Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Smoke. The smell of it wafting through the air brought back memories of screams. The screams pleaded with him, but there was nothing he could do; they were already dead.

The screams became louder and shriller until he realized they weren’t screams at all. The sound was almost like the Serparnian flute only higher and thinner in pitch. Was there some kind of concert going on down the hall? Perhaps one with pyrotechnics to create the smoke he smelled.

The sound of disruptors cleared up his confusion. He rolled off the sleeping mat and crawled towards the door. Pressing his ear to the door, he heard not just a single weapon but several accompanied by high-pitched warbles similar to the alert siren. The sound of Serparnian screams.

Someone was attacking the palace. From his vantage, Brett didn’t have any idea if the shots he heard belonged to the guards or the invaders. In any case, he, Robyn, and Hurd would need assistance.

Brett tapped his communicator to contact Ramirez on the Orion. He received no answer. He tried again with an identical result. The invaders were jamming the signal. “Great,” he muttered.

They were on their own.

The sound of gunfire became louder when Brett opened the door. He peeked out into the corridor. From the sound of it, the battle was going on in the reception hall. He hoped the attackers didn’t break through for at least a few more minutes. Time enough to get Robyn out of here.

Her door was locked from the inside. Brett didn’t want to risk pounding on it and shouting in case some nearby unfriendly heard him and decided to check on the noise. In a residence as old as the prime minister’s, though, the locks were primitive mechanisms. Using a pointed tip of his communicator badge he managed to break the lock.

Despite the noise, Robyn remained curled up on her sleeping mat, using her jacket for a pillow. For a brief moment he thought back to the other times he’d seen her sleeping like this in his bed, using his chest for a pillow. Until that final morning when he woke up alone.

Another disruptor shot reminded him he didn’t have time to dwell on the past. He crept over to Robyn, shaking her shoulder until she stirred. Her hand reached out to pat his arm and continued up to caress his cheek. Then her eyes opened wide; she rolled up against the wall.

“Brett, what are you doing?” Robyn slept in her undershirt; she grabbed the dinner jacket from the mat to cover up. “Are you spying on me?”

“No, of course not. Someone’s trying to break in. A lot of someones by the sound of it,” he said. A part of him couldn’t help wondering if she’d been thinking of him or her husband when she touched his cheek.

Robyn listened for a moment and then tapped her communicator. Her attempts to contact the ship didn’t work either. “Someone’s jamming us.”

“Right. We better get out of here while we can.” As he finished saying this, someone opened the door. Brett spun around in time to see Hurd crouching in the corridor with a worried look on his face.

“Are you two all right?” he asked.

“We’re fine, Lieutenant,” Robyn said.

“We might not be if we stay here much longer,” Bret added.

“I know a way out of here. I saw it earlier when I was doing my research. Come on.”

Robyn followed after Hurd with Brett in the rear. He looked down the corridor to see a flash of green light from another disruptor shot. He still couldn’t tell who was getting the better end of the fight. At this point he didn’t care. He only cared about getting Robyn back to the Orion.

Hurd led them the opposite way from the reception hall, past other sleeping quarters. No one else had noticed the fighting or they had already left. Either way, they didn’t have time to worry about that now.

The corridor led nowhere, ending in a wall of hardened mud. “Great, a dead end,” Brett said. “I thought you were getting us out of here.”

“I am. Stand back.” Hurd produced his miniature phaser from his pocket. With Brett and Robyn behind him to screen the shot from anyone in the reception hall, Hurd burned away a semicircular groove in the mud wall. Before Brett could ask what Hurd hoped to accomplish, the Intelligence operative kicked the section of wall back into empty space.

“It’s hollow,” Robyn said.

Hurd motioned for Robyn and Brett to go through the opening. Once they were through, he put the section of wall back, although anyone with working eyesight could see the damage and figure out what had happened. As if reading Brett’s mind, Hurd used the phaser to fuse the mud together on the inside, making it harder for anyone wanting to come after them to get through.

