Star trek double helix, p.63
Star Trek - Double Helix, page 63
“Stay down.” Spock’s voice rang in his ear. “Cover your head.”
Drowning out Spock’s words, a shattering hail of granite bits and shards of metal pulverized them as they lay crushed to the floor of the depression. Stiles shrank into the smallest crushed-up ball he could manage as his back was hammered by his own success. The wreckage of the beam housing had taken a little tour flight and was now coming to visit the two little elves who’d arranged the trip.
His chest heaving, he finally managed to press up onto his elbows, then to his knees.
Crouched at his side, Spock was slapping him on the back over and over.
As Stiles was trying to figure out a way to tell the ambassador that he wasn’t choking and didn’t need to be patted, Spock simply explained, “Your clothes were burning.”
“Oh…thanks. Was that…one…explosion…or two?”
“Two. One concussion wave.” Spock spoke as if nothing had happened at all, then coughed. The cough made him seem perfectly mortal and gave Stiles a bit of comfort that otherwise might’ve slipped on past him.
As a shimmering cloud of debris—the last of the pulverized housing—drifted around them as if it were a theatre curtain lowering, he winced his way to a standing position and had to lock both legs to stay up. His whole body trembled and pulsed with aftershock.
Through the drifting dust, he peered at the mass of wreckage, completely flattened, in fact depressed into a crater. The steel structure that had held the beam’s emitter lay in mangled messes all over the grass, which had itself been seared brown.
“Think it worked?” Stiles wondered. “Is the CST okay now?”
“If they veered off at the correct tangent, yes.” Spock made moves to stand up, but faltered. Instead he looked at his legs, first one, then the other, in a strangely clinical manner.
Stiles turned to him. “Sir?”
Before he could ask the question that came up, he flinched bodily at what he saw—a shard of metal the size of a writing stylus embedded in the side of the ambassador’s left thigh, with a good two inches sticking out.
“Oh, sir…” Stiles knelt beside him. The cloth of Spock’s pantleg was stained with his blood, and the Vulcan was plainly stiff with pain, although he pretended this didn’t bother him much. “How deep in do you think it is?”
“No way to tell,” Spock said, and looked around at the sky. “The blast was substantial enough to have alerted the authorities. Someone should be arriving soon.”
Shaken by that, Stiles also looked around at the gray sky. “And here we are, out on the lone prairie, with no way to defend ourselves—sir, don’t!”
He put out a hand, though he didn’t really know what to do when the ambassador abruptly grabbed the protruding two inches of the metal shard and simply slid it out of his leg.
“You’re not supposed to pull out something that’s sticking in you like that!” Stiles protested. “What if it hit an artery? You could bleed to death!”
“I clot well.” Spock tossed the shard into the scorched grass and pressed the heel of his hand tightly to the wound. “I must be able to maneuver, and certainly a metal implement in my leg would be troublesome.”
Stiles stood up again and looked around. “They’ll be here any minute. We can take cover in those hills…I’ve heard of people digging down a few feet and finding the hollows made by ancient root systems that aren’t there anymore.” In the blast-flattened grass, he found a large piece of a support strut with the bolt still attached in one end. “We can dig with this. I think I can hide you for a while in there, and after nightfall we can make it into the foothills.”
“Commander…would you consider—”
“No, I will not consider leaving you and going off on my own. That’s not even in the picture, so don’t think about it. If you’ll let me help you up….”
Holding his digger in one hand, he slipped the other arm around the ambassador, who allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. Smeared with Vulcan blood, their clothing scorched, hair filthy, they hitched their way out of the almost invisible depression that had saved both their lives by allowing the blast wave to pass over them instead of deep-frying them into the ground. Any minute now a patrol would show up to investigate the blast, which probably showed up on every scanner on this part of the continent. Obviously, too, the Pojjana must’ve known they’d caught something in that gravity-weird contraption.
“This way, sir.” He drew Spock along, dismayed that the Vulcan seemed not to be helping much. “We’ll hide until night, then we can make a bivouac in the hills and figure out a way to defend it. There they are! I see a plane! Come on, before they spot us!”
Chapter Twenty
STILES PRESSED FORWARD, aiming for the shadowy protection of the rock-lands ahead. He could hear the distant murmur of the plane’s engine, recognized the type of aircraft, and made his bets.
“They’re still miles away,” he gasped, pulling Spock along, “but even if they spot us they can’t land on this terrain. They’ll have to send a recon hoverscout with a patrol team to flush us out. If we can make it to the hills—”
“Commander?”
“Don’t worry, I can take more of your weight. We can’t slow down. If we can make it to—”
“Of course, Mr. Stiles, but I do have a question.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“From whom are we hiding?”
“Watch that rock—don’t trip!”
“From whom,” Spock repeated, “are we about to hide?”
