K’davu
“A bomb!” Pike didn’t wait before making the call. “Enterprise! I have something to beam into space!”
“Stand by,” he heard through his suit.
“I can’t stand by!”
“It was what we were bringing for Enterprise,” Kormagan said, “had we needed to scuttle it ourselves.”
Bleeding and bruised, Quadeo laughed. “I’ll settle for all of you. I’ve given my life to fighting Rengru. I’ll do it now if it means making sure this plague doesn’t spread!”
“No good, Captain,” Pitcairn said. “We’re still offline—and when we restore power, we’ll only be able to receive, not send.”
That settled that: Pike couldn’t beam a bomb to his ship. He looked to the others. “Is it armed?”
Kormagan nodded. “The second she activated it.” She glanced at Pike. “You wouldn’t have caught it when you disarmed us. The Slammer-Nine’s reactants are held in stasis, and wouldn’t have scanned as dangerous until mixed.”
“That’s refreshing. How long?”
“Five minutes. Maybe.”
“How big?”
“We cleaned the sites at Susquatane with these.”
Damn it, I was afraid you were going to say that. “Pitcairn, I want you beaming people up as soon as you can,” Pike shouted.
“Aye, Captain!”
He looked to Eudah. “You’d better warn your population.”
“Doing it now,” she replied, looking fearful. The Rengru down in the valley were moving frantically. “It takes much longer to shield the cities than to uncover them.”
Then five minutes won’t do. Pike looked up and around. No ships, no anything—and the natives’ flying platforms weren’t fast at all. “What have we got?”
Connolly called out. “Look here.” He knelt beside the geocorder he’d brought to study the planet. “Those tunnels atop the escarpment—they’re mines.”
Eudah nodded. “From the days when we plundered K’davu for resources.”
Connolly pointed to the display. “There are shafts going down. Pretty deep.”
“Yeah, but they’re staggered,” Pike said, regarding the readings. “We can’t just pitch it in. If the bomb lands on a ledge, the whole ridge blows out onto the valley!”
“No, sir. Look—tunnels that hook.” He traced the outlines with his finger. “They used J-tunnels to contain the old underground nuclear tests on Earth.”
Contain. That was all Pike needed to hear. He reached for the bomb.
His move startled Una. “Captain, wait! Maybe the natives could help.”
Eudah gestured to her flying platform. “Solar-powered. They would fail before they got far.” She looked to the valley nervously. Many citizens were still out and about.
Connolly started to stand. “Sir, I’ve used the jetpack before—”
“And you ran half dry getting to Enterprise. Galadjian topped me off.” He buttoned up his armor and pointed to Connolly. “Give me maps if you can.”
The “Aye, sir!” was nearly lost in the rumble of Pike’s engine—and he himself nearly bought it against the escarpment wall before he righted his course. The Boundless battlesuits, Spock had told him, were designed for the novice—and at flying, he definitely was. But Connolly knew how the machines worked, and seconds after a chime announced the arrival of underground maps, the lieutenant was online telling him how to feed the legs of his journey into the autopilot.
Pike arced high—and soared into an open pit, evidently an air shaft. Darkness enveloped him as he careened near one wall, and then another—only to flip head-over-heels and decelerate.
“First base,” Connolly said as Pike hovered over a surface that would have been invisible if not for his battlesuit’s interface. “Go left!”
A slight jog to the left and Pike was descending again. The Boundless were skilled at communicating locally through some of the worst mediums around; Pike was thankful for that fact as his position was reported back to Connolly.
“Second. Left again!”
Another jog, another plunge. “Connolly, use what fuel you’ve got and beam out. Put the Boundless on Eudah’s platforms, if they’ll go—”
The shaft ended before he could finish. “You’re on the level,” Connolly said. “Two lefts and you’re home!”
“I said go! That’s an order!”
Pike’s impulse was to run through the horizontal section, but the ceiling was too low for the immense battlesuit—and his time too short. The jetpack wasn’t designed for lateral travel on a world with gravity, he soon saw—slamming against walls and ceilings as he went.
The far end arrived before his systems sensed it. He struck hard, protecting the orb with his arms as he fell. Dazed, his system alarms screaming from the impact and low fuel, he paused to catch his breath, and question his sanity—
—but only for a second. Yes, he was in a mine again, but he wasn’t going to stay this time either. Hell, no. He clambered to his feet and rounded the turn, ducking all the way.
Finally, his battlesuit’s laser sights detected the end up ahead. He bowled the beastly marble and turned to make his way out.
Pike was strangely thankful the bomb had come with no timer attached; he didn’t need the motivation, especially not when the jet-fuel warning was impetus aplenty. He took the route back to the vertical shafts on foot, allowing—at the cost of his complaining back—the battlesuit to curl him into a crouched run.
By the end of the first of the two vertical shafts back to the surface, he was nearly dry. “I don’t think I can do this,” he called out. No one answered. He felt only acceleration, saw only darkness, heard only—
Chris, I’m with you.
Pike blinked. Vina’s voice.
He saw a pinprick of light, still so far ahead. A tiny star at the center of a nebula of hardship. The jetpack sputtered, and he continued to rise—even as he saw an alarm appear. A sensor had reported back by subspace a fact heading for him in milliseconds: a detonation.
“Shields activate!”
Pike went up—and part of the mountain did, too, seeming to heave and churn. A jolt struck his personal shields, knocking him sideways—then upside down, and every way possible. The force quickly exceeded the shields’ capacity. He felt weightless for an instant, prone and powerless, riding the back of the shockwave.
And then, just as he began to fall, he felt something else. Something clamped about his midsection. Above, through the miasma of light and churning dust, he saw divers heading for him. No, not divers—it only looked like he was drowning. They were people in battlesuits, as he was, riding what little fuel they had in a quickly forming chain of arms and legs to gently guide him clear of the blast.
His crew.
Completely spent from the experience, Pike barely felt it when the group landed, fuel exhausted, on one of the lower terraces farther out from the escarpment. He rolled on his side to see the ridge venting columns of smoke from several high apertures, but otherwise most of its shape remained.
Una reached him first.
He tried to focus on her. “I told . . . you all . . . to get out.”
“I’m afraid we all work for someone who has very stern rules about this sort of thing.” She smiled gently. “Leave no one behind.”