Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [67]
“You really ought to save your energy for dealing with my employers, Captain,” Trahve said. “After all, you’re going to be seeing them very soon.”
Archer ignored the man’s gibe, which he knew was calculated to make him lose his cool—and thereby lose his focus. “We’ll see about that.”
“They’re going to reward me handsomely for handing you over to them, you know. The Xindi, I mean.”
“If you ask me, they don’t seem to be a very trustworthy lot,” said Reed, who stood beside Hayes, Kemper, and Money in the aft portion of the cockpit compartment. The tactical officer’s voice dripped with unconcealed disgust. “What makes you suppose they’re going to honor whatever agreements you’ve made with them?”
Trahve smiled tolerantly. “Ah, you simply don’t know them the way I do, Lieutenant.”
And that’s a situation we’ve got to change, Archer thought as he continued his so-far fruitless labors behind the primary pilot’s console. As quickly as possible.
“So this was your job all along,” Hayes said, not asking a question. “To lure us away from our real objective to a decoy weapon site.”
“Of course. How better for the Xindi to protect their real particle-beam weapon from discovery by Enterprise?”
Hayes sounded both incredulous and angry. “And you even manipulated us into beating your decoy’s location out of you.”
Trahve chortled quietly. “Well, I had to make the entire scenario as convincing as possible for all of you, didn’t I? It was a small price to pay for a much bigger reward.”
“There’s got to be a way to break free of this thing,” Archer said, his frustration mounting as he continued working the flight controls to no avail. “And I’m going to find it.”
“There isn’t, Captain, I assure you. But if it makes you feel better…” Trahve trailed off, and Archer glanced toward him long enough to see that he had used his feet to push his chair half a meter or so farther away from the console before him. With his hands still confined in manacles, he made an almost courtly be my guest gesture toward Reed, inviting him to join the captain in what was beginning to look increasingly like a completely hopeless task.
Hayes and Kemper wasted no time hustling the alien into an adjacent seat, and Reed hastened to take the newly emptied chair beside Archer’s. Private Money merely watched the proceedings in attentive, and perhaps apprehensive, silence.
No matter what commands Archer and Reed fed into the console, the little ship remained firmly caught in the tractor’s apparently unbreakable grip. The Xindi weapons facility—or rather, the large-scale Xindi decoy—now filled more than half of the forward window, and continued quickly increasing in apparent size. Several docking ports, each equipped with multiple spidery grappling arms, beckoned in sinister fashion. Banks of external floodlights mounted on the facility itself made almost the entire football-field-sized platform clearly visible, along with several of its vaulted, utilitarian docking bays.
“We’re going to need a lot more thrust than this boat’s power plant can deliver,” observed Reed, who continued working calmly yet speedily at Archer’s side.
“You’ve noticed that, too,” Archer said dryly as he continued manually entering commands. He’d already identified a number of alternative pathways through which he could supplement main power by directly tapping the warp core, though none of these appeared to have any effect on the amount of reverse thrust the vessel was able to produce. Where’s Trip when I really need him? he thought, though he knew that his chief engineer had been in no condition to join the Kaletoo landing party. And even if Trip had been well, Archer could never have predicted developing such a keen need for the commander’s engineering talents during this mission.
“We’ll just have to keep at it,” Reed said before lapsing into silence as he continued puzzling out the alien controls.
Feeling Trahve’s eyes boring into the back of his neck, Archer spared a quick backward glance in the courier’s direction.
“You’ve both come