So, here's the excerpt -- Spock has been temporarily knocked unconscious and Sulu is in command. They've taken the ship into a cloud of material that baffles sensors to the point that it results in temporary invisibility for the ship.
"A Little Bitty Bit of Treachery"
by Cher Petterson and Mylochka
“Sir!” Bergman called suddenly from the Science station. “The cloud – it’s starting to thin…”
Sulu frowned. “No sign of the
Galileo?”
“Sign of… something…” The young man stiffened, then turned. “Ships, sir. Two of them at least. Big.”
The helmsman’s mouth hardened into a tight thin line. “Klingon?”
“Very probably, sir.” Bergman rechecked his readings. “We’re going to exit the cloud right on top of them.”
“
Well, you were thinking a surprise attack would work best,” Del’s voice drawled in his mind as the helmsman adjusted his course based on the freshly updated readings to avoid a collision.
“
I didn’t plan on being one of the ones surprised,” Sulu thought back. Aloud, he ordered, “Keep your eyes peeled for that shuttle, Bergman.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Battle stations!” he called over his shoulder to the Communications Officer.
Paradoxically the all-too familiar screech of the klaxons steadied him as his battle-ready heart sent warm blood coursing swiftly through his veins. He hoped the alert signal would have the same effect on his less-experienced third watch crew. Now was the time for all the drills everyone had been hating him for to pay off. He had faith in each and every hand-picked name on the bridge’s duty roster – first watch to third. The Vulcan’s hellish drilling schedule had at least given him that. There was only one position he had any regrets about. Monique wasn’t a bad shot. She just wasn’t quite as good as….
“Relieving you, Miss Dubois,” a familiarly accented voice said, appearing at his elbow as if by magic. Chekov gave his old helm-partner a grateful smile as he slid into the seat behind the navigation console. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”
It only took Sulu’s brain a half-second to supply the name of someone who could have convinced the Russian that he’d been ordered to the bridge.
“
Monique was nervous as a cat,” that person argued preemptively. “
And you know this son of a babushka is too dumb not to have nothing but the ice-cold waters of the Volga flowing through his veins.”
“
Settle down, Cajun,” he reprimanded silently.
“
Sorry,” DelMonde grumbled unrepentantly inside his head. “
It my first mutiny – I a little excited.”
And still amped up on whatever it had taken to knock Spock out, Sulu decided. Without waiting for confirmation, he turned to the navigator. “We target the biggest ship -- or closest -- of the two. Weapons, engines, bridge – in that order. Have a full spread of photon torpedoes ready to keep the second one busy.”
“Aye, sir,” Chekov acknowledged, his fingers already communicating their intentions to the waiting Weaponry crews.
“Readings, Bergman!” he demanded, keeping more than half his attention on the thinning but still treacherous verilium-obsitrate cloud.
“Clearing,” the young man reported. “But still indeterminate.”
“Can they see us yet?”
“Doubtful. If they’re running sweeps on the cloud, they may read…” Bergman suddenly broke off. “Captain! Thinning rapidly now. We’re visible in 5…4… 3… 2…!”
“Sheee—it,” Del breathed from the Engineering station as the sparkling veil that had been cloaking the main viewer seemed to lift, revealing an alarmingly close view of the heavily armed aft section of a Klingon vessel.
“Fire!!” Sulu cried, rolling the ship hard to starboard with all his skill and might.
Quick as thought, Chekov sent screaming beams of green death into the warbird.
Impacts blazed blue and red so close to their own ship that the Enterprise shuddered with the wounds she’d inflicted on the warbird.
“The
Galileo!” Del shouted, pointing at the viewscreen while he hung onto the bridge’s railing.
“Photons! Now!” Sulu ordered, wrestling the ship back to port in time to avoid ramming the second ship.
“The first ship’s engines are damaged!” Bergman yelled, hanging onto his console for dear life as the torpedoes exploded against the hull of the second vessel. “Tractor beams failing. The
Galileo is starting to drift.”
“Get a beam on her, Del!” Sulu shouted over his shoulder, but the engineer was kneeling on the deck, his face contorted with pain as he struggled back to his station.
“No life signs on the shuttle!” Bergman reported.
“
They got ‘em somewhere in the lower decks.” DelMonde’s mental “voice” was agonized. “
Sweet Jesus, what them monsters done to my sweet girl?”
