Broken Bow - Diane Carey [42]
What about Reed and Mayweather?
He reached for T’Pol.
Weapons fire streaked in from hundreds of feet away.
“Trip!” Archer called, and shoved the engineer onto the platform, then piled in after him. Under them, the platform began to rumble and shift with the rush of thermal energy. Sarin was doing something with a control box. Was this an elevator?
“Come on!” Archer waved, but his voice was snatched away by a thermal rush.
Sarin moved toward the platform. She reached out to climb aboard. A blast struck her square in the back.
A Suliban stood across the area, his weapon trained on her. He fired again just as his eyes met Archer’s.
Sarin fell hard. The points of impact on her back glowed and sizzled as they burned their way through her writhing body.
Archer launched off the platform, followed by Tucker. Tucker provided covering fire and drove the Suliban back while Archer knelt at Sarin’s side.
The Suliban took cover behind an outcropping of twisted pipes, but he was more persistent than the others and didn’t run. Archer’s mind flashed on his moment of contact with the single Suliban, and he recognized something in this individual’s eyes, his manner, his drive. Unlike the others, who had ducked and hidden with more relish than they had fought, this one had a stake in whatever was happening.
Archer glanced over again and memorized the patterns of dappling on this Suliban’s face.
But beneath his hands, the female Suliban was dying.
“Find Klaang,” Sarin murmured raggedly.
Mercifully, she lost consciousness as the wounds in her body continued to glow, burn, and grow, eating her from the inside out.
“Trip!” Archer bolted to his feet. He hoped it would be quick for Sarin. He could give her no more now.
He motioned for Tucker, and together they jumped back onto the trembling platform. Archer slid the hatch shut.
The moment he did that, the platform blasted upward through the shaft, driving them to their knees, propelled by a rolling pillar of steam.
In seconds the hot steam was blown away by an arctic blast. Archer forced his eyes open and saw snow blanketing the landing dock. They’d made it!
The platform shot up and stopped a full two feet over the dock. The Starfleet team was thrown into a pile, but alive. Steam blasted out in all directions under them, billowing into the frozen air.
Still covered with sweat, Archer pulled his team into the frigid snow. “Let’s go!” he called over the whine of wind and blowing ice.
“Where’s the pod?” Hoshi called.
“Over here!” Tucker waved and pointed.
T’Pol, though, called louder over the wind and pointed in a different direction. “No, this way!”
Archer weighed the two options, then picked T’Pol’s direction. She was the only one who had ever been here before. He made the bet and pointed. “Come on!”
As the four of them headed toward an obscured shape with two lights that might indeed be the shuttle, Archer bent against the wind, endured the sweat freezing on his cheeks, and brought the communicator up, flipping it as he ran. “Lieutenant Reed, this is Archer! Come in!”
“zzzzzzkkkkkggggaaazzzk.”
“We’re up on the roof! You need to get up here as quickly as possible! Where are you? Emergency evacuation! Reed!”
The communicator buzzed frantically. Someone was definitely trying to get through to him. Where were they? How deeply had they wandered into that steamy maze?
The storm was getting worse. The landing deck was turning into a skating rink. Archer fell twice, Tucker once, and the women stumbled into each other like skittering ducks before the shuttlepod took shape before them in the white fume.
Unintelligible sounds continued to burst from his communicator. He left it open, hoping to hear something that would give him a clue he could follow somehow to get Reed and Mayweather out of the complex, and all of them away from these attacks.
Suliban soldiers appeared only seconds after Archer