“New Blood”
Stardate 75087.8;
February 02, 2398
Episode 75
Written by Chris
Adamek
Chapter Eighteen
Matthew
Harrison grabbed his phaser and opened fire. A ragged beam of orange light streaked across the murky bridge
and collided with the massive Drusari looming only a few meters away. The ghastly alien expelled a sonorous shriek
as the blast of energy penetrated his craggy exoskeleton, but when the light
finally faded, the Drusari appeared to have sustained only minimal damage.
“Weapons will
do you no good now,” shouted Commander Bruton—though his clawed fist remained
clenched upon his own bulky weapon.
Harrison
nevertheless heeded Bruton’s warning, and cautiously lowered his weapon. “Then what should we do?” he
inquired.
Verdant fire
spewed from the Drusari’s pores as he stepped closer to the away team’s position. The ship rattled with each giant step
forward, and Harrison knew that it was only a matter of time before the buffer
zone between the away team and the Drusari evaporated. However, much to Harrison’s apparent
consternation, Commander Bruton’s answers were not forthcoming.
“I do not
know,” said the Inguari after a thoughtful moment. “I am hardly an expert on the Drusari. In fact, only a few days ago they were believed to be little more
than legends… Legends that I may have
dismissed a bit too quickly.”
The ship
rumbled again. Harrison’s eyes snapped
back to the Drusari, but he seemed to have stumbled backward a few meters—and
as the ship rumbled yet again, the massive alien fell to the ground.
“The ship is
breaking apart,” Bator urgently reminded.
“Indeed it is,”
Harrison suddenly recalled. Amidst the
excitement of the Drusari, that one small fact had momentarily slipped the
Commander’s mind. “We must return to
our designated beam-out coordinates on deck two!”
“And just how
the hell are we going to get there?” asked Sarah Hartman, though her words were
muffled by the Drusari’s continued groans.
As Harrison
pondered the question, the Drusari crawled back to his feet and continued to
slog across Bruton’s bridge—only now the flaming entity moved with more drive
and ambition than ever before. Haunting
verdant shadows swiftly fell upon Harrison and his comrades as the Drusari
approached. The time for pondering was
up and the time for action was at hand.
“RUN!” Harrison exclaimed, just
as a clawed fist swung at him. The
Commander swiftly ducked, and the Drusari missed, his clawed hand digging deep
into the adjacent bulkhead.
Furious, the
beast suddenly crouched, and leapt across the bridge at unthinkable speeds,
leaving a flaming jade maelstrom in its wake.
In tandem with Bruton and one of his guards, Harrison scrambled for the
exit, where Bator and Marizex were already waiting with the remainder of
Bruton’s guards. Unfortunately, Doctor
Hartman was nowhere to be seen…
The newly agile
Drusari landed atop a sparking workstation of some sort. He perched upon the edge like a demonic
gargoyle for only a moment before his weight forced the side of the workstation
to crumple. He swiftly jumped to the
floor with a resonant CLANK and came about to face his nemeses.
“Doctor!”
called out Harrison—but there was no response.
He turned to Bator. “Has she
already proceeded to deck two?”
The Phobian
shook his head. “I do not believe so.”
Harrison
clenched his fists. “Drat! We must—”
“Your crewman
is dead,” Bruton yelled as plowed through the exit. “Now let’s go!”
A manky tendril
of yellow energy suddenly arced across the bridge and lanced Bruton in the
side. Harrison swiftly followed the
bolt back to the Drusari, and—despite Bruton’s warning—fired off a few phaser
blasts in the alien’s general direction.