“The authorities. They’ll be here any time—”
“And to whom…did we come here to speak?”
Stiles dragged the ambassador along another five or six steps before this sank in.
As the drone of the aircraft drew closer to the bomb site, he felt his face screw up in a frown of confusion and doubt. Something just didn’t seem right about this.
The ambassador tentatively put more weight on his injured leg.
Stiles shifted back and forth on his own feet and finally met Spock’s eyes. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”
Spock bobbed an eyebrow, flattened his lips, and charitably avoided nodding.
While digesting that little nugget, Stiles lowered the ambassador onto the first sitting-sized rock they’d come upon, a harbinger of the fact that they could’ve made it to cover if logic hadn’t gotten in the way.
They remained still, unresisting, out in the open, as the Pojjana aircraft buzzed the scene of the explosion and Stiles thought his arms and legs were going to fall off with the urge to run again, hide, defend—
The plane strafed the flattened beam emitter for several seconds before veering abruptly toward them. His spine shriveled. They’d been spotted.
‘They’ve seen us,” Spock said with quiet satisfaction.
“How are we going to explain blowing up their emitter?” Stiles circled behind the ambassador and came around the other side as if stalking the plane on its approach. “We had to do it. I couldn’t let it pull my ship down—”
“Of course not.”
The plane soared over them, one wing tilted low, and they could clearly see the pilot in his helmet looking down at them. He was contacting the Pojjana security forces.
They’d never get away now. Stiles battled inwardly, wrestling with the idea that getting away wasn’t the best idea, wouldn’t get them where they needed to be, wouldn’t find Zevon.
“You needn’t call me ‘sir,’” Spock told him, as if they were sitting over a dinner table or playing badminton. “I have no Starfleet rank any longer, and you are the commander of the vessel that matters in our lives today.”
“Yeah, well…well, it’ll be long time before I can think of you as anybody other than Science Officer Spock of the Enterprise.”
The plane circled the area, keeping them inside its surveillance area while no doubt calling for backup. Stiles never let his back turn to the plane, moving constantly to stay between the aircraft and the ambassador, a shield of vellum against rockets if they decided to open fire. Each step drove him deeper into his troubled thoughts.
“Do you know,” he began, “do you realize how many hours on end I rehearsed calling you ‘Ambassador’ before that evac mission? I just knew I’d get down to that planet and call you ‘Mister’ or ‘Captain’ or ‘First Officer’ or ‘Your Honor’ or ‘Your Highness’—something stupid was waiting to pop out of my mouth and I could just taste it. All the way in Travis and the evil twins kept saying, ‘Eric, will you quit mumbling the word ambassador?’I’ll bet…I just bet Captain Kirk never had that kind of problem.”
Spock paused a moment. His eyes never flinched nor did his expression change much. He peered solemnly into the past and seemed to enjoy what he saw.
“No,” he said. “He had others. Those were excellent days. But they are passed now.”
Despite the circumstances, Stiles found himself sighing. “Maybe for you. Not for the rest of us.”
Looking up now, Spock said, “Because you feel you must live up to them?”
Somehow there was no right answer to that question. Damned if he did, damned—
Apparently the ambassador didn’t expect an answer, because he kept talking himself. “If James Kirk’s mission logs are the barometer against which you measure yourself, you set too high a task for yourself. You must temper your awe. You can never attain so high a standard.”
Even though a patrol scout craft now appeared over the mountains and streaked toward them across the meadow flats, Stiles turned to Spock and didn’t bother to look at the patroller as he heard its humming engines approaching.
“Oh, is that right?” he challenged. “I always admired you for the things you did and the—I guess ‘style’ is a good way to say it…I never got the idea you were filled up with yourself. Till now, anyway…. Why are you nodding? I just insulted you.”
“Rather, you just complimented yourself,” Spock corrected. “And you must not expect me to argue with the ship’s commander.”
His tone was somehow cagey, manipulative, carrying palpable ulterior messages. And that eyebrow was up again. Stiles scoured him silently, wondering what to make of the ambassador’s expression. Was he being teased?
“Are you feeling ill?” Spock asked him then.
Stiles flinched. “What?”
“You’re very pale.”
“Well…it…isn’t easy getting needled by a…by a…”
“A super-eminence?” Spock supplied.
Stiles peered at him, able for a moment to ignore the approach of the Pojjana security scout. Was Spock smiling? Was that a little smile? Was it?
As the Pojjana scout came to a hover over them with its warning lights flashing, its containment field snapped on to enshroud them in red spot-light—they could no more walk out of it than through a vault wall.
“Stay quite still,” the ambassador warned. “They will assume we’re armed.”
With the flat of his hand Stiles shielded his eyes from the containment field’s glare. “We should’ve been. I botched it.”