“Target their bridge first, then their weapons,” Sulu ordered, grimly swinging the ship around for another run at the flagship. “We’ve got to take out those forward shields. Bergman, pinpoint Antari and Indiian readings.”
A near-miss blast from the second ship sizzled past the lower right hand corner of the main viewscreen, accidentally tagging the starboard pylon of the flagship.
“Thank you.” Chekov grinned as he poured a blazing line of lethal green down the flagship’s main hull. “I was just about to get to that.”
“Shields weakened but still holding,” Bergman reported. “Flagship charging weapons.”
The second Klingon’s next shot was less wild and hit them midships as they turned to make their next run of the flagship.
“Feed him some more photons, Chekov,” Sulu said, whirling the ship around to give his partner a better angle.
“Shuttle in tow,” DelMonde reported, finally pulling himself back up to standing and wrenching his mind out of whatever hell Ruth was experiencing. “Deflector shields holding, but we took some damage.”
They flew into the second Klingon’s teeth, firing volley after volley of torpedoes. The Klingon stubbornly returned fire. Just at the moment Sulu began to fear the warbird was going to insist on a head-on collision, the Klingon peeled off to starboard in an attempt to strafe their main hull.
“Aft torpedoes!” the helmsman ordered, cutting the engines in the sort of abrupt deceleration that was more natural to a needle than a starship.
“
Shee-it, Kam!” Del protested inside his head as the ship whirled wildly. “
You trying to tear this thing up?”
Sulu grinned as the warbird overshot, taking another torpedo hit and them leaving a momentarily clear path back to the flagship. “
Whacha gonna do? Take the keys and put her up on blocks?”
“
Don’t be tempting me,” the Cajun warned.
“Chekov, target those forward shields again,” Sulu ordered, tilting the ship into a sharp approach vector intended to give the flagship as little flank as possible to aim at. “Bergman, I need those readings now.”
“Yes, sir!”
The helmsman freed one hand up just long enough to hit the comm. button. “Transporter room.”
“Scott, here. Standing by for coordinates.”
Good man. Sulu concluded. Sickening red began to bloom from the Klingon’s weapon ports. “Bergman, I need those readings now!!”
“Sir, I…” the Science Officer began helplessly, not daring to take his eyes from his viewscreen.
“This may help, Mr. Bergman,” Chekov said, confidently pressing the buttons to release a burning line of energy into the Klingon’s duranium-plated hide.
“That my boy!” DelMonde congratulated his roommate as a satisfying plume of fire rose from the Klingon’s hull. “Forward shields buckling!”
“Got ‘em, sir!” Bergman reported. “Transferring coordinates to Mr. Scott!”
The ship suddenly lurched to one side as a hit from nowhere exploded against their starboard flank.
“A third Klingon warship!” Bergman reported a little belatedly. “Must have been obscured by the cloud.”
“Damage reports coming in from all decks!” DelMonde reported grimly. “Power down to eighty-six percent!”
“Mr. Scott, are you still with us?” Sulu shouted in to the comm. as he struggled to wrest the limping ship back on course.
“Locking on now, Sulu,” the Scotsman replied.
“Target his weapons, Chekov,” Sulu said, bringing the ship in closer proximity to the Klingon’s shields than the manufacturer’s handbook recommended. “I’m going to give you a nice shot.”
“Alarmingly nice, Mr. Sulu,” Chekov agreed as they came near to skimming the outer pylons.
“We have the lasses, Sulu!”
“Fire!” the helmsman commanded, wishing the inhabitants of that vessel a particularly uncomfortable death.
Repercussions of the blasts rocked the ship as they twirled out back towards the verilium-obsitrate cloud.
“Oh, hell,” Del swore. “They gonna follow us.”
“Bergman?” Sulu queried urgently as the sparkling veil of verilium descended again over the main viewer and the ship jostled into the rough terrain of the cloud.
“The flagship is probably too badly damaged to pursue,” the Science Officer replied. “But the other two ships have penetrated the cloud.”
“And now we can’t see them,” Sulu said, glancing down at the nonsensical proximity readings his console was providing him.
Another blast jolted the ship to one side.
“But we’re leaking plasma,” Del apologized.
“So, they can see us,” Sulu concluded, adding zig-zags to his already complex course following a breadcrumb trail of converted probes through the cloud’s minefield of pockets. “Cajun, get on that plasma leak!”
