Chapter 8: Other Men Die
The goggles filtered the afternoon glare as Culber stepped to the window on the upper floor of the hall, near the sleeping quarters to look out over the monotonous stretch of fields outside.
His fingers ached and the inside of his skull felt chafed raw. He really wasn't this kind of doctor. He wasn't used to treating living patients or at least treat them with the intention of keeping them alive and in fighting condition. He researched toxic gas agents. He dissected lab subjects.
Nevertheless, he felt he had done a decent job of patching up what he could — and euthanised everyone he lacked the equipment or the time to help. Most everyone he had put back on their feet was now back in New Anchorage, leaving behind only a skeleton crew for protection, though what difference it would make was pretty much beyond him.
"Any news?" he asked when he sensed rather than saw Ferasini step to his side.
"Kodos' appointment hasn't been revoked and as a result, we maintain control of the city and the phaser batteries," she answered. "We have enough people to hold the city against the military forces on the planet, but the Defiant carries a complement of shook troops that could decimate us easily."
Culber stole a bemused look at her and caught her picking at the edge of the artificial skin on her face. It looked dried up, angry red coming up below patches of white. Artificial skin needed permanent maintenance until the body replaced it with its own tissue. He considered offering to treat her but found he was more interested in how long it would take her to ask him for help.
"That's why the phaser batteries will come in handy," he said.
Ferasini pulled her face and snipped a tiny flake from her cheek, then lowered her hand when she realised what she was doing and that he had noticed.
"And then what?"
"And then what what?" he asked back.
Angry, she crossed her arms over her chest. "What do we do next?"
Culber shrugged and said nothing. Personally, though he didn't feel like sharing the line of thought, Lorca had proven to be resourceful enough. He had turned himself from helpless prisoner into a conquerer — albeit a minor one — by riding on the coattails of circumstances, luck and his own, raw talents. He'd come up with something and it was out of Culber's hands anyway. So, instead of saying any of this, Culber turned back to look out over the fields and said, "Have you noticed he's not bothered by the light?"
She made a low sound, which he chose to interpret as vague interest.
"So what's your bet? Phenotypic difference or individual mutation?"
"You should dissect him and find out."
Culber chuckled to himself. "Not likely that I'll get the chance."
He had a shot of analgesic prepared for himself, which should get him through the first bouts of a stay in the agony booth, it wasn't his fault Ferasini had dismissed his offer.
"Did you notice anything about Captain Lorca when he was here?"
"It was night," Ferasini said in a tone that implied she was ready to finish the argument there and then. Culber shrugged, as amused at her seething anger as he was captivated by his musings on Lorca's physical disposition.
They fell silent again and Culber watched little puffs of white clouds mar the sky, wondered if there would be rain, tried to remember what weather control had scheduled for this month.
"He took the Rush pin," he said.
"And that surprises you?" she asked, quite incredulous. "I thought he was the only one who believes he's faking it."
"My dear Doctor Ferasini," Culber said, knew the too-friendly tone would just rile her. "I never said I was surprised."
"You…" she started and he was already fairly certain what she would say next. Not in her precise choice of words, but the sentiment had come through clearly several times already. She thought Captain Lorca had made a grave mistake when he put Culber in charge instead of her and she thought this strange, alien Lorca they had in their hands was either a pathetic pushover or a dangerous contender.
An alarm siren filled the building and the view Culber had sought out briefly flickered as the shield emitters they had put up come to life in a tight periphery.
"Would you look at that," Culber said as he watched the first escape pod fall like a shooting star from the tranquil clouds to bury itself into the field not far from them, charring and burning crops all around it.
Ferasini already flew into action. Back along the catwalk and down the steep ladder, shouting orders.
"You don't see that every day," Culber said, over his shoulder as if she was still close enough to hear him, or would have cared if she were. He turned back to the view and watched as the pods began to fall like hail.
Corpses littered the narrow outer door and narrow steps leading down to the subbasement of the phaser battery, where the control room was housed in a bunker just below. The short hallway and small, adjoining rooms —a common room, bathroom facilities and a handful of offices, storage and a small weapons' locker to supply personnel — all showed the same scorched signs of a fight.
Tyler picked his steps careful through the mess, making sure he didn't venture too close to someone before he wasn't sure they were really dead, finishing them off with a phaser blast rather than the more intimate knife.
