Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [61]
This was too much. Crusher was not going to face an armed opponent with only a hypo. She very much doubted that there was another exit from the room, so if she could move something heavy in front of the door, the tech would be trapped until security could make it down here. But who knew what kind of damage might be done while she waited?
Steeling her resolve, the doctor eased around a console when, suddenly, a new alarm went off. It wasn’t the planetary disaster klaxon she had left behind upstairs, but something else, something that originated inside the core.
“Dammit,” Crusher hissed, her grip tightening around the hypo. She tried to keep low and use the consoles for cover, glad that her quarry would not be able to hear her footfalls over the din of the alarm.
She turned a corner and almost walked into the intruder’s back. He was leaning over an active interface console, lit up in what looked to her like a transporter configuration, working so intently that he didn’t appear to even notice her. Ducking back, she collected herself, checked the setting on her hypo and willed herself to be calm. You’ve done this a thousand times, Bev. Put it on his neck and press the button. She took a deep breath, straightened, stepped quickly around the console and gently laid the hypo below his ear. There was a satisfying hiss as the hypo emptied.
The intruder looked over his shoulder at her, gave her a mildly annoyed look, then returned to his work. He did not, as anticipated, crumble to the floor and begin to quiver. Crusher glanced at the hypo, resisted the urge to check the cartridge label and instead raised her arm and snapped the hypo down on the man’s temple.
His head twisted to the side, but otherwise the blow seemed to have no effect. Then, slowly, he turned his head and the doctor saw that there was a glowing filament plugged into a copper-colored port beneath the peeled-back skin of his right temple. “Please, doctor,” he said lightly. “Don’t interrupt.”
Chapter Sixteen
THE ENTERPRISE LISTED TO PORT and Deanna Troi felt her stomach yaw to starboard. Not a direct hit, but close. And then, incongruously, she reminded herself, For every action, an equal and opposite reaction.
“Inertial dampeners—compensate,” she called to environmental, then felt the AG fluctuate beneath her.
“Incoming!” Commander Heyes called from tactical. She had just turned over the bridge to Troi when the enemy vessel had risen suddenly from the planet’s arctic region and opened fire. The impact had sent Tellisar, Troi’s tactical officer, over the front of his console, unconscious, possibly dead. Heyes had scrambled from the turbolift doors to the weapons station while the deck seesawed under her feet and managed to fire off a volley of torpedoes.
Troi clutched at the arms of the command chair while around her, bodies hit the deck as the ship rolled to starboard.
“Shields down to eighty percent, Commander,” Heyes called. “Power is stable.”
“Attack pattern alpha one nine,” Troi ordered. “Commence fire.”
“Phasers firing.”
Lances of orange light tracked across the void, then vanished. Troi’s forehead knotted uncertainly as she turned to Heyes. “Did we hit them?”
Reflected light danced across Heyes’s face as she initiated a complex sensor sweep. “I’m not finding anything,” she said, and it didn’t require Troi’s empathic abilities to sense her confusion. “No ship, no debris, no energy signature, nothing.” Frustrated, she recalibrated the sensors and reran the search.
Troi gave her room to work. “Stations, report.”
Around the bridge, the station heads called off their status. Engineering and environmental systems were functioning at acceptable levels, and the helm was responding. Medics came onto the bridge, bundled Tellisar onto a stretcher and removed him. Troi saw that he was, in fact, breathing and felt regret that she hadn’t at least tried to determine his condition, but then chastised herself: that wasn’t part of her role when she was commanding the bridge.
“Could it have been a cloaking device?” Troi asked,