“Yes, sir!” DelMonde replied, gesturing a crewman from Damage Control to temporarily replace him as he exited.
“Sulu,” Chekov said slowly as he studied the muddled readings from his instruments. “If the Klingon vessels are following the plasma trail…”
Sulu could have kicked himself for not drawing this conclusion first. “Best guess at their coordinates. Fire phasers aft!”
“Aye, sir!”
There was a familiar whine as the phasers were deployed. Then the sparkles on the mainscreen ignited into a multi-colored shimmer.
“Bergman?” Sulu asked, unable to make any more sense of the new readings his console was recording than the old.
The Science Officer spread his hands. “I think we may have hit one of our converted probes.”
The helmsman turned to the navigator. “A
better guess next time, Pavel?”
“Much better, Sulu,” the navigator promised, chagrined.
Before he could program his next volley, the ship shuddered with a new impact.
“Aft shields failing,” the Damage Control officer, Richardson, reported.
The
Enterprise’s phasers whined again. This time, the thick space surrounding them rumbled with the aftershocks of what had to have been an impact on one of their pursuers.
“A definite improvement, Navigator.” Sulu nodded as he zig-zaged their starship down the twinkling trail of magnetic probes they’d left on their way in.
“Thank you, Commander,” Chekov replied politely as his fingers worked frantically over his board. “May I try again?”
“At your discretion, Mr. Chekov,” the helmsman invited him generously as he twisted the ship in a sharp turn to avoid a pocket that reared up suddenly in their path.
“Power loss has slowed,” Richardson reported, “But is continuing. We’ve taken damage to the thrusters.”
Sulu nodded as he attempted another abrupt portside turn. “I can feel it, Mr. Richardson. Maneuverability is down. She’s getting sluggish.”
The phasers whined again. The bridge crew held their breath for a second but there was no sign of the shudder that had accompanied the last hit.
“Clean miss,” Chekov concluded.
The ship lurched as the Klingon used Chekov’s last trick against him and used the trajectory of his phasers to guess the
Enterprise’s location.
“Nobody likes a smartass,” Sulu muttered ducking and weaving dangerously between his breadcrumb probes.
“Aft shields have buckled,” Richardson reported. “Their next shot could take out our engines.”
“Not gonna happen,” his commander assured him. “Estimating the far edge of the cloud, Bergman?”
“Of the forty-five probes we launched, we’ve cleared twenty-three,” the Science Officer reported, sounding like he was making an effort to be optimistic.
“Bridge,” the comm. crackled. “This is DelMonde. We got the plasma leak plugged.”
“Fixed?” Sulu clarified.
“I said plugged,” Delmonde replied dryly. “It’ll hold for about half-hour or so if you can manage to stop shaking the ship around.”
Despite the Cajun’s typical nonchalance, Sulu thought he could hear an edge to the engineer’s tone. He had to be as eager to get to sickbay as the helmsman himself was.
The ship nearly sloshed into one of their probes as she wallowed around yet another of the sharp turns Sulu ordered her to perform. “I could manage a lot better if we could get power back up.”
“
Mais, if you see a space dock out here, pull over and we’ll get this thing fixed right up,” the engineer replied sarcastically.
There was a sharp cracking noise nearby.
“Bergman?” Sulu demanded as a shimmer filled the screen.
“The Klingons are…”
“…destroying the probes,” Sulu and Delmonde finished with him.
“Bastards!” the engineer swore.
“Del, I need speed.”
“Some things never change.” The Cajun drew in a deep breath. “I do got an idea, but I not know if Scotty’ll go for it.”
Sulu gave the next probe a wide berth. “Why not?”
“It be a little crazy.”
“Plain crazy or suicidal crazy?”
“Just plain crazy,” the engineer assured him.
“Tell Scotty you have my blessing,” Sulu decided. “Report progress.”
“Aye, sir,” the engineer replied, snapping off the link.
The screen filled with shimmers as the Klingons destroyed another glimmering probe.
“How do they think they’re going to navigate out of this soup?” Chekov asked, frustrated.
“Destroying us is priority one right now,” Sulu replied curtly as he coaxed his increasingly sluggish controls into another hard dive to the starboard side of the twinkling probe. “They’ll worry about survival at their leisure after that.”
A sparkling probe just ahead of them burst into a shooting star of dazzling dust.
