Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [79]
La Forge turned to him. “We could use one about now. Let’s hear it, Reg.”
The thin man licked his lips. “All the nodes on the station are connected by major power circuits, right? It’s just the controls and the transporter mechanisms that seem to be decentralized.”
The chief engineer looked at him. “So?”
Barclay shrugged. “So we don’t have to use the confinement beam in this node to let energy out of the system. We can use a confinement beam in a different node. All we’ve got to do is find another control room and activate that system the way we hooked it up here.”
La Forge frowned as he thought about it. “It’s risky, Reg. We’ve made this area safe by putting our own locks on the doors. But anywhere else on this station …” His voice trailed off ominously.
The thin man swallowed. “I know,” he said. “Still, I’d like to try it.”
The chief engineer’s attention was caught by another will-o’-the-wisp of electromagnetic energy. “All right,” he decided. “But I’m going with you.”
Barclay nodded.
A moment later, he was jogging down the curving hallway with Commander La Forge beside him, hoping that nothing terrible would happen before they could put their plan into effect.
Julia Santos had never used a phaser in her life. There had been an optional course in its use at the Academy, but she had decided not to take part in it.
After all, she was a doctor. Her business was saving lives, not ending them. Until now, she thought, hefting the weapon that Travers had slipped into her hand before they took off across the open plaza.
As the last of the colonists piled into the still-intact administration center, Julia peered out the window and looked around. Her heart sank like a stone in a deep, dark pool.
She had been prepared for the sight of the lizardlike invaders, ugly as they were to her human sensibilities. Hell, the whole reason they decided to hole up here was because they had glimpsed the bastards on their short-range monitors, and knew that they were now approaching on foot.
But she was unprepared for the numbers in which they swept toward the colony, like a tide of green and gold, glittering in the sun. There must be a couple of hundred of them already, and there were more beaming down all the time.
It was hopeless. Utterly hopeless. Their phasers might as well have been slingshots, for all the good they would do them.
And Dixon … or rather, Jean-Luc. Had he known about this? Had it been preordained, a fixture in his future timeline? Or had this come as a surprise to him as well? But why would he save the colony from destruction only to see it ravaged by some—?
“My god,” spat the commodore, pressing forward to get a better look through the window. “It’s him!”
Julia followed Travers’s pointing finger to the leftmost extremity of the colony’s semicircle, where one of the phaser batteries had been before the invaders blasted it out of existence. Sure enough, there was someone there, running toward them. And he wasn’t lizardlike at all.
Without warning, the commodore thrust forward the muzzle of his phaser rifle, punching a webbed hole through the shatterproof window glass. Julia flung an arm up out of instinct. But she recovered quickly enough to grab hold of Travers’s arm.
“What are you doing?” she demanded of him.
The commodore glowered at her, his face florid with hatred. “I’m paying him back,” he snarled. “For betraying his own kind.” His nostrils flared. “For throwing in with them.”
The doctor shook her head. “No. Can’t you see? If he was one of them, he’d be with them—not running from them. He’s no more their friend than we are.”
But Travers wasn’t buying it. “Now I’m to believe you, am I? A traitor, just like him?”
Julia could see that it hurt him to say that. Of course, he didn’t really believe it, or he wouldn’t have let her pick up a phaser and join him here in the administration center. The commodore’s lips trembled, but it was too late to take back what he’d said.
“You know I’m not a traitor,” she replied evenly. She jerked her head, to indicate the man from the future.