Assassination Game (27 page)

Nadja barreled past them, knocking Bones into Kirk and Uhura and sprinting down the hall.

Bones righted himself and kicked his leg out, flinging the little terrier harmlessly down the hallway. “Come on!” he said, dragging Kirk to his feet. “Before that holy terror gets its legs back!”

“Sorry!” Kirk said over his shoulder to Uhura as Mrs. Penelope went after her instead.

Nadja had grabbed the only turbolift, so they took the stairs. She was already out the door and halfway across the quad before they got outside, but Kirk was able to close the gap on her while Bones lagged behind. At first Kirk thought she might be heading for a transporter, but she took a left at the public transporter hub and ran for one of the shuttlepads. Kirk knew if she got there before he caught up to her, they would lose her. Nadja’s long legs and athletic training kept her out front. She blew past a stunned deck officer at the shuttlepad and threw herself into the only shuttle left, a short range Class F called the
Davy Crockett
. The door lowered shut
just as Kirk got there, and he leaned on it and banged on the duranium hull.

“Nadja! Stop! Wait!”

She wasn’t about to do either one. Kirk heard the shuttle’s ion engine fire up, and he backed away as the shuttle lifted off and swung around, heading up into the atmosphere.

Bones ran up, panting. Uhura was right behind him.

“Now we’ve lost her!” she said. “Damn it, Kirk! You’ve ruined everything!”

“Me? I’m not the one who was skulking around in what was supposed to be an empty hallway.”

“I was
skulking
, as you call it, because I was trying to stop the person who planted those bombs!”

“Nadja Luther,” Kirk said. “Yeah. We know. That’s what we were doing there too.”

The confused deck officer ran up, checking her own PADD. “That cadet can’t just take a shuttle without filing a flight plan,” she said. “Where’s she going?”

Kirk shook his head. “No telling.”

Uhura checked her PADD and shook her head. “I’ve lost her. She’s out of range.”

“No,” Bones said, trying to catch his breath. “No, wait. I know where she’s going.”

Kirk, Uhura, and the deck officer all waited impatiently for him to get his wind back.

“Spit it out!” Uhura told him.

“Not all of us joined Starfleet because we like to run all over creation,” Bones groused.

“Bones, where’d she go?” Kirk asked.

His friend sighed. “The Argos telescope. I’d bet the horse farm on it.”

“Argos?” Uhura said. “Why?”

“I caught her rooting around in the machinery the last time I was there. She told me she was just fixing something, but …”

“We need a shuttle,” Kirk told the deck officer. “It’s an emergency. That woman, she’s the one who planted the bombs at the medical conference, and now she’s headed for the Argos telescope.”

“W-What?” the deck officer stammered. “But—”

“We don’t have time to explain,” Uhura told her. “Please. We need a shuttle.”

“That was the last of mine,” the deck officer said. She checked her PADD. “There are still shuttles at pads one, three, six, and nine, but they all have cadets on them for transport to McKinley. They’ll be leaving any minute.”

Think
, Kirk told himself.
Think. You don’t have a shuttle. How do you get to Argos?

“Wait! Can I see that?” he asked the deck officer. She shrugged, handing him her PADD. He scrolled through the passenger manifests.
Please, please, please—Yes! There!

“Hold this shuttle!” he told the deck officer. “Tell them … tell them there’s turbulence, or something’s wrong with their antimatter containment, or there are turtles on the runway—something.
Anything
. Just don’t let them take off yet!”

“All—all right,” the deck officer said, bewildered.

“Kirk, they’re never going to let us have one of those,” Bones said.

Kirk shook his head. “We don’t need a shuttle. We’ve got something better.” He took out his communicator and flipped it open.

“Kirk to Chekov; come in, buddy.”

Pavel Andreievich Chekov waited for his transport shuttle to lift off, clinging to his personal safety harness in exactly the way the instructional vid told them to. He didn’t care that all the other cadets around him weren’t paying attention to the vid or holding on in the correct fashion; it wasn’t an order, after all, just a recommendation. And it wasn’t that he didn’t trust the shuttle or had any doubts about the pilots. It was just that there were reasons for doing things the right way. In this case, holding on would help prevent minor bumps and abrasions should they experience turbulence in the atmosphere or loose artificial gravity in space, which had been known to happen.

The safety vid ended, and Chekov took a deep breath and relaxed, trying not to think about his assignment. It
was important not to get too excited. Getting excited made him look like he was a kid, which he practically was, but he wanted—he
needed
—his senior officers to think of him as an adult. In less than an hour he’d be standing by as the relief navigator on the USS
Nautilus
, an important posting for the Academy’s youngest cadet.

Just telling himself not to get excited got him excited, though.
Calm thoughts
, he reminded himself.
Breathe
. Taking his Vulcan mathematics teacher’s advice, he began to recite pi in his head to focus himself.
3.141592653589793238462643383—

Chekov’s communicator rang.

