Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [79]
“Casualties on decks seven and eight,” Paxton added. “Sickbay is sending out teams.”
Picard felt a familiar hand on his shoulder. “We can’t just trade volleys with them,” Ben Zoma said, his voice so low that only his friend could hear it. “That’s what Greenbriar wants us to do.”
The captain frowned as he considered his options. In the meantime, the Cochise wheeled and came at them again with full fury. As before, Idun made it difficult for Greenbriar to hit them, but he still got in a solid phaser shot.
“Shields down eighty-seven percent,” Gerda announced, a hint of frustration in her voice.
And the Cochise, her captain undaunted, was coming about for another charge at them.
The Stargazer could withstand only one more barrage before she lost her defenses altogether. If Picard was going to turn the tide, this would be his last chance to do so.
Perspiration collected in the small of his back. He had to do something. But what?
And then it came to him. Of course, he thought. It was so simple, he was amazed that he hadn’t thought of it before.
“Mr. Vigo,” Picard said.
The weapons officer turned to him.
“Target the center of the Cochise’s navigational deflector and hit it with the narrowest, most intense beam you can manage. And don’t let up until I tell you.”
Vigo smiled, a sign that he had some idea of what his captain was up to. “Aye, sir.”
The captain glanced at his helm officer. “Give us a good look at our target, Lieutenant.”
Idun nodded, as steady as ever. “I will, sir.”
As they closed with Greenbriar’s ship, Idun banked sharply and unexpectedly, taking the Stargazer across the Cochise’s bow. It seemed like a reckless move in that it exposed their flank to their adversary’s phasers for an awkward amount of time.
And the Stargazer paid for it.
Raked by Greenbriar’s directed energy beams, she lost more than what was left of her shields. She suffered hull breaches and severed power linkages and ceased to function in a thousand small ways.
Picard didn’t need to hear the damage reports. He could feel what had happened in his bones.
But Idun’s maneuver also gave Vigo the opening he needed. The Stargazer’s powerful crimson phaser beams plunged mercilessly into the heart of their adversary’s navigational deflector, cutting through layer upon layer of graviton-contained spatial distortion in the merest fraction of a second.
Fortunately, they didn’t have to take out the entire deflector. Their objective was the small, long-range signal emitter at the center of it, a shallow, bowl-like structure currently being used for one purpose and one purpose only . . .
To transmit the special-frequency radio waves that drove Greenbriar’s radar system.
As Obal rushed into the shuttlebay with the other members of his security team, he took in the scene as calmly and objectively as his Academy trainers had advised him to do.
There were three crewmen down. No, he thought, as he came around a cargo shuttle and saw another pair of legs protruding beyond it, make that four crewmen down.
Racing across the bay as fast as he could, he reached the unidentified legs and saw the body to which they were attached. It belonged to Lieutenant Chiang, the chief of this section.
The man was unconscious, bleeding from a cut on his forehead. There was blood on the shuttle next to him as well. Apparently, Chiang had struck his head on it during one of the phaser impacts the Stargazer had suffered.
It was Obal’s job to get him out of here, just as his comrades were removing the other crewmen in the bay. Of course, Chiang was much bigger and heavier than the Binderian, but he believed he could manage.
He had already hooked his hands under the man’s armpits and begun to drag him toward the exit when he noticed something—a red light on the lonely-looking console not twenty meters away.
It gave Obal pause. If he recalled correctly, a red light only came on in case of trouble, and very specific trouble at that. It signaled that the semipermeable force field between the bay and the tinted sea of gases outside was about to fizzle out.
If that