"I think it's just a skeleton crew," says Zula. She is fiddling with her tricorder and looking intent. "The Na'kuhl evidently came here, left a small force in possession, and went on to Priyanapari. Probably no more than a dozen of them."
"Weel, it could be worse," I say, "but, on th' ither hand, there's nae but two of us."
"We could get back in the Scorpion and head back to the Leacock," says Zula. She has a resigned air, like she already knows what I'm going to say next.
"If the Na'kuhl ken we're here, an' yon station has ony weapons, they'll be shootin' at us all the way, and Ah cannae guarantee we willnae get hit, an' yon Scorpion's no' gannae stand up tae station-mounted weaponry. Nae. We're jist gannae have tae make quality count mair than quantity, hen." I grin at her. "Ye kent verra weel Ah wis gannae say that, am Ah right?"
She rolls her lovely eyes expressively, and checks her phaser. "There's a bit of sensor fuzzing already going on," she says, "but I'm reading at least three of them coming towards this location. I'd guess they heard the shots."
I grunt. Na'kuhl are tricky, and that ship commander will have left some reasonably competent people behind. And this station is bleak, it's not got much going for it in the way of cover - even if I knew the layout, which I don't, I reckon I'd still be pushed for somewhere to hide. "Let's gae in an' say hello, then," I say, and raise my rifle to firing position.
We edge through the doorway, into a long empty corridor. I was right, there's nothing much to hide behind. We play leapfrog from doorway to doorway down the corridor, one covering while the other moves. The doors, when they open at all, open onto bleak little cubicles with virtually empty interiors. Stripped and abandoned. We're coming up on an intersection now -
And three red-clad figures come around the corner with weapons ready and determination in their little red eyes. Zula fires first, the golden beam of her phaser streaking out and splashing away from a heavy-duty personal shield. The Na'kuhl don't even bother with demands for surrender. Pale green bolts of chronoplasma blast from their hand weapons.
Zula suddenly flares and vanishes in a blast of light.
I yell, wordlessly, and fire the sniper rifle. The tritanium slug goes right through the first Na'kuhl's shield and into his head. He drops. The other two are shooting, but I'm already moving. I don't know how they train these Na'kuhl insurgents, but their tactical doctrine evidently doesn't have methods for dealing with a vengeance-crazed Scot coming at them, shouting "Creag an tuire!" and firing a TR-116B from the hip. Holes perforate the wall of the corridor, and two Na'kuhl bodies, and then I'm at the intersection, and the enemies are down on the deck.
And Zula - is nowhere. Damn it.
All right. I have to live through this. And deliver some payback to the damn Na'kuhl, too. I look around and get my bearings. They must have registered us by now, they will be converging on this point - if I was them, where would I start converging from? I sprint down the corridor, to another intersection. I hear booted footsteps on the deck plating, and I crouch down.
A chronoplasma bolt snaps over my head. The rifle sneezes once, twice, three times, and an oncoming Na'kuhl staggers, dropping her weapon as her hands go, uselessly, to the gaping holes in her torso. She falls, but there are three others behind her -
Something whizzes past me along the floor, zips towards the Na'kuhl. Spinning lines of energy slam into them around shin height, tripping them and sending them tumbling to the floor. I shoot one of them as he tries to regain his feet, roll away from a badly-aimed return shot, take out the shooter with my next round. A beam of golden light fixes itself on the last Na'kuhl, clawing at her personal shield. I fire, one last time, and she drops.
I turn to face Zula. "Dinnae iver dae that tae me again," I say.
"I don't think I will." Her eyes are very wide. "Wow, you really laid into them, didn't you?"
"Ah wis highly motivated, hen." My own fault, though, really. I should have known she'd have some Intelligence trickery on her; feigned disintegration and tripwire drones will be only part of her arsenal. "Is there ony mair o' th' wee beggars?"
"Oh, yes." She points. "Looks like some sort of concourse, that way. It'll give us more space to manoeuvre, at least. But they'll definitely have us on scan, now, and no way my tricorder will get through their sensor spoofing -"
I run through the maxims of Sun Tzu in my head, consider whether I'm in debatable ground or deadly ground, decide to settle for "ground where I'm going to kill a bunch of Na'kuhl" instead. "Let's be gaein', then," I say to Zula.
We head down another bleak corridor – and the door at the end hisses open before we even get near it. I send a slug through the doorway on general principles, but there’s no red-clad figure standing there – only movement, some humped shape shuffling along the ground -
“Crawler mines!”
I hit my transporter buffer and pull out a couple of breather masks. I toss one to Zula, and she catches it one-handed while spraying the floor with phaser fire. I jam the mask over my mouth, just in time, as the first mobile gas mine goes up in a cloud of greenish fug. My shield stops most of the blast, and the breather protects my lungs, but a trace of the vile chemical reek gets through, and my eyes sting and burn.
It’s supposed to slow us down. Well, I don’t let it. I toss a concussion grenade through the doorway, follow it while the echoes of the blast are still dying away, screaming at the top of my voice and firing shot after shot. There are confused sounds ahead of me. I barrel through the doorway.