At first he just stared at his pocket, not understanding. Who did he know who would call him in the middle of a red alert?

Alex Leigh, one of the many twentysomething women in his dorm who looked upon the teenage Pavel Chekov like a little brother, sat beside him on the shuttle. She nudged him.

“Your communicator’s ringing.”

“Who do I know who would call me in the middle of a red alert?”

“Why don’t you answer it and find out?”

Chekov let go of the safety harness, all worries about turbulence and weightlessness tossed aside. He fished out his communicator and flipped it open.

“Who do I know who would call me in the middle of a
red alert?” he asked. “Oh! Hello! … You are? She is? You do? Yes—yes, I can do that. I can do that! I’ll be right there.”

Chekov flipped his communicator closed and unbuckled himself.

“Pavel, what are you doing?” Alex asked him. “We’re just about to take off.”

“I can’t go. They need my help!”

“Who needs your help?”

A redshirted officer came down the narrow aisle of seats. “Cadet, refasten your safety harness. We’re getting ready to leave.” At the other end of the shuttle, the outer door began to close.

“No! No, wait! I have to get off the shuttle!” Chekov broke for the door, his runner’s instincts kicking in and his thin, nimble legs dancing between the outstretched legs of his fellow cadets.

“Cadet! Come back here!” the redshirt called. “You leave this ship and you’re AWOL!”

Chekov glanced back in time to see the big officer stumble and fall at the feet of the other cadets, thanks to a trip from Alex.

“Oops,” she said. “Sorry, sir.” She winked at Chekov, and he blushed and nodded his thanks before diving out through the closing door.

McCoy paced the engineering building’s transporter room, wondering what Kirk was playing at. There was no way they could transport up to the Argos telescope from here. Not directly. It was hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, well outside the range of any standard transporter. He kept telling McCoy to be patient, but every second they wasted was another second Nadja Luther had to do whatever it was she had started that night he’d joined her on the Argos telescope.

“We’re wasting time,” McCoy said again, and again Kirk told him to calm down. His friend was actually leaning casually against the transporter console, like he was doing nothing more urgent than waiting on a pizza to be delivered.

Across the room, Uhura flipped her communicator closed. She’d been talking to someone, filling them in on everything after they had all compared notes, but she hadn’t wanted McCoy and Kirk listening in. Secrets within secrets within damn secrets.

“All right. How are we doing this?” Uhura asked. “We’re wasting time.”

“That’s what I keep trying to tell him,” McCoy said.

“You guys relax. We can’t do this without—and there he is!”

A slight, curly headed, red-faced cadet came running into the room, smiling.

“Here I am!” he said. “I made it!”

Kirk ruffled the boy’s hair. “You made great time, buddy. Thanks for coming.”

“I am glad to help!”

“Wait a minute,” McCoy said. “This kid? Aren’t you the one who runs around barefoot all the time?”

“Yes. I find that the foot’s natural arch acts as a spring, absorbing the shock of striking the ground and converting the energy of the fall into forward motion, like this,” the kid said, demonstrating.

“Well, it’s true that running on the balls of your feet remove stress from the plantar fascia,” McCoy said. “There’s a study of the human foot in the latest—”

Kirk tapped an imaginary chronometer on his wrist. “Um, Bones? Maybe we can table this fascinating discussion for another time?” Kirk turned to Chekov. “We need to get to Argos. You think you can do it?”

“I’m sure I can,” Chekov said. He hurried behind the transporter console and began tapping at the controls.

“There’s just no way,” McCoy said. “The distances are too great. And if you think I’m letting him shoot my atoms off into space in the hopes that they land somewhere—”

“McKinley to
Excalibur
, to … the USS
Prester John
, to the USS
Surprise
, if she’s still holding station by then … then Jupiter Station, back to the
Tennessee
—”

“Wait. You’re going to bounce us there, pad to pad?”

McCoy said. “It can’t be done, Jim!”

“You did it, Bones,” Kirk said.

“Not in five minutes! It took me a week to set up that stunt!”

“You went to Argos by transporter?” Uhura asked.

“To impress Nadja Luther,” Kirk told her. “For their big date under the stars.”

“Wait, you’re
dating
this girl?” Uhura said.

“
Was
dating her,” McCoy corrected. “I’d say things started to go downhill when she tried to frame me for treason.”

“Later,” Kirk said, hustling them up onto the transporter pad. “You can override all the pads you need from here to there?” he asked Chekov.

“I think so.”

“He thinks so?” McCoy said. He tried to get back down off the pad, but Kirk held him where he was. “Jim, I had my first drink before that boy was even
born
!”

“You’ve got enough transporters to get us there?” Uhura asked.

“Um, mostly,” Chekov said.

“Mostly?” Kirk said, his grip on McCoy loosening.

“Initiating transport in three … two … one …” Chekov said, and McCoy felt that awful tug in his gut that said he was being broken down into atoms.

He just hoped the junior space cadet could put him back together in one piece somewhere.