In a spectacular radial blast of transwarp particles, Banshee 5, the Manticore, exited 'warp burst' mode and reentered normal space-time, the vessel's quantum capacitors fully drained.
A sharp intake of breath and a wheezing coughing fit came from the back seat of the small cockpit, along with a few muttered and half choked-off profanities. From her place in the forward position, Kim Tycho just smiled. She had had the same reaction the first time she experienced the radical warp burst maneuver.
"You okay back there?" she asked with a wry smile.
"What a rush!" huffed a recovering Thomas Riker. "Back in my day, we risked a warp core breach if we pushed our engines up to warp nine. We just did better than warp thirty!"
"Yeah. Starfleet's made a lot of progress in the last ten years," said Kim appreciatively, patting the console in front of her affectionately. "It's an off-shoot of technology Voyager brought back from the Delta Quadrant."
Now that the immediate excitement was over, Riker turned once again serious. He asked, "Do you think anyone will come after us?"
"No way," said Kim confidently, partly to reassure her passenger; partly to reassure herself. "We were in gray mode the whole way. I'll be back on Starbase 901 before anyone notices I'm even gone."
"Hmmph," grunted Riker. "More likely your captain will clap you in irons the second you set foot back there." Kim suddenly felt his hand on her shoulder, and felt an involuntary thrill. Riker said gently, "I appreciate your helping me like this. You're putting your career on the line for a total stranger."
Kim tried to shrug it off. "It's no big deal," she said as nonchalantly as she could.
She felt Riker's hand leave her shoulder and heard him settle back in his seat again. He said in a lighter tone, "So, just why are you throwing away a promising career to help a perfect stranger?"
"Uh..." Kim suddenly had no words. Riker's question had resurrected painful memories of the last few days -- the lovers' conspiracy, a slap, angry words, then running, running through seeming miles of corridors until she found this man...
"Let me guess--" Riker was saying, still jovial, scratching his scruffy goatee in mock concentration. "--boyfriend troubles," he joked.
Kim gasped involuntarily. His guess had hit the nail right on the head. Suddenly angry at Riker for being so smug, but mostly angry at herself for letting this insufferably smug man get under her skin, she lashed out. "Just shut up, Tom! You don't know anything!"
Taken aback by the sudden unexpected outburst, he just said, "Okay, okay. Calm down, Lieutenant."
Kim sniffed, and fixed her attention on the flight controls.
The awkward silence that followed stretched into minutes, broken only by the irregular beeps and hums from the Manticore's nav-computer. Kim considered breaking the silence and apologizing to Tom for yelling, but just as she was about to turn around to face Riker, his low voice cut her off.
"I'm sorry for getting you into this, Kim," Riker said. "Right from the first, I could tell that there was something troubling you. I should've stayed hidden down in the cargo holds, but I didn't. I took advantage of your vulnerable condition and convinced you to go AWOL. And now you're going to be in more trouble than you've ever been in before, and all because you just wanted to do what was right -- to help a person in need."
"Kinda like what you did at Orias," she replied. "You did what you thought was right."
"Well--" he began, but decided to divert the conversation from that particular topic. "If you want, I'll come back with you to your space station," he offered. "I'll tell them I forced you into all this. You'll be off the hook."
"Absolutely not!" said Kim firmly. "I'll drop you off, then I'll go back and face the music." After a second's pause, she added, "And I'll try to patch things up with Garek..."
"All right--" began Riker, but his next statement was chopped off by the wail of the Manticore's red alert siren in their helmet speakers.
Kim snapped into action, making full mental connection between her neuro-helmet and the Banshee's A.I. systems, tapping into the sensors. "Damn!" she hissed between clenched teeth.
"What is it?" demanded Riker from the back seat.
"I was so busy talking that I wasn't paying attention to flying," she said roughly, cursing her incompetence. "We've been spotted. Hang on!"
Riker gripped the sides of his seat and did his best to hang on as Kim sent the nimble Banshee into a series of wild evasive gyrations. Outside the cockpit, Riker could see explosions begin to blossom all around them as their adversary tried to zero in on its elusive target.
"Why don't we just go to warp burst again and outrun them?" he shouted above the whine of the straining impulse engines.
"The warp engines aren't available! The warp burst drained them; it'll take the quantum capacitors another eight minutes to recharge!" yelled Kim back. The blast from a particularly close miss rocked the plane, and Kim yanked the stick hard to the left in response. "Damn Nausicaans," she cursed. "Where did they come from anyway? Those are small short-range fighters, and there's no bases around here."
"They must have a hidden base around here somewhere," concluded Riker from the rear of the cockpit. "They're probably planning a surprise attack on the starbase."
Kim picked up where Riker left off. "And we accidentally stumbled on them before they were totally ready."
"We have to go back and warn the station," concluded Riker.
"But you'll be caught!"
"This is more important."
"Right," said Kim after a moment's deliberation. "But first we have to dodge the Nausicaans for another seven minutes until the warp engines get recharged."
"Can you do it?"
"Just watch me!" said Kim, but the slight quaver in her voice belied her confident words. "Now shut up and let me do my job."
"Yes ma'am!" Riker renewed his grip on the seat and clamped his mouth shut. He wished he had something to do instead of just sit here like a piece of inanimate cargo, but their fate was totally in Lieutenant Tycho's hands.
