her voice rattled in her throat.
And then she repeated it…and died again…and again…
He turned and saw Darg’s image on the screen. He was smiling. It was not a pleasant expression.
“Those were her last words, Calhoun. I recorded them for you. I knew you’d want to hear them. If you’re hearing this…which I assume you are…I can further assume that you’re in the main computer room. That’s where you would naturally come to try and head off Thul’s plan. That is naturally where we would be…if we didn’t mind being easy targets for you. We’re secured in another part of the station, I assure you, preparing for the great moment. I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It would be most appreciated, however, if you would kindly…die.”
At that moment, Calhoun had no idea where to go.
At that moment, Calhoun didn’t care.
The door to the computer room slid open, as he knew it would. Darg was standing there, as he knew he would be. He was empty-handed, and he waggled his fingers toward Calhoun. Pressing in around him, from all sides, were armed guards. They had their weapons trained on Calhoun. The slightest move and they could easily blast him to free-floating atoms.
“If you drop the weapon…you have an opportunity at me…man to man. If you don’t drop the weapon…my men drop you.” He paused and then said softly, “Come on, Calhoun. You know you want it.”
Calhoun allowed the blaster to drop from his fingers. At that moment, they could easily have killed him where he stood.
They didn’t. Instead, they simply watched and grinned. Clearly they were all of the opinion that Darg was in absolutely no danger at all. But at that moment, Calhoun didn’t give a damn what they thought. Instead he charged toward the far bigger man, building up speed with every moment, and he slammed into Darg with everything he had.
And bounced off.
His head spun around him as he hit the floor. He had no idea what had just happened. It had been like crashing into a bulkhead at full tilt. His eyes crossed and then uncrossed and he looked up at Darg who was coming right toward him, his fist cocked and ready to slam home. He barely managed to roll out of the way in time as Darg smashed the floor where he’d just been and made a hole in it the size of a watermelon.
Calhoun stumbled out the door. Darg’s men made no effort to stop him. They seemed to be having too good a time. Darg lumbered after him, coming toward him like a tidal wave, just as easy to reason with, just as unstoppable.
“A little different this time,” he rumbled. “Come back here, Calhoun. We have old scores to settle.”
He closed on Calhoun, swung an uppercut that could have taken off Calhoun’s head had it connected. Calhoun barely dodged it, moved out of the way of a second thrust, dodged a third. “Stay still!” snarled Darg, but Calhoun did not feel inclined to oblige.
Once more Darg swung, and once more Calhoun got around him, and this time Darg was slightly off balance. Calhoun moved quickly and drove a punch to Darg’s jaw. Darg let out an angry yelp and staggered, and Calhoun hit him in the head a second time, staggering him. But then he pressed his luck and this time Darg caught his hand, yanked him off his feet, and slammed him against the wall as if he were a beanbag.
Calhoun felt his face starting to swell from the impact of hitting the wall face-first. He saw Darg advancing on him. Trying to stall for time, he pushed his tongue against the false tooth to activate it. Nothing. Instead he felt the broken shards of the device crumble in his mouth. The impact had shattered it. He spit it out and made a mental note to write a memo to Nechayev about the durability of SI devices.
Darg extended his hands…and razor-sharp blades snapped out of the ends of his fingers. He swiped at Calhoun, slashing across his tunic, and Calhoun barely managed to avoid more serious injury. He stared at the blades uncomprehendingly.
“You still don’t understand, do you,” Darg said. “All right. I’ll make it clear for you.” He turned the blades toward himself and slashed open his shirt. It fluttered to the ground in several pieces, to reveal Darg’s glistening metal silver torso.
“Thul found me, damned near dead. He was impressed I’d survived that long on sheer hatred. He kept me alive and took me to Narobi. They built me this body. My head, my brain’s all that’s left. I’m not a man anymore. I’m a walking weapon, a machine that pretends it’s vaguely alive. A freak. And it’s your fault, Calhoun. Your fault!” Upon the last words, he succumbed to total rage and charged at Calhoun.
Calhoun twisted loose the heel of his boot. It came clear and he aimed and fired. The phaser blasted out, smashing Darg squarely in the chest. It knocked him back and he fell with a startled grunt.
Calhoun did the only thing that seemed reasonable under the circumstances. He turned and ran.
One of Darg’s men tried to fire after him, but Darg slapped the weapon from his hand. “No! He’s mine! After all this time, he’s mine!” He charged after Calhoun, the floor trembling under his footfall.
In the back-up computer room to which they had been relocated, Kendrow was making the final adjustments under the watchful eyes of Silver and Gerrid Thul. “We’re running out of time, Mr. Kendrow,” Thul said. He didn’t sound nearly as jovial as he usually did.
