Mercenary Frigate Eris
First came light, then justice. The transporter beam had only begun to fade away around Seven when she pressed the firing studs on her disruptor pistols. Ellory did the same, and together they filled Eris’s command deck with a heavy-stun field that hit the four Antican officers like the hand of an angry goddess. It enveloped them in flashes of white light as it knocked them out of their chairs. Three were out cold before they struck the deck. Only the largest of them, the one who had occupied the command chair, clung to consciousness as he lay on the deck, twitching and gasping like a landed fish.
Seven knocked him out with a short disruptor pulse in his torso on her way to the forward consoles, whose smooth interface surfaces were cracked and sparking—collateral damage of Seven’s and Ellory’s overlapping barrages of disruptor energy. She was relieved to find that the panel continued to accept input despite having been fractured by small-arms fire.
Ellory visited each of the command deck’s three aft stations, inflicting minor bits of sabotage at each one before moving on to the next. “Warp drive, weapons, and shields offline,” she declared proudly. “Internal comms disabled. Should I knock out the subspace transceiver?”
“No. We need it.” Seven finished her work at the ship’s operations console and then joined Ellory at the comms station. “Call up a copy of Kohgish’s voiceprint while I prepare a message for time-delayed transmission.”
“On it.” As she navigated the frigate’s computer system to get the voiceprint file, Ellory stole glances at what Seven was doing. “Let me guess: you write it, but the computer says it with Kohgish’s voice.”
“That is the general idea, yes.” She finished writing the message and set it to broadcast on a loop once transmission was initiated. “Do you have the voiceprint?”
“Applying it to your text now…. Done. How long until it sends?”
Seven checked her awareness of time’s passage. “The Talarians arrive in three minutes and fifty seconds. Begin transmission in four minutes.”
“Done.”
“Let’s keep moving. Sickbay. One deck down, one section aft.”
Side by side they left the command deck and strode down a short corridor to a ladderway. Seven descended first and held her disruptor ready, covering the passageway ahead while Ellory followed her down to deck two. Using hand signals, Seven directed Ellory to head aft and to look for their target on the left side of the corridor.
They neared the door to Eris’s sickbay. Ellory raised a hand and made a fist, signaling Seven to stop. As they paused, Ellory pulled a compact Romulan stun grenade from her jacket’s front pocket. With an irritated look Seven asked, What are you doing with that?
Ellory smirked, shrugged, and then armed the grenade.
The tiny device beeped softly as it counted down to detonation.
With a tilt of her head, Ellory cued Seven to leapfrog past her to the far side of the sickbay door. Seven darted down the corridor and put her back to the bulkhead next to the portal. With barely any time left on the grenade’s fuse, Ellory pivoted in front of the sickbay entrance. The door slid open, she lobbed the grenade inside the medical bay, and then she ducked back against the bulkhead on the other side of the doorway.
A snap-bang and a searing flash of veridian light was followed by the crackling of lightning run amok as the grenade lit up the sickbay with stunning tendrils of electricity, frying both equipment and personnel into submission.
When the commotion ceased, sickbay was choked with thick white smoke that stank of scorched polymers and burnt fur. Seven surveyed the scene and offered Ellory a grudging nod of approval. “Most efficient.”
“Thank you.”
The pair resumed heading aft.
“Do you have any more of those?”
“Sorry, that was the only one Veris had.”
“Unfortunate. Had I known, I might have recommended we save it for main engineering.”
Ellory rejected that idea with a small shake of her head. “Not ideal. Multilevel and too much open space. That kind of electro-stunner works better in confined spaces.”
“Noted.” Seven stopped at the next ladderway and let Ellory pass her.
The Trill woman descended the ladderway without hesitation, as if she understood what Seven wanted and needed from her without having to be told. At the bottom of the ladder she took up a covering position while Seven followed her down.
They arrived in the middle of a longer corridor than the ones on the upper decks. Ellory pointed aft, toward the entrance to the main engineering compartment, and Seven nodded. Together they advanced, shoulder to shoulder, disruptors level and steady. Every few steps Seven looked back to make sure they weren’t being targeted from behind.
Several strides shy of the double doors to engineering, Ellory’s expression betrayed a hint of anxiety. “How do we play this?”
“Eight targets, four on the upper level, four below. I will breach the door. You cover the four up top, and I will take the four below.”
“How exactly do I—”
Seven jogged toward the double doors, which parted ahead of her, and then she sprinted, vaulted over the low safety railing that encircled the engineering compartment’s ring-shaped upper catwalk, and landed hard in a low squat on the lower level’s deck—much to the surprise of the four Antican engineers who were there monitoring the ship’s impulse and warp reactors.
