Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [93]
A few yards from him, Spock rose to his knees in the ferns, his hands dripping with green stuff. “The great outdoors.”
As if afflicted, Stiles stood up on a pair of rattling maracas. “God, we lived… that was the longest beaming I’ve ever been through. My head feels like a stone.”
“The restraint shield they put around us is apparently geared toward weapons energy, fortunately. It allowed us to beam in is your phaser active?” Spock was holding his phaser, looking at it critically.
Stiles pulled his own phaser. “Drained! These were fully charged !”
“The shield sensed the charge” Speck said, “and neutralized them. Useless.” Just like that he dismissed their lack of weaponry.
“Where are the grenades?” Spock slashed at the ferns with his hands, looking for the only thing they’d had time to bring with them-a pouch loaded with heavy-duty shaped grenades normally used by CST crews to blow off an irreconcilably leaking nacelle before the nacelle exploded and took a whole ship with it.
All around and above them, black trees spindled high and low, wretched branches dipping low into the marshy weeds and snaking up again with newly absorbed nutrients. Hands shaking, Stiles dug at the thickly shadowed overgrowth and wished there were more sunlight. Those clouds up there, blocking the light, those were the ones he’d seen displayed on the Saskatoon’s screens as the energy from the planet drew the ship deeper and deeper into the atmosphere. The clouds seemed so passive and blanketing, he had to struggle to recall that they were as deadly as venom, blinding his crew as they were sucked closer to being milled to dust.
Seemed like the ship was a million miles away, down here with the peace and quiet and ferns… be easy to lie down and take a nap.
“Twelve minutes” Spock reminded. “At this rate, the CST will crash at six hundred ten miles per hour.” “And disintegrate I know” Stiles pawed furiously through the ferns now. “It’s got to be here. It came through, didn’t it? What if the envelope let us through and stopped the grenades somehow?” “The pouch would be here empty.”
“Oh… right. Here it is!” He came up from the ferns with a weed-matted satchel, and half a bush attached to his hair. Through the pouch’s mock-leather skin, he felt the presence of two charges in their canister. “We must hurry” Spock urged.
After a moment’s clumsy hesitation, clarity struck him that Spock’s statement was meant to let Stiles lead the way. “Right-this way.”
The transporter had put them down at the edge of the weed forest. As they broke out of the knotty growth, tripping on hidden roots and fingers of dipping branches coming up again as independent plants, Stiles immediately saw the center of his universe-a blocky gray beam housing nestled in a meadow, positioned so that it had almost 170-degree firing clearance in every direction, even over the mountain range to his right-those mountains sent a javelin through him, which seemed to drive him backward… moving his feet to go toward the building caused such physical stress that his legs nearly went numb.
The blocky beam housing was nothing more than a platform of granite blocks and a spidery dutronium arrangement that acted as legs for a conical device standing about thirty feet above the ground. From that device at this moment a blinding blue beam was being emitted, that bellowed like a concert band trying to tune up.
Maybe they could’ve brought it down with hand phasers, but it would have taken a while to melt, Stiles noted with some satisfaction. At least the right choice had been made there. They hadn’t taken the time to get hand phasers out of the security lockers and had brought only the canister charges. A dumb mistake. A dumb midshipman’s mistake. Why did his mind always turn to taffy when Ambassador Spook was around?
“Both sides of the base?” Stiles asked as he handed one of the charges to the ambassador. “Yes.”
“These are shaped charges, sir, so