Death Count Read online

  It doesn’t matter what he wants, Chekov caught himself thinking. If he’s going to get out of there, he has to come through me. He couldn’t count on help from Davidson and Tate—he could only concentrate on what it would take to drive this intruder back behind the force barrier in the brig, where Chekov had some hope of containing him until help could arrive. He was already counting in his head the number of steps from here to the security isolation door, from there to the equipment locker in the back of his office, as he eased his legs beneath him and slowly regained his feet.

  He froze that way for a moment, listening. Nothing came to him through the darkness except the rubbing of his uniform against his body as he breathed and the high, white-noise hissing of his blood in his ears. Deprived of every useful sense but hearing and touch, his focus zeroed down to a point so fine it made him dizzy. He put a hand against the wall to steady himself, and the ridged metal felt cold and intricately contoured.

  He resisted trailing a hand along the wall when he started to walk. The faint sound of his skin against the metal seemed obscenely loud in the darkness. Vertigo bled into the void once he was moving, and the layout of his department blossomed in his mind’s eye like graphics from the simulator games on Sigma One—oversimplified but accurate, with important doors and goals highlighted to supernatural clarity in his thinking. Stepping away from the wall, he kept to the center of the corridor and crept down the darkness toward his office door. There were phasers in the equipment locker behind his desk, and they’d be easier to reach than the ones kept locked in the squad room. If he could just get a weapon and stun whoever was down here, he’d be fine.

  His eyes kept fooling him, warning him of movements and flashes of light that he knew he couldn’t truly see. Ignoring them was hard—he caught his hands twitching with a want to do something every time a phantom shadow twinged his nerves. He finally balled his hands into fists just to keep them steady. No sounds of breathing, though. No click of hard-soled shoes on decking, no whisk of fabric brushing fabric from somebody else’s movements. He stopped twice to feel the wall for the edges of a door and to listen. Once, he thought he felt the heat of someone’s body very close beside him. Then the feeling passed, and he shivered from the image. He hoped that hadn’t meant the intruder had somehow crept by.

  The office door came up on him sooner than he had envisioned. He stretched out one arm to feel the wall beside him, and didn’t realize he’d reached too far until his balance betrayed him and toppled him through the opening, into the room beyond. A crash sounded as he tumbled to the floor. He rolled, trying to scramble away from the sound, suddenly blind and lost all over again. The clash and clangor of falling equipment and slamming locker doors filled the dark sector with shards of broken sound. Something in him registered that the noise came from deeper in the department, near the squad room.

  A man’s voice cried out in alarm, answered by the waspish song of a phaser.

  Davidson? Tate? Not calling out to them was agony. Chekov found the door to his inner office on all fours, sensing its nearness only an instant before actually colliding with the surface. It slid aside when he stood, and seven fairly confident steps took him around to where he knew his desk must be and placed him close enough to the equipment locker to find it with both hands. This is going to get me killed, he thought as he poised his thumb above the trigger for the lock. But he couldn’t think of any other way to stand against this intruder, and he couldn’t let a saboteur leave the area.

  His thumb depressed the trigger, and the lock panel exploded to life with a blast of green light and an ear-shattering chime. The computer’s voice, tuned to a conversational volume, rebounded off the green-lit office walls like the sound of mortars: “Prepare for retina scan.”

  It was all Chekov could do to keep his eyes open when everything in him wanted to wince away from the damning intrusion of noise. He dug out the key while the scan temporarily blinded him again, fitted it against the lock while the computer requested, “Voice identification required.”

  He set himself to jerk the doors open as soon as it cleared him. “Chekov,” he whispered, “Lieutenant Pavel A.”

  “Please speak in a normal tone.”

  God, God, when he got out of here he was going to memo every security division in Starfleet about redesigning this damned system. “Chekov, Lieutenant Pavel—”

  A shriek of phaser fire arced white light all over the room, and a force like a light-speed missile slammed into his shoulder, throwing him against the locker. Seared flesh and burnt blood filled the room with a choking stench, and Chekov felt the horrible, deep heat in his shoulder blade that meant damage worse than being shot by a phaser set on stun. The locker doors popped open as he fell, a random collection of phasers and gear clattering out onto the floor around him. Footsteps clicked near the outside door, and he jammed his right hand in his mouth to muffle his anguished breathing as he pawed about him for a phaser, for a rifle.