“I’m very aware of that, sir,” said Kendrow nervously. “But I’m getting some odd readings off the Omega 9. Having a bit of trouble locking down some of the neural nets…”
“I have far too much riding on this, Kendrow.” He pointed below him at the masses who were watching the ceremony about to start. “When one makes the sort of announcements that I have made, it is incumbent upon me…for the purpose of my sustained credibility…to see them through. I do not need last-minute glitches ruining my plans.”
“Neither do I!” Kendrow shot back, sounding rather nervous. “Do you think I don’t know what you’ll do to me if I—”
“Steady, Kendrow, steady,” said Thul gently. “Just do your job. Silver…are you prepared?”
Silver was seated in front of the interface panel. He had his palm flat, prepared for the process to begin. “I am ready,” he said in that flat and rather unappealing voice of his.
“Excellent.” Thul’s eyes glittered with anticipation.
Calhoun found an access port directly in front of him, and then he heard the thundering footfall of Darg coming in fast behind him. He ripped open the access port and dropped through.
He landed lightly on a narrow maintenance bridge and made the hideous mistake of looking down.
“Down,” in this instance, went on forever. Because he was at the uppermost point of the sphere, standing on a very small bridge which ran across the top of the gigantic column that fed energy into the cloaking device. It was anchored to the top of the sphere by support struts overhead.
Far, far below him, in the center of the great sphere, the cloaking device hummed powerfully.
Clutching onto the railings, Calhoun started running the length of the maintenance bridge. He had almost made it to the far end when he heard a tearing of metal, and then Zolon Darg dropped onto the bridge in front of him. Darg looked utterly confident. There was no reason for him not to be.
“Shoot me again,” Darg challenged him. “Go ahead.”
Calhoun aimed for Darg’s head and fired. But Darg easily blocked the shots by raising his huge metal arms in front of his face and deflecting the blasts. Quickly, Calhoun squeezed the sides of the heel-shaped phaser instead, increasing the intensity of the blast. This actually caused Darg to stagger under the barrage, but it also seemed to anger him more. Despite the sustained assault, Darg advanced step after steady step. His arms outstretched, he was within five feet of Calhoun, then four and then three, and the phaser blast was starting to falter. Calhoun realized that he was reaching the limit of the small phaser’s energy capacity.
Calhoun backed up, further and further, and cast a desperate glance behind and up. He saw Darg’s men clustered at the access port above and behind him. They didn’t seem about to let him climb out. Instead they grinned and pointed and clearly were waiting for the inevitable moment when Darg would get his mechanical hands on him.
He glanced up at the support struts…levelled his phaser, and fired.
Darg’s smug grin of triumph flickered and then vanished as he saw what Calhoun was doing. “Wait! Hold it, you idiot! Stop!”
But it was too late. The phaser blast tore through the support struts, weakened it sufficiently, and the entire thing tore loose. The maintenance bridge, with a groan of metal, angled wildly downward, affixed to the ceiling only by the struts behind Calhoun. Calhoun clambered toward the section that was still secured, holding on to the railing for dear life as the bridge slanted wildly beneath him, threatening to send them both tumbling off.
Darg leaped forward and upward toward Calhoun, trying to forestall sliding down and off. Calhoun tried to swing his legs up and clear away from Darg’s desperate grasp, and almost managed it. But Darg, at the last second, snagged Calhoun’s leg. Calhoun let out a yell as he felt his leg practically being torn right out of its socket. Then he lost his grip on the railing and both of them slid off the maintenance bridge and fell.
Gerrid Thul grinned in triumph as the Narobi named Silver pressed his hand flat against the interface board. “Contact processing,” announced Silver.
Suddenly a clipped voice called from behind him, “Disconnect him.”
He whirled, and couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
It was Picard. He was standing there with a blaster and an extremely irritated expression. The insensate bodies of a couple of guards could be glimpsed out in the corridor. “You,” he said, “have been a very difficult individual to locate.”
“Indeed,” said Thul slowly. “How did you do it?”
“I asked around. I believe you will find that several of your guards are no longer functioning at full capacity. Have him back away from the computer. Shut it down.”
“That’s not going to happen, Picard,” said Thul.
“I think it will.” Picard aimed the blaster and fired almost point blank at Silver.
The blast coruscated around Silver. He paid it no heed.
Picard couldn’t quite believe it. Thul, however, didn’t seem the least bit thrown. “Very dense material that the Narobi are made from,” he said mildly. “Resistant to blasters, phasers, disruptors…just about anything. And you’ll find that the exterior of the computer bank is coated with the same material. Just one of the several contributions that the Narobi provided. You see, Picard…I tend to think ahead. I was not expecting that some foolhardy Federation idiot would come charging in here at the last moment and try to disrupt it…but I anticipated it. I try to anticipate everything.”
