Kobayashi Maru - Michael A. Martin [3]
It will remain unfamiliar to them, he thought, raising the long-barreled disruptor pistol he clutched in his vacuum-gauntleted right hand. So long as air remains in this suit, and breath in my lungs.
A swiftly moving shadow cast against the ships dim emergency lighting suddenly drew his attention aft. The approaching partys booted footfalls echoed loudly through the otherwise silent vessel, the sounds seeming to originate in the direction of the engineering section, from which the most recent explosion had sounded. His training instantly taking over, YaVang flattened himself against one of the narrow corridors walls and watched as the initial shadow lengthened and resolved itself into multiple shapes, all of them vaguely humanoid. A pressure-suited figure stepped directly into view, immediately followed by at least two more.
Arm raised, YaVang stepped forward abruptly and fired. The foremost of the approaching raiders doubled over the fireball that suddenly threw him backward into his fellows. The Klingon maintained a merciless fusillade, taking full advantage of the element of surprise.
He heard a footfall behind him and whirled toward it. The sudden heavy impact against his chest threw him supine to the deck an instant before he felt the fierce heat penetrate the charred front of his pressure suit.
RomuluSngan disruptor, he thought as he realized that his own weapon had somehow slipped from his grasp, no doubt because of the ungainly bulkiness of his gloves.
Despite the tumult of running booted feet all around him, YaVang noticed that the hum of his helmets air circulation system had ceased. That meant that his final signal had been transmitted. The dead-man switch was to engage either when his suits life-support system failed, or the moment his lifesigns ceased to register upon the suits internal monitors. The trap he had so laboriously set over the past DIS had been sprung at last.
And the motherless carrion-eaters had done it themselves.
The deck shuddered and rattled as the individual charges, adapted for their current purpose from the SImyoH s armory, began detonating in series throughout the battle cruisers superstructure. Within but a handful of lup, very little of the ship would remain intact, to say nothing of the misbegotten muqaD who had dared to try to take her.
YaVang bared his teeth in a warriors grin as several RomuluSngan converged upon him from both directions, their weapons raised and poised to fire once they all had gotten out of one anothers line of fire.
The deck plating sheared away beneath their boots and YaVangs back.
Freefall. Airless space penetrated YaVangs body like countless icy blades. His last breath rasped in his chest like dry leaves, and he methodically emptied his lungs, just as his training demanded.
The Klingon captain awaited death calmly. Today, after all, was indeed a good day to die, for he had prevented a hated enemy from acquiring one of his peoples mightiest battle cruisers intact. And he also may well have booked passage for himself, as well as for his entire crew, aboard the Barge of the Dead, bound for eternal Sto-Vo-Kor .
But even as tumbling debris and oblivion took him, he wondered what fate might befall his beloved Empire the next time a treacherous, dishonorable attack such as this one were to occur.
After all, whatever else the contemptible RomuluSngan might be, they were nothing if not tenacious.
ONE
Thursday, May 22, 2155 Enterprise NX-01
“A DMIT IT , J ONATHAN . Youre already at least as bored with this mission as I am.
Unable to deny his fellow NX -class starship captains assertion, Captain Jonathan Archer smoothed his rumpled uniform and leaned back in his chair with a resigned sigh. Porthos, whom Archer had thought was fast asleep behind him at the foot of his bed, released a short but portentous bark, as if