Omake - Devas and Asuras Pt 3 - Simon_Jester
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
DEVAS AND ASURAS
Chapter Three
Chapter Three
Recommended Listening: "The Battle of the Ice"
Advisory: This chapter contains depictions of intense, close-quarters violence.
USS Kumari
Six Light-Minutes off Deva IX
Stardate 25152.7
"Ma'am, the Sydraxian cruisers have dropped shields on the side facing Endurance- I think they're beaming boarding parties over!"
"Understood." Jessica Rivers hid the fuming frustration and worry building in her gut.
She'd had her reasons for dividing her command in the face of the enemy. She'd expected a chaotic melee with no ship able to concentrate on another for long. Formation fighting had never been a Federation strength, and nothing she'd seen, read, or heard led her to expect it from the Sydraxians. But if the fight would be chaos, keeping one ship out of the fray to watch the others and exploit opportunities? She'd need that, as a reserve force.
And it had worked. Endurance's sniping fire had chewed up the shields of more than one of the Hierarchy ships, either directly or indirectly. But the price was leaving Chekov isolated. She'd bet on the Sydraxians being too busy to take advantage of that, she'd lost, and now they would pay.
Still, better a bunch of screaming commandos than another spread of those crude- but frighteningly effective- thermonuclear torpedoes. If the enemy wanted to board Chekov's ship, at least they had minutes, not seconds, before the Excelsior was mortally threatened. Minutes they could use. But how? Rivers felt her jaw twitch slightly, as she pondered the display. How to make the advantage Chekov had bought her count? Could they exploit that, hard enough to turn the tide of the battle, and bail the other Excelsior out of its disastrous troubles?
USS Endurance
Main Bridge
Moments Earlier
Pavel Chekov sucked in a deep breath as the Sydraxians milled about in the middle of their battle against the rest of Task Force One.
They'd brutally beaten his ship with massed fire. Endurance lolled in space, attitude thrusters stuttering in short sharp bursts to counteract plumes of boiling coolant from hull breaches. Entire sections were offline, though he desperately hoped that was damage to internal communications and not outright destruction of vast tracts of the hull. But he still had torpedoes, most of his phasers, some of his propulsion systems... The shield generators would be back on line soon enough. If the rest of the fleet could keep the Sydraxians from finishing the job-
ch'Vohrer cried from the backup tactical console, "Sir, their cruisers are lowering shields-" even as frinc Cheg at the main controls laid in a barrage of phaser strikes. On battery power and with some of the control lines cut, the Excelsior's fire lacked its usual ferocity, doing little more than skitter across the cruisers' armored hulls, leaving long burn scars but little damage.
"Picking up spikes of transporter energy!"
And within a heartbeat of those words, an armored soldier began to appear in a blue shimmer before Chekov's very eyes- only to double over, agonized. Ensign Melethdra had leapt from the helm console in that moment, drawn her smallsword, and leaned into the mass of sparkling motes. When the Sydraxian fully emerged from the transporter's unreality, he did so with a length of steel as long as his forearm already buried in- commingled with- his heart.
The Amarki drew her phaser and died, another Sydraxian's carefully aimed flechette gun raising a spray of blue-green blood from her chest and neck. Time seemed to stretch as Melethdra fell, and Chekov shouted an agonized curse. He'd had his phaser out and trained and firing, but the stunning beam shimmered harmlessly against the commando's heavy armor. The Sydraxian's flexible neck flicked around quickly and their eyes met. Then a second weapon warbled its song, Commander frinc Cheg adding the weight of his own stun-beam.
The commando's knees buckled from what fraction of the effect had leaked through armor plate, buying moments. Chekov's fingers might tremble now and then, but he knew exactly where to place them from half a century of practice as he set his phaser to kill. It was the old model, souped up in a few ways that had never made it into the books, and the captain's next shot left a blinding red-purple outline of disintegration where the Sydraxian used to stand.
Chekov hissed and nearly dropped the weapon; he'd forgotten how much heat the little old thing could generate at maximum power. He knelt, half expecting to have to pick the phaser up off the floor, but it didn't slip through his fingers after all. His decision took only an instant as his bridge crew traded energy beams against scattergun blasts at point blank range. We'll never be able to hold here, or control the ship even if we do. Sooner or later there'd be a second wave.
He flipped the hidden latch off a cover plate, made one adjustment- screamed again, as ricocheting flechettes chewed into and through his left leg, sending him sprawling to the deck. Scrabbling, the old man recovered the weapon. Removed a certain interlock dowel, made another adjustment, a third. Over his head, his bridge crew fought and died. Frinc Cheg screamed horribly, and it wouldn't stop- The main door slid open and a security team charged through, phasers at the ready. Soon the firing stopped.
Chekov dropped his gun and stopped gritting his teeth against the pain. This he must do. "Computer! Transfer control to Auxiliary Bridge! Bridge crew, evacuate!" The Starfleet officers around him heard the shout, and the computer's faint, calm "Acknowledged." A few moved as if to argue, but when they saw that he was wounded they changed their minds. Two security troopers moved to drape his arms over their shoulders and led him off the bridge.
Numbly, he allowed it- his eyes, though, dwelt on the wrack and ruin of officers and equipment.