  His left hand closed on a slim arc of metal, and hope speared through him sharply enough to make him groan. One of the infrared visors he’d brought back from engineering yesterday. Wrenching to his knees, he bit his hand against a swell of pain, and collapsed, gasping, across the desk chair. The gunner knew where he was—Chekov heard someone push aside the visitor’s chair near the corner. Slapping on the visor, he shot a frantic look around the office, already knowing he had no route of escape.

  The phasers, measuring the same temperature as the deck and the rest of the room, showed up against the flooring like deep gray jigsaw pieces, faint outlines against the bigger darkness. Underneath his desk, the butt of a phaser rifle barely registered between the legs of his chair. The heat from Chekov’s body showed up warm yellow through the visor; a cooling handprint in his own blood glowed sickly orange against the floor.

  Only the gunman radiated outside the proper spectrum—framed and detailed in brilliant silver and white, screaming temperatures no human could have survived much less sabotaged a ship while suffering. Even the phaser in his hand showed cherry red from the warmth it had absorbed from his body.

  Not human, Chekov’s mind whispered urgently. He tried to connect a race with the tall, stocky body configuration even as the saboteur slowly raised his phaser, aiming it over the desk—

  —and Chekov dove underneath for the rifle, squeezing off a shot without even lifting it clear of the floor.

  The blast blew out the front of the desk. Chekov heard the intruder shriek and stumble back into the hall, but pain and blood loss kept Chekov from gathering his right arm beneath him with enough strength to scramble after. By the time he’d dragged himself out from under the desk, his head looped in such sick surges that he didn’t make it cleanly out the doorway. Staggering against the bulkhead, he hugged the phaser rifle across his chest one-armed, and tried not to give in to the waves of dizziness crashing over him.

  Something brilliant yellow stitched a splotchy trail down the corridor. I hit him, Chekov realized with some relief. He can’t get far.

  Unfortunately, neither could Chekov.

  A movement at the fringe of his hearing shot adrenaline through him. He whirled as best he could, bringing the rifle into line with the slim heat-outline behind him.

  “Davidson?” he asked, recognizing the mottled collection of orange-and-yellow as human, even though he couldn’t identify a specific person.

  “Lieutenant?” The tiny voice that drifted to him out of the darkness didn’t belong to either of Chekov’s missing guards. “I didn’t—” Aaron Kelly took a shuddering breath, and his heat pattern slumped to sit on the deck. “Are you the only one here?”

  Chekov lowered the rifle, trying not to notice the brittle tick-tick-tick of his own blood dripping onto the floor. “Are you out of your cell?”

  Kelly’s outline nodded, then the auditor seemed to remember that Chekov shouldn’t be able to see him in the dark, and he verbalized, “Y-Yes. I think he destroyed the generator—”

  “I’m
going after him,” Chekov cut him off, pushing away from the wall. “See if you can restore the lights. The main panels are near the turbolift, farther down this hallway. Can you find them?”

  Kelly fumbled for a grip on the wall behind him, nodding again. “I can try.”

  From an auditor, that’s all Chekov could ask.

  The saboteur’s blood sprinkled an uneven trail down the starship’s corridor. The glowing spots—already faded from sunburst yellow to a deep green—were large and spaced at irregular intervals: the saboteur was moving fast, then, but bleeding hard, as well. They had that much in common, Chekov acknowledged grimly. The lieutenant tried to flex his right hand, and took a certain amount of comfort in the feel of his fingers curling into his blood-slicked palm. It hurt like hell to even think about lifting his arm away from his side, but at least he knew he could do it if he had to.

  Blood splatters peppered the bulkhead and led around the corner, finally coming together in a wandering puddle at the door to a maintenance ladder. A hand-sized smear marked where the saboteur had jerked the doorway open to climb inside.

