The Garden - Melissa Scott [91]
"Great!" Paris exclaimed, and Renehan laughed.
"You're out of your mind, Paris."
"And you're not?"
Renehan waved the words away, and turned to follow Seafire. Grayrose said, "Quickly, then. Let's go."
They left the bodies where they had fallen-no time to bury them, certainly, and not much else that could be done, but it still gave Paris a strange feeling to step around the huddled corpses to climb into the shuttle's cockpit. The interior was configured differently from the shuttle he had flown in before; the pilot's post was much the same, but the passenger seats had been replaced by a domed bubble enclosing an acceleration couch set in a ring of control panels.
"You r place is there," Grayrose said, and Paris strapped himself into the couch. The dome was clear-a heads-up display, he thought, for an instant, and then realized that it was not a projection, but armorglass or something similar. "The red boards are guns, green is sensors, all kinds. You don't need to adjust any settings, just tell me if you get orange or red lights."
"All right." Paris swung the chair, and found he could easily reach the four control yokes for the guns. They looked like systems he'd handled during his brief tenure with the Maquis, right down to the spotting lights, and even the oddly offset trigger couldn't shake his confidence. He noticed a band of dark gray keys running along the edge of the consoles-no, he realized, not just dark gray, but every shade of gray, running from absolute black to pure white. He frowned, and Grayrose touched one of the medium-gray keys.
"This is the spotter's call," she said. "If I call for it, or if there's a ship in either the white or the black range-" She swept a hand over the keys, indicating the two sections lying side by side. "-press the keys to give me a heading. I have a repeater at my station and I'll see where the trouble is."
Paris nodded, and Grayrose turned back to her station, began fastening her own harness.
"Why in the black or white?" Paris called after her.
"That indicates something directly behind me," Grayrose answered, and Paris could have sworn there was laughter in her voice. "I want to know that."
"Makes sense to me," Paris murmured, but his words were drowned in the sudden howl of engines.
"Stand by to lift," Grayrose called, and Paris raised his voice to carry over the noise around them.
"Ready when you are."
"Lifting," Grayrose answered, and the shuttle bounded forward. Paris braced himself against the sudden lift, and saw the ground fall away behind him. The second shuttle rose as quickly, and he thought he caught a glimpse of Renehan in her dome before the armor darkened.
"The other shuttle's away," he called, and Grayrose lifted a hand.
"The main fight is in orbit," she said. "Only one Andirrim shuttle got through before the field went up, but they're trying to break through the defense system."
At least that was something familiar, Paris thought, swinging automatically to check his weapons. All the checklights glowed green-and at least the Kirse used that same convention, he thought-though he had no idea what each one meant. And it doesn't really matter, he added silently. I know the main things- trigger and aiming mechanism-and that's all that counts. A part of him, the part that always sat back and analyzed his own actions, wondered how much he was doing this to make up for his failures as Starfleet and as a Maquis, but he shoved that knowledge aside. All that was past; what mattered now was this fight.
"Orbit it is," he said aloud, and overhead saw the white of the field darken toward the edge of space.
B'Elanna Torres frowned thoughtfully at the Kirse schematic displayed on the main screen, then glanced again at the image on her tricorder screen. Even with Revek's help, it had taken some hours to translate the Kirse symbols into their Starfleet equivalents, and even now she wasn't completely sure of all the congru-encies. Oh, the various components