Chapter 13

Chapter 13

The last time Brett had ridden in a Starfleet shuttlecraft was from the Icarus to Starfleet Headquarters for his court-martial and resulting dishonorable discharge. The circumstances for this trip in the Orion’s shuttlecraft wasn’t much better. This time he risked getting himself killed by the Serparnians or any booby traps they may have left behind.

To his left, Ensign Cooper was sweating as if the possibility of death had occurred to her as well. “This is probably a wild goose chase,” Brett said, trying to cheer her.

“Yes sir,” she said without enthusiasm.

He checked the shuttlecraft’s limited sensors again for any sign of enemy activity. Nothing. He supposed if anything did crop up the Orion with its far better sensors would have alerted him. If young Ensign Merle was on the ball. Looking over at young Ensign Cooper again, Brett sighed. He must be getting old and paranoid. Before long he’d launch into stories about the good old days before the war with the Dominion.

Turning back to the sensor readouts, he studied the mining camp for signs of life. There wasn’t anything. He wondered how long the Serparnian renegades might have used this area as a base, if at all. There was only one way to find out.

“I’ve got what looks like the operations center. No life signs detected but maybe the computers will have some data. We’ll put down on the landing pad and beam over,” Brett said to Robyn aboard the Orion.

“Sounds good, Commander. We’ll watch your back.”

“Take us in, Ensign.” He took off his straps and went to the back to join Ramirez and the pair of security officers with him, the same ones who had escorted Brett to the brig earlier. All three were grim-faced as they clutched their phaser rifles. Brett couldn’t help noticing they weren’t much older than Ensign Cooper. I really am getting old, he thought.

Brett braced himself against a bulkhead and then took out his phaser. Unlike the disruptors on the Cassandra, the phaser was almost new and fully charged. He wished he could have gone to the holodeck for a few practice sessions but if the situation got bad enough that Ramirez and his team couldn’t handle it they were all dead anyway.

The shuttle landed with a gentle thump on the landing pad. From the sensor readings, there was a tube leading from the pad to the onion-shaped control center, but Brett had no intention of risking his neck walking down a tube that could have a breach—intentional or perhaps caused by the elements—or Serparnian booby traps. Better to beam in and take any renegades by surprise.

“All right, here we go. Cooper, stay with the ship. If you don’t hear from me in fifteen minutes get the hell out of here and back to the Orion,” Brett said.

“Yes sir,” Cooper squeaked.

On another occasion he might have paused a moment to say something comforting to her or left someone here to baby-sit the ensign, but there wasn’t time. If the Serparians were around and somehow avoiding detection, they would have been alerted to the shuttlecraft’s presence. In which case they might be preparing all sorts of nasty surprises for anyone stupid enough to waltz into their hideout.

Ramirez and one of his team went first on the shuttlecraft’s transporter. Before they had time to report back, Brett and the other security officer beamed in. As his molecules reassembled, Brett felt bile rushing up into his throat.

The mining station had been occupied recently, but now it was a killing field. The bodies of Serparnians—their shells painted an emerald green to denote their status as laborers—lay scattered about the control room. Some were slumped over their computer terminals while others lay sprawled on the deck and one rested at the foot of an airlock. The common denominator was a disruptor burn to the head of each one.

One of the security officers next to Brett doubled over, throwing up his breakfast onto the deck. “I’m sorry, sir,” the security officer said.

“It’s all right, son,” Brett said. Vomiting was a perfectly normal reaction to a slaughter like this for someone seeing his first real action. “Let’s spread out and see what we can find.”

Ramirez went one way and Brett the other, each taking a security officer with them. The smell of burnt flesh stung Brett’s nostrils, but he didn’t want to cover his mouth in front of the weak-stomached officer. He had to stay strong and set the example for the kid like a good commander.

The renegade Serparnians—provided it was the same ones who’d attacked the Orion and Cassandra and not some other band of pirates—had not only killed the control room crew; they also destroyed most of the computer equipment as well. Brett knelt at a terminal, easing aside the dead technician to try to see if he could get the machine working. Other than a few sparks, nothing happened.

“Orion, this is Boutwell. Everything here is wrecked. We need an engineering team.”

