Star Trek - TOS - 79 - Invasion 1 - First Strike Page 5
"But our chance is lost!"
Aragor continued staring. That voice -- so loud, so
completely uncharacteristic.
"Sir... sir," Aragor began, "we had no salvo prepared
for penetration. We thought we should take the
opportunity to rescue you before
Kellen rounded on him again. "You had one chance!
You will not have that chance again! Next time the
choice is to save my life or take an enemy life, take the
enemy life!"
Nobly said, but Aragor remained confused. He lowered
his voice to compensate for the boom of Kellen's.
"Sir, why do you want to destroy them? What did you
see there?"
Breathing heavily, Kellen fell suddenly still and his
eyes fogged with fearful memory. He gazed again at the
enemy ship. His voice changed. The skin around his eyes
tightened.
"All these things we tell our children to scare them...
things we pretend to have conquered in our own minds
... they're all true, Aragor. There are demons. Real
demons."
"Demons? Which demons, sir?"
Two strong shudders washed through Kellen's large
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steady confidence.
"I saw the Iraga first," he told them, and paused.
A chill washed through the bridge. Aragor's heart
began pounding. The other crewmen were looking at
him as if to wonder whether to be afraid of their
general's sudden insanity or afraid of what he was
saying.
They didn't really think he was insane. They knew he
was not.
That meant he had seen... it.
Kellen's frazzled condition and overheated excitement
ran like a virus through them all.
"Then there were others," he added.
Aragor's hands were clenched. He could barely find his
voice to speak. "More... Iraga?"
"No, other kinds. After the Iraga came out of the wall,
others came too. Demons with vestigial membranes
expanding from their shoulders... they spread their
arms and the membranes opened and filled the space
before me..."
"Shushara!" the helmsman gasped.
"Others had fingers that reached to the ground...
and w ith fangs protruding from their foreheads..."
"Hullam'gat!" Mursha whispered, his face blanched.
He looked at the helmsman, and together they were
terrified.
Watching realization dawn in his crewmen's faces,
Kellen nodded slowly. As he transferred his excitement
to the crew, he seemed to grow more like his usual self,
recapturing the restraint that had brought him ultimately
to power.
"The tales are all true," he said. "They have come
back as they promised they would... and they are on
that ship out there."
His knees barely steady enough to support him,
Aragor moved toward Kellen. "What should we do?
What can we do?"
"I know what to do," the general said. "It will take us
34 FIRST STRIKE
all to defeat them. Aragor, you beam onto Ruhl's ship
and take command of the fleet. Call the Empire for
reinforcements. Track that ship, but do not go near it.
Do not. I will go for help."
"For help? From where?"
"I said it would take us all," Kellen repeated.
Once more he turned to the viper's tongue of a ship on
the main screen. He began distractedly plucking the bits
of moss and dust from his hair.
"We need a demon to fight demons," he said. "I am
going to get one."
35
! begin to like you, Earthman. And ! saw fear in
the Klingon's eyes.
--Maab of Capella IV
"Friday's Child"
Chapter Three
"LEvr qK, secure position and open fire!"
Ah, life in space. Weeks of tedium broken by moments
of terror.
For centuries they'd said that about being at sea. It was
dead true about both.
Dust rolled off the ridge from photon salvo bombardment
and turned into a shimmering heat in the valley
below.
Two hundred enemy troops. Maybe more. Almost the
whole crew of a large battleship. That meant there must
be more than one ship up there now, and probably a
conflict going on in space.
The captain's dirty hands and torn uniform tunic
attested to a stressful morning. Barely noon, and there
had been four major skirmishes already.
Through the shaggy hair of his attacker he had shouted
to his own men, while chiding himself for having been
surprised, for concentrating so much on the movements
of the troops that he'd let himself be jumped. His face
cracked into a grimace as he took a numbing blow to the
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side of his head and had to damn away the dizziness in
order to keep fighting. If he had to be close to a Klingon,
this was at least the way. Punching.
Beneath his soles the dry earth drummed with the
thudding boots of men fighting all around on the jagged,
jutting terrain. He sensed a shift in the attack pattern.
Saw nothing, but he knew what he would do in this
terrain, with these objectives, and made a bet with
himself that the enemy would do it too. The chips were
the lives of his men, the pot this planet and its sixty
million tribesmen, some of whom had no idea the others
existed.
