THE PROBLEM WITH KLINGONS
HB22147-a, High Orbit
DRSV Grazine (SG01)
Stardate 2261.28
- 1245 hours -
Captain Kirk was flying head-first down one of the Grazine's narrow corridors, gliding along with the ship's null gravity to where his sensors told him the life form reading was last recorded. The location was a hundred meters ahead and a few degrees starboard; the heads-up display told him there was a passage ahead and to the right, so just before he got to it he tucked his knees into his chest, turned slightly in the air and then uncoiled at just the right time to push his feet off the opposite wall and dart into that corridor. His fire team followed close behind, each in a slightly different direction to avoid a collision so that all five of them emerged into the passage in a loose formation, filling the opening with their bodies.
They nearly collided with the four heavily armored Romulan marines who had been coming the opposite direction at that moment. Both sides recognized each other instantly, raised their weapons and fired from only a few feet away. Kirk felt their plasma bolts pinging off his overshield and saw his phaser shots sparkling against the Romulan's armor. A combination of panic and training sent him scrambling back out of the passage and around the corner as the volley trailed off, and somehow he was aware that the Romulan marines were retreating back down the passageway in the opposite direction.
Same direction we're going, he thought. The tricorder reading had been only been clear for a few moments, but it was unmistakably coming from the somewhere in the vicinity of the very large hangar bay into which all three of the Starfleet fire teams and an indeterminate number of Romulans were now now converging. That open bay would be a free for all: there was no cover anywhere, no bulkheads dividing the space. There were a few small suttlecraft in holding racks, but once they were in that space there would really be nowhere to hide. This would be a real test of starfleet combat training. Kirk had always hated tests.
"Enterprise to away team. You have multiple boarding parties inbound on your position." It was Spock's voice. The hardness in his tone suggested that the ship was having a difficult time of things too, which was somehow comforting.
"Copy that, Enterprise," Kirk answered, "We'll try to hurry this up, but something tells me we're gonna need-"
A burst of static filled the channel and then it went dead. Spock had ended the transmission without even signing off; or rather, something had ended it for him. Must be heavily engaged, Kirk thought. Then to Lieutenant Rand he shouted, "Let's try and take that shuttle bay before more reinforcements show up."
"Gotcha," the Lieutenant toggled her communications settings for a second, and then her voice came over his helmet speakers, "Alright, people going into a skirmish space," Rand announced, warning her team and any others on her channel, "Stay mobile, don't take any position for more than two seconds. This is null gravity, so keep sight of each other and watch all the corners, not just the sides."
Kirk turned his attention back to the heads up display. The scanner showed another passage coming up on the left, and vast open space just behind that. He moved forward a bit, caught a hand hold just short of the intersection and paused, peaking his head around the corner. The short passage opened into a huge stadium-sized cavern built into the Grazine's hull, within which a rather violent gun battle had already erupted between Romulan plasma rifles and another weapon that Rand thought sounded like phasers. Couldn't be Cardassians in there; they used projectile weapons with smokeless powder, and in any case the Cardassian marines had stopped trying to repel the boarders once it became clear that none of their weapons would work against Starfleet shielding.
"This is it, everyone. Let's get our people back," Rand announced, then batted Kirk on the shoulder, "You ready?"
"Nope." He planted his feet on the hatch rim and shouted, "Go, go go!" as he pushed off with both legs.
Captain Kirk shot out of the corridor like a gun from a bullet and then immediately fired his suit thrusters, veering off to the left to clear the path. Lieutenant Rand was right behind him, keeping pace and covering his back, while the rest of the fire team came through right behind her and darted off in the opposite direction.
Kirk was prepared for trouble, but not on the scale she was seeing now: a squad of about twelve Romulans was zipping around in their strange armored suits, jetting back and forth using thruster inserts that flashed like plasma arcs. They moved almost like fighter planes, swarming and swooping, arranging into squads and then breaking off again to get the advantage. They moved so gracefully and with such frightening purpose that Kirk almost didn't notice the loose knot of Klingon warriors fighting them. The Klingons' movements were impressive in a different way: powerful, purposeful, like parkour athletes trying to outrun a police droid. They had no thrusters and no armor, but they used structural columns, hand rails, parked shuttlecraft and even each other to push off and change directions, angling for a better position on their Romulan enemies. It was almost like watching a war between birds... If birds could be equipped with tactical armor and directed energy weapons.