Just outside, where the steps drew level with the pavement, he found the body of Commander Markannen, slumped where she had fallen. He put his boot to her side and she rolled to her back, her face still set in the faint expression of surprise she had worn during death, still stunned at the way events had unfolded.
The phaser battery sat in the middle of the city, in a small plaza surrounded only by the fence of thin spikes, the shield emitters to deter unauthorised approach. All around, the city was deserted, the lockdown firmly held in place by automated systems and the population's sense of self-preservation. Tyler's searching gaze found nothing and no one looking back at him, everyone shuttered away behind in-transparent screens blocking out not only the cruel glare of the sun but the harsh, prevailing reality.
Satisfied that no sniper was left to take a lucky shot, Tyler bent down to retrieve the knife from Commander Markannen's armpit. The blade had dug deep, right through the protective armour and into her heart behind her rib-cage. Tyler had to put his other hand to her shoulder to get enough leverage to tear it free.
He stood up and made his way back to the control room, carefully sealing each door on the way there, for whatever it was worth. While Kodos held the governor's seat, even Maddox would have trouble overriding the colony's computer system, it wouldn't last, but it didn't have to.
They had taken control of the other two phaser batteries as well, though only to find one of them taken off-grid for repairs. Repairs which, by the look of it, had been overdue for some time. Tyler racked his brain briefly for the report, but couldn't come up with anything. Maybe he had forgotten to sign up on it and here he was, paying the price. Lieutenant Leighton — re-united to Tyler's utter lack of surprise — with Cadet Moreau, had taken command of the second phaser battery which gave them control over the sum total of New Anchorage's defences.
In the control room, a central console encircled two targeting chairs and several workstations along the wall for support and maintenance. When Tyler entered, Lorca was standing in front of the central console, one arm extending and the other resting on his hip, watching at the view-screen in front of him.
The two-dimensional image rippled and tore, distorted almost beyond recognition.
"Permission to abandon ship, Captain?" a woman's voice asked and Tyler knew who this must be.
Lorca was still, in disconcerting contrast to the violence of not so long ago. Tyler stepped to him, finished wiping the knife clean of blood and offered it to him. The weapon was standard issue, nothing to distinguish it from the countless other knives stuck and lost inside an enemy because the rhythm of the fight had made it momentarily disadvantageous to retrieve. Tyler only knew it was Lorca's knife because he had seen him use it, had stood with the others as Lorca put himself at the front of them, to meet Markannen and her presumptuous demand for Lorca's surrender.
Lorca had never said a word, never hesitated, never even slowed down. He had dispatched her with a speed and ease, the soldiers around her had been as stunned as she was herself. There had been a fight afterwards, of course, but Tyler couldn't shake the feeling that this first, callous opening salvo had shaken these people to their core. To them, in a few precious seconds, it had been made clear just why half the galaxy was calling for Lorca's blood while trembling at the sound of his name, while the other half had fallen in line behind him and for him.
The thought had flashed through Tyler's mind then. What if this was no charade? What if this story about parallel universes was nothing but a fairy tale, meant to throw sand in the eyes of opponents and allies alike? Did this look like a man who was not the Gabriel Lorca the galaxy knew about?
Now, leaning against the console with his eyes cast down in thought, Lorca looked nothing but tired, his posture a badly disguised attempt to keep himself upright. Mere minutes ago, the black of his combat armour had given him the lean, lethal appearance of a killer, yet now it made him look like a haggard shadow about to fade. His face was pale and gaunt and his expression was blank.
"You're asking me, Commander?"
The woman on the screen chortled, shifting in the captain's chair. The image quality was too bad to truly assess her condition, but Tyler wouldn't have been surprised to learn she was badly injured, possibly dying. What he could make out of the bridge behind wasn't doing much better, either.
"No one… else," she croaked through the hysteria of her laughter. "No one else there to ask."
A beat, a cough.
Lorca didn't move a muscle.
"Permission to abandon ship, Captain?"
Without any visible change, Lorca spoke, voice pitched low and almost intimate. He said, "No need to go down with the ship, Commander. You don't need permission, I'm ordering you out of there. We clear?"
Tyler expected Landry to bark at the casual arrogance, but she only laughed again, the sound weak in her exhaustion.
