CHEKOV HAD BEEN DRINKING when the yellow alert had sounded. Not heavily, but the events of the day had seemed to require some kind of finishing touch, and after watching two men hack away at each other with swords only a few feet away from him, a good stiff drink seemed the most appropriate response.
Technically, since he was off duty and it was only a yellow alert, he was not required to respond. He nearly decided not to—he could feel the effect of the vodka—but he hadn't gotten to be chief navigator by shirking his duty over a technicality. Yellow alerts most often led to red alerts, and his place then was on the bridge unless he was totally incapacitated.
Now as he left his station with the captain, Sulu, and Scotty, he wished he had hit the bottle a bit harder. Not so he would have been left behind, but to knock down the jitters he felt about this whole situation. Besides what he had seen for himself on the monitors, Sulu had given him that "Here we go again look," and Scotty had passed out extra power packs for their phasers; neither act exactly inspired confidence.
Nor did the captain's words on the way down in the turbolift. "Remember, gentlemen, this is an android. Phasers will have little effect on it except at full force, and we can assume that it will defend itself if attacked. Our best bet is to try to reason with it; let it know that Mudd is already dead and that there's no point in continuing on with whatever it intends to do."
"What if it already knows he's dead, and it came here for revenge?" Chekov asked.
"Then we disable it," Kirk said.
Chekov and Sulu exchanged another look. Right. Disable it. Simple.
The captain wasted no time in the transporter room. The moment the turbolift delivered them to deck seven he strode across the hallway and in through the still-widening doorway, said to Ensign Vagle, "The same coordinates we just gave you," and took up his position on the platform. Chekov and the others hurried to take their places as well, and the moment they were on the grid he said, "Energize."
They materialized in a crowded street paved with large flat stones. There were no vehicles in evidence, just red- and orange-clad Prastorians. There were plenty of them to fill the avenue, all pushing past one another and yelling to be heard over the din of their own voices and the loudspeakers on every corner that blared the message, "Citizens in squadrons twelve through nineteen, please report to your duty stations for battle assignments."
Chekov was keenly aware of his own greenish yellow uniform. Wrong color here. Every Prastorian he saw—men and women alike—wore a disruptor pistol, and everyone who saw him reached instinctively for the weapon. They only relaxed when they realized he and the others weren't