Forge’s lead and raked his nails down his aching ear. The shock of pain brought tears to his eyes and his stomach knotted into nausea, and though it had been a day since he could last remember eating, he brought up bile and gagged.
But when he could look up again, there were no more visions to torment him. Instead, before him stood a gray-skinned, large-eared Reman female whose eyes were hidden behind a visor of solid black. Her long leather cloak shimmered with iridescent colors like the shell of a scarab.
“Very well,” the Reman said. Her voice was harsh and guttural. But even then Picard knew she was Norinda. At last in a guise that elicited no unwanted response. “Ask your questions, Picard. Whatever you want to know, I will tell you.”
18
PROCESSING SEGMENT 3, CARGO TERMINAL, STARDATE 57486.9
Kirk had been prepared to launch a full assault on any Romulans outside the airlock, but the presence of Remans made him reconsider.
One Reman would be challenging. But three of them—when he was handicapped by an environmental suit? Rushing out, fists flying, no longer seemed appealing. So Kirk changed tactics on the fly. Quickly motioning to McCoy to stay put, he marched up to the first Reman, gave the Romulan salute, and then, because he knew that saying anything in Federation Standard would give the Remans reason enough to attack, he began cursing them out with every word Joseph had brought back from Quark’s holosuites on Deep Space 9, heavy on the references to Tellarite anatomy, and taking great pains to growl in the back of his throat on the appropriate Klingon syllables, all the while waving the green-metal cane.
The unorthodox approach had the proper effect. The Remans remained in position, making no move against Kirk or McCoy. Their helmets had no visible visors at all, but from slight changes in their posture, Kirk could see that they were all engaged in a conversation, though on a com channel his helmet wasn’t picking up.
Successful as the tactic was, Kirk knew it was vulnerable to a more forceful set of orders from the Assessors on the other side of the airlock. It was time for his next diversion.
He fell into the rhythm of the swinging cane, keeping it flashing hypnotically, he hoped, until he raised his other hand and the cane became his bat’leth. Without missing a beat of his recitation of words Joseph was not allowed to say, Kirk slashed the curved handle of the metal cane into the helmet of the first Reman in his best approximation of the k’rel tagh stroke of major severance.
The first Reman staggered back, gloved hands on his helmet, and even as the second Reman began to lunge for Kirk, he used the momentum of his first strike to deliver a partial k’rel meen blow to the second Reman’s chest, knocking him off balance.
Then, in a move that had no name in the catalogue of ritual bat’leth combat, Kirk let the cane slide through his glove until it was at full extension, and used the curved handle to catch the second Reman’s boot and yank it forward, making him fall back into the third Reman.
The need for caution gone, Kirk yelled at McCoy to run, then spun the cane up into a rifle grip, and used it like a pole to punch the first Reman in the gut, forcing him into a crouch, making it easy for Kirk to swing the cane around and bring it down like a club on the back of the Reman’s helmet.
The last Reman standing dropped limply to the metal deck beside his struggling companions, and Kirk saw self-sealing pressure foam bubble up from a hairline crack in the helmet.
Surprised at first that he had been able to crack a vacuum helmet with only the strength in his arms, he realized a moment later that Remans would not necessarily be outfitted in the most robust of equipment, the result of some Romulan Assessor’s cold and cruel calculation of the balance between the worth of a Reman slave’s life and the cost of a properly reinforced helmet. At least the helmet had a self-repair capability.
Kirk swung at the other Remans with all his might, until they too, remained on the deck, pressure foam swelling to encase their own damaged helmets.
Less than a minute after the airlock door opened into the rock chamber, Kirk tossed the metal cane to McCoy and together they rushed out into the crater itself.
In the distance, red-suited Remans and yellow-suited Assessors stopped their individual activities—staring at the two interlopers who had suddenly appeared on the crater floor.
But Kirk was still confident of reaching the spacecraft he’d already selected as his first choice. The Remans and Assessors were just far enough away that he and McCoy still could make it.
The small transport shuttle with an attached warp pod was only one hundred meters distant, and it was still unguarded. Kirk had seen the craft from the observation window, parked in a landing ring marked with the Imperial emblem, connected to power and air umbilicals.
The small craft’s warp pod was too small to contain a Romulan singularity drive, or hold enough antimatter for a trip to the nearest star, so the shuttle was most likely a VIP transport used to ferry Romulan inspectors to and from the homeworld in short bursts of warp speed. But as a VIP transport, Kirk was counting on it to be fully equipped. For what he had planned, the shuttle’s range was a secondary issue.
But as he and McCoy headed for the shuttle—McCoy’s breathing becoming more and more labored and his awkward cane-assisted gait threatening to topple him to the ground—Kirk saw he hadn’t considered the ramifications of one feature of the craft.
It was so small that, like a Starfleet shuttle, it had no airlock. But Kirk had not asked himself why it was parked in the open, deadly atmosphere.
The question and the answer collided in his mind as he saw the small transport slowly begin to descend into the crater floor.
The shuttle was parked on an elevator pad, one that would drop down to an airlock chamber. If he couldn’t reach the craft before the chamber roof closed over it, he and McCoy would lose their best—perhaps only—chance for escape.
Telling McCoy to keep moving as quickly as he could, Kirk broke into a sprint and forged ahead, challenged for breath himself by the twin burdens of Reman gravity and the bulky environmental suit.
By the time he reached the edge of the crater floor, the landing pad had dropped two meters.
Kirk knew he had no choice, and so he leapt without hesitation, fully aware that the extra mass of the suit would be no friend to him. Plummeting with unnatural speed, bending his knees and hitting the pad as if he were coming down on a fast orbital parachute descent, Kirk rolled onto his side to spread the energy of impact over the largest surface area he could.
Despite his best efforts, the landing was hard. So hard Kirk’s chest went into spasm and he couldn’t breathe.
But neither could he wait until breath returned to him. McCoy could never make that jump. And if the shuttle reached the airlock chamber below…Kirk knew he’d never be able to climb back up to the crater floor to try for another craft.
It was this shuttle, or nothing.
Black stars flickering at the edge of his vision, Kirk forced himself to his feet, scrambling for the shuttle’s hatch.
He pulled the release switch. The hatch wasn’t locked. It swung open in a cloud of normal atmosphere venting from within.
Kirk pulled himself inside, checked quickly to be certain there was no one in the passenger cabin, then forced himself into the pilot’s chair and at last gulped down air, able to breathe again.
The shuttle was powered up, the controls familiar. He had flown Romulan craft before and the basics remained the basics.
Kirk dispensed with any type of preflight check. Either this would work, or it would not.
He looked out through the main viewport. He could see the airlock chamber roof was at eye level, already beginning to close. He estimated he had twenty seconds. After that, the shuttle would have descended far enough that the roof could close over it.
