Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [71]
“And yours, too, incidentally, Trahve.”
Hayes was impressed. He really hadn’t thought that the captain, or even Reed, would have quite enough courage to face death so directly.
Hayes grinned at Trahve, who clearly wasn’t made of such stern stuff. Catching the alien’s frightened gaze, he nodded toward the front window, through which a second pair of mechanical grapples could be seen heading toward the ship.
“I’d offer you a front-row seat,” Hayes stage-whispered in Trahve’s ear with a blackly humorous smile. “If I thought any of us were going to be alive to see the fireworks show that’s about to begin.”
Thirteen
Outside Shuttlepod Two
AS THE MEMBERS OF Strike Team Hammerhead continued moving into position, one thought occupied Chang’s mind almost to the exclusion of all others: Gods, how I hate space. The sentiment turned over and over in his mind, repeating like an endless mantra. Stars whirled with disconcerting speed in the blackness above—or was it below?—his gray-colored helmet. Hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it.
It wasn’t that space was unpleasant to look at; Chang enjoyed looking at the stars through Enterprise’s observation windows probably as much as any of the Starfleeters did. He even found the gigantic interstellar vistas inspiring in a way he had difficulty putting into words, though he rarely felt moved to try. Being in space, however—specifically in zero-g freefall, no less, with the added handicap of a bulky environmental suit, a workbelt stuffed with equipment, and a conspicuous absence of decks, bulkheads, and grav plating—was a harrowing, gut-heaving sensation for which he simply had no use.
And against which Phlox’s antinausea potions no longer seemed to be having much of an effect.
He silently berated himself as he looked through his faceplate at the dizzying starscape that extended toward infinity in almost every direction. And although he knew that Mayweather had been reared in space, he continued to ask himself: How was it that someone as undisciplined as this Starfleet ensign could make this look so easy? And how could Chang himself—who had aced MACO training—come up so short when it came to suiting up and making a damned spacewalk? For perhaps the tenth time today, he reminded himself that his current discomfiture wasn’t rooted in any lack of courage; after all, he felt certain he’d amply demonstrated his valor on numerous occasions, in military engagements that stretched from the Martian Freehold Uprisings to the defense of Jupiter Station to the Janus Pirate War.
And now all the way to the backyard of the Xindi, he told himself, closing his eyes momentarily to chase away a furious wave of vertigo. In an effort to keep his belly level, he tried to concentrate on the very slight grinding sound that his movements were transmitting into his suit, thanks to the thin layer of improvised camouflaging material that now covered most of the suit’s exterior. Again, he had to marvel at Starfleet ingenuity. While the strike team had patiently waited for the three Xindi ships to depart, Ensign Mayweather had set to work on drawing some of the dust cloud’s fuel isotope particles into the airlock; less than an hour later, he had combined it with a portion of the shuttlepod’s stock of emergency hull-breach repair foam, fashioning a paste that altered the sensor profile of each of the environmental suits, making them effectively blend in with the dust-caked surface of the Xindi fuel tanks. The stuff had smelled pretty nasty back inside the shuttlepod, something like spent gunpowder mixed with rotten eggs—a problem from which everyone was thankfully spared now that they were sealed into their suits—but nobody could argue with the results, at least so far. Chang could only wonder if either he or any of his people would have tumbled to such a simple yet brilliant solution on their own.
Of course, he wasn’t about to speak any of these laudatory thoughts aloud—not with Mayweather