She fired her disruptors, bathing the lower level with heavy-stun pulses.
Two of the engineers were slammed back against bulkheads and crumpled to the deck like cheap sacks stuffed with raw meat. But two slipped behind cover—one behind a bank of control stations, the other behind the warp core reaction chamber.
Plasma bolts screeched down at Seven from above, scorching the deck in front of her and caroming off hard surfaces behind her. She dove for cover behind a boxed junction of EPS conduits. Lying on the deck, she blind-fired a few stun pulses at her attackers on the upper level.
Then, from above, a sound sweeter than music: the vwap of heavy-stun disruptor pulses followed by the thumps of bodies hitting a grated catwalk. Two down up top, two to go.
Fiery streaks of plasma raced past close enough to singe Seven’s hair. Noting the angle of the shot’s ricochet, she realized it had come from the Antican behind the control stations.
And two more down here.
She made a mental time check: she had just over two minutes until the Talarian broker was expected to arrive. Two minutes to deal with these troublesome engineers, and then an entire platoon-strength gang of mercenaries in the shuttlebay.
Another burst of plasma tore past her.
Seven laid down a blind salvo of suppressing fire as she stood, and she kept firing as she charged across the lower engineering deck, hammering the bank of consoles and the warp core with stun-force blasts from her disruptor pistols, forcing both her opponents to stay behind cover.
Then, as she passed the warp core and neared the consoles, she remembered her fight on Zirat and threw herself into a slide across the smooth metallic deck, firing all the way.
She slid into the view of the engineer behind the consoles—and flattened him with a heavy pulse before he realized what had happened.
Then she rolled over, reset one weapon to full power, narrow beam, and targeted the coolant conduit above the other Antican engineer’s hiding place. One shot ruptured the conduit and doused the area behind the intermix chamber with freezing-cold chemicals, flushing the hidden Antican into the open—where Seven dropped him with a stun blast from her other pistol.
She looked up and saw one Antican emerging from a nook behind Ellory. No time to shout a warning—Seven fired and put him down with a stun pulse. Then she heard Ellory’s weapon discharge. The last of the Antican engineers tumbled over the catwalk’s safety railing and landed on top of the deuterium injector assembly beside the intermix chamber.
Moments later, Ellory slid down the ladder from the catwalk and joined Seven on the lower level. “How far to the shuttlebay?”
Seven pointed out two doors along the compartment’s aft bulkhead, one each to port and starboard. “Through either door, straight aft into who-knows-what. We’ve got ninety seconds and a target-rich environment.”
“Let’s split up. Hit ’em from both sides at once.”
Seven consented with a nod and a smile. “Good luck.”
“You, too. And don’t waste time being careful.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
They kissed quickly, and then they sprinted in opposite directions—Ellory to the starboard hatch, Seven to port.
The corridor from engineering to the shuttlebay was mercifully empty.
The hatch at the far end was unlocked. It opened as Seven approached.
She charged through it, knowing she had seventy-five seconds left.
Eris’s shuttlebay was mostly open space, but its forward end, near the two hatchways, was a cluttered, disorderly mess. Tall stacks of cargo pods and crates of spare parts were clustered in uneven heaps, creating an asymmetrical labyrinth of blind intersections. Loose bits of junk littered the deck, and dozens of untended cables and hoses curled over and around one another like a serpentine orgy. Passing through it, Seven glimpsed Ellory advancing along its opposite side, but she quickly lost sight of her in the maze of industrial refuse.
As Seven neared the end of the mess, she chose a pod to use as cover, crouched behind it, and surveyed the group of heavily armed mercs surrounding Kohgish and the shipping crate full of latinum. Wide-field stun blasts would be useless at this range in such a cavernous space, and she was fairly certain the mercenaries would not be using stun settings when they returned fire.
But I promised Harper I’d play by the rules. Or that at least I’d try.
Seven reset her pistols to narrow beam, maximum stun.
Sixty seconds left.
She popped up from cover and opened fire. Even from a distance, she peppered the clustered platoon of mercs with ease. Each shot she landed slammed another goon to the deck. From the other side of the junk maze, Ellory joined the assault. Watching the Trill’s disruptor blasts level one merc after another, Seven knew Ellory had made the same adjustments to her weapons as she had.
By the time the first eight mercs fell, the rest had scattered, and Kohgish had taken cover behind the shipping container. Seven had expected the goons to retreat to cover—but instead they charged toward her and Ellory, zigzagging to evade incoming fire, their weapons blazing, lighting up the stacked pods and crates with plasma, phaser pulses, and particle beams.
Ricochets caromed around Seven’s position, and the mercs’ barrage rained white-hot motes down upon her as their weapons slagged the crates into molten junk.
