"Alright, Zhang – what's the situation?" Scotty pulled his uniform jersey on as he crossed the control room, and combed his fingers through his hair. As the Ensign had only been on board the Sherman for a few weeks, Scott's first thought was that the young officer had misread the readouts – and God help him if he had.
"A Klingon vessel, sir, on an approach vector," said Zhang. He was standing in front of the central control console, which was quartered into inward-facing stations with a monitor atop of each. The Ensign indicated the monitor he was facing, then switched the image to the room's main viewscreen so that everyone could see it.
"Damn," said Scotty, under his breath. There was no mistake: the energy signature of the vessel at the extreme range of the scanners was, indeed, Klingon – and a D6 Warbird at that. If Zhang hadn't been running a check on those systems… "Kill that blasted klaxon, will you, Ensign – we all heard it!" In the stillness that followed, Scotty suddenly understood the phrase 'the burden of command'. Nineteen people were looking right at him, as though he had some idea what to do, and the only one who didn't look plain scared was Simon Angelus – and that was because he looked scared and relieved, no doubt thanking his stars that he wasn't going to be the one making the decisions today. "Okay." Think… think! What do we need? That was easy – help! "Angelus, get on the comm channel and send a distress signal. The Sherman might still be in range, and if they're not…"
"We can't, sir." A young redheaded technician spoke up, and Scotty remembered assigning her and her team to the communications relays. "We just finished taking out the old sub-space systems ten minutes ago – we haven't gotten around to putting the new ones in yet." She looked at the two men flanking her as though requiring back up, as she went on: "We only have internal channels working right now. Sorry."
He gave her a hard stare, though he knew he was being unfair: none of them could have foreseen that they would need those systems in quite such a hurry. "We'll all be sorry if you don't get back in there and get them connected, Murray!" He nodded at Tallamy. "Mike, go give them a hand."
"It'll take…"
"… at least three hours, yes. By which time the Klingons will be within jamming range. See if you can find a few short cuts."
"Will do."
The four of them left at a run, and Scotty looked round at the remaining crew. "Alright," he said, bracing his hands on his hips, "Tell me what we have got."
A half-hour later, he was re-reading the briefing Nogura had put on his tricorder, wondering if he had missed anything, overlooked some clue as to why the Klingons were coming toward them. More importantly, was there anything in it that would help him keep them away!
He had a team working on enhancing the station's shields and transporter screens; and another assembling backups for both. If the Klingons wanted to get onto the station, they'd have to do it the hard way: through the air-lock – and Scotty had sent Rachel and a couple of technicians to seal that shut. He'd also put a couple of teams to work installing force-field generators in the central maintenance shaft, and Lieutenant Hill and Ensign Nunez had been sent to fetch the contents of the weapons store-room. Simon Angelus was sitting at a console opposite Scotty, double-checking the station inventory to see if there was anything else they might adapt, patch together, cross-circuit or overload. Of course, if the Klingons were intent on simply vaporising the station, there really wasn't a whole lot any of them would be able to do about it – they had no phasers, no photon torpedoes, not even any anti-matter to beam into the Warbird's path.
Scotty glanced at the onrushing image on the control room's main monitor screen – and realised that the reason for the Klingon attack was staring him in the face. "It's the scanners."
Angelus gave him a blank stare. "What's the scanners?" He looked at the monitor screen, back at Scott. "There's nothing wrong with them, if that's what you're driving at."
"They're perfect, Simon, that's what I'm driving at!" He tapped his tricorder, and pointed at the screen. "Nogura said that most of the station's systems had not been upgraded for thirty years. But all the scanners have. They've been replaced every few years for the past decade. Why do you suppose that is?"
He saw understanding dawn in Angelus' eyes. "Magellan is a listening post!"
"Aye, and one the Klingons have got wise to."
The same thought occurred to both of them together: "They're going to blow it apart!"
"Scotty, we have to stop them!"
The full-stripe braid on Angelus' sleeve caught the light as he jumped to his feet, and Scotty wondered if Nogura had had this much of a challenge in mind when he had ignored Angelus' seniority and put a Junior Grade Lieutenant in charge of the mission. I have got to learn not to talk to pretty women at the back of the room. It never ends well¸ he thought. Aloud, he said: "And your idea is…?"
Angelus began to discount options, ticking them off with his fingers as he spoke: "They don't know we're here - we can't contact them – they probably wouldn't care if we did – we can't move the station – we can't escape ourselves…"
"Escape!" Scotty snapped his fingers, "That's it!" He pulled up the station schematics on the wall monitor. "There's an escape pod for the station staff in case of emergency."
"But it only holds four!"
"I'm not intending for it to hold anybody – the Klingons will probably use it for target practice – but it has its own independent distress-call system! I can program it to sent a squirt message for help to the Sherman, and broadcast an overlaid shorter-range message in an old code that the Klingons will pick up."