“Any sign of the Serparnians?” Robyn asked.

“Negative. My guess is we missed them by a few hours.”

“I’ll send a team over. Orion out.”

“What do we do now?” the security officer asked.

“Let’s get these bodies out of here before anyone else gets here,” Brett said. The security officer gulped, but then slung his phaser rifle on his back to help Brett move aside the corpses.

They stacked the bodies in a supply room until they could be disposed of properly. From what Brett could tell, no property had been taken from the mining crew, meaning this wasn’t any ordinary pirate raid. Clearly the renegade Serparnians had stopped here to make repairs and then killed the mining crew to silence them.

The biggest question remaining then was where the Serparnians had gone after the slaughter. Given the color of the mining crew’s shells, Brett didn’t think this was the normal operating base for the Serparnian warship. That meant they had stopped here for emergency repairs and would then probably go on to their real base. And in the process by stopping here they’d thrown the Orion off their tail.

The engineering team beamed aboard ten minutes later and set to work trying to revive the station’s computers. In the meantime, Brett set out to do some exploring on his own to see what clues he could turn up.

He followed a narrow corridor from the control center, pausing every few feet to scan with his tricorder for booby traps or pressure leaks. In the darkened corridor he stumbled across another of the technicians, this one with a hole drilled through his shell. These renegades clearly meant business.

The corridor led to a mess hall that was completely empty. Plates of dried rodent meat were set on trays at some of the tables. The renegades must not have scheduled an appointment ahead of time.

Another door led him into the crew quarters. Serparnians slept on circular mats, pulling their extremities into their shells like Earth turtles while they slept. Some of the mats were still dented from when their occupant got up.

Among the artifacts of the crew he found letters written in the Serparnian language; he didn’t need to translate them to know they were the standard letters home to wives or parents. Tucked beneath a mat he even found a stash of Serparnian pornography that turned his stomach. He didn’t have any doubt this was exactly what it appeared to be: a mining station unfortunate enough to be in the path of a rogue warship.

Under another mat he found something that turned his stomach as much as the pornography. It was a propaganda leaflet with a Federation symbol crossed out with a bloody X. The text was written in the Serparnian language, but he was able to feed it into the tricorder for translation.

“The Federation oppressors are coming to aid their allies and establish a puppet regime as they have done all across the galaxy. The Serparnian Liberation Army will fight to the last to ensure our people are not enslaved by these humans and their pawns,” read the text. On the back was an even more ominous slogan: “Remember the Sunigwil!”

The Sunigwil was the name of the freighter destroyed by the Icarus. The leader of the renegades who’d boarded the Cassandra claimed to be with the Serparnian Liberation Army. They were using the refugees aboard the freighter as martyrs, symbols to justify their war against the Federation—against the Orion. Symbols created by Brett. He had put the Orion and its crew in danger. All of this was his fault.

He sagged onto one of the Separnian mats, staring in disbelief at the leaflet. Babs and fifty others aboard the Orion, not to mention Grek and Smitty, were all dead thanks to him. And Robyn and the others had nearly died because of his order to fire on a shipload of refugees.

This was his fault, his responsibility to clean up. He wadded up the leaflet, pitching it against the wall. Now was not the time to mope around in this graveyard. Now was the time to find this Serparnian Liberation Army and put a stop to them before anyone else suffered.

Stomping back to the control center, Brett found the engineers had worked another miracle by getting some of the computers functioning. On a cracked monitor, one of the technicians brought up security footage of a group of armed Serparnians beaming into the control center. Brett recognized them right away as the same ones who’d boarded the Cassandra. The leader with his scar and mangled hood grabbed one of the mining crew around the throat and growled something at him.

Then he shot the crewman in the head and tossed the body over by the airlock.

The rest of the slaughter didn’t take long, no more than five minutes. The footage cut off with a Serparnian disruptor blasting a console. “That’s all we got?” Brett asked.

“I’m afraid so,” one of the technicians said, shaking his head. “The sensors on this place weren’t very good even before these guys wrecked all the equipment.”

“So there’s no way of knowing where they went?”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

They had run into a dead end.