  Chekov slowed, and his equilibrium overshot him and nearly knocked him to his knees. Breathing deep to quiet his gasping, he made himself pause to look carefully to all sides, to really see all the pieces of the multihued infrared puzzle. No, the saboteur’s trail really ended here—this was no clever trick. He eased up to the side of the access door, briefly passing the rifle to his slippery right hand, and balanced the muzzle across his left forearm as he reached across to fling the door open. If the saboteur were crouched inside, ready to shoot whoever breached his hiding place, at least Chekov wouldn’t be standing in front of the entrance to make an easy target.

  When he knocked the door aside, though, the explosive in-rush of air jerked him into the doorway as the atmosphere around him voided into sudden vacuum.

  Sulu slammed a frustrated fist against the turbolift’s outer door, barely feeling the impact through his layered environmental suit gloves. “The power came back on,” he told Uhura through his suit channel. “It took the lift away before I could talk to Chekov.”

  There was a long pause. “I’m not getting any response on the turbolift intercom,” Uhura replied at last. “But Mr. Spock says it went directly to the security corridor on Deck Seven.”

  “That figures.” A faint film of mist bloomed inside Sulu’s face plate with his snort. “Knowing Chekov, he’s probably gone back to work.”

  A vacuum-sharp shadow slid across him, and Sulu turned to see two white-suited engineers wrestling a portable bulkhead down the central hallway. “It looks like they’re getting ready to isolate the hull breach. I’d better report back to Captain Kirk before they shut the permanent bulkheads down.”

  “Acknowledged. I’ll tell him you’re on your way.”

  “Thanks.” Sulu ducked around the corner after the engineers and hurried down the corridor, his silent footsteps even eerier now that the ceiling gleamed with its usual strip lighting. Relief at finding Chekov alive fizzed through him, tempered only by the nagging worry that the security officer might be injured. He was healthy enough to bang out his name in code, Sulu reminded himself. If he was hurt, he could have sent the lift down to sickbay—

  A reflected flicker of motion swam up the curved side of his face plate and Sulu spun to face it, all his instincts suddenly alert. He tried to balance himself on the edge of one foot to free the other for a kick, but the thick metal fabric of his boots refused to cooperate. Cursing, he retreated a step, then realized the motion was just a cabin door sliding closed. He relaxed with a sigh that turned into a choke when he noticed the room number.

  “Hey!” Sulu launched himself across the hall, banging a fist on the security plate beside his door. The small message panel embedded there flashed a golden locked-for-privacy remark at him, which meant there was someone inside. “Hey, that’s my room!”

  A memory of smashed plants and scattered clothes tore through his head, jumbling his thoughts while he tried to punch his access code into the door panel. What the hell was that new number Chekov had given him? 4729?

  “Mr. Sulu, is something wrong?” Kirk’s voice in his ear startled him until he realized the captain was speaking over the communicator channel.

  “There’s an intruder in my room, sir.” The message display suddenly flared red, warning him that he’d tried an incorrect access code. “I’m trying to get in to see who it is.”

  Kirk’s voice sharpened. “Location?”

  “Corridor C, sector thirty-nine. Cabin nineteen.” Sulu racked his brain for the access code, trying not to think about the myriad small treasures left in his room for a vandal to destroy. Was it 4279? No, that didn’t feel right—he was pretty sure the seven and the nine hadn’t been that close together. How about 7429?

  “We’re on our way,” Kirk said grimly. “Proceed with caution, Mr. Sulu. Kirk out.”

  Another red warning message crawled across the security display, this time informing Sulu that he had only one more chance to enter the correct code before the door barricaded itself against any further entries. His face plate misted with the force of his groan. He knew the silence from inside the room meant nothing, since sound couldn’t carry in a vacuum. Right now, the invader could be obliterating everything he owned. Did 7249 sound right?