“Great, now what?” Brett said.

Hurd turned on a hand light, waving it around a two-foot wide opening between mud walls. The second wall had cracks and pieces chipped away as if it had seen a lot of use. “I ran a scan while I was walking around earlier. They built the new palace inside the old one. If we follow these old corridors we should find our way out.”

“Good thinking, Lieutenant,” Robyn said.

With Hurd in the lead, they made their way along the ancient corridors. These walls didn’t have paintings or even suits of armor along them. Rather, images of stick figures representing Serparnian heroes and kings were carved into the walls. Brett wondered how much Serparnian historians knew about these carvings.

The corridors wound deeper into the ground until Brett thought for sure they would end up going all the way to the planet’s core. The air turned colder and mustier the deeper they went until Brett wished he hadn’t left his dinner jacket back in his room.

A putrid smell turned the air foul so that the three Starfleet officers had to put their hands to their faces. The odor was the unmistakable stench of decaying bodies. The Serparnians must have interred some of their dead in these ancient caverns.

But this smell was too fresh to have come from some ancient burial. It could only come from someone dead recently, probably no more than a week ago from the power of the stench. Robyn must have noticed this too because she slowed down to fall in beside Brett. “Where are we going, Lieutenant?”

“It’s not much farther,” Hurd assured them.

The smell of rotting dead became more powerful the farther they went. Robyn leaned against Brett, her entire body shaking from the effort of trying not to throw up in front of her two subordinates. He couldn’t blame her if she did; he might just join her.

Hurd stopped at a heavy stone door at the end of the passageway marked with more of the carvings. From what Brett could deduce, these carvings depicted some kind of warrior heaven where the most valiant warriors received food and drink while they celebrated their deeds, not unlike the Klingon afterlife.

“Here we are. There’s a drainage shaft through here that should lead us to the outside,” Hurd said.

“Great, I could use some fresh air,” Brett said.

Hurd and Brett had to work together in order to open the stone door. Inside, Brett saw the bodies of several Serparnian guards lying on slabs of stone next to mummified corpses, fresh disruptor burns charring the faces of the guards. “What the hell—” Brett started.

Then he saw the Serparnian captain known as Slonix rise up from behind one of the slabs, a disruptor in his hand. A half-dozen other Serparnian rebels rose up alongside him. “We meet again, Captain Boutwell. This time you will not escape.”

Brett turned towards Robyn, everything becoming clear to him. Hurd shoved Robyn forward, the phaser aimed at her head. “You sold us out!” Brett said.

“How could you?” Robyn said with utter hatred. Treason was number one on Robyn’s list of unforgivable sins. She could forgive someone like Brett who’d disgraced himself through an accident, but never someone who betrayed the Federation and his fellow Starfleet officers.

“The Serparnian Liberation Army pays a lot better than Starfleet Intelligence,” Hurd said. He looked up at Slonix. “You have the money?”

One of Slonix’s goons set a metal case onto one of the slabs. The gold-pressed latinum inside bathed the room in golden light. Hurd stepped forward to inspect his haul.

That moment of greed was the opening Slonix needed. He triggered a full-power disruptor blast into the Starfleet Intelligence operative’s head. The remains of Hurd slumped over the case; he would never get a chance to spend its contents. “You humans are such greedy fools.” Slonix’s lips curled in an imitation of a human smile as he stared into Brett’s eyes. “But it is you who will pay. Take them.”

With that, two of the Serparnians grabbed Brett while another two grabbed Robyn, separating them. He tried to call out to her, but Slonix knocked the wind out of him with the butt of his disruptor.

“I am going to enjoy this,” Slonix whispered into Brett’s ear. Then the guards hustled Brett along the drainage shaft Hurd had mentioned. In the darkness Brett couldn’t see Robyn. More than anything right now he wanted to apologize for getting her into this mess before they both ended up like the ill-fated Lieutenant Hurd.