She fell back, flooding the zone with disruptor blasts to cover her movements.
Ducking and darting through the chaotic maze, she heard the mercs barking information at one another as they tracked her and Ellory. Their footfalls and the echoes of their voices revealed that they were splitting up to cut off all avenues of escape.
In other words, Seven mused, you just divided yourselves.
Now we conquer.
There was no time to think about tactics, no master plan. For Seven the battle became a dance, an improvisation, a work of inspiration as she took her cues from every shifting shadow, every reverberating sound. She turned a corner, fired—and down went a merc. She climbed on top of the stacks, alighted soundlessly from one heap to another, and then leaped down into the midst of her enemies and mowed them down with speed and precision, pinning some, using others as shields before stunning them with point-blank pulses to their chests.
The whine of weapons fire and the thud-grunts of large thugs meeting the deck told Seven that Ellory was cutting her own swath through Kohgish’s troops.
Moving through the labyrinth, Seven felt alive. Powerful. Here in the dark, skulking in close quarters, she knew in her bones that she was this jungle’s apex predator.
She holstered her pistols. Stalked the last few mercs in silence and put them down by hand. A palm-strike put an Orion’s head against a metallic pod. A knife-hand attack into a Betelgeusian’s temple knocked him out before he knew Seven was beside him.
An eerie silence filled the shuttlebay.
Ten seconds to spare.
Seven walked out of the maze to find Ellory was several meters ahead of her, scuffed, bloodied, but mostly unhurt, standing perfectly still in the open space of the shuttlebay.
Then a lone figure stepped out of the far end of the maze. It was Kohgish, no more than four meters behind Ellory, with a particle-beam pistol aimed at the back of her head.
The Antican general beckoned Seven with a curl of his free paw. “Miss Hansen, I presume? Mardani told me quite a bit about you. Do come say hello.”
Seven walked slowly toward the showdown, taking care to keep her hands away from her holstered disruptors. “General Kohgish. Let’s not do anything foolish.”
“I think we’re past that. Don’t you?”
“I suppose we are.”
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen now, Miss Hansen. You—”
“My name is Seven.”
The general snarled. “Impudent little stroyk! Mardani gave me your dossier. I know your real name is Annika Hansen.”
“That name belonged to someone who no longer exists. My real name is Seven of Nine.”
“Tell yourself whatever you want, Miss Hansen. But if you defy me again, your friend dies. Now, as I was saying, here’s what will happen next. You will both remove your weapons. Set them on the deck. And kick them back to me.”
Seven stared Kohgish in the eye. “We will do no such thing.”
The general grinned to show his fangs. “I warned you, Miss Hansen.”
Kohgish fired.
A brilliant white beam leaped from his weapon’s muzzle—
—and slammed into an invisible barrier three meters in front of him.
Golden ripples of distortion shimmered across the hemispherical surface of the force field… which sat over Kohgish like a dome.
Enraged, he fired again.
Once more the force field shimmered—but now it was half a meter smaller in diameter. Kohgish stared in wide-eyed shock. “What is this?”
Seven nodded at Ellory, who walked quickly to the latinum crate. Then Seven paced in a slow orbit around Kohgish’s gradually shrinking invisible prison.
“This, General, is the force field you set up to protect the latinum from the Talarians. I reprogrammed it while I was on your ship’s command deck.”
Ellory affixed a transporter recall beacon to the shipping crate, triggered it, and stepped back. Half a second later, the crate full of latinum dematerialized on its way to Nodokata.
“Right about now, your starship broker, Qulla, is probably wondering why you and your crew won’t answer his hails. I expect he’ll wait a few minutes before he beams over here to investigate the matter for himself.”
Kohgish slammed his paws against the contracting force field, only to be punished by harsh shocks. Then it began to touch the top of his head, shocking him into a low crouch. “What are you doing? Let me out!”
“You’re a wanted man, General. The only place you’re going is to prison.”
He growled like a wild animal as the force field started to crackle against his whole body. When he spoke, he sounded as if he were choking. “Hansen, you guvok! You’ll pay for this! You hear me, Hansen, you filthy Borg soka?”
Kohgish writhed in agony on the deck as the force field crushed the air from his lungs, pushing him toward unconsciousness. Seven kneeled beside him. “You’re right about one thing. I am part Borg. I will always be part Borg. But I will never let anyone shame me again for being who I am.” She leaned in close and savored the fear in his eyes. “And I will never, ever let anyone tell me again that I don’t know my own fucking name.”
Seven stood tall above the Antican and composed herself as he gasped for air inside his invisible cocoon. Ellory stepped up beside her. Seven pulled out her badge and declared, “Kohgish of Antica, I am Fenris Ranger Seven of Nine—and you are under arrest.”