Picard swung the blaster around and aimed it at Thul. “You,” he said sharply, “are not blaster proof. Shut this down, now, or I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Kill me?” There was no longer any trace of amusement in his voice. “You already killed me, Picard. You killed me years ago, when my son died because of you.” Slowly he started to walk toward Picard. “You know…when I considered the possibility of the Federation sending someone…when I contemplated, imagined that I might find myself facing a desperate emissary trying to stop me…I always fantasized it would be you. Isn’t that interesting? No one else. Always. In my mind’s eye, I saw it just this way, with the two of us face-to-face, and you standing there feeling the same sort of helplessness as Double Helix was unleashed that I felt when I lost my son. Lost him because of you. Because of your damnable Federation.”
“And everyone, every man, woman and child is to suffer because of your loss?”
“That’s right. That is exactly right.”
“You won’t live to see your triumph.”
“Don’t you understand? I don’t care! Do your worst, Picard! I assure you it will pale next to what I have already done to myself! But in the meantime, nothing you will do will matter one iota, because in the final analysis, I will still win! And there’s absolutely nothing you can do to—”
That was when the lights when out and the sphere was rocked by a massive explosion.
In other sections of the Dyson Sphere (or the Thul Sphere, as it were) the gravity was zero, as Picard had learned. But in the center the gravity was near normal. Calhoun tumbled, end over end, trying to find something that he could grab onto, but there was nothing. Far, terribly far away to his left, was the docking port where his ship was comfortably anchored. It operated on voice recognition, but it had to hear him to respond, and he was simply too far away.
Then Calhoun slammed into something. He landed badly, wrenching his shoulder, and he lay there a moment, stunned. He realized that he had struck the outer edge of the cloaking device. He could feel the power of the mighty machine humming beneath him.
He slid a few feet but then managed to halt his skid. Slowly he tried to push his way back up toward the center of the cloaking device, in the meantime looking around and trying to catch a glimpse of where Darg had gone to. His main hope was that Darg had not landed quite as fortunately as he had. That he had instead clipped an edge and bounced off, or perhaps missed it entirely, and was sent tumbling the rest of the way to the bottom of the sphere.
Suddenly he felt the surface of the cloaking device tremble beneath him in a manner that was in excess of the power rumbling beneath it. He craned his neck around and saw Darg charging him.
The top of the cloaking device was slightly angled downward, and Calhoun did the only thing he could: He stopped fighting the pull of gravity and allowed himself to skid toward the edge. Darg was right after him. Calhoun got to the edge of the device and saw a yawning drop beneath him. He also saw that the side of the device was not smooth: There were handholds, or at least protruding surfaces that could be utilized as hand-holds. The only hope he had was that Darg’s metal fingers were so thick that he wouldn’t be able to utilize them.
Calhoun swung his body over the edge. His toes sought and found something to break his fall. He started clambering down the side like a monkey scaling a mountain. He just couldn’t help but wish that he had some clear idea as to just where the hell he thought he was going.
And in the meantime, his mission was still unfulfilled. He knew that he had almost no time before the Double Helix was unleashed. He had to stop it, somehow.
There was absolutely no choice.
He reached up to his face, grabbed the fake scar that was adhering to his own, and pulled. It came loose with a soft tearing sound, and he slapped the adhesive against the side of the cloaking device. He twisted the edges around each other, and he realized that he had no idea as to whether it was actually activated or not. Well, within fifteen minutes, he’d know for sure…and if the thing really were as powerful as claimed, it would wind up being the last thing he knew.
He then continued his descent, and he’d made it fifteen feet, moving quickly in the slightly lighter-than-normal gravity when he saw Darg reach the edge and look down at him with cold, implacable fury. But it would still take Darg time to find a way to come down after him.
Darg jumped.
Son of a bitch, thought Calhoun.
Darg’s hand lashed out and he snagged a crossbar, halting his fall. The bar held. Damned sturdy devices these Romulans designed. He was clinging, bat-like to the surface of the cloaking device, only a few feet to Calhoun’s right. He advanced on Calhoun, and Calhoun looked around frantically, up and down, trying to determine if there was a direction he could go fast enough that would carry him out of Darg’s reach. Nothing presented itself.
Darg was closer, closer, and the blades were fully extended on his hand. Within less than a second, he would be close enough to slash out at Calhoun and cut him to ribbons. Beneath Calhoun’s fingers, he could feel the power of the cloaking device surging beneath him. If there were some way to disrupt it, maybe…
Too late. Darg’s fingers lashed out, trying to slice through Calhoun’s grip. Calhoun desperately shifted handholds, swinging his body out of the way, buying himself perhaps another second or two. But Darg had him cold, they both knew it.
And then Darg spotted the explosive that Calhoun had affixed to the surface of the cloaking device. He didn’t recognize it for what it was, clearly, but he didn’t like what he saw. With one glance at Calhoun’s expression, he could tell that Calhoun wasn’t happy about his noticing it either. That was more than enough reason for him to reach for it and start to peel it off. As he did so, he said almost conversationally, “Any last words?”
