Star Trek Discovery: Danger Zone

Chapter Nine

"This is it, men! We hold the line!" Getch squinted through his rifle's holographic sighting reticle and waited to kill his enemy. Around him he heard disruptor rifles powering up, and laser sights danced across the main hatch to control room.

Then the room lurched as if being pulled from the ground by the claw of an angry deity, sending soldiers tumbling like toys. Debris rained down around them. Getch looked up—too late. There was already a ragged tear in the ceiling exposing the tops of trees and an inky, star-spackled sky between them.

The beast descended on a tether.

Getch tried to draw a bead on the moving target, but another explosion threw him to the ground.

Grenade! The damn thing was smart...

He fired without aiming this time as the beast laid down a curtain of fire—how???—Getch's brain processed the image: the beast descended head-first, using its foot-claws to hold the tether, while it fired a disruptor rifle from each hand.

The room filled with the panicked cries of his soldiers being mown down.

Getch fired again, missed, scrambled to his feet, brought the rifle to his shoulder and took aim.

The beast released the tether, dropped with gravity as Getch's bolt sailed over him and sliced the tether in two, then somersaulted in mid-air and landed on its feet in the center of the room.

Getch re-adjusted his aim, just as the beast fired both of its rifles on rapid-fire.

He was cut down before he could even pull the trigger.

24

Linus tossed aside his spent rifles and picked one up from the body of an unmoving Noviani soldier. It hadn't been fired. The control room was silent except for the slight crackle of a fire his grenade must have started, and the occasional sharp rasp as a power system overloaded and sprayed sparks. He felt the nighttime air pour in through the hole in the ceiling.

The driving, propulsive force of the marshmellons in his system had crested and felt more focused now, more able to think strategically. He looked over the monitors that were still operational until he found one with a layout of the complex. It had a big blinking square and the words PRISONER HOLDING, which made things easier. Linus hitched up his rifle and headed off.

The compound was quiet except or the sounds of secondary explosions as he ran down the prefab corridor that connected the control room to the makeshift prison cell. Linus rounded a curve in the corridor and ran into a flurry of disruptor bolts, forcing him to one knee. He returned fire, and was rewarded to see two Noviani soldiers tumbled against the walls and slump to the poly-formed deck plating.

He had just lowered the rifle when a second flurry of blasts arced over his head and burned away at the walls of the corridor. Linus aimed at the source and saw that they were coming from a slight gap between a door and a doorjamb up ahead. A moment later he saw an eye and a slice of a face appear in the gap.

"Joann!" he shouted.

"Linus?" she answered.

"It's okay! I'm pretty sure the base is clear," he said, slinging the rifle over his shoulder to point safely at the ceiling.

"Linus?" Detmer's strawberry-blonde head abruptly popped out from the opening.

"Keyla! Are you all right? Are the rest with you?"

"We're all here," Joann answered, and Linus's heart leapt from the chasm where it had been precariously perched from the moment he'd heard their panicked cries over the communicator.