The sky here was unforgiving, cloudless. His opponent
twisted sideways and forced the captain's face into the
sun, blinding him, and he staggered. The Klingon's
shoulder crashed into his cheek. He felt his own teeth cut
the inside of his lip, and the sudden warm salty taste of
blood filled his mouth. It made him mad.
He spat the blood into the Klingon's glossy bronze
face.
The Klingon arched backward and took the captain by
both arms. They sawed at each other for a terrible
instant before the grip was broken and the captain
managed to land a knot of knuckles where they did some
good. The Klingon spun and slashed downward with his
hard wristband.
The captain raised his own arm to block the blow.
Bracing his shoulder for the impact, he took it full force
but managed to deflect it to the side and keep his skull
from being cracked open, though the force drove him
facedown to the ground. He sprawled. His skin shriveled
in anticipation of a hit, but luck was with him. The
Klingon stumbled.
Bracing his palms on the ground, the captain shoved
upward, balling his fists in a single surge into the
Klingon's solar plexus. He felt his hands go into the soft
organs beneath the Klingon's rib cage, slamming the air
out of the big alien's lungs.
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FIRST STRIKE
The Klingon gagged, staggered, and went down, suffering.
The captain scraped to his feet, knotted his rocky
right fist, and delivered it like a piledriver into the
soft
spot at the base of the Klingon's skull. The attacker went
down and didn't get up.
One down, two hundred to go.
Chest heaving, he straightened and looked around.
Disruptor fire glazed the air and raised a crackle of
burning ground cover and scrub brush. Hacking, shouting,
and shooting, the Klingon wave was attempting
another surge over the grade to the captain's left, their
disruptor fire hampered by the rock formations, but
creating dangerous shrapnel out of the stone.
He drew a breath and shouted.
"Spread out! Separate!" If his men weren't close
together, there was less chance of having them mown
down. "Go right! Move! Move, move!"
They swerved and scrambled in the direction he
waved, the knuckle of rocks bearded with dry growth
that would provide cover long enough for them to take a
breath, reorganize. Motion diluted the terror with the
twisted passion of combat.
"Take cover!" he shouted.
Not retreat, and they didn't.
Below, on this side of the narrow gravelly ramp
leading between two towers of rock, his battered men
lined the gully. Their red and gold backs created a
necklace of ruby and amber jewels across the bright
throat of the ridge as disruptor fire cracked over their
heads. Among them were the native Capellans, taller
than the humans by a head, and flamboyant with bright
blocks of color on their long-sleeved suits and snug
hoods that imitated helmets.
Hand-to-hand fighting had broken out in four places
that he could see--make that five. Anxious to be in five
places at once, he forced himself to keep low. The valley
was dotted with solid patches of color--the Starfleet red
and gold, the native purple, black, blue, green, and even
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pink now and then. They looked like giant Ninjas in
goon boots and windbreaking capes, with fur stitched
across their chests and hanging in long stoles over their
shoulders.
He didn't care if the natives wore fishnet stockings as
long as they backed up his troops, and they were doing
that. He brought his palm-sized communicator to his
lips and flipped open the antenna grid.
"Kirk to Enterprise."
The ship didn't answer. Why not? Where were they?
In his mind Jim Kirk saw the giant cruiser looping the
planet in orbit, emptied of a third of her crew because he
needed them down here, and he gritted his teeth. Why
wasn't the bridge crew answering? What was wrong?
At dawn, when he ordered his ship piloted away from
the planet, everything had been peace, quiet, mission
accomplished. He'd secured mining rights and turned
the leaders of this province away from dealing with the
oppressive Klingons. Now look.
Unfortunately the Klingons hadn't gone away pouting.
They weren't satisfied at having been legitimately edged
out. If they couldn't have this planet by trickery or
bribery, they would take it by force. They'd come in with
the sunrise over this region.
Leaning his communicator hand on his bruised knee,
Kirk paused to catch his breath and scan the battlefield.
It figured. Just when he got complacent, easy in his place
as a spacelanes wagoneer, the universe snapped his axle.
This was nonaligned space, and that was the problem.
Having made the treaty, Kirk was obliged to veer back in
and protect the Capellans against the insulted Klingons.
It was a good thing he was obliged to come in, because he
was mad and would've come in anyway.
He had ninety-four men on the ground, plus sixty
Capellans from the nearest tribe. Others had been summoned
in the night from far-distant tribes, but they
wouldn't make it in time. The battle was here and now.