Kirk felt a series of plasma bolts hit him in the shoulder and his suit gave a warning that its overshield was almost depleted. He didn't have to search long to realize that the same four Romulans that he had nearly collided with a moment ago were scattering their formation and moving to encircle him. That suited him just fine; beyond them, he could see the rest of the fire team was moving around outside their circling move taking up positions. He shot his phaser rifle into one of them and was joined by Rand a moment later. The second Romulan was hit from behind by the combined attack of three phaser rifles from the rest of the fire team. Both of the Romulan soldiers flared up bright orange where the phaser beams hit them, then they erupted into clouds of ash and floated away on the air, like giant cigars burning out at superfast speeds. The other two moved evasively, trying to get clear of the crossfire. Kirk let his encounter suit track them on sensors in case they came at him again.
Then he heard a scream from the far side of the bay, like the roar of a hundred men simultaneously burning their fingers off. From that direction, he saw what looked like a solid wall of Klingon warriors pouring out of a passageway into the shuttlebay. Even the Romulans had paused to marvel at the spectacle.
This was not going to end well.
"Got a reading," Lieutenant Rand announced, "Personal locator, twenty five meters! It's Doctor Marcus!"
The locator appeared on Kirk's HUD and he took stock of the situation before letting himself really focus on it. For the moment, the Romulans had become preoccupied with the growing swarm of angry Klingons pouring into the room, whose combination of phaser fire and enthusiasm was rightly their number one concern. Kirk took a second or two to work out where the locator was pointing him in relation to the actual hangar, and then with a burst from his suit thrusters veered up and away from the cross-species melee until he found the lone abnormality he was looking for: a large blast door, large enough to admit a Federation shuttlecraft, had been forced open with explosives or plasma fire or both, and behind it he could see twists of machinery and electrical equipment. His tricorder detected no life signs inside, but Doctor Marcus' personal locator was clearly present. "Target located! Converge on me now!" Kirk made another adjustment with his thrusters and rocketed towards that location without waiting for the others.
One of the Romulans behind the forced-open door fired a plasma rifle at him as he approached. Kirk deftly evaded it with a controlled thrust, then tucked his knees under himself and landed on the bulkhead just above the blast doors, out of their sight. He paused for a moment, set his phaser on stun, reached into gap where the door had been forced open and fired blind into the compartment.
Lieutenant Rand landed next to him and added to the fire, and four others landed on the opposite side and did the same. In a few seconds, the room was filled with crackling blue light as phaser beams spilled over the walls and irradiated everything in sight. A flurry of plasma bolts flew back out again as someone on the inside started firing back.
The chirp of a communications link caught Kirk's attention even as he poured phaser fire through th blast door. "Enterprise to away team. Status report."
Gasping between phaser blasts, Kirk answered, "Enterprise, I think we've found our people, but we're encountering Romulan boarding parties and we're facing heavy resistance. I'm gonna to need a little more time here."
Lieutenant Loganoff didn't land with the others, but pulled his arms into his sides and dove head-first into the opening before immediately firing thrusters to both slow down and veer off to the side. Three others penetrated the same way, and then Rand and Kirk and the rest of their teams followed with phasers ready.
The transporter chamber was a huge enclosed sphere with a vaulted door on one side that had been left open to reveal its contents. It filled most of the room, but a small staging area had been left in front of it where people and materials could be moved in and out of the sphere for transport to and from the ship. There were no individual receiving pads or coils, the Cardassians simply beamed the entire volume of that sixty-foot sphere to a location somewhere outside, or beamed everything within sixty feet of their target into the sphere. A small green box indicating Doctor Marcus' locator beacon had been flashing on Kirk's hud until now, but his eyes saw nothing in that location and the beacon was floating in the middle of the air, slowly moving downwards with no physicality. Must be a false reading or a sensor ghost. Maybe the jamming field throwing off the scans...
Maybe not. Kirk pushed off a wall and moved towards the beacon until the sensors showed him he was close enough to touch it. He reached both hands to either side of the beacon until he felt his body hit something, and he wrapped his arms around the waist of the suddenly-visible Doctor Carol Marcus.
She was unconscious, though either from phaser stuns or some other injury, he could not tell. His sensors showed him no other personal locators except for the Starfleet fire teams, and no other life forms either except for two partially-visible (and very unconscious) Romulan troops floating in the air a few meters away. If the missing crewmen were on the Grazine at all, their locators were beyond their reach, and with the shuttle bay filling with Klingons they had no opportunity to look for them. "We've got what we came for, people! Fall back to the corridors for beamout..."
"They're coming in!" Lieutenant Loganoff shouted from the open blast door, an instant before a Klingon phaser rifle tore through the middle of his chest and burned his torso into a cloud of ash. The rest of the startled away team ducked back behind the cover of the mangled door just as what seemed like a solid wall of phaser fire poured into the entrance, scorching the walls and deck plating around them. Ensign Barnheisel crouched down low next to the gap, pulled a photon grenade off his belt and tossed it through the opening; a Klingon phaser beam vaporized his head and helmet before he could even get behind cover. A second later the photon grenade detonated outside of the bay and the massed phaser fire thinned out enough for Lieutenant Rand and the rest of the fire team to pop up and fire back without instantly dying.
Kirk estimated they had between five and ten seconds before the Klingon zerg rush flooded into the room and literally tore them all apart. He keyed his communicator again, first setting up a high-gain locator beacon so that Enterprise could pinpoint his location despite the interference from the jamming field, and then piggybacked voice channel onto it, "Kirk to Enterprise! Emergency! We need starship fire support! My coordinates! Danger close!"
"Standby, Captain," Spock replied, and then was silent.
On the same channel Kirk heard Lieutenant Rand ask, "Is there another way out of here?" and a voice he couldn't identify answered, "Only the blast doors. This compartment is sealed off from the rest of the ship!"
"Then fall back to the transport chamber," Kirk shouted, "We'll use the blast door as a bottleneck! Hold them off until Enterprise can assist!"
The fire teams next to the blast door moved back along the walls until they were completely clear of it and then repositioned themselves in a broad, fanned out formation to cover the blast door from all sides of the room. A few moved inside the spherical transporter chamber to use its vaulted door as cover. Kirk thought about trying to use the Cardassian transporter to escape, but nixed the idea when he realized it would take more time than they had left to figure out how to operate it and longer still to figure out if it was even still working after all the damage this ship had sustained.
An ear-splitting battle cry poured into the room from outside, growing in intensity as its source came closer. All eyes and all weapons trained on the half-open blast door, and Kirk watched the sensor feed from his heads up display as what appeared to be a solid mass of Klingon genome poured towards the blast door like a living avalanche.
How long can we hold out here? Kirk asked himself, An hour? A minute? A few seconds?
The light filtering in from the shuttle bay went dark, and then the darkness exploded into a half dozen moving shapes pouring into the room: Klingon warriors with phaser rifles, diving head first into the compartment. A dozen Starfleet phaser beams hit them from all sides, burning them to cinders as fast as they could appear. What had been a group of humanoid aliens passed through the door as humanoid ash clouds, still smoldering by the time their remains bumped into the transport chamber. Still another wave of Klingons tumbled through the blast door, howling like animals and firing their phasers in random directions. Some didn't even have that much and burst through the blast door carrying daggers and swords, and a few were even carrying Cardassian or Romulan weapons.
The Starfleet crossfire reduced them to a wall of fire and organic debris, but a handful slipped through intact and began darting around the room, looking for a target. Kirk used his phaser to pick off the survivors before they could make trouble. One came through waving a bat'leth in one hand and a phaser pistol in the other before Kirk shot him through the chest, burning through his torso. The air opened up behind the new corpse and two more Klingons came up behind him, snarling like a pride of lions closing for the kill. Kirk shoved Doctor Marcus deeper into the transport chamber and fired his phaser at the closest one, catching him in the kneecap and spinning him end over end in the path of his comrade.
Kirk heard Spock's voice as if speaking to him through a mile-long tube, "Brace for support fire..."
In zero gravity, no one felt the vibration in the hull or sensed the sudden movement of the decks. There was not, at first, even a sound to go with it. The first that the Klingons knew that something odd was happening was a bright red flash of light that suddenly filled the Cardassian shuttlebay and then a portion of the bulkhead door disappeared, exposing the bay to space. The second indication was an even brighter flash as the entire bay door erupted into incandescence and then it, too, was gone. Almost a hundred cubic meters of atmosphere instantly blew out into space, carrying with it over a hundred Klingon and Romulan corpses and almost as many live bodies. Within half a second the shuttle bay was in vacuum, and five seconds and a hurricane rush of air later, so was the transporter complex adjacent to it.
The sudden silence that filled the transporter complex brought with it a kind of confusion and bewilderment that commanded attention all by itself. Kirk knew immediately that the compartment was in vacuum, and he knew just as immediately that this gave him between fifty and one hundred seconds to get Doctor Marcus out of hard vacuum before she suffered permanent damage. For the briefest moment he entertained the notion that the hard vacuum of space would at least deal with the Klingon problem...
Until a Klingon phaser beam bounced off his chest and scorched the bulkhead next to him. The same two he had just been fighting with were moving , one of them pulling an edged weapon from his battle dress while the other - the one he had kneecapped with his phaser - was adjusting the setting on his phaser pistol, reprogramming it to a lower setting to take full advantage of the hard vacuum of space. No, three of them were moving; the one he had shot in the chest had actually recovered from what should have been a fatal chest wound and was now moving up to join battle with his comrades, bat'leth in hand.
The problem with Klingons, Kirk reminded himself, is that killing them only makes them angry.
He pushed off the wall behind him and darted upwards towards where he had pushed Doctor Marcus' form, firing blindly behind him as he went. He grabbed her around the waist with one arm, and with the other thumbed his thruster controls to push himself up and clear of the three Klingons and their boiling, vacuum-packed rage. Phaser blasts cut through the air around him. He had just enough presence of mind to expand his shield envelope to cover Marcus as well, but almost as soon as he did so he heard the low-pitched "power cell" warning, which meant he had about five seconds of serviceable life left in it. Whether the Klingons noticed this or not, Kirk would never know; three of them moved to the sides to box him in while a fourth summersaulted through the vaulted door, pushed off the inside of the transport chamber and brought his bat'leth around in a wide, deadly ark, straight through the thickest part of Captain Kirk's throat.
He felt the blade pass through his body.
He felt the Klingon pass through his body.
Then he felt himself crash to the ground on his back as Doctor Marcus' limp form landed on top of him in the Enterprise's transporter room. The impact seemed to shock her back into consciousness; Marcus rolled on her side, flailing and gasping for breath as Kirk came to a sitting position in his encounter suit, clawing at his neck where he'd felt the blade pass through him. He'd been partially de-materialized when the bat'leth struck, but he'd still felt it all the same. "Wow," he muttered, "Great timing, Chief..."
"Clear the pad!" someone shouted, and when Kirk didn't move immediately he felt a set of arms hoisting him up by his arms and legs and carrying him off to the side of the transporter room. Another set of arms - these, he could see, belonging to a set of field medics and service robots in white smocks - scooped up Doctor Marcus and four other prone forms that Kirk hadn't noticed until now, loaded them onto gurneys or just sat them against the wall as the transporter activated yet again. Another set of floating bodies appeared over the pad, and as before, crashed down to the platform as if they'd rolled off the top of a bunk bed.
"One more coming in!" the transporter chief shouted, "Clear the pad! Clear it fast!"
Most of the officers who'd materialized managed to roll/crawl/jump down under their own power, one tripped over a badly broken ankle and crawled painfully down from the platform. The transporter hummed one last time, and a humanoid figure materialized in the center of it: Lieutenant Janice Rand appeared in the middle of the transport chamber and immediately dropped to her knees; she was wearing her encounter suit, a helmet with a shattered faceplate, and a nine-inch straight-edged dagger that had impaled her through the chest.