The Operative (A Star Trek novel)

Chapter Nine

A dark, deadly-looking dart leaves Enterprise and maneuvers slowly across the space between the two ships toward the freighter. Suddenly, a phaser stabs out from the freighter, drenching the tiny ship's shields with blue opalescence.

"Shields holding," the ship's computer says. "I think they're annoyed."

"You think?"

Flynn watches through the forward viewports as the freighter begins to fill the screen. "Annoyed enough to risk getting blown out of the sky by Enterprise. Or scared. Either way, as soon as we're through their shields, take out that phaser bank and shield generator, also the sensors around the top aft section of the ship. Minimum damage."

"Aye."

A shrieking sound, fingernails on blackboards, fills the cabin. Some of the ship's special features have come into play, peeling back the other ship's shields just far enough to admit the little dart.

"Returning fire now."

The freighter's phaser is answered by its prey and falls silent. Quickly, faster than the eye can follow, Shelley's phaser stabs again and again with surgical precision, and Bayou continues on her way, partially blind and almost defenseless.

Whatever her other failings might be, Montenegro has the good sense not to use the remaining phaser bank to fire on Enterprise.

❖

Inside Bayou, two crewmen nervously wait in a silent corridor near the stern, phasers drawn. They were near enough to the phaser bank to hear the whine of its firing, then the muted explosions that they could only assume was incoming fire, then silence. Now, ominous clanking sounds come from overhead, like a giant walking on the hull. In moments, the whine of superheated metal is heard as a cutting phaser begins work overhead. They trade glances. The bigger of the two, a blond, hard-faced man, swallows hard.

A glowing orange circle forms in the ceiling and, seconds later, a disk of hull material falls with a crash onto the deck below. Luckily for the two watchers, the air does not rush out. Through the hole, they can see an airlock snugged tight against their ship's hull, its rubbery grommet looking almost obscenely organic.

"Captain," one of the men whispers into a throat mike, "Juarez here. We're on E deck, corridor 14A. Intruder has bored a hole through the hull. We'll hold off the boarding party as long as we can before..."

His voice trails off as he loses consciousness. He collapses in a heap next to the still form of his fellow crewman.

Another stun grenade follows the first, then Flynn lowers himself head-first carefully past the still-hot flanges of the hole into the corridor, then drops with a flip to land on his feet. His chameleonskin suit rapidly adjusts to mimic the dingy corridor.

He pauses to scan for others, but his tricorder is blocked by the jamming device. He puts it away, exchanging it for a phaser set to stun. Bending over the crewmen, he attaches a tiny transponder to each of them. Seconds later, the corridor lights up and then dims as the two are whisked away to Enterprise.

Watching the transporter effect fade, he is glad that he had an excuse to bring the ship over. He hates transporters, possibly as only someone born before their invention truly can; almost a superstitious dread, really. Now, of course, they are a fact of life, like space travel or computers. Only eccentrics and philosophers worry about their implications. So what if you are effectively destroyed at one place, then reconstructed at another? The new copy of yourself has all the memories of the old one. It just picks up where you abruptly left off.

Flynn isn't a mystic. He doesn't believe in a soul. But whenever he allows himself to worry about it, he wonders if he doesn't perhaps die each time he uses a transporter, and new person identical in every respect to the old is born and carries on. He doesn't mind so much for the previous incarnation, but he surely does begrudge the next incarnation the death that will create him.