USS Endurance
Deck Five Corridors
As he led his people to sickbay, Pavel Chekov had scraped together the bridge crew, the bridge module computer techs, and two medical orderlies. Even so, They had barely enough people- even counting walking wounded- to keep watch against the fireteams of roving enemy commandos, keep moving, and assist those unable to move themselves.
Especially not after the Sydraxian claymore mine went off, killing the security team's point man and wounding two other officers.
Ch'Vohrer limped along on his own feet now, refusing help and sweeping for more boobytraps. The Andorian was so mauled from his attempt to grapple with a Sydraxian commando that Chekov was amazed the lieutenant could stand, let alone operate a tricorder. But he couldn't afford to tell him to stop, as they trudged and staggered through corridors that were starting to fill with the smells of smoke and blood.
He could hear Commander T'Mela's crisp voice over the intercom; either the Sydraxians didn't know where Battle Bridge was, or they hadn't been able to get commandos into it. Grimly, he repeated the long-familiar process of thanking his stars for a Vulcan's implacable nerve in a crisis.
For a moment he longed for his old leaders, his old companions- then thought better of it. Perhaps it was best that it be him. The hapless young Russian. Not so young now- but in his bones and in his heritage, Pavel Chekov knew how to endure through red-handed chaos. McCoy, Sulu, Spock, the rest- they deserved better than to have to suffer this. They'd have done marvelously, that he knew... but this wasn't their kind of fight, not any of them.
And the new breed of officers, the ones who'd killed the Biophage and manned the frontier against the Cardassians? They had their virtues, too. Lieutenant Commander Chatsworth had, without a word, with seemingly total unconcern, quickened her pace to replace the team's point man. Holding her phaser in a posture straight out of a textbook, she fell into step with the security team.
Presumably, the communications officer had spotted the arm sticking out around the corner a split second fast. But only a split second- Ensign Zwicky shouted "DOWN! GRENADE!" even as the hissing whine of Chatsworth's sidearm split the air, and ended in an eerie silence. No explosion. For in that moment, grenade, arm, and hand had all vanished in a red flash of disintegration, annihilating the chemical explosives before they could detonate.
The silence was broken by armored commandos charging around the corner. Chatsworth took the first, her beam stepped back down to high heat, tracking out to sweep up and through his long, twisting neck. Two security men fired within moments, the net of deadly energies such that the next commando was disintegrated before he could fall. They turned their fire on the third and last- who was already writhing, his armored visor smoking from another burst from Chatsworth.
Chekov could not help but be surprised, even though he'd known this on some level, known since the counter-intrusion drills he'd ordered run just after the Cardassians hit Bajor.
He'd known this. He'd known. He just hadn't... grasped it when he came aboard.
The most capable pistolera on his ship was his communications officer. Not Security. Not Tactical, as often proved the case despite the difference between war in space and on the ground. No, it had been communications, of all things. The quiet, asocial, electronics wizard. The standoffish officer with the clipped, severe voice, the one he couldn't help but imagine shushing library patrons. Sometimes he half expected her ears to sprout points- but in all honesty, most of the Vulcans he'd known were friendlier, once you got to know them.
And she might just have saved all their lives.
Gritting his teeth, Chekov gasped, "KEEP... GOING!" Sickbay was defensible- at least, so far as any place could be defended against this.
Chekov rounded the corner they'd just fought their way around, bolstered by a barrel-chested Vulcan. The computer technician gripped his shoulder with casual strength, like a machine press trying to be gentle, supporting his captain even as he carried Commander frinc Cheg slung under his other shoulder like a parcel.
All the Vulcans among their motley band were helping wounded, now, whatever they'd been doing before, whatever their specialization. Anyone could fire a phaser or scan for explosive boobytraps. Only a Vulcan could handle two or three wounded men with no more trouble than a human would have with one.
Looking at the alien, Chekov couldn't decide if the first commando, the one with the grenade, had been lucky or not. The disintegration blast had only taken the Sydraxian's arm. Chekov watched, realizing that the seeming twitches of the commando's right hand were not purposeless, but truly were reaching for some device- but even as he took breath to shout an alarm, the commando vanished in a shower of blue swirling sparks. Beamed up, beamed away to some Sydraxian ship that must be hovering like a vulture outside his own.
It hadn't only been the descent on the bridge, then. The Sydraxians must be using their transporters for more than just a round of boarding attacks.
Unbidden, his mind threw images of the enemy commandos appearing out of nowhere, vanishing as his security teams reached them. The attack on the bridge might have been a fight to the death, but the Hierarchy's ground troops weren't stupid. They would know an Excelsior's crew had the advantage of numbers, and better knowledge of the ship. But with Endurance's shields still firmly down, the Hierarchy troops could move about the ship and concentrate their forces at will, whittling away his people one attack at a time and vanishing whenever they met more resistance than their objective was worth.
The blood of his crew, draining from a hundred cuts...
Smoke and burnt flesh were stronger smells, now; distant explosions and the sounds of weapons fire echoed along the corridors through the glare of emergency lights.
His mind was wandering. Focus! He wracked his brains, trying to recollect things that could be done to defeat a teleporting enemy, things within the skills of the people he had left...
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