"Yes, sir."
When the connection was cut, Tyler handed Lorca the knife he had retrieved, observing the remnants of practised grace as Lorca took it and bent down to slide it back into its sheath.
"Landry is already evacuating the crew via escape pods," Lorca informed him.
He paused and seemed like he wanted to say something else, then shook his head just slightly. He stood straight and then away from the console he'd been leaning against as if to prove he didn't need its support after all.
"Let's do our part," Lorca said, loud enough to hear the command in his voice. The two soldiers in the targeting seats booted up the system. With his back to them, Lorca stood facing the view-screen in front of him, paced a few steps before he stopped and crossed his arms over his chest.
The control room of the phaser bank was no bridge, smaller and with fewer systems. It had communications and was locked into the colony's wider computer network as well as an uplink to satellites in orbit to allow for more precise targeting, but it was not a starship, leaving Lorca momentarily at odds with where to go.
Tyler picked an empty computer console at the side of the room. He accessed their accumulated data and threw it on the small view-screen in front of Lorca, giving him something to focus on. With his back turned towards the room, Tyler couldn't see Lorca's face, but suspected it was set in concentration as he analysed the data Tyler was crunching in front of him.
The sensors had some difficulty picking out the Defiant in orbit, considerably more than Tyler had expected. It turned out, the recent battles had dislodged more than a handful of asteroids and damaged satellites. Debris of all sorts, not least the wreck of the Buran littered the atmosphere. Several of the larger pieces already triggered impact alarms when the system projected their flight path and the fact that they would crash into the surface of the planet.
Finding the Defiant in the chaos turned out to be easier than finding a weak spot for the phasers to target. There was no other ship of its class in the empire. They had similar ships, reverse-engineered from what had been advanced technology when the Defiant had first appeared, but they had applied terran logic to these designs. Lorca's universe followed completely different concepts and Tyler had no time to question Lorca about them.
"Wait," Lorca said, voice quiet and when he said nothing more, Tyler turned around to find Lorca looking up at the display.
"We can't shoot it down," he added.
Tyler hesitated for a second. "The phaser banks have enough firepower to…"
"No," Lorca snapped and frowned at Tyler and his incomprehension. "We can't. We shoot it down, we're stranded. The plan was to ride the Buran out of here, but that's not happening."
Tyler just watched the other man, aware that everything in him was straining to start an argument with his commanding officer in front of a number of other subordinates at the peak of a crisis. With a terran commander, it would be a death sentence. But Lorca didn't have any authority Tyler hadn't given him and he had put such a point on not being terran…
"We can't take the Defiant," Tyler said. "There's just no way…"
Though, inwardly the odds didn't seem quite as bleak. They probably had enough soldiers to take control of the Defiant, but it meant nothing because they were down on the planet, where Maddox could just pick them off using his superior firepower and equipment.
Lorca made a noise at the back of his throat, like a growl and a sigh, fuelled by exhaustion and resignation. He trailed a look over the view-screen and the pieces of analysis data littering it, some of them turning red as the Defiant approached. Lorca didn't bother to argue. With two strides, he was at Tyler's side, completely ignoring him as Lorca reached for the console.
One-handed, Lorca put in several data-points and Tyler observed as the attack pattern emerged for the phasers to target. Phaser banks, torpedo bays, shield emitters. Everything the Defiant needed to fight, but sparing her most basic functionality.
When he was done, Lorca stepped back as if nothing had happened at all and strode back to his central position.
He said, "Call Lieutenant Leighton. Audio only."
Unsure of how he felt about the situation, Tyler followed the order.
"Channel open," he announced, making sure nothing of his misgiving entered his voice.
"Lieutenant," Lorca said. "We need to keep the Defiant space-worthy, sync your targeting to my parameters. Don't blow that ship up, just make it stop firing at us."
There was a pause as the systems synced with each other and a tiny fraction of it longer, while Lieutenant Leighton, much like Tyler, considered the wisdom behind the tactic Lorca was running them on. Unlike Tyler, Leighton kept his tongue and gave only a curt, professional confirmation.
The phaser battery's control room sat right on top of the underground generator and a slight vibration climbed up through the floor as the phasers powered up, feeding the tension in the room.
