Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [97]
At least he survived, Archer thought, not wanting Trahve’s death on his conscience, whatever crimes the man might have abetted.
A painfully bright flash of light erupted an instant later, forcing Archer to raise a hand to shield his eyes. Trahve’s vessel vanished, and a quickly expanding fireball took its place. Almost immediately, the fireball’s edges touched and then engulfed the periphery of the Xindi facility, and continued to grow and spread across it like a summer wildfire.
Even as the initial detonation’s shock wave noticeably added velocity to the shuttlepod, rapidly carrying her even farther along her departure trajectory, the blast set off a series of successively larger, even more brilliant explosions across the length and breadth of the Xindi trap. Archer had to look away entirely, his eyes clenched shut against the glare as he steadied himself against one of the bulkhead handholds during the few moments it took the shuttlepod’s inertial dampers to adjust to the additional acceleration load. Emblazoned across his retinas was the afterimage of the Xindi decoy crumpling in on itself as though its hull had been no more substantial than the thermal foil that Chef used for covering leftovers in Enterprise’s galley.
The Xindi decoy weapon was no more. We won. Or at least we survived.
But Archer knew that this victory had effectively cost him the trail to the real Xindi particle-beam weapon, at least for the time being.
Unless a few survivors besides Trahve managed to get into escape pods right before the end came, he thought as he quickly made his way down the ladder toward the airlock’s inner hatch, which Reed and Peruzzi were already cycling. Once the pressure equalized on either side of it, the hatch would open upward and admit them down into the rear of the little craft’s cockpit section; in the meantime, they would all have to wait inside the cramped airlock.
Frustrated and impatient, Archer pulled out his communicator and flipped it open. “Archer to O’Neill.”
“O’Neill here, sir. Welcome aboard.”
“Were you able to scan the wreckage for survivors?”
“Yes, sir. I’m tracking two escape pods, one of which came from that ship you just escaped from. That one reads as a single humanoid life-form, and the other shows several life signs.”
“Several life signs…are they Xindi?”
“They vary a bit from what’s in our database, sir, but I’d say they’re close enough to be cousins—or another Xindi subspecies. I’m also picking up several warp signatures, all of them closing in on the vicinity of the explosion.”
Damn! Archer thought as the inner hatch finally opened, allowing him to scramble down the companionway ladder and into the shuttlepod’s main section. The others quickly followed him down.
At the bottom of the ladder, Archer moved forward and took the seat beside O’Neill’s, grateful to be back inside the familiar confines of the shuttlepod after having spent so much time aboard La’an Trahve’s vessel.
“Can you identify the approaching ships, D.O.?” he asked as he took in the various readouts and gauges.
O’Neill shook her head. “No, sir. But I’d bet you euros to Draylax dinars that they’re Xindi as well.”
“And they’re not going to want to allow any prisoners to fall into our hands,” Archer said, now wishing he’d simply stunned Trahve and dragged him along instead of allowing him to escape to the tender mercies of the Xindi.
“Can we reach either of the escape pods before the Xindi get to them?” Hayes asked, still breathing somewhat heavily from his encounter with hard vacuum.
“I think so, Major,” O’Neill said coolly. “But we’d never get away from the Xindi vessels afterward, and we’re not exactly the most well-armed ship in the sector.” She turned toward the captain, and looked more than a little worried. “Captain, I don’t believe they’ve detected us yet. The explosion is going to make our impulse trail difficult to detect. We can still get away without attracting their attention—if we go now, that is.”
“But without any prisoners,” Archer said. “Or even a goddamned clue