Under Kim's skillful direction, the sleek Banshee fighter danced a deadly tango with its opponents, three in all. Spheres of rapidly expanding plasma and brilliant lances of coherent energy filled the night as the battle raged. At one point, a pair of crackling blue fireballs from the Banshee's quantum cannons connected with the exposed underside of one of the Nausicaan ships, cracking its shell wide open and spilling its contents into the void. Seconds later, the wreck was engulfed by a massive fireball of its own, vaporizing what was left. The two remaining ships however, seemed to harden their resolve and attacked with more ferocity than ever.
"We're not going to make it!" shouted Kim over her shoulder to her charge. Another violent explosion heaved the cockpit upward. Outside, the Banshee's shields sputtered pathetically under the continuous assault. Smelling blood, the Nausicaans moved in for the kill.
"I'm going to have to ditch us somewhere! Program the automatic distress buoy to transmit the record of this battle," she told Riker. "Hopefully, the starbase will get the message in time to avoid the Nausicaan sttack no matter what happens to us!"
Glad to finally have something to do, Riker began feeding the instructions into the Banshee's computer. A few seconds later, he shouted, "Done!"
Kim pushed the throttle full open and aimed her ship directly at a small planetoid about fifty-thousand miles distant. "Time to play 'follow the leader', boys," she muttered at the closing Nausicaan ships.
The Nausicaans took the bait. In a line, the three ships, one Banshee and two Nausicaan pirate ships, hurled themselves at the craggy face of the planetoid. As the surface drew nearer, the Banshee made contact with the outer layers of the thin atmosphere. What shields remained sputtered brightly, then flashed out, finally overloaded, and the nose of the Manticore began to glow dully orange. The scream of the racing atmosphere outside hurt their ears, but Kim didn't dare let up.
Behind the fleeing Banshee, the Nausicaan vessels were having a worse time of it. Not designed for atmospheric flight, their shields had also failed and their outer hulls were already glowing white hot from the atmospheric friction. So intent were they to destroy their foe however, that they gave no heed to the danger they were in.
Without warning, the lead Nausicaan ship began buckling. The engine pylons bent and twisted unnaturally, then gave way altogether, ripping jagged holes in the hull. Hot plasma and deuterium spewed out, leaving a glowing comet's tail behind the stricken craft. A blinding explosion from the power plant followed moments thereafter.
Seeing the fate of its companion and not wanting any part of that pie, the remaining pirate ship decided it had had enough, but it was too late. It tried to pull up, but its engines were no match for the atmospheric drag and the gravity of the planetoid, and the last Nausicaan ship joined the other in subatomic oblivion.
Elated, Kim whooped a triumphant battle cry "Whoo-Hooo!" but her exhilaration quickly turned to near-panic when she tried to pull out of her own suicide dive. The controls fought her. "The atmospheric friction's melted the maneuvering thrusters!" she hollered back to her passenger. "I'm gonna have to use just the impulse engines! Hang on to your eyeballs!" She couldn't tell if Riker heard her over the scream of the wind outside.
The surface of the planetoid was coming up fast. Kim pulled on her stick as hard as she could, trying to level out their flight. If she failed, any search party the starbase sent out would have to look for pieces with a neutrino microscope. Ever so slowly, the Manticore's nose pulled up. Their flight leveled out, but they were still traveling at an impossible speed. Suddenly, from beyond the horizon in front of them, a long range of tall mountains rose perpendicular to their flight path, and there was no way she'd be able to pull up in time to avoid them. At their speed -- several thousand miles per hour -- they'd impact in mere seconds. There was only one thing to do.
"We're punching out!" she yelled. Reaching back behind her head with both hands to the twin ejection handles, she braced herself and yanked as hard as she could.
Explosive bolts blasted away key points holding the Banshee's cockpit to the rest of the plane and emergency hydrazine thrusters boosted the entire cockpit upward and away from the stricken fighter. They were like a tiny bit of debris caught in the voracious grip of mighty hurricane winds, flung and spun around at their mercy. The escape pod's inertial stabilizers howled in protest at the titanic g-forces they were contending against, and as the cacophony rose in pitch, Kim fervently hoped technology would prove the victor this time; otherwise the centrifugal forces being exerted on the wildly tumbling pod would smear its two occupants all across its insides like a thin layer of strawberry jelly.
Finally, the mechanical whining began to subside, and the pod steadied on a single orientation, affording Kim her first coherent look out the window. As the escape pod tumbled none-too-gently earthward, she watched stone-faced as her stricken starfighter plowed into the mountainside at better than Mach 20.
Their initial speed had been so high that they were still doing well over Mach 3 themselves, even with the hydrazine thrusters expending every last drop of fuel to slow them, so when the ground rushed up and connected with the falling escape pod, the touchdown was murderously rough. The streaking pod gouged out a brand new scar in the barren landscape of the planetoid -- arrow straight, deep and almost a mile long. Somewhere in the midst of their long scraping tumble, the pod's canopy shattered, metal shrieked and tore, and human occupants were thrown around the inside like a couple of beans in a maraca.
Through all this, Kim's thoughts were of the emergency beacon -- hoping it would survive and transmit their warning to the starbase, and her last thought before the darkness came was of how glad she'd be to get back to the station and see Garek again.
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