“How many probes left, Bergman?”
“Seventeen.”
“Chekov, when they fire again, best guess and fire photons,” Sulu ordered. “I’m going to decelerate and let them blow past us.”
“But they will continued to destroy our probes,” the navigator objected.
“Trace their line of fire back and keep hitting them with phasers like they’re doing to us. We’ve got to disable their weapons before they disable us”
“If we lose the trail of probes, we could all end up lost in this cloud,” the Russian pointed out. “Sensors are useless for aiming our weapons…. And we are losing power. Soon we will not be able to maneuver. And there are two Klingon ships and one of us…”
“I’m aware of the possibilities, mister,” Sulu interrupted grimly.
Chekov drew in a deep breath and nodded understandingly. Command decision. That’s what it meant to be the person bearing the ultimate responsibility of being in control of a starship. “Yes, sir. Preparing to fire on your order.”
“Bridge,” the comm. link crackled to life. “This is Delmonde.”
“What have you got for me, Del?”
“A daft scheme,” Scotty was grumbling in the back ground. “E’en more daft than the first…”
“We gonna try creating a controlled explosion in the secondary thrusters using a borobsitrate compound.”
“Where are you getting borobsitrate?”
“We make some by superaccelerating a half ton of obsitrate we beamed in from the cloud.”
“Unstable mess of worthless junk…” DelMonde’s superior fretted discontentedly. “As likely to blow our crystals as boost them.”
“It just gonna be a boost – if it work,” the Cajun warned. “Not gonna last more than a minute or two. But it gonna shoot us up out this cloud like a cannonball.”
The screen filled with shimmers again as the Klingons blew the next probe out of existence.
“How fast?”
“I dunno,” the Cajun admitted. “Maybe beyond warp twelve or so for a few seconds.”
“Will shake us apart,” Scott predicted. “Or blow the engines so badly we’ll be lucky to make warp two.”
“We got a steady power loss,” Delmonde stated. “We down to 67% and they not a thing we can do to fix that in this cloud. We got a brace of Klingons on our tail and plasma leak that’s fixing to break loose again here in a minute and light us up like a neon bullseye. This the best option I got for you. It not a sure thing, but it all I got. Whether or not you take it is up to you.’
Sulu took in a deep breath as he ducked the ship under another probe. “Scotty?”
“He may be a madman,” the Chief engineer conceded, “but the lad has the right of it when he says we’re in a fix and we’ve no other option to offer ye. ‘Tis your decision, Commander.”
The helmsman took in a deep breath. To have tricked the Vulcan out of this ship only to destroy it… To have saved two precious lives only to lose all four hundred and thirty…
“Prepare the booster, DelMonde,” Sulu ordered.
“Ready on your mark,” the Cajun replied.
The helmsman hit the button on the intercom that would broadcast his voice throughout the ship. “Attention all hands – Brace for acceleration.”
Beside him, Chekov gripped the sides of his console. “A straight line course between the remaining probes and out of the cloud plotted and on your board, Mr. Sulu.”
The helmsman switched back to the line connecting him to Engineering. “Engage on my mark,” he said, placing his hands carefully over his controls.
“Aye, sir.”
“Engage!”
At first it felt like a completely normal increase of speed.
“Warp six,” Chekov announced.
…But the sensation continued… and continued…
“Warp nine,” the navigator read.
The only thing Sulu could compare it to were the times that they had tried slingshotting around the sun. He felt stretched… elongated… like space pulling at the coattails of time…
“Warp twelve,” the Russian informed him.
The ship was moving faster than his conscious mind could work now. He let his brain slip carefully out of gear, trusting himself to make the right decisions by instinct rather than by reason.
“Warp…. Speed is off the dials now.” Chekov’s voice was simultaneously far away and intimately close.
Del was wrong. They were not like a cannonball at all. They were a great silver bird. Muscles. Flesh. Feathers. Blood cells. Each of them a part of her being. A unity gliding through planes of being… A silver hawk sailing through the endless night…
The featureless sparkle of verilium-obsitrate smeared and streaked into multi-colored strands… which finally resolved itself into stars…
“Warp four…” Chekov’s voice was saying as the galaxy resolved itself into its normal appearance and the engines moaned down to a halt. “Warp three… Warp two…”
“Shee-it!” Noel DelMonde swore over the intercom.
** *** **
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