Lorca took a step forward, staring at the view-screen as if he could will the phasers to find their mark with his intensity alone, watching the proximity counters change. The Defiant was finishing off the Buran, her shields would be up, but the phaser batteries of Tarsus IV were built to deal with an enemy fleet of ships. Planet-bound, they didn't have to worry about weight or size or power distribution in an enclosed space surrounded by a vacuum.
Completely focussed on the screen, Lorca raised both hands, one finger raised between the soldiers in the chairs behind him and the target in front of him.
"Ready to fire, sir," Tyler said and received only a slight tilt of Lorca's head in response.
"Target and fire on my mark," Lorca said. The Defiant slowed down a fraction and the sensors said it had stopped firing at the Buran because the ship had been torn apart. As it adjusted its orbit, several more of Lorca's preferred target lit up on the screen.
"Fire!"
The surge of energy made the entire room shiver like a great beast.
"Again!"
"Defiant shields at 84 per cent," Tyler announced. "Damage to the hull of the forward saucer section. Shield emitter grid is rebuilding. The Defiant is changing course."
"Target main sensor array," Lorca said. "Fire."
The room shook again. The rush of the energy so close, Tyler thought it brushed over him on the way into orbit. He imagined he could feel the powerful impacts as they shook through the shields.
Lorca had them lay down concerted fire along the hull of the Defiant, intentionally targeting either weapons' systems or non-essential parts of the ship until the sensors said they found a weakness in the shield distribution grid and Lorca concentrated fire on that.
"The Defiant will be within firing range in twenty-three seconds," Tyler said.
"Well, take out her phasers then," Lorca said, the sneer audibly pressed through his bared teeth.
They changed tack again, short, hard bursts aimed at the phasers, timed in accord with the second phaser battery to reduce load on their own. The Defiant was suffering shield strength fluctuations due to Lorca's focus on the distribution grid. Tyler set the computer to analyse it and within moments, he could time their shots to when the Defiant's shields would be at its weakest.
They punched through the shields. The phaser's power only slightly mitigated by the hull polarisation as it hit the outer hull and scratched the inner one.
Lorca made a low sound in his throat, it sounded triumphant, but he otherwise kept his composure firmly in place. The battle commanders Tyler had known so far would usually take time out to gloat, trusting their crews not to waste an advantage, but Lorca seemed far too aware of how precarious their situation was.
If Maddox was smart, he'd retreat and save his ship from further damage. The Tarsus phaser batteries were built to engage a fleet of ships, with all firepower aimed at just one, the Defiant didn't stand a chance. This battle could be won on ground level and easily for Maddox. He should find a spot nearby when he could drop his shields and beam down his shock troops. He could overrun New Anchorage in a few hours, but the Defiant didn't budge.
"We're being targeted," Tyler said when the warning flashed in front of him. "We should be able to withstand them for a while, but…" But I'm not sure if we can outlast them.
Lorca wasn't the only captain with an intuitive understanding of battle. Maddox had earned his place, too. Perhaps Maddox was blinded by his need for revenge, but he wasn't stupid enough to throw it all away for nothing.
Lorca turned his head towards Tyler, expression stony and unreadable except for the slightest cant of an eyebrow. Pitching his voice a little lower, Lorca said, "Finish your sentences, Commander, I have no time for guessing games."
Smarting under the reprimand more than seemed necessary, Tyler cleared his throat and said, "If the Defiant doesn't retreat and we can't disable her phasers, we'll be blown up."
Something akin to a smirk stole itself onto Lorca's face just as he turned his attention back to the screen. He took a breath, like bracing himself and his voice lost the hint of familiarity it had held just before.
"I know, so let's not do that. Time our shots with theirs, target the phaser muzzles, but fire at half power to limit the damage."
The shrilling of a red alert siren filled the room just ahead of the first phaser impact from the Defiant. Tyler input the new orders and the two soldiers at the phaser controls took them.
Tyler glanced over the sensor readings to gauge the situation outside. New Anchorage was still deserted, the lockdown still in effect, but even without it, people weren't stupid enough to run around outside while they were under a phaser bombardment from orbit. Some of the surrounding buildings had already suffered, slowly turning the city into a war zone.
