Star Trek Discovery: Danger Zone

Chapter Seven

Linus melted into the surrounding foliage, and then winced as the powerful bolts from the huge soldier's portable cannon blew craters into the earth and sent geysers of dirt and vegetation into their air. Even from his vantage about a hundred meters away, he could see trees crack and topple and collapse, bringing down small chunks of the lower canopy. Linus had left the unit he'd used to remote-operate the soldier's cybernetics—a tricorder slaved to a portable subspace transceiver that he'd stuck together with the sticky fabric wrap Engineer Reno was so fond of—in a relatively bare patch in the overgrowth and set it transmit aggressively in the hopes it would draw out just this type of response.

Whatever else the man was, he wasn't surgical, Linus concluded. He wasn't tactical either; otherwise he wouldn't have exposed his position. Linus scanned the origin point of the plasma bolts with a set of binoculars he'd taken from the Noviani soldier's field kit. They didn't really fit his face very well, so he had to turn them sideways and use them like a spyglass.

The binoculars gave him a quick readout of the distance and angle between them. Linus was about a thousand meters away and on a slight rise, perhaps twenty meters. The two remaining Noviani soldiers were on a slightly bare patch on a stretch of relatively flat land, with a steep drop-off on the southern side. The big one was firing off this side at the decoy Linus had set up. It was perhaps two hundred meters below them, and the havoc caused by the massive energy bolts was bleeding over into their position: the falling trees were entwined with others and taking them down as well. If the soldiers cared about the possibility of being crushed, they didn't show it.

He lowered the binoculars and shouldered the Noviani plasma rifle. His enemy's rage had made them incautious and that made them vulnerable. He twisted his head so he could peer through the optic. It was set to a 3x magnification and gave him a decent view of his enemies' location, though he couldn't see them through the foliage. His thumb found the selector knob on the optic's side to set it to the sensor bandwidth, which would effectively look through the vegetation...

--And stopped—

Linus froze, his breath trapped in his chest, his muscles turning stone.

Too easy! A voice deep inside his mind shouted furiously. These are not animals! Not tessinarks during mating season! They're warm-bloods with all the cunning and resourcefulness their breeds possess. They've watched you trap them several times already! Will they just stumble into another?

Very slowly, Linus removed his hand from the optic's controls, and then let out a heaving sigh.

The soldier firing madly broadcast his position perfectly.

The optic's sensor bandwidth was an active sensing device, meaning it could be detected...and traced back to its source.

A trap! And they'd nearly caught him in it, too. Slowly, quietly, he lowered the rifle. Of course, they'd finally figured out how to play to their strengths. They knew he'd stolen their gear, and they knew how their gear worked, so they knew how he'd use it.

All-righty, then, he thought, echoing one of Ensign Maki's aphorisms, time to take it to limit.

The sky rumbled, and a moment later a furious tropical rain began to fall.

I can use this, he thought.

********

"Come on, damn you. Show yourself," Thok muttered from his makeshift blind, wedged between the trunk of some great tree and a strategically-built pile of a vegetation. His plasma-rifle was propped on his field pack, and he squinted through the optic, which was set to scan for sensor emissions. He was covered in vegetation and his uniform baffles prickled against his skin as they dissipated his heat signature. His combat ECM kit was emitting a low-level dampening signal. He was, for all intents and purposes, invisible.