The next few minutes would tell.
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FIRST STRIKE
The line of Starfleet crewmen was jagged because of
the terrain of bulging rocks. Above them, in the taller
and deeper rocks, native Capellans bombarded the oncoming
enemies with stones and sling-pellets. Not
deadly, but confusing. Soon the enemy would be funneled
into withering fire from the Starfleet hand phasers.
The enemy surge was a litter of silver tunics and black
sleeves, dark beards and sweaty bronze complexions,
faces furious as if their land were being snatched instead
of the other way around.
"Kirk to Enterprise," he said again, then again. With
bloody fingers he tried to adjust the gain. "Enterprise, come in. Mr. Scott, come in."
The instrument only crackled back at him. No answer.
He readjusted it for local communication.
"Kirk to Spock. Kirk to Spock..."
Nothing.
He looked up, scanned the bright rocks for the form of
his first officer.
There was no other slash of color like Spock in this
battlescape. All other Starfleet forces were command or
security troops, wearing gold or red tunics. Commander
Spock's lone blue shirt stood out. Among the hundreds
of Terrans, Capellans, and Klingons, he was the only
Vulcan.
He had been the only Vulcan for a long time, the first
in Starfleet, and bore his solitude with grace. Kirk
watched with appreciation, but also annoyance. Why
wasn't Spock pulling out his communicator and answering?
The Dakota-like terrain, baked by midday sun a few
shades brighter than Earth's, was hot and dry as baked
clay. His men maneuvered in companies of twenty, each
under a lieutenant. If he couldn't talk to them, how
could they be ef fective?
The captain slid to one knee, barely realizing his own
flash of weakness, and shook the communicator.
"Kirk to Spock, come in!"
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Diane Carey Neutralized somehow. He couldn't reach the ship, but
also couldn't reach his own men down here. Without
communicators, he was back in the 1800s, orchestrating
ground assault with hand signals, smoke, and mirrors.
He looked around, picked a huddle of his own troops down the incline, and skidded toward them.
"Jim! Where'd you come from?"
Kirk waved at the dust he'd raised and looked toward
the voice.
Ship's surgeon Leonard McCoy's face was almost
unrecognizable, his squarish features coated with sand,
brown hair caked with sweaty dust until it was the same
color as his face. His tunic, the only other blue one on
the terrain, wasn't very blue anymore.
"What happened to you?" Kirk asked.
"What d'you mean, what happened to me? Klingons
all over the place, Capellans knocking me down left and
right, and Spock doing his Wellington imitation in my
face!"
"Give me your communicator." Without waiting he
snatched the doctor's communicator from his belt and snapped it open. "Kirk to Enterprise."
The empty crackle aggravated him.
"Kirk to Spock. Kirk to anybody."
"What's wrong, sir?" A skinny lieutenant named Ban-non
sagged back against a rock for a moment's rest and
knuckled his dust-reddened eyes.
"Instrument failure. Try yours."
The red-haired lieutenant tried, then looked up guiltily
when he failed. "Sir..."
"You too," Kirk said to the three others, all ensigns,
huddled in this clutch of rocks.
"How can they all be broken down?" McCoy asked as
Kirk tossed him his communicator. He rattled it at his
ear.
"They can't."
Lieutenant Bannon rubbed his bruised jaw. "Can't we
reach the ship, sir? They could break through the com
44 FIRST STRIKE
munications trouble from Lieutenant Uhura's console,
couldn't they?"
Nettled, Kirk frowned until his face hurt and didn't
meet Bannon's questioning eyes. "Probably."
One of the ensigns glanced at Bannon, then asked,
"Does that mean they're in trouble up there? They can't
come after us?"
"Don't worry," McCoy supplied, sparing Kirk having
to answer. "Mr. Scott's a no-guff man. He'd step over
anybody's line. I wouldn't get in his way. If the Klingons
do, it's their own bad luck."
Kirk looked out between two knuckles of rock at the
Starfleet company nearest to the ramp. "That's Lieutenant
Doyle's group. Phasers up... they're looking for a
target. Awfully quiet down there all of a sudden..."
"Maybe the Klingons are retreating," McCoy suggested
with hope in his blue eyes.
"Not likely." Kirk leaned forward with both hands on
the rocks. "The local Klingon commander's in trouble.
He lost his mining deal with this planet when we showed