The room shook and shuddered constantly now, as the Defiant gave as good as it was getting. Other than that, the silence in the room was nearly absolute. Intensity was coming off Lorca in waves, his hands still raised at the view-screen as if he was conducting the phasers, following along to interfere the moment he needed to make an adjustment to their aim.
"Sh…" Tyler hissed, stopped himself from cursing. "Captain, the Defiant has launched two torpedoes. Six seconds to impact. One at us, one at the other battery. The target…"
This time he couldn't have finished the sentence. The torpedoes hadn't been aimed directly at them, but just outside the small circle of protective shields around them. The torpedo tore a deep crater into the plaza outside, burned and scattered the corpses still lying there.
"Here comes another!"
The lights flickered and the room shook.
"Sync with the crowd control defence turrets, try to take out the torpedoes before they hit," Lorca ordered.
They were neither powerful nor fast enough to catch a descending torpedo, but it was worth a try anyway, possibly they'd get lucky.
At a fourth impact, several fuzes blew and filled the room with the acrid scent of a smouldering fire, followed by the equally unpleasant smell of the fire extinguishing agent.
"Captain," Tyler said. "Lieutenant Leighton reports severe damage to the phaser battery."
"Open channel," Lorca said. He had to snap an arm out to keep him on his feet as the newest hit found them. The rumbling was starting to come from below, too, an indication the torpedo impacts were doing some damage to the underground installation, too.
"Sir?" Leighton came on on speaker.
"Status?"
"We're down one phaser conduit, the second is overheating. Structural integrity of the power generators is compromised. We can't keep it up for much longer."
"Keep it up for as long as you can," Lorca said. Tyler could've sworn he expected Lorca to append an evacuation order, tell them to abandon the phaser battery when it became non-functional and return to the base.
There was an audible silence at the end of the line, perhaps because Leighton expected something similar, too.
Lorca turned his head slightly, enough for Tyler to catch the side of his face and make an educated guess about his expression. He knew they expected him to allow them to save their lives at the end of it. He knew and he had deliberately done none of it.
"Open communications to all units," Lorca said instead.
"Ready, sir," Tyler said.
"Everyone, here's what we'll be doing next: The phaser batteries will strip the Defiant's shield away, we're taking some damage down here, but we're holding. Once the shields are down, the Defiant will most likely begin beaming shook troops to our locations. Let's not engage. We've got control of the New Anchorage public transporters. While they beam down, we'll beam up. We got the people to man a starship, so no need to spare anyone. Just don't damage the ship, we need it to get out of here. Hold yourselves ready. Lorca out."
An overheating warning became visible on the screen and Tyler was tempted to introduce a slight cool-down delay for the phaser to mitigate the effect a little, but he wasn't sure Lorca would allow it. Before he could decide to ask, Lorca said, "How's the Defiant doing?"
"Shields down to 38 per cent and falling, they have a few hull breaches and we've damaged their main sensor array. Shame we can't target the torpedo bays from here."
"Yeah," Lorca agreed, sounding somewhat resigned. As if on cue, a new impact shook them, harsher than before, making the lights go down again.
"Can we extend our shields?" Lorca asked.
"No, emitters have fixed range," Tyler said. "Unfortunately."
Placing the phaser batteries inside the city had always had some drawbacks. The installation's shields, when powered, were likely to disturb electronics and computers in the surrounding area, which had prompted the council back then to use the minimum they could get away with. The argument back then had been that the phaser batteries weren't the only line of defence and only meant as support for attack satellites and ships in orbit. How the council thought the Empire would even send ships to help them in case of an invasion, Tyler had never quite figured out. Tarsus had been one step away from being abandoned, after all. It must have been the primary reason why Lorca — the real one — had used this solar system to build a hidden base.
"Our shields are beginning to fluctuate," Tyler said after the last impact had shaken some of the internal wiring and taken out some of the emitters, leaving the others to struggle to keep up. The same problem the Defiant was suffering from, Tyler thought, quite ironically.
Another warning lit up on the console and Tyler added, "Lieutenant Leighton is evacuating the second phaser battery, it's gone off grid. We're on our own."
