The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [48]
The alien leader muttered something about them turning around, but Trip wasn’t really hearing him. For that moment, his gaze locked with that of his oldest friend, and absorbed a myriad of emotions. Love, regret, anger, fear.
“Hey, this guy’s the captain,” Trip said, shouting to the “pirate” leader, breaking the moment.
“That’s enough,” Archer snarled.
Trip faced the chalk-skinned alien. “He’s my boss. If I’m gonna disobey his order, I don’t want him coming along.”
“Trip, that’s enough!” Archer repeated, shouting this time, shoving Trip again.
An errant thought flickered across Trip’s mind. Everyone’s playing their parts a bit too well. But he knew they had to. When the security logs were reviewed, this had to look real. Still, it bothered him that the fingers of these “pirates” really were poised to pull their triggers.
“Listen… I won’t do this if you kill him. But could you please shut him up?”
Trip fully expected one of the boarders to stun Archer with a blast, but instead, on a nod from the leader, one of the other two aliens crashed his rifle’s stock into the back of Archer’s head. The captain immediately crumpled to the deck, unconscious.
Trip winced. They really didn’t need to do that. Still, he had his part to play, and they were running out of time before Malcolm’s security teams would arrive from the armory on F deck.
He began leading the “pirates” down the corridor, trading barbed words with them as they went, all of it concerning the specific whereabouts of their quarry, and the Orion slavers who had supposedly paid these men to bring Shran and Theras to face “justice” for the deaths of some of those who had participated in the recent raid against the Aenar city. Trip felt as though they were being almost too arch with these exchanges, but hoped that upon a close investigation of Enterprise’s security logs, no one else would notice just how dunderheaded this entire piracy scenario really was.
“Take me to Shran now, or I’ll send one of my men back to kill your captain,” the lead alien said, making a show of his mounting impatience.
Trip affected a nearly panicked tone, but wasn’t completely sure he was only acting. “Okay, okay! I’ve got a better idea. I’ll bring Shran and Theras to us. We won’t have to go any farther.”
“Be very careful,” snarled the pistol-wielding alien.
They went on a short distance until they reached a narrow hatchway, which he and Malcolm had already rigged for precisely this sort of situation.
“You can all come see for yourselves,” he said to the men behind him as he pulled the hatch open and began to climb inside a crawlspace filled with a profusion of cables and conduits. “This is just a com station.”
He reached up and began moving a small handle mounted at the top of the cramped chamber. “I’m gonna need to open this so I can bypass the security protocols,” he continued. “Is that okay?”
The “pirate” leader approached closely and inspected the equipment. His weapon remained raised and ready. “As long as you keep your hands where we can see them.”
“No problem,” Trip said as he continued working. The handle turned, opening up an overhead access panel containing still more cabling and circuitry. After carefully bypassing the security protocols, he grasped one end of an open energy conduit inside the panel and pulled it down.
Holding the open conduit out in front of him, he said, “Now, all I need to do is connect this to the relay inside that panel.” He gestured toward a second overhead panel, located not far from the first one.
“Stop,” the head raider said. To one of his men, he said, “Open it for him.” He pointed at the second panel. “If there’s a weapon in there,” he warned Trip, “you’re going to die before your captain does.”
Still holding the conduit, Trip watched as one of the rifle carriers reached up and opened the second panel. No obvious weapons were in evidence.
“Satisfied?” Trip said.
The head alien sniffed. “Proceed.”
Trip reached up into the second open panel and extracted another open conduit line, the virtual twin of the one he still