The tendril flickered, vanished, and then abruptly returned,
transferring its electric wrath to one of Bruton’s guards. Harrison fired his phaser a few more times,
but to no avail. The guard emitted a few
high-pitched squeals and then vanished amidst the blazing tendrils. When the strand of energy cracked out of
existence one last time, the only sign of the guard was a small pile of dust…
Convinced that
Doctor Hartman had not suffered a similar fate, Harrison promptly turned to
Bruton—who was already marching into the access tubes. “You go ahead,” he yelled. “I must find my officer!” Without so much as a grunt of
acknowledgement, Bruton and his guards made haste to depart, leaving Bator and
Marizex at the threshold. Harrison
promptly motioned for them to follow in Bruton’s footsteps. “I shall be along shortly with the
Doctor! Now go!”
Bator clearly
disagreed with Harrison’s decision to face the Drusari alone. In fact, he almost hesitated to follow the
order in favor of defending Harrison, but the Commander tersely repeated his
order—and Bator complied, leaving Matthew alone with the Drusari.
The alien had
already leapt back over the crumpled, dilapidated workstation he had perched
upon earlier, and now lumbered past the workstations along the back wall of the
bridge, seemingly oblivious to Harrison’s presence. The Drusari suddenly paused, and stared at one of the consoles
for a long moment; his clawed hand hovered over the controls, and a wealth of
data suddenly flitted across the screen.
Very slowly, the alien began to clench his fist. The surface of the workstation gradually
became depressed, as if the alien’s claws were digging into it—and then, in the
blink of an eye, he withdrew his hand and the entire workstation imploded…
…and something
suddenly grabbed Harrison around the chest and yanked him from his feet. The air vacated his lungs as he hit the
gritty floor, and then everything went dark…
The Aztec
gracefully came about as a great plume of fire encompassed Commander Bruton’s
smoldering starship. The tiny vessel
lingered nearby for only a moment before its impulse engines flared red, and it
shot off toward the outskirts of the Navarre System. Meanwhile, Bruton’s vessel hung ominously before a giant gray
moon, wildly spewing flames as it rotated on some random axis. Another massive explosion suddenly rippled
through the hull, blowing a considerable chunk of the command section into space. Another moment passed, and the remainder of
Bruton’s ship finally met its demise amidst a sea of crimson flame.
The last thing
Matthew Harrison remembered was falling to the deck on the bridge of Bruton’s
starship. Something—he did not know
what—had pulled him to the ground with such force that the air vacated his
lungs. Given the Drusari’s angry
demeanor, Harrison was quite certain that he had perished; perhaps some unseen
tendril yanked him to the deck and vaporized him? Whatever the case, Harrison knew he was no longer aboard Bruton’s
ship, for the air that passed through his lungs was devoid of any smoke, and
the ground beneath him was reasonably soft.
But as he opened his eyes, Harrison knew he was not in any sort of
heaven, for Sarah Hartman loomed just overhead with a medical tricorder in
hand. “Have I died and gone to hell?”
asked Harrison, surprised by his groggy voice.
Hartman
promptly snapped shut the tricorder.
“You’re not dead,” she assured him, “but you are indeed in hell.”
Given the
cramped surroundings, Harrison swiftly decided that they were in the aft
compartment of the Aztec. Not
quite hell, but so near the barren planet Navarre that the Doctor’s statement
was partially valid. “Where is the Starlight?”
he asked.
“Heading for
the nebula,” Hartman replied. “The
temporal probe didn’t detonate on time, and the Starlight had to go
defend the fleet in glorious battle… or something like that.”
Harrison
carefully propped himself up against the wall.
His chest was still a bit sore, so he did not dare move any
further. “And what happened to me?” he
inquired. “Was I assaulted?”
Hartman shook
her head. “You were about to be,” she
stated. “But I grabbed you before the
Drusari could do any harm.”
Harrison’s eyes
widened. “That was you?”
Hartman flashed
a devious smile, clearly pleased with her actions. “And you thought that I was in need of rescue…”
A weak cough
briefly parted Harrison’s lips; he swiftly suppressed the lingering impulse to
cough again, and then turned his attention back to the Doctor. “Was it truly necessary to grab me with such
force?” Though there was a hint of
amusement in Harrison’s voice, the question was indeed genuine.