His hands were ice. Emblazoned on the flank of the scout, the Pojjana symbol of a gray lightning bolt crossed by a red arrow seemed alive to him, a swollen symbol of his captivity. Those terrors and miseries rushed back at him. His legs trembled so violently that he could barely stand. Only Spock’s steadying presence kept him from bolting, a spontaneity which would’ve fried him to a flake at the edge of the containment field. Strange—he knew that if he were the senior “eminence” here and his crewmates were with him, he wouldn’t be so shaky. He would never let them bolt. How there could be two men in one suit—
“HOLD POSITION!” the scout’s broadcaster boomed, so loud it knocked Stiles back a step.
Spock held up both hands in a surrendering gesture. Stiles couldn’t manage that. His hands were frozen at his sides, his chest heaving, his leg muscles bound up.
“Relax, Mr. Stiles,” Spock called over the scout’s hum as the craft nestled into the crusty burned stubble, his dark eyes squinted into shafts.
Without looking at him, Stiles gulped, “Remember what happened last time you told me that?”
The Pojjana craft settled completely and gave off a loud hiss as its anti-gravs equalized. The sight of Pojjana guards lumbering down the hatch ramp as it crashed down gave Stiles a cramp in the middle of his gut. All four guards and a sergeant came thundering out and leveled firearms at them.
“Our sidearms are completely drained,” Spock stated in passably fluent Pojjana to the sergeant who came to face them down. “We wish to speak to the planetary authorities.”
“You are aliens,” the sergeant said with malice, and confiscated their phasers instantly, drained or not. “This is Red Sector. We’re supposed to be left alone.”
Beside Stiles, the ambassador struggled to stand despite the fact that everyone could see his leg was bleeding. Spock faced the sergeant at eye level.
“Things change, Officer,” he said. “I am Ambassador Spock of the United Federation of Planets, former emissary to the Pojjana Assembly. This is—”
“Don’t tell them,” Stiles whispered.
Spock instantly revised. “This is the commander of the transport ship you nearly brought down. We destroyed the emitter in self-defense. We have no aggressive intentions. We have a proposal for the provincial exarch.”
“We have no exarch anymore. That position was eradicated.”
“Who is in charge?”
“The provost of the works.”
Spock tipped his head. “That is the supreme authority on the planet?”
“That’s right.”
“Please take us to this person.”
The sergeant shook his head. His helmet reflected light from the clearing sky. “You’ll be incarcerated in the provincial prison until you come to trial for invasion.”
“We must be allowed to see the senior authority. This is a matter of interstellar importance.”
“I’ll put you where I want to put you,” the sergeant said. “Then I’ll wait to be asked what happened.”
Stiles beat down a shudder. “Nothing really changes.”
“We cannot wait,” Spock told the sergeant. “If you withhold us, you will be blunting advancement of a critical mission. Do you wish your name to be prominent when the provost discovers that he was not informed?”
The sergeant stood with an unreadable expression for a few silent seconds, then gestured them toward the scout’s ramp and the four other guards waiting to funnel them inside.
“Clear them for energy signals,” the sergeant ordered to his men, and one of them came forward.
The guard lowered his firearm, whipped out some kind of scanner, and ran it over Stiles from ears to toes, then over Spock, front, back, and both sides.
“No active energy or signals of any kind,” the guard confirmed. “No readings.”
“He told you we were unarmed,” Stiles complained, knowing that he wouldn’t have believed it either.
The sergeant stepped aside and leveled his own weapon. “Go in.”
Obviously there wasn’t much more to be done here. Stiles’s jaw ached to speak up, spit who he was and insist on some kind of instant retribution, but a thousand warnings clogged his throat. He was in command of the ship, not the mission. If they found out who he was, would they take offense or insult? Stuff him back in a cell and start auctioning beatings again?
Stiles started toward the scout, pausing only when the ambassador took a step on his injured leg and crumpled to one knee. The sergeant stepped forward to assist. Stiles met the uniformed guard with a fierce shoulder butt to the chest.
“Back off,” he snapped, and took the ambassador’s arm himself.
None of the other guards made any attempt to touch them further. Stiles escorted the ambassador into the scout and to the first of only three passenger seats. They were in custody.
Stiles straightened and maneuvered to take the next seat. As he raised his eyes to scan the interior of the scout while the guards came aboard, he found himself no longer seated but rather standing ramrod straight and staring at a mounted photograph in a gilded frame on the port bulkhead.
After a wicked choke, he blurted, “Who in salvation is that!”
The sergeant, just coming aboard, glared at him as if he and the ambassador were complete idiots. “That’s our provost of the works. He saved half the planet from the Constrictor. He developed a way to predict the waves. He sponsored engineering schools and guided architectural renovations all over the planet. Don’t you even know who you came to see? We owe him our lives.”
