No Surrender - Jeff Mariotte [7]
“Watch for those squarish lumps!” he said into his communicator. “They’re phasers.”
“You mean the ones we talked about in the briefing?” Corsi came back.
“Yeah. They don’t look quite like I expected them to.”
“Just assume that every square inch of this thing is a weapon,” Sonya’s voice suggested. “I don’t even know that the Kursicans are aware precisely how well-armed this thing is.”
Fabian looked at the surface beneath his feet. Sonya’s advice made sense, but at the same time, the platform was old, its outer skin pitted and charred. He doubted whether it could be as sophisticated as the commander speculated.
But on the other hand, it was old enough that there could be booby traps that none of the da Vinci crew had ever encountered before. It wouldn’t hurt to step lightly—magnetic boots willing.
Looking across at the other members of the away team, he saw that they were following the same advice. A couple of others had inadvertently set off the hidden phasers. Probably a simple sensor set into the hatch that detected the presence of an intruder, he knew. Crude, but no doubt effective.
He started working his way, with the others, toward the bottom of the main core, where they had decided to go in. Corsi had worked her way to the front of the group already. He expected no less from the chief of security and his one-time—and he did mean one time—lover. She would always put herself in harm’s way to protect the rest of the crew. He was near the back of the pack, as it turned out. Everyone looked pretty much alike in their space suits, especially with their backs turned—with the exception of Pattie Blue, who didn’t require a suit—but he thought he was following Dr. Lense and Kieran Duffy.
He found out he was right when Kieran turned around to look his way. He pointed to a panel on the platform’s surface—it looked almost like the rest of the thing’s skin, but not quite as old and worn, less than a meter square. “Look out for that,” Kieran warned him over the comlink.
“Right,” Fabian said, remembering this one from the briefing. It was a magnetic field that would reverse the polarity of his boots if he stepped on it, propelling him out into space. Since these environmental suits had internal thrusters, he’d be able to reverse course and return, but it still wouldn’t be a pleasant sensation. This station was so old, though, that it had probably been built in the days before thrusters became common on environmental suits.
“Microtorpedo launcher,” Corsi’s voice reported. Fabian looked up to where she was—really, he supposed, down to where she was, since they were working their way toward what was supposed to be the bottom of the thing. But since it whipped around, out of control, there was no real telling what was up and what wasn’t. He saw where she was pointing, though—an array of narrow tubes through which the torpedoes would fly if they were triggered.
In this fashion, each one pointing out hazards to the others, they worked their way to the bottom of the core, where the shuttlebay was. Commander Gomez had decided that was their likeliest entry point from the outside. It took twenty minutes for them all to reach the wide-open space. And when they got there, Fabian had a sense that the hard part was just about to begin.
Gold watched the away team’s progress on the forward viewscreen, though for minutes at a time they were out of sight due to the twists and turns of the platform. His responsibility weighed heavily on him at times like these—he knew those people were all in his charge, and while they were professionals, fully able to take care of themselves, in the end he was their captain and therefore would answer to himself—his own worst critic, according to Rachel—if anything happened to them.
Concern for their well-being, though, had to be balanced with the necessity of performing the task at hand. He’d been ordered to do this by Starfleet, and that