Broken Bow - Diane Carey [58]
“Believe me,” he vowed, “I’ll try.”
Inside the Suliban cell ship, Trip Tucker gritted his teeth against leaving John Archer on that floating junk heap. Beside him, crammed in like a sausage in its skin, the Klingon spat and coughed protests about the accommodations.
“RaQpo jadICH!”
“I don’t particularly like the way you smell, either,” Tucker opined.
“MajQa!”
Tucker ignored the comment and kept sweeping for the Enterprise.
“I don’t get it ... this is right where they’re supposed to be.”
He adjusted his scanners, hoping the alien contraption was just plain wrong.
It wasn’t. There was no one out there. Nothing.
“The charges are getting closer again.”
Malcolm Reed tugged at the collar of his uniform tunic as the fifth low-frequency boom in as many seconds rolled over the starship.
“Another five kilometers, Ensign,” T’Pol ordered.
Mayweather worked the controls on the helm. “At this rate, the captain’ll never find us.”
“Wait a minute!” Hoshi interrupted. “I think I’ve got something!”
“Amplify it!” T’Pol ordered with endearing passion.
Hoshi tapped her controls. A cacophony of noises, radio signals, background noise, and distortion blasted through the bridge.
“It’s Commander Tucker!”
How had she deciphered that from these crackles?
“All I hear is noise,” Reed pointed out.
“Sshhh! Listen ... it’s just a narrow notch in the midrange ... he says he’s about to ignite his thruster exhaust!”
T’Pol moved quickly to her viewing hood and peered inside. “Coordinates—one fifty-eight mark ... one three.”
“Laid in!” Mayweather confirmed.
“Ahead, fifty kph.” She turned to Hoshi, and for the first time regarded the other woman with respect. “Shaya tonat.”
Hoshi offered a small smile. “You’re welcome.”
They all watched the sensors, though they could see very little on any screen that wasn’t the shifting of atmospheric chaos.
“Two kilometers, dead ahead,” Mayweather said, carefully maneuvering the ship to avoid a deadly collision—deadly for the Suliban pod that held their shipmates.
“Initiate docking procedures.” T’Pol authorized.
Hoshi turned to them, her face gray. “I’m only picking up two biosigns ... one Klingon ... one human.”
Somehow, a hunted animal knows, senses, that it’s being hunted. Jonathan Archer felt like a rabbit in a fox’s den. He clung to the help of his little scanning device, which showed two Suliban moving away from a central indicator. They’d lost him.
But he was far from out of trouble. He squatted behind a metal beam more than eight feet off the deck. When he was sure he could jump down safely, without being heard, he did.
His leg, which until now had pretended to be completely healed, nearly buckled. He fell against the wall and steadied himself for a few seconds, and used those seconds to tap the scanner and give himself a wider view of the vicinity. Other blips showed still more Suliban, but there was a large area to one side with no life-signs at all.
Sanctuary. If he could get there, he might be able to hide for ... long enough.
He made sure he wasn’t going to collapse on that leg and hurried down the corridor.
When he found the pass to the empty area, the narrow passage looked completely different from anything he’d seen here before. It ended at a single door. Archer hesitated. Was he being herded? Funneled? He got that feeling. This area was too empty. Had he been lured here with a sense of safety?
Suddenly he felt vulnerable and somewhat foolish. On the other hand, he had nowhere else to go. Maybe there were still answers to be found here. He owed himself those answers, and he was beginning to realize that he owed them to T’Pol, to Admiral Forrest, and even to Soval and the Vulcans. He owed them a good, solid representation that humans and Vulcans could work together—yes, they could.
We can.
His vulnerability went away. If there was someone here who knew what was going on, Archer very much wanted a confrontation. As he closed in on the single door, his fears for himself dissolved. Escape went away as his