Broken Bow - Diane Carey [26]
“Try the translator again.” Frustrated, Archer tried to contain his impatience.
She worked with the padd. It didn’t help.
“I’m going to need to run what we’ve got through the phonetic processor.”
“MajOa blmoHqu!”
Archer turned to her again, but Hoshi could only offer, “He says his wife has grown ugly.”
He sighed. If the best translator he knew couldn’t do any better than this, what kind of primitive garble were they dealing with? What he needed was a Klingon who spoke English.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Hoshi said quietly. “I’m doing the best I can.”
He was about to give her a word of comfort when Phlox interrupted.
“Excuse me,” the doctor butted in as he took a scan of the Klingon. “His prefrontal cortex is hyperstimulated. I doubt he has any idea what he’s saying.”
“Hljol OaOqu’nay!”
“I think the doctor’s right,” Hoshi said. “Unless ‘stinky boots’ has something to do with all this.”
The ship shuddered under them, sending Hoshi wobbling against the Klingon’s bed. She shimmied away and Archer caught her arm and pulled her farther. The guy had spiked leg bands, after all.
“That’s the warp reactor again, right?” she asked softly.
“OaOqu’nay!”
Archer hurried to the nearest wall com. “Bridge, report on that.”
“We’ve dropped out of warp, sir,” T’Pol’s voice announced with a shiver of electrical static. “Main power is—”
A burst of static. The com went dead. The lights flickered suddenly—then, consoles all around sickbay began to go dark, one by one!
CHAPTER 7
ARCHER INSTANTLY CROSSED to the com booster and played with the controls, but all he could get was a ghost of the action on the bridge.
“T’Pol! Respond!” he attempted. “Tucker! Anybody?”
The com chittered, but there was no sense to it. “It might be the sensors going dark,” he muttered, thinking aloud. As he spoke, the sickbay went finally to total darkness. The Klingon raged on his bed. The security guard shambled about, though he didn’t know what to do. Archer heard them, sensed them, felt Hoshi’s rising fear, but couldn’t see a thing.
The com was completely dead. The ship was dark.
In his mind, he saw the action going on all over the ship—crew automatically going to stations, the procedures of emergency and safety snapping into place. He imagined them calling for him on the croaked com system. He felt the ship’s power depleting rapidly, felt the drag on his body as speed dropped. Around sickbay, Phlox’s zoo of pet alien organisms chirruped and whistled either in confusion or ecstasy.
“Where are the handheld lights?” he demanded. “Phlox!”
“I don’t know, Captain. I haven’t inventoried those yet.”
“They’ve got to be in a drawer or a cabinet. Feel around. We can’t do anything if we can’t see. Hoshi, look around for the beacons. Guard, you, too.”
“Aye, sir,” the guard rumbled.
Despite her fear, Hoshi started moving. He heard the clap of cabinets and drawers. A few moments later, she was the one who found them.
Instantly, sickbay glowed with red lights. Klaang continued to bellow his maddening protests.
Archer paused and forced himself to think. “Auxiliary power should’ve kicked in by now ...” When the Klingon growled and spat again, louder now that nobody was paying attention to him, Archer added, “Do you know how to tell him to shut up?”
More nervous by the second, Hoshi swung to Klaang. “Shut up!” she shouted.
But it didn’t work. Diplomacy just wasn’t the way today, was it?
“Sedate him if you have to,” he snapped to Phlox. “I need to get to the bridge!”
“Captain!”
He whirled at Hoshi’s shocked cry. She was moving her beacon across the lateral bulkhead.
Why was she doing that?
Without waiting for him to ask, she hissed, “There’s someone in here!”
Archer glanced around the poorly lit room. “Hoshi ...”
“I’m telling you, there’s someone—”
She stopped moving. Archer followed her beacon to the wall again—
A humanoid form!
Like a chameleon, the form had taken on the appearance of the background, complete