The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [124]
He touched a few of the cockpit’s other thankfully simple controls. The deck plates beneath his feet began to rumble with a gratifyingly familiar vibration. That sensation alone told Trip that the warp drive was beginning to warm up to operational temperatures, pressures, and intermix ratios.
The little vessel suddenly shook and rattled intensely, as though it had been punched by the fist of an angry god.
“They’ve opened fire,” Ehrehin said dryly, one eyebrow arched upward as if to announce that he found making declarations of the obvious to be darkly amusing. He calmly studied the readouts on his copilot’s board. “At the rate they’re gaining on us, they’ll be in weapons range in only a few siure.”
Trip considered the grim fact that it could all be over for them both in a matter of only a few short minutes. He felt a knot of fear twisting in his stomach.
Fortunately, Trip often regarded his own fear as a wonderful source of motivation during a crisis.
“Put on your helmet, Doctor,” he said as his hands flew across the console. “We’re going to warp.”
Ehrehin scowled again, then reached under his seat and drew up his helmet with a pained grunt. A moment later, he was fitting it clumsily over his head and trying to mate its collar to his suit’s broad neck ring.
The vessel shook again, though not quite as roughly as on the previous occasion. Trip hoped that meant that their pursuers had scored only a glancing blow this time.
After noting the temperature and power-level readings, displayed graphically as well as in unreadable Romulan text on the warp field gauge, Trip heaved a brief sigh of relief that the weapons fire hadn’t disabled the warp drive.
Yet.
Eager to deny their pursuers another opportunity to strike, Trip wrapped his gloved left hand around a pair of levers. Here goes. He pulled the levers down quickly, then punched a button beside them.
A moment later the starfield that lay before them distorted into streaks around the edges, with the light of the stars near the center shifting toward the blue portion of the visible spectrum.
“We are now at warp,” Trip announced. I’m not the only one who gets to state the obvious around here.
“And I’m sure Valdore’s ship is still pursuing us, only much faster than before. Do you think it was really wise to go to warp so close to the planet?”
Trip knew very well that certain types of warp fields could unleash catastrophic gravimetric and subspatial effects if activated too deep inside the gravity well either of a star or a planet. Once again, he had no choice other than to defend his decision to gamble for the sake of his mission.
“Seemed like the best option at the time, Doctor,” Trip said as he unstrapped himself from his seat restraints.
He rose to help Ehrehin hook up the hoses that led from the back of his helmet to the environmental pack mounted on the back of his suit.
“Indeed,” the scientist said, obviously unconvinced.
Once he was satisfied that Ehrehin’s suit was completely sealed and functioning properly, Trip reached behind his own helmet, attaching his own air hoses and checking his suit’s seals in a series of swift, practiced movements.
Then he noticed that Ehrehin, who had already strapped himself back into his seat, was staring daggers at him through their helmet faceplates.
“These particular pressure suits were an interesting choice on your part, Cunaehr,” the old man said, his voice distorted slightly by its passage through two hel-mets before reaching Trip’s ears; Trip had taken the precaution of disabling the com systems in both suits, so that Ehrehin wouldn’t be tempted to find a way to use them to communicate with their pursuer.
Trip shrugged as he strapped himself into the pilot’s seat once again. “You have to use what you have on hand.”
“Indeed you do.”
Trip looked across his console’s orderly bank of gauges and monitors, noting with some apprehension that the pursuing vessel was steadily