"Saying what? 'Don't shoot'?"
"No." Scotty grabbed a toolkit, glad of having something technical to do. "Saying 'please assist, under Klingon attack, imperative they do not access our memory banks' – or something like that." He shrugged. "I'll sort out the finer points while I work. Keep on with that inventory, Simon – I'll be back in ten minutes. I hope."
"Um... external communications have been re-established, sir," said Murray, walking back into the control room just as the Klingons' ultimatum to 'surrender or die' echoed around the station.
Scotty nodded an acknowledgement, while Angelus jerked a thumb in the direction of the nearest speaker. "Yeah, we got the message. Thanks."
"Look on the bright side," said Tallamy, who was lying prone on the floor, looking down into an open maintenance conduit, "At least we're not about to be reduced to our component atoms."
"Not yet anyway," muttered Angelus.
"Don't suppose anyone's up for surrendering?" Tony Hill's English accent preceded his blond head out of the access hatch next to Tallamy, and he held up his hands as everyone else in the room growled and glared at him. "Alright, alright! Just making sure we'd explored all the options! I don't care for the other one much!"
"We're not going to die," said Scotty, getting to his feet and checking that everyone was back in the control room, "Not if I have anything to do with it. If you've finished tying in the shield backups, Tony, get out of there. Lieutenant Angelus has finished the inventory, and I need everyone to take a look at it and see if they spot anything potentially useful - beyond the obvious, I mean." He turned to Angelus. "Put the information up on the main screen, will you, Simon? Flag the items we've already identified for use."
While Hill and Tallamy picked up their tools and replaced the conduit's access panel, Angelus fed the information from his monitor to the main screen. Green asterisks had been placed beside engineering and agricultural implements, and question marks next to medical equipment. The rest of the list mainly consisted of medicines, office supplies, non-perishable food, and seeds.
"Um… Mr Scott?" Ensign Zhang pointed at the screen as he spoke, puzzlement etching his features. "There are two spare warp nacelles in the Ships' Spares section – and you've flagged them for use? How?"
Scotty smiled. "By using the station's own transporter," he said, tripping a toggle to put a schematic of the station on the screen. "That sealed airlock isn't going to keep the Klingons out for long, it'll buy us a little time is all. Once they get inside the station, there are four routes to this room: the turbolift; the main corridor; the central maintenance shaft; and the long way around via the main storage areas. Now, we can sabotage the turbolifts but we need a quick and easy way to block the other approaches. Once we've got everything we need out of the store rooms, I'm going to beam one of those nacelles into the stores' corridor, and the other nacelle into the main corridor."
"But they're too big! The passageways aren't nearly wide enough to… Oh." Scotty saw understanding cross the Ensign's face.
"Exactly," he said, "The nacelles won't fit. They'll actually fuse with the corridor walls and the rock behind, and form a solid barricade."
"Holy cow!" he heard someone mutter.
"Wow!" Rachel's voice sounded strained, but she managed a wan grin. "Do you know how much those things cost?"
She clearly hadn't meant for him to take her question seriously, but he answered it all the same. "Starfleet can build more nacelles. They can't build more of any of us." He switched the screen back to the list of stores. "And we still have the central maintenance shaft to deal with, because that's the way the Klingons will have to come at us. That means we have got…" He checked the chronometer on the console in front of him, "… less than two hours to block, booby-trap, and barricade it." He pointed at the list on the viewscreen. "Any suggestions?"
"Well… some of those medicinal items could probably be combined to make a tranquiliser, or gas-grenade?" ventured Nunez, after a moment.
Scotty nodded. "Check it out on the computer – unless anyone here majored in chemistry?"
As Nunez slid into a chair beside one of the workstations and began to interrogate the system, one of the technicians spoke up. "Er… they've also got trico-triticale seeds listed, sir. We might be able to use those."
"Trico-triticale seeds?" Scotty spent precious seconds racking his brains trying to work that one out before deciding that Reinhardt must have misunderstood the situation. "Werner, I'll put this as simply as I can. We're the three little pigs, and the big, bad wolf is coming to get us. The last thing we need is straw!"
"It's not straw – it's wheat." Reinhardt shook his head. "In any case, that's irrelevant. The seeds are the important thing. They're small, hard and spherical – like those ball-bearings they used to use, anyone seen those in the engineering museum? Just spill them on the floors and watch the Klingons fall over!"
Scotty grinned. "Sounds like a shortcut to really pissing them off," he said, "Go get the seeds, Reinhardt – and Ngaio, go help him. But don't spill anything till we're good and ready!"
The two technicians left at a run, and Scotty switched the main viewscreen back to the external scan. The Warbird was much closer now. There was nothing to give it scale, but Scotty knew that it was 300 feet long and could carry a crew of over 200. If the Sherman didn't get back here within the next few hours, chances were there'd be no-one left for them to rescue.