Which only meant the Defiant now knew where to focus her fire. Which was what happened almost instantly. The impacts began to fall constantly, although the torpedo impacts seized. Instead, the Defiant was targeting the area around them with short, but hard, phaser burst. Even without looking, Tyler knew the city around them would be a pockmarked wasteland by now. If the people had stayed in their nearby houses, they would be dead. He could imagine that panic had overcome the lockdown, making the inhabitants flee like rats to the outskirts of the city. He wondered if Kodos and the council were doing anything to keep order, whether Kodos truly intended to be governor, or whether he felt his job was done with handing Lorca the reins. Either way, there wasn't going to be much left to govern on Tarsus IV once this fight was over.
"Defiant's shields at eight per cent and falling!" Tyler announced, finding a grin in his voice he hadn't expected there. He looked over at Lorca, expecting — or hoping — to find a similar expression there, but he looked grim, barely made eye contact with Tyler to acknowledge the news.
At some point, their air ventilation had cut out, and the air had turned thick and stale. No alarm had gone off, so it was still safe to breathe, but it was a tangible reminder that they were trapped underground and everything around them was exposed to constant battering.
"What about ours?" Lorca asked, instantly taking Tyler's spike of excitement down a notch.
"Eleven per cent and falling, fluctuating worse than the Defiant's," Tyler responded, collecting himself as the strain transformed his excitement into something darker. Those of the soldiers who had nothing to do but stand around and wait looked on edge, fidgeting on their feet and fingering their armour and weapons, desperately looking for something to occupy them to bear the pressure of impending death.
Tyler and the two in the targeting chair had something on their minds and under their hands, easily focussing on what was in front of them. Stealing a look at Lorca, Tyler was surprised that Lorca had noticed their anxiety, too and barked a sharp order in their direction to ready to fight the moment they could be beamed to the Defiant. Their uncoordinated fingering turned into a much more concerted series of preparation movements, checking armour straps and weapon holsters.
Something in the sound of constant battering was changing, the crunching of the wall sounded thinner now, the hiss of the generator becoming louder and the overheating gauge crept closer and closer to critical. The Defiant had returned to bombarding them directly. In fact, ever since Lorca had given the order to directly target their phaser muzzles, the Defiant was doing the same, imitating what was a potentially devastating tactic. Technically, shields were perfectly capable of working one way only, allowing a torpedo or phaser blast to pass through while simultaneously deflecting everything coming, but given the damage the distribution grid had taken, the phaser trajectory through the shields was a weak spot.
He wanted to say as much, he didn't know how to compensate for it on the fly. He was familiar with the phaser battery, but he was neither engineer nor computer expert. But he wasn't even sure anymore what Lorca was and if there was anything he didn't know or couldn't do.
Tyler took a breath to voice the warning when he saw the alarm flare up on his console, a split second before the howl of the siren filled the room as it plunged first into darkness and then into the blood-red hellfire glow of emergency lighting.
The Defiant's phaser cut through their shields, mimicking their own phaser blast perfectly. They were firing at half-power, the Defiant was not, so the power ate itself down into the phaser muzzle and into the system below, all the way into the generators just beneath their feet.
Explosions ripped apart the floor and the roof at the same time, chunks of concrete the size of shuttles propelled into them, the blast of the weapon and the heat of the radiation burning through those unfortunate enough to stand on that side of the room.
Tyler's senses went out one after the other. First, there was blackness, crushing him and he heard himself screaming through the roaring and shrieking of the destroyed building collapsing. He knew he blinked, tried to bring his hands up to shield his eyes or his head. The world spun, even though he couldn't even see anything. His body should be in pain, and, somewhere distantly, there was, the console forced into his rips, breaking them, the heat on his back, the sharp, twisting feeling where his leg attached to his hip. His body went numb, senses scattering. The air in his lungs felt like tar, rough and sharp-edged. The last to go was his hearing, filling his head with the unspeakable noise, mounting until he thought his eardrums would burst, the all-encompassing white-noise of it almost soothing in the chaos, dragging him under.
Concrete and metal rumbled from far away. He didn't feel the great weight pressing down on him until it was suddenly lifted off him and his lungs sucked in hot, dry air, coughing him into consciousness and the pain it contained.
Some of the emergency lights still shed an ominous glow, so dull he wasn't even sure he could see in it at first.
"Tyler? You still alive?"
Lorca's voice came scratchy and low, close to his head and Tyler managed to focus on the man above him, making out the details of his features faintly in the gloom.
