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“I doubt it.” Troi barked a laugh. “I mean, if someone else figured out how to rig an MD detonator, I doubt they’d use it for something like this. They’d go around selling it to the highest bidder—or at least using it for an explosion with a bit more oomph than this.”
Vaughn let out a breath through his teeth. “Probably, but I have to consider all the possibilities. You’re right, though, Romulan sabotage is the obvious answer. Which leads me to wonder what theywant with Raknal V.”
Troi shrugged. “Maybe they just want to—” Before he could continue, his tricorder beeped an alarm. “Elias, someone’s penetrated the force field.”
“What?”
Expanding his tricorder range outward, he asked, “You said you posted a Klingon guard?”
“Qaolin’s people did, why?”
“The only life signs I’m picking up are you and me—and our intruder, but it’s masked with some kind of screening field.”
Vaughn started to look around, seeming to take in the entire three hundred and sixty degrees around him at once. Then he sprang into action rather suddenly, leaping to push Troi to the ground. “Get down!”
Even as he did so, Vaughn unholstered his phaser and fired it.
Green beams of coherent light sizzled over Troi’s head, which meant the weapon they came from could well have been a Romulan disruptor. Or, as Elias pointed out,Troi thought, someone trying to set the Romulans up.
Somehow, despite the weight of Elias Vaughn on top of him, Troi managed to get a look at his tricorder. It was still picking up the life reading, and also the masking field. Whoever was firing at them didn’t want to be identified by species. Troi had no idea what that meant in the grand scheme of things, but that was Elias’s problem.
Troi’s problem was getting out of this alive.
Vaughn had gotten into a crouching position, covering Troi’s prone form, and fired again. Right after he did so, the life sign reading fluctuated. For a moment, it registered as Vulcanoid. My God, it really could be a Romulan.
“We’ve got to get out from the open,” Vaughn said. “We’re sitting ducks out he—”
Then a green beam struck Vaughn, and he went down—albeit with no obvious physical trauma. Since when do Romulan disruptors have a stun setting?
That question was the last thing Troi thought before a green beam struck him in the shoulder. As blackness started to claim him, he heard a rumbling sound. The building’s about to collapse!He tried to make his arms and legs move, but they refused to respond to his brain’s commands. The ground started to shake under him even as consciousness slipped away, and he felt something heavy smash into his chest…
Intellectually, Elias Vaughn knew he had opened his eyes. However, he had no empirical evidence to back this knowledge up, as there was no qualitative difference between what he saw after he opened his eyes and the pitch blackness of unconsciousness.
Immediately, he assessed the situation. His head was pounding, and there was a coppery taste in his mouth that he knew was blood. Although he was aware of the presence of his body below his sternum, he couldn’t really feelthat part of him as such. There was also a very heavy weight that was keeping him in place—probably one of the metal frames of the building. That weight pi
He also couldn’t get at his combadge to call for help. If his combadge was even still on his uniform, which he couldn’t tell from the darkness.
Vaughn also had the vague queasiness that often accompanied awakening from a phaser set on stun. The weapon that fired on him and Ian Troi looked and sounded like a Romulan disruptor, which didn’t traditionally have a stun setting, but Vaughn himself knew how to reprogram its lower settings so that it could mimic a stun blast, so it stood to reason that their assailant might know how, also.
All in all,he thought, I’ve been in worse spots.That thought was a rather telling commentary on the kind of life he lived, Vaughn realized.
“Oooooh.”
The noise sounded like Troi’s voice. “Ian?” Vaughn’s voice was a barely legible croak; he cleared his throat, and repeated himself.
“E—Elias?” The voice sounded weak.
“I’m here, Ian. Where are you? Are you all right?”
“Wha—wha’ happen’?”
“Best guess is that our assailant rendered us unconscious, then left us in the building for when it collapsed.”
“M—makes sense.”
Vaughn frowned. “Why?”
“Well, feels like there’s a big piece o’ plasti-form ’n my chest.”
Oh, hell.Instinctively, Vaughn once again struggled against the beam that held him in place, but he had neither the strength nor the leverage to budge it. He was trapped. And given the numbness in my lower body, I doubt I’m in any shape to move even if I could get this thing off me. Dammit.
“Can you reach your combadge?”
“’S not there.” Troi’s voice was weakening. “Musta fallen off.”
Or more likely was removed.“Stay with me, Ian.” He couldn’t afford to let Troi go into shock. “Talk to me.”
“Why’d ’e do ’t?”
Vaughn blinked. At least he assumed he did. It was still pitch black, after all. “Why did who do what?”
“Th’ Romulan. Stu
“Assuming it was a Romulan, then—”
“Was.”
That confused Vaughn. “Was what?”
“Was Romulan. Or Vulcanoid, anyhow. Gotta readin’ after y’ shot ’im.”
A pity that Ian’s tricorder probably went the way of his combadge.“In any case, the lighter setting means less physical evidence on the bodies of being shot. All there’d be is nerve damage. If the saboteur shot to kill, either there’d be evidence of the disruptor blast on our bodies, or we’d just disintegrate, in which case our missing bodies would raise a red flag. Much easier to leave our bodies in the collapsing building, where cause of death would be blindingly obvious, and likely no one would investigate further. It’s just his bad luck that we both survived.”
“Jus’—one—of—”
“We’re both going to make it,” Vaughn said sternly. “The Carthagewill send someone to look for us.” He couldn’t imagine Vance Haden letting his second officer and a mission specialist stay missing for any length of time.
“Not—if—combadges—gone.”
Troi had a point. “They’re still going to look for us. And once they find that we’re not with our combadges, they’ll search. We’re virtually the only humans on this planet, it won’t be too hard to pick us up.”
“Mebbe.” Troi made some kind of noise. “Hell’va s’prise.”
“Surprise?” Vaughn asked after a moment, when no explanation was forthcoming. Besides, silence could be deadly.
“Tol’ D’a
Normally, Elias Vaughn did not believe in giving people false hopes, but he was damned if he was going to sit here and listen to Troi bury himself. “You’re not going to die, Ian. They’ll be by soon to rescue us.” A pause, which Vaughn refused to let go on for any length. “What was the surprise going to be?”
“Du
Trying like hell to sound encouraging, Vaughn said, “We’ll be rescued soon, Ian.”
“Sorry I—c’dn’t see you one las’ time— imzadi.”
He knew that last word was a Betazoid term of endearment of some sort. Lwaxana was an especially powerful telepath, even by the high standards of her species, and Vaughn wondered if Troi thought his wife could hear him.
Futilely, Vaughn tried once again to move the beam, but his strength had diminished—probably because of blood loss, based on the increasing coppery taste in his mouth—and his leverage certainly hadn’t improved.