Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [37]
Ten meters. Worf felt the wine-dark Klingon combat hormones pumping into his blood. His muscles itched for immediate use.
Five. Two. Zero, said the rangefinder. The first one had passed.
Worf touched the control under his hand. The cover moved.
Suddenly he saw white, and heard a sustained roar. It was as though a bomb had gone off in his head. His limbs refused to work. His hand fell from the control; stopping the cover in a halfway position. His other hand dropped his electric prod, which fell, irrevocably lost, into a cluster of conduits, but he was only dimly aware of the loss, or of anything else.
It was Worf’s bad luck that, commencing a short time ago, the one-eyes had started emitting blasts of radiation as they had moved down the Jefferies tube, to prevent the ambushes they had decided were likely.
The metal plate that would have protected Worf was stuck halfway down, leaving him vulnerable.
Detecting a hidden living consciousness, whose brain waves were too distant to be decoded, the soldier one-eye emitted another blast of radiation before going behind the cover for a close-up inspection. The radiation dose was measured to incapacitate a human for several hours but render him available for brain scan. The soldier one-eye wanted to know what other plans might be afoot.
The second blast knocked Worf out completely. But his Klingon nervous system had responded a bit differently than a human’s. Its water molecules hadn’t been vibrated as violently. It was already recovering.
The soldier one-eye backed up and joined its companion. Like two curious boys peeking over a backyard fence, they hovered half hidden by the metal cover. Their antennae bent toward Worf. Their lenses zoomed and focused with little servo-motor whirs.
They knew no context for identifying Worf. His brain waves could be received but not accurately decoded. Aliens, the programming of the one-eyes told them, did not exist, but this being in front of them was close enough to Homo sapiens’ form to be classified as a strange kind of mutant deformed human. They would follow the procedure for humans—the only procedure they knew.
The locksmith one-eye stayed back, while the soldier one-eye moved right up to Worf’s head for a scan of his brain waves.
The slow, non-rhythmic “delta” activity in Worf’s brain resembled human coma or deep sleep. But the soldier was misreading the signals. It could not tell that Worf was coming around; did not know that Worf was enraged, and that the proper response to an enraged Klingon was to leave the area immediately.
Worf’s arms moved with explosive speed. He grabbed the one-eye at its base, getting a good grip on its antigrav housing, turning the one-eye so it couldn’t fire its radiation directly at him. Although not all of his strength had returned, he could feel his arms overcome the pull of the antigravs.
The one-eye fired a blast from its gun, bouncing the radiation helter-skelter around the crawl space. Worf absorbed some of it, but managed to hurl the one-eye against the wall with a sparking clang. It slipped away from his hands like a darting fish. He aimed a prodigious kick at it, sending it tumbling back over the side of the metal cover and into the Jefferies tube, where its unarmed partner had already retreated to safety.
Worf felt himself losing consciousness. In a confused state, he dimly understood a duty: Geordi would insist that he preserve his life. Another part of him, a Klingon part, wanted to keep fighting and die with glory, but at this moment duty took the fore. He managed to tab the control and close the metal cover, separating him from the one-eyes. Then he blacked out completely.
In the Jefferies tube, the one-eyes resumed their progress toward Engineering. The crew on the bridge were able to tell, through the life-monitor in Worf’s communicator pin, that Worf was injured and unconscious. They advised Geordi that the one-eyes had not been stopped, and that he should prepare his department