Broken Bow - Diane Carey [3]
He had seen the disgusting sight before. He began to feel his way around, and found a ladder.
By the time he heard the Suliban dislocating their skeletal structure to melt under the door—actually, he heard their shuffles as they reassembled, but in his mind he saw the meltdown—he was bursting out another door, high in the silver tower. Another roof!
Yes, he had seen this nearby small building, and now it was here to help him! He held his breath, and leaped.
His soles slammed onto the tiny roof, breaking the plated material that warded off weather. In his mind, he endured a quick guess about what kind of weather would come to a place like this.
Then he was on the ground again. He lost balance for a moment as he spun around and drew his disruptor. Now! He would get a shot at them! They were inside that port he had just come from, trapped in the metal tower! A disruptor shot would charge those metal walls and force the Suliban out the other end, where Klaang would be waiting for them!
He leveled his disruptor and fired a single salvo at the open portal he had just come from.
Rather than a simple charge, what came out was a gout of sheer fireball. The tower rumbled at its base, then blew to splinters with a great throbbing roar.
Explosives! Why would these aliens keep volatiles in a field of stalks?
Klaang staggered, shocked, blown backward by the unexpected detonation. He stared at the instantly burning wreckage and wondered why a simple tower would get a noble death, just for hiding volatiles.
But the Suliban would have no more interest in him. Not those two Suliban.
“Top ryterr!”
Momentarily confused, Klaang stumbled and turned to see the slope-shouldered alien now standing two steps from him, with a weapon aimed at Klaang’s breastplate.
“Aymeenut!” the alien cried.
Klaang tried to make sense of the sounds, which seemed to have some Klingon inflections, but he made much more of the stance. “Rognuh pagh goH! Mang juH!”
Would the alien understand his warning?
The alien’s face crinkled. “May’v nodea mityer sning, muttay gerrentee i nowow tuze iss!”
Why had this creature interfered in the quarrel of others? What kind of people were these? In a rage of insult and irritation, Klaang slapped his thighs and ranted, “HIch ghaH! Oagh DoO!”
He was about to spit out his further opinion, when the alien proved him completely wrong by opening fire.
An energy stream bolted from the weapon and caught Klaang in the chest. As he sailed through the light and bright air to the place where he would die in the stalks, he silently thanked the interesting alien for a wound in front. At least future ages would know he hadn’t died running.
CHAPTER 2
Starfleet Spacedock
Earth orbit
SPACEDOCK WAS A TECHNOLOGICAL WONDER. Built in space of geodesic parts assembled on Earth and expanded to full size in space, the shimmering silver dock soared in orbit around a glowing blue planet marbled with white clouds, an image almost religious in its mystical beauty. Within the enormous open structure buzzed a tiny workpod, moving like an insect around the elegant gray-blue body of the planet’s first faster-than-light deep-space cruiser.
Together, as the pod maneuvered around the orbital inspection pod and under the rim of a gigantic blue-gray saucer, the two men inside watched through a small ceiling portal as a string of hull bolts breezed past in orderly fashion.
“Well, Trip, ol’ boy, it’s an unwritten law in these parts that every starship’s got to have a country boy on board or it ain’t going to fly right.”
“You’re making fun of me,” Engineer Charles Tucker noted.
“Darn right I am, pardner.” Captain Jonathan Archer smiled, completely content in the moment. “If I didn’t take it out on you, I’d probably go ballistic in the face of some Vulcan dignitary or an admiral or a ship’s cook or somebody important.”
“Are you saying I’m not important!”
“Why would I say that? You’re the country boy.”
“Can an engineer tell a captain to shut the heck up?”