“It was
impulse,” Hartman flatly replied. “If
you would like, I could move slower in the future and allow the Drusari to lop
your head off.”
Harrison raised
a dismissive hand. “That will not be
necessary,” he assured the Doctor—but his voice trailed as his attention was
summarily drawn to the rather large figure draped over the bed on the opposite
side of the compartment. “How is Bruton?”
Hartman briefly
regarded the Inguari before providing Harrison with an indolent shrug. “Unconscious,” she simply stated. “I don’t have the proper tools to treat him
here… However, the wounds don’t appear
to be life-threatening.”
Harrison arched
a curious eyebrow. “He was in a lot of
pain, then?”
“No,” said
Hartman. “He was quite a nuisance in
the cockpit—I mean, you thought Alan had a superiority complex—this idiot comes
barging in and immediately demands we set course for some star cluster forty light
years away.”
“He wishes to
rejoin General Kron,” Harrison quickly surmised.
Hartman shook
her head and glanced back over to Bruton.
“Well,” she said evenly, “he’s not going anywhere now…”
As she sat at
the Aztec’s flight control station, Megan Reinbold couldn’t help but
feel a bit claustrophobic—the ship was designed to comfortably hold no more
than five or six people. However, there
were ten people aboard the Aztec, and four of them were large enough to
constitute two people, making Megan somewhat nervous. Thankfully, the trip back to the Starlight
would be short, and as long as she focused her mind on piloting the ship—and
Bruton stayed in the aft compartment— everything would be fine.
“The Starlight
has taken heavy damage,” Bator reported after studying his side of the
workstation. He sat at the station
beside Megan, and seemed completely unfazed by the crowd.
“Must have been
a hell of a fight,” Justin mused, reviewing the data for himself at the kiosk
behind flight control. “Too bad we
missed it.”
“You could have
stayed behind,” Megan crisply replied.
Though her fleeting claustrophobia was still foremost in her mind, she
was nonetheless eager to discuss her son’s reasons for tagging along on the Aztec.
Much to her
chagrin, Justin was not eager to talk.
He simply shrugged, and delved back into the tactical data. “I needed a change of scenery,” he said
after a moment.
Megan smiled
faintly. “Sure,” she said evenly. In time, she was confident that all the
answers would be revealed, but for now she just let the conversation
slide. Keeping the Aztec’s
flight smooth was her priority, after all.
The doors to
the aft compartment suddenly slid apart.
Megan carefully tapped a few course adjustments into the computer and
then turned to see Commander Harrison and Doctor Hartman strolling into the
cockpit. The Commander promptly
regarded each of his subordinates, and then turned his full attention to
Bator. “How bad is it?” he inquired.
The Phobian’s
face immediately turned grim. “See for
yourself,” he said, alluding to the cockpit window.
In tandem with
Harrison, Megan turned her eyes to the stars.
At first she saw nothing—but after a moment, a holographic cursor
highlighted a series of specks in the distance. The contents of the circular cursor quickly zoomed in to fill the
entire window—and it was a spectacle to behold.
The Starlight
suddenly loomed just ahead—but it was not the majestic sight Megan was used
to. Instead, the hull was riddled with
scorch marks and hull breaches—the largest of which cut a wide swath all the
way through the hull—and presumably into the non-existent port warp nacelle…
“It’s a miracle
the entire ship wasn’t destroyed,” Hartman bluntly stated.
“But I believe
my quarters were,” Lieutenant Marizex quietly stated.
Bator quickly
placed a yellow grid over the Starlight’s hull and pinpointed an area in
the devastated swath. “Sorry,” he
said. “If it is of any consolation,
Doctor Hartman’s quarters were also obliterated.”
Hartman’s eyes
darted back to the Starlight—and Bator promptly pinpointed another area
on the grid. “Hell, it’s not like I
ever used my quarters,” she grumbled.
“Everything I need is in sickbay.”
Marizex
somberly shrugged. “Lucky you…”