"Probably not, sir," Tyler croaked. He tried to move and the pain shot up the side of his body, from his leg to his shoulder and into his neck. His chest hurt and his breathing rattled uncomfortably. It felt as if his heart-beat was jostling his broken ribs around.
Lorca dredged up a weak smile. Dust and dirt and soot had painted his face, though the dark streaks could just as well have been blood, colour perception all thrown off by the light.
"Some of the coms still working?" Lorca asked and Tyler pondered where the man got the energy from. If not for the low tone and rasp, he sounded barely any different than before.
Tyler struggled up, miraculously still in his seat by the console, though the thing was completely dead in front of him. His attention slipped past it, too, barely able to hold his interest in his addled state. Instead, he looked at Lorca, found him leaning heavily into a piece of debris, watching him in turn, each trying to assess the other's state. Some small and metallic glinted in Lorca's neck, the Rush pin he hadn't bothered to remove.
Doing his best not to agitate his hip as he moved, Tyler reached down to his belt and pulled out his communicator. The Defiant would be able to zero in on it the moment it was activated, but it was the only device they still had.
"That's the best I can do," Tyler said, knowing full well what it meant. Perhaps… perhaps, they could get someone on the line fast enough who'd beam them back to the base, where Culber could patch them up and the survivors from the Buran had hopefully dug into a defensible position. If they were too slow, or whoever operated the transporter was slow to respond or out of commission like they were, then Maddox would have exactly what he had come here for. Or at least, he'd have something almost as good in his hands.
The room rumbled again, more pieces falling from the ceiling across the room, where the initial breakdown had occurred, it ate through what remained of the structure, metal beams slowly coming loose. Something above in the dark, where they couldn't see it, snapped. The suspension from the phaser canons coming apart under some unseen pressure, cutting down through the building like a giant whip.
Lorca tried to jump away, but he wasn't fast enough, wasn't graceful enough, tripped on something on the floor or his body wouldn't quite follow his directions anymore. The cable cut down through the boulder he'd been leaning against, right past Tyler's console, slicing across Lorca's face and square across his chest, hip and upper thigh before it left a gash in the ground.
Despite his own injuries, Tyler managed to get to his feet, even as Lorca stumbled back and dropped boneless into a heap of debris. Wary of more sudden damage, but fully aware that he couldn't do anything against it, Tyler hobbled over to Lorca, surprised to find him conscious, although just barely.
Even in the glow, the blood welling up from the long cut was obvious, coating the smooth layer of the armour on either side of a deep gash. Not just blood was welling free, Tyler realised, the cut had gone deep into Lorca's gut, internal organs squeezing through the gaping wound.
Lorca's fingers dug fervently around his chest, looking for purchase in the material and slipping. His breathing was panicked, too fast, wheezing. He was blinking rapidly, fighting unconsciousness and trying to get the armour material to close over the injury as a makeshift bandage.
Carefully, Tyler edged forward, lowering himself next to Lorca, wincing in pain. He tried to hold the other man's gaze, but Lorca clearly wasn't aware of him anymore. His head lolled back, eyes drooping closed.
Urgently, Tyler said, "Trust me, please."
Lorca keened. His hands slipped away from his torso, falling limply by his side and a shudder went through his prone body.
Tyler opened the communicator against on edge of concrete, too tired to flip it open and unable to bring his second hand up.
"This is Commander Tyler," he said, took a shaky breath. "Calling the ISS Defiant. I can give you Gabriel Lorca if you..." he lost his voice, swallowed dry to get it back. "If you beam us up right now. Or all you'll get is his corpse."
There was no response on the communicator, but a moment later, the transporter beam engulfed Lorca. Tyler gargled a laugh, deeply unsurprised by their attempt to get just Lorca, without Tyler attached. He had seen it coming, reached out a tired hand and clutched Lorca's shoulder even as it disintegrated.
The transporter beam sizzled between them, seemingly reluctant, but then reached out to Tyler and whisked him away alongside Lorca.
End of Chapter 8: Other Men Die
Reference: "A syllogism; other men die. But I am not another: therefore I'll not die." — Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Author's Note: Late as ever, shorter than the ohers, no naked Lorca, way too much action and a cliff-hanger ending. I'm truly sorry for this mess.
Though, next chapter is slated to fix most of the above issues, so there's something to look forward to.
Last revised on 02/February/2019