I’m in a big empty-ish space, with consoles sticking out of the floor like random islands, and a whole lot of tubing and piping and wiring decorating the walls. Not a concourse, then, more likely the station’s main engineering section. My spirits lift a little. If we can clear the Na’kuhl out of here, we’ve gone a long way towards taking the station entirely.
Of course, the Na’kuhl know that, and are acting accordingly. Chronoplasma beams stab through the air towards me. I duck and weave, manage to dodge some, take the rest on my shield, shoot back. Phaser light slams into one target as Zula follows me into the fray. I drop that one with my next shot, but the rest of the Na’kuhl have gone to ground, taking cover behind consoles.
There are thumps and blasts of green smoke as more gas mines go up. The smog is making it hard to see. “Ye pin ‘em doon an’ Ah’ll gae after th’ mines guy!” I yell at Zula.
She rakes the consoles with phaser fire – it won’t hit anyone, but it should make them keep their heads down. “You’re still doing the damn accent now?” she yells back at me. The controller for the crawler mines must be somewhere nearby; I crouch down and edge around a console myself.
“Ah’m a wee Scots lassie frae Inverness!”
“Then you should be speaking Gaelic, not Lallans Scots!” The breather mask slightly muffles her indignation. I hear movement. I pop my head over the console and bang off a couple of rounds. Sparks fly from something on the wall, hopefully not something vital. Someone is shuffling, nearby.
“Anyway, your parents moved away from Inverness when you were four years old!” I just hope this is confusing the Na’kuhl. “To the south of England! You went to school at freaking Roedean!”
I duck and roll round the next console, and suddenly I’m face to face with a Na’kuhl, and he has a crawler mine controller in his hands. And then he has the butt of my rifle in his face, hard, and he goes sprawling on the floor. OK, good, if we can take a prisoner, that’ll help -
The blast knocks me off my feet, and the world fills with green smoke. The chemical reek gets worse, and there’s a nasty whiff of something else besides it. I paw at the breather with one hand, making sure it’s still in place. The mines guy fell on one of his own crawler mines, and it detonated. Damn it. So much for prisoners.
“Ye’ve been readin’ up on me? Ah’m flattered,” I call to Zula.
“It’s in your personnel record!”
“Is that th’ one that ends at Caleb IV? Ye dinnae want tae rely on that, hen.”
There’s no immediate answer. I peek out of cover, in the direction where I hope Zula is. She’s there, and so’s a Na’kuhl injector lieutenant, and they are locked together in a grim wrestling match. I swear quietly to myself. It’s going to take finesse, picking off the Na’kuhl without hitting Zula instead -
I needn’t have worried. Zula breaks loose from the Na’kuhl woman’s hold, seizes her right hand and jams it into her throat. The Na’kuhl lets out a despairing wail as the injector blasts her with the toxins she’d meant for Zula, and then she goes limp and lifeless. Zula drops her, ducks back from a chronoplasma bolt, and snaps a phaser shot back. I turn in that direction.
There is a shifting, flickering, half-visible shape there, scuttling from one console to another. Another Na’kuhl, using one of those temporal gadgets to fuzz his position in space-time, so he looks like multiple shadowy images instead of a single solid person. I squint down the rifle, sighting carefully. There’s a way around this, but it needs steady aim and quick reflexes.
The moment comes. I squeeze the trigger. For just an instant, several versions of the temporally-fuzzed Na’kuhl’s head are all lined up, and the rifle slug passes through all of them, including whichever one is temporarily real. The Na’kuhl falls heavily to the deck, shadowy images coalescing into one inarguable corpse. The hole through his head, compounded of several alternate paths the bullet might have taken, is quite exceptionally messy.
There are no more shots, no more explosions. There is no more movement. That was the last one.
I stand up. The air is still smogged with toxic gas, there are holes and scorch marks over the walls and the consoles, there are trickles of sparks and smoke coming from a number of places, there are urgent beeping sounds which are probably alarms. The Na’kuhl are down. I grin at Zula; she can’t see it through my breather, but I grin anyway.
“Wha’s like us?” I ask. “Damn few, and they’re a’ deid.”
---
There’s a control room a couple of levels up. We need to get to that – first, to clean out any remaining Na’kuhl, second, to get a proper idea of how much damage we’ve done to the station and how to go about fixing it.
“My tricorder’s acting crazy,” Zula mutters, as we lope towards the control room door.
“Mair sensor spoofing?”
“I don’t think so. There was, but then there was – some sort of energy release.”
“Whit sort?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you.” Zula gives her tricorder a thump. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m reading – well, it’s hard to tell, but there’s definitely at least one life sign.”
“Och, we can handle one.” I ready the rifle as we come up on the control room door. It’s blank and anonymous like all the other doors in this place. And it isn’t locked; it slides open as I approach.
And I charge through it with another cry of “Creag an tuire!”
I have a brief glimpse of consoles, of a body lying inert on the floor, and then my attention is concentrated on one moving shape, and I am whipping the rifle up towards it, while at the same time finding myself staring at close range into the barrel of a nasty-looking nanite disruptor pistol.
Somehow, we manage not to shoot each other. We just stare, for one frozen moment.
“Captain Caird,” says T’Laihhae. “Jolan tru.”
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