  It was his best guess, Sulu decided, and punched it in with reckless haste. The message display rippled, then faded to a familiar, welcoming blue as the doors slid apart. Sulu dove through without thinking and found himself locked in gathering darkness when the doors slid shut behind him.

  Dammit, he thought in exasperation, I’m getting as bad as Chekov! The sweeping arc of his helmet light danced across the contours of his room, an alien landscape under a glittering shroud of ice. Nothing stirred.

  “Sulu.” This time, the abrupt crackle of Kirk’s voice in his ear made Sulu jump. “We’re having a little trouble getting past Mr. Scott’s portable bulkheads. We’re going to have to circle the deck. Are you all right?”

  “So far, sir. I haven’t seen—” Something large and pale hurtled at him from the shadows, and Sulu leaped out of its way. He recognized the white gleam of an engineering suit, cursed, then let his momentum ricochet him off a wall and back toward the intruder.

  The collision staggered both of them against the wall, frozen plants falling around them in a silent cascade. Sulu squirmed inside his environmental suit, trying to grapple with the bulky white form looming over him. He knew the two layers of vacuum-proof fabric between them would blunt the force of any blow he tried to deliver, no matter how well-aimed. His best hope was a wrestling hold.

  His attacker simply ignored his efforts, lifting him as if he weighed nothing, then slamming him down onto the worktable. It wasn’t the jolt of pain that galvanized Sulu—it was the pitiful feel of his ice-crusted plants shattering beneath him. Indignation at this final assault on his possessions gave him the strength to roll back onto his feet and hurl himself at the intruder.

  They crashed to the floor in a tangle of bulky limbs, with Sulu mostly on top. He tried to keep his position long enough to pin his assailant, but the body below him exploded into a desperate convulsion of violence, awkward but powerful. The first slamming blow tore Sulu’s hold away completely; the second sent him sliding across his plant-littered floor to thump against his overturned lily container. He rolled over in time to see the intruder lurch to his feet and bolt for the door.

  “Dammit!” Sulu untangled himself from the marble pond and scrambled up to follow, his breath hammering inside his suit.

  “Sulu, report!” Kirk’s voice sounded impatient on the helmet channel, as if he’d repeated the order several times. Sulu couldn’t remember hearing it. “What happened?”

  “I found the intruder, sir,” Sulu panted, skidding out into the hallway in time to see the white-suited form aim for the turbolift doors. He sprinted after him. “He’s heading for turbolift eight now.”

  “The l
ift doors should be locked.” The captain’s voice sounded almost as breathless as Sulu’s. Running in a bulky environmental suit wasn’t easy. “He’s not going to get out that way.”

  “No, sir.” Sulu pounded down the hall in eerie silence, slowly gaining on his assailant. Sweat trickled down his face and stung at his eyes, blurring his view of the corridor for a moment. When he shook his vision clear again, he thought at first that the white-suited intruder had vanished. Then he saw him—crouched across the hall from the turbolift, beside the red-rimmed panel that opened onto the maintenance ladders.

  Sulu’s breath left him in a horrified gasp. “Captain, he’s trying to get into the repair shafts!”

  “Stop him, lad!” Scott’s voice broke into the communicator channel. “The ladderways are still at atmospheric pressure—opening them will yank the air out of the entire emergency access system!”

  “Kirk to bridge, priority call!” The captain’s shout thundered inside Sulu’s helmet as he flung himself down the hallway at the intruder, praying he could reach him in time. “Seal off all repair shafts above and below Deck Six. Repeat, seal off all repair shafts—”

  A battering wall of wind hit Sulu in midstride, hurling him back against the corridor wall hard enough to slam the air out of his lungs. He choked and dragged in a trickle of breath, just enough to let him force his way through the fierce blast of frost-sparkled air, to dive into the emergency ladderway and onto the intruder’s back.

  They fell together against the rungs on the far side, both scrabbling to hold on against the silent blast of wind. Something brushed across the back of Sulu’s neck, tugging gently at the metallic fabric of his suit. The gusting wind slowed to a clearing whirl, then died in a final flurry of ice crystals down the dim ladderway.