Star Trek Discovery: Danger Zone

Chapter Six

Linus leaned out as far as he dared from his perch several meters off the ground in the flexible but sturdy branches of some kind of rubber tree variant. In the purpling twilight the explosion was a white/blue plume. He wondered how many of his attackers he'd taken out with the explosion. He decided that he should conclude it was only one. Now was not the time for overconfidence.

He left that to his enemies.

They were so certain of their invisibility to sensors that they didn't even notice the disruption they made as they moved through the overgrowth. Perhaps at ground level, it would only be a distant commotion—some rustling on the wind someplace—but from here, in the dimming light of the fire caused by the explosions, he could see the shaking of the trees where they crashed through them like the clumsy primates they were. They were moving in no particular direction, and that fact gave Linus some satisfaction. It meant he'd rattled them.

A moment later angry red disruptor beams slashed wildly through the night sky. Behind him, a tree exploded. Linus blinked away sawdust.

Time to move.

********

It was just the barest flicker of light on his sensor goggles, but Doreel charged it anyway. He ignored the lashing branches and tearing underbrush as he ripped through vegetation, imagining himself an unstoppable force like an extinction-level comet or a one of the destroying gods of the Old Religions. He had reason to be confident, for he had adjusted the input sensors to sift out most of the planet's indigenous fauna. If life-signs showed up on his HUD, it almost certainly was The Animal.

Doreel saw another flicker—more pronounced this time, with a humanoid shape—about twenty meters in the distance. He increased his pace and felt the jungle gash his flesh more deeply.

"I have him!" He shouted over the comm-web, and gave coordinates. "Come join me for the barbecue!"

"Be careful," Thok's voice admonished through his earpiece. "This animal killed Wachtu. He is crafty!"

"Then he will pay for his cleverness," Doreel snarled and fired his rifle from the hip, stabbing at the trigger stud as quickly as he could. The gun's tri-barrels spit sizzling disruptor bolts which chewed up the dense foliage ahead of him, carving a steaming, hissing tunnel out of the jungle.

Doreel charged the animal's last position and felt the jungle grab at his ankles. He kicked free and continued his charge.

And then his HUD lit up with proximity alerts.

Doreel barely had time to process what his sensors were telling him when the log swung down in a tight arc and crushed him against the trunk of a tree.

********

"Damn him!" Thok choked past his rage and –yes, he had to admit it—his fear. He stood over Doreel's crushed body, the man's face locked in a perpetual state of stupid surprise. "He was always too reckless! I told him hundreds of times, I said to him: 'you need to evaluate the situation.' I used those words—evaluate."

"This beast is more cunning than we anticipated," Celtriss mused, not failing to miss an opportunity to flaunt his thoughtful approach to command, Thok thought. "He lured us into underestimating him."

"He will die slow for this," Zantho rumbled like a volcano waking. He flexed his biceps for added effect.

"Better yet," Kletchka piped in his reedy, damaged voice. "Keep him alive long enough to watch what the Klingons do to his comrades."

"No!" Zantho, growled. "He killed our teammates. We will be the ones to make him suffer, not the Klingons!"

Thok said nothing, understanding the value of letting the fury and bloodlust boil amongst them. He hoped Celtriss would say something to further inflame their passions. Instead, the man just looked at the dangling log that had killed Doreel, then traced its path his gaze until he found the perch, high in a nearby tree where it had been staged.

"How did he get something so heavy up there?"

********

Official transcription of remarks of the 2162 Annual Starfleet Medical Conference for Health Care Providers

Wednesday, March 5th 1100hrs

Topic: Xeno-biology and the future of Starfleet

Speaker: Physician Phlox (Starfleet, Retired)

Doubtless, gentlemen, you have seen my rather...vociferous objection to Starfleet's Personnel Resources categorization of Saurians. I stand by my remarks. Classifying Saurians as—and I quote—"assets to planetary missions, due to their extreme strength as a result of having four hearts" unquote reduces their contribution to one of merely brute strength, and while I have nothing but the utmost confidence in the forward-leaning policies and attitudes of Starfleet, such a descriptor does run the risk of marginalizing this newest member of our spacefaring family. There is no reason to believe Saurians cannot and will not become valuable members of the engineering corps, science division, Medical, and so on.

Of course, no one I denying there are times when brute strength is an asset...

********

"There! There! There!" Thok stabbed the air like a lunatic, and dozens of plasma bolts sizzled through the humidity and shredded and boiled a section of jungle several meters from their intended target.

"Check fire!" Cetriss's voice came over the comm-net, irritatingly calm and precise. "New coordinates incoming."

Thok's HUD lit up with the appropriate target coordinates. He stifled the urge the smash his fist through the smug little climber's HUD goggles and pulverize his face. Of course the man would take the opportunity to make him look the fool! Thok had come up enlisted, a ground-pounder in countless campaign where he and his comrades in arms were regarded as nothing but cannon-fodder. Meat-padding for the officers. They hadn't been issued HUDs, tracking goggles, or even advanced optics—those were reserved for the troops who had a chance for survival. For Thok and those like him, the only advanced targeting they had was probing fire.

But Celtriss had come up in the new Noviani military—the one with all the toys supplied by the Klingons. He was a thoroughly modern warrior, and now he had his chance to show off his understanding of cutting-edge war technology and make Thok look like the obsolescent old dog he was.

"Kletchka, lay down tracking fire..."

Gods! The man was giving orders now! And worse, his unit was obeying them. Kletchka unhesitatingly brought his rapid-fire plasma rifle to bear on the target.

"No!" Thok shouted. "You'll give him our position, that damn gun is an arrow pointed—"

But the wiry man's cybernetic limbs had already activated the gun, and fired a raking burst, the red plasma bolts fired so rapidly that they resembled a solid beam. Immediately, that section of growth evaporated, while great tree trunks halved as if by a laser scalpel.

Thok huffed with impotent rage. It had finally happened. He had lost his command.

He didn't recall making the decision; his arms had simply moved of their own accord, and a moment later he was staring down the sights of his rifle at Celtriss's skull. His finger hesitated on the trigger stud. Should he at least give the man a warning first? Would a public dressing-down be more effective than an execution? Command forced one to consider these options.

Suddenly Ketchka cried out in shock and surprise, as his arc of fire went wide.

"What the hell are you doing?" Thok screamed over the 'net.

"I can't control them!" the man replied his voice crossing from panic to hysteria. "They're not my arms! They're not my arms!" Then the pulsing, whining, sizzling fire swung around toward them. Thok leapt to the side and rolled onto his shoulder, the rough terrain of stones, and packed dirt, and roots digging into his side. He looked up to see Celtriss caught in the merciless beam. The man held out his hands as if to implotre Kletchka to stop. And them he was cut in two.

Kletchka cried out in horror. Zantho did so in grief. Thok brought his rifle up and fired into Ketchka until he and his hacked cybernetics disintegrated into ash.