Disclaimer: Enterprise, Star Trek and all related characters are the property of Paramount Pictures, Inc. No copyright infringement is intended. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money has changed hands. The original characters and events are the sole property of the author and may not be used without permission.
"Derelict (Pt. III)"
by Darrin Colbourne
Archer and Will dove back inside the lift car as the energy blasts hit the nearby walls. They stood upright when they were on either side of the open door. Energy blasts were still pouring in as they heard footsteps running toward them and drew their weapons.
"These phase pistols work as well as that transporter?" Will said.
"No better time to find out!" Archer said as they turned out the door and opened fire. This time it was the attackers' turn to dive. One wasn't quite fast enough. Will's beam hit him squarely in the head and he went down hard. The other rolled around on the deck, trying to keep from being hit as he lined up his next shot.
Archer had no intention of waiting for him. He ducked back into the lift. "Controller!" He said as he grabbed one of the switches. Will ducked in and grabbed the other, leaving the attacker free to fire into the car again.
"Armory!" Archer called out, praying that this ship had one. He got the answer he wanted. The lift car closed and moved again. The Captain whipped out his communicator.
"Archer to T'Pol and Tucker! Just listen..."
"...ambushed at the transporter room!" T'Pol heard as the lift car slowed down. "Don't go near there! Take the lift to this ship's Armory!"
Sato was still processing the information when T'Pol drew her weapon and the door opened. Energy blasts flew in immediately. She stretched her arm out the door and returned fire blindly, causing the attackers to back off. She never let go of the controller.
"Armory." She said as she ducked back in. The lift closed again and moved.
Tucker and Mercurio changed their destination while the lift was still in motion. The Chief Engineer checked the setting on his phase pistol while they waited for the lift to get where it was going.
"What if the bad guys get the same idea?" Mercurio said.
"Then we just have to beat 'em to it." Tucker said.
"Firing!" Reed said. Enterprise's phase cannons cut loose, lancing the fast enemy ship with energy beams. Thanks to modifications made by Reed and Tucker over the past few weeks, the weapons were almost as powerful as they had been when they were first used against the ship's strange, silent enemy. Unfortunately, they still weren't doing enough damage to their current target.
"Blast!" Reed said. "It's diminishing their shields but we're still not getting through! Keep them in our sights!"
"Coming about!" Mayweather said as he swung the ship to follow the maneuvers of the attacker. Meanwhile, Ulysses was finally in attack position. The older Starfleet ship let loose a barrage of pulse blasts, but the hits had no effect.
"Hail Ulysses!" Reed said to the crewman at the comm station. "I have an idea."
Archer and Will exited the lift and swept their phase pistols ahead of them as they searched the corridor, looking for the mystery ship's weapons cache. They found it around a bend and went in.
There were hundreds of weapons in storage racks along the walls, strange but recognizable for what they were, rifles, pistols, mortars and the like. "Go out in the hall and wait for the others." Archer said. "Take out anyone else who comes near the place."
Will rushed back out of the room while Archer started pulling promising items off the racks. It wasn't long before T'Pol and Sato came rushing in. About a minute later Will returned with Tucker and Mercurio in tow. They shut the door to the Armory, but couldn't figure out how to lock it.
"They'll be here any minute." Tucker said. "I can't believe they won't be able to figure out where we've gone."
"They may not care." Archer said. "They ambushed us at the transporter room, but didn't try to keep all of us in the separate areas of the ship."
"They want to keep us here," T'Pol said. "The transporter is the most effective way off the ship."
"And with Enterprise under attack, we don't have its transporter to get us out of here either." Archer said as he started passing out the items he'd been gathering.
"What is this?" Will said, as he took the boxy-looking weapon Archer handed him.
"I think they're phase rifles of some kind." Archer said. "There seem to be setting controls for the beam emissions."
Tucker looked his new weapon over dubiously, his mouth twisting up as he looked at the emitter. "They gotta be kidding! This looks like that big deflector on the front of the ship! It's like a ray gun from an old movie!"
"That's the first thing I thought." Archer said. "Let's hope it functions more seriously than it looks. We'll have to combat assault the transporter room. We don't know how many people we'll be facing but I'm sure it will be a lot more than we've seen, so we'll need more firepower than what we're carrying. If these things work, we may be able to use them to tip the balance in our favor."
"If they work." Will said. "Not much on the ship does."
"Let's test them." Mercurio said.
"How would we do that?" T'Pol said.
Mercurio looked around. Her gaze stopped on a desk in the space. It was probably where a crewman sat to sign out weapons. She turned the setting on her phase rifle up to full, aimed at the desk and pressed the contact.
The beam that came out was more solid than the ones from the phase pistols, and the emission sounded more like a high-pitched purring than an electronic whine, but the weapon was effective. The desk turned several bright colors and disappeared in a series of hazy after-images, leaving behind a desk-shaped smoking burn on the floor.
Mercurio looked back at the others. "I think they work." She said, sheepishly.
"Just watch where you point that thing." Tucker said, with a half-smile.
"Good work, Ensign," Archer said, "but let's keep these things on a lower setting. I want information from whoever's attacking us, and they can't tell us anything from oblivion. T'Pol, can we get back to the transporter room without using the transit system?"
T'Pol checked her scanner. "There are several emergency stairwells throughout the ship, however, we are deep in the cylindrical hull, and would have to traverse several decks to get to the transporter room in the saucer."
"I'm up for some exercise." Will said.
"That's good to hear," Archer said, "but time is the real problem. We don't know what's happening to our ships right now, and I don't want to be gallivanting through this monster on foot while it happens."
"We could just call up and ask." Sato said.
"I believe Lieutenant Reed is too busy at the moment to answer." T'Pol said.
"She's right." Will said. "Enterprise and Ulysses are probably both engaged right now."
"But you'd have to call Enterprise anyway to get us transported back up." Mercurio said.
"I've been thinking about that," Archer said, "and I've got a better idea. Reed will probably come back on his own to get us, and with an armed boarding party roaming around our main priority is to get off this ship, not on to our own. If T'Pol can get the transporter here to work, she can transport us to the planet's surface somewhere far away, hopefully somewhere far enough that the bad guys don't come looking for us. Then we can--"
He was cut off by the sound of the door opening. Two of the gunmen burst in and started firing, causing everyone to duck for cover. Sato was hit before she could get far and went down. Mercurio and T'Pol managed to bring their phase rifles to bear and returned fire, downing one attacker and driving the other off.
"'Trip', Will, after him!" Archer said, and the two officers raced out into the corridor.
T'Pol went over to Sato and checked her pulse and breathing. "She is alive," She said, "but stunned."
"So they don't want to kill us--yet." Archer said. He went to check the body of the attacker. This person was dead. Apparently they hadn't quite figured out the settings on the new weapons correctly. He was reaching for the gunman's mask as Tucker and Will returned.
"He got to the lift before we could stop him." Tucker said.
"We won't be learning anything from this one." Archer said. "We'll move soon. Sato is out cold, so we'll have to figure out how to..."
He stopped when he saw T'Pol walk out with Sato slung over her shoulder, followed by Mercurio carrying three rifles. He'd forgotten that Vulcans were supposed to be stronger than humans. T'Pol didn't seem to be showing any strain at all.
Archer turned his attention back to the attacker. He reached down and pulled off the black facemask. What he saw made him grimace.
The face was Human.
"We'll use the lift." He said. "Hit the transporter room and then wait for Malcolm on the surface. 'Trip', watch our back, Mercurio, take point. Let's go."
The group got set up with T'Pol and Sato in the center and moved to the lift.
"Stay with him!" Reed commanded, as he tried frantically to keep a phase cannon lock on the enemy vessel. The attacker was now salvoing energy beams at both Starfleet ships, requiring punishing evasive maneuvers to be made by the helmsmen.
"It's getting tougher!" Mayweather said as his hands worked the control yoke and impulse throttles.
"Just a little longer." Malcolm said. "Ulysses is almost ready...firing!!"
Two long beams shot out from Enterprise's phase cannons, boring into one particular point on the alien ship's starboard engine nacelle. A split-second after they impacted, Ulysses launched two torpedoes, which impacted on the same point as the phase blasts weakened the enemy shields. There was a satisfying explosion as the rush of firepower broke through the shielding in that area. Enterprise salvoed two torpedos of its own, and the impact damaged the nacelle and sent the craft spinning and venting plasma. Enterprise and Ulysses poured it on, hammering the ship with pulse and phase blasts until it tumbled uncontrolled into a low, unstable orbit around Coogan's World.
"It's spiraling in!" Mayweather said.
"Tracking!" Reed said. He'd done a better job than he planned. If it crashed, they might never get the answers Archer wanted. He tied his sensor controls into T'Pol's. "There are some biosigns, but they're jumbled, as if they don't want anyone to know who's aboard."
"They're moving too fast to use the transporter." Mayweather said. "The ship will burn up in the atmosphere before we can do anything."
"Bloody Hell." Reed growled under his breath.
"How are you doing, T'Pol?" Archer said as he ran up the next flight of steps.
"I am fine, Captain." T'Pol said. Even with her burden she didn't sound all that tired.
They'd ended up taking the stairs after all. The attackers had apparently had better luck with the mystery ship's systems than Archer's party had. They had shut down all the lift cars in the transit system, leaving archer and his people no choice but to try to get to the transporter room on foot.
Archer stopped at the top of the landing. "Where are we now?" He asked.
T'Pol used her free hand to check her computer. "We're at the bottom of the stem that connects the Saucer to the Cylinder. This is mainly a service and utility space. There is one more flight of stairs, and then we must climb a series of ladders through an emergency access tunnel."
"All the way up?!" Tucker said, incredulous.
"Can you make it with Sato on your back?" Archer said.
"It is...doubtful." T'Pol said.
"Well, Captain?" Will said.
Archer thought about it for a moment. "We could make it without Sato, but we can't leave her, and who knows what the bad guys will have waiting for us along the way. We'll just have to take our chances and call Malcolm. Let's get to a more open area of the ship first."
"There aren't any spaces more open than the Engine Room and the Shuttle Bay." Mercurio offered. T'Pol checked her computer.
"The Engine Room is closer." The Vulcan said.
"Engine Room it is." Archer said. "Let's go."
The party backtracked its course, descending two decks before heading aft down a long corridor. They were about to make the first turn when they felt a slight rumble shake through the deck. It stopped them in their tracks as it built to a crescendo, vibrating the hull around them.
"I think the Engine Room is probably not a good place to go." Mercurio said.
"Why is that?" Will said.
"Because they might have just started the Impulse Engines." Tucker said.
Then the rumble was accompanied by a creaking sound, a loud wrenching noise that echoed through the hull, as if the ship were being torn apart. There was a quick, weird noise, which Tucker could only describe as air shooting through an underwater tunnel, and suddenly the ship shook with what sounded like thunder, but felt more like the world was breaking apart chunk by chunk.
Then it hit Archer. It wasn't the whole world breaking up.
"Uh-oh..." he said, just before a series of tilts threw his people into the bulkheads. They were all on the floor when the rocking subsided. T'Pol had lost Sato, but had made sure the communications officer hadn't hit her head or suffered any serious damage.
"If they can make this ship move, then we can take it over!" Archer said. "The Engine Room is exactly where we need to go!" He picked himself up as he said it, but another violent motion threw them all aft as the rumbling grew louder and more strident. Then the rumble quieted down to a background tone and the tremors ceased.
"What happened?" Mercurio said as she sat up. "Did we stop moving?"
She was a little slow to figure it out. "Don't count on it." Tucker said.
"The Inertial Dampening and Artificial Gravity Systems are now on line." T'Pol said.
Mayweather followed the alien ship until it went into the atmosphere. The ship's course was marked by a long, white-orange streak that ended abruptly over one of the world's small seas.
"Keep going around." Reed said. "Bring us back into orbit over the mystery ship."
"Aye, Sir." Mayweather said as he pulled into a higher orbit and accelerated.
"Sir, Ulysses is hailing us." The crewman running the comm said.
"Put them through." Reed said. Bridling appeared on the screen with a look of shock on his face as he stared at another monitor.
"Lieutenant," He said, "we've got a problem. The mystery ship is moving!"
Reed went pale. "Get us there, Mr. Mayweather, Full Impulse! Bridling, don't let that ship out of your sight! Corda, hail Captain Archer!"
Corda tried to contact the Captain. "No response, Sir. I don't think he's receiving."
"It's coming up fast!" Bridling said. "It'll be around the Southern Pole by the time you get back over it's start point."
"Send us the coordinates, Bridling! Mayweather, set course to intercept."
Everyone acknowledged, then Bridling's face went off the screen. Reed stared intently at the planet's terminator as Mayweather maneuvered. Soon the pilot settled on a course and leveled out. The horizon settled at the bottom just as a small white speck came rose from it.
The speck began to take shape as Mayweather got closer. Reed watched with rapt attention as the speck turned into a spot, then an upside down triangle, then started take shape as a vessel. Reed began to make out details. The saucer stood out first, then the gold, shiny deflector dish on the cylinder. The red Bussard Collector endcaps on the warp nacelles shone bright with energy, and the bright white hull made the two Starfleet ships look dark and sickly by comparison. What really struck Reed was how big the ship was getting as they closed. By the time the two ships came to a relative stop ten thousand meters apart, the saucer of the mystery ship had filled the viewscreen.
And somewhere inside that white hulk, Captain Jonathan Archer and the rest of the landing party were stuck, out of communication, possibly in danger, and most likely unaware of the momentous occasion unfolding around them.
Enterprise was facing off against...Enterprise...
TBC...