Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [41]
He also saw that Hayes’s mottled gray-and-white uniform tunic was spattered with livid orange blood. Archer decided then that he wanted no more blood spilled, unless doing so proved absolutely unavoidable. If I really need to see alien blood, I can wait until we finally catch up to the Xindi themselves.
Archer took a seat behind the conn console, right beside Trahve. He looked out the forward window into the infinite, star-bejeweled void that lay ahead. Somewhere in all of that unimaginably vast expanse lay the device with which the Xindi planned to lay waste the planet Earth.
“Dangerous and vague will have to do,” he said, tentatively taking the controls and powering up the console in front of him. “Let’s make best speed for the particle cloud.”
“Shouldn’t we send a coded message to Enterprise?” Reed asked. “Let them know where we’re headed? We may end up needing their help, after all.”
Archer considered Reed’s question for a moment, then shook his head. “Unfortunately, we’d run the risk of alerting the Xindi that we’re coming, Malcolm. We’re going to have to maintain com silence, at least until we know we’ve lost the element of surprise.” He nodded toward Trahve. “Get us under way, Trahve.”
Though still manacled, Trahve entered a course for the cloud with surprising grace and deftness. Archer noted that the cloud’s boundaries appeared to lie only a few light-hours away, past the outskirts of the Kaletoo system’s Kuiper belt. And within that cloud’s boundaries lay…what?
“Ahead, full impulse,” Archer said once the course showed as laid in on the navigation console. He was well aware that relying on Trahve’s impulse engines rather than his warp drive would make the journey take a good deal longer. But with her warp drive powered down, Trahve’s ship would also maintain a much lower profile on any Xindi scanners that might be pointed their way.
The impulse drive engaged at full power, and the brown orb of Kaletoo suddenly fell away into the midnight deeps. And as the bright pinpoints that lay before Trahve’s vessel shifted toward blue, with those on the periphery lengthening into multicolored, relativistic silver and gold streaks, Archer allowed himself to hope that their quest to save humanity might finally be nearing its end.
Kaletoo
O’Neill watched anxiously as Ensign Chandra pointed his scanner toward the shuttlepod, which gleamed with the reflected light and heat of the merciless afternoon sun.
“There she is,” Chandra said as Corporal Peruzzi, her rifle at the ready, approached the little auxiliary ship. “The shuttlepod is right where we left her.”
“Everything seems to be in order inside the shuttlepod,” Chandra said. “I can find no evidence of any attempt to gain entry, or to access her systems remotely.”
O’Neill heaved a mental sigh of relief, took another swallow from her nearly depleted canteen, then wiped yet another muddy waterfall of sweat and dust away from her forehead. I would kill for a two-minute shower, she thought as she glanced again at Peruzzi, whose long, red-brown hair and fair skin looked all but immaculate. Don’t these MACOs even sweat?
Placing the canteen back inside the pouch on her cloak, O’Neill opened her communicator and pointed it toward the shuttlepod. She heard the whirr of the servo motors as the gull-wing hatch on the small spacecraft’s port side obediently opened. Chandra walked toward the beckoning hatchway.
At that precise moment, something large and heavy struck the tarmac directly behind O’Neill, startling her into nearly dropping her communicator. An unfamiliar voice shouted something guttural that she interpreted as “Don’t move!” or something similar. Something unseen zinged loudly past her ear, and O’Neill heard a nearly simultaneous cry as well as the discharge of a phase pistol.
Peruzzi didn’t hesitate, throwing herself onto the ground while barking a time-honored MACO curse. She rolled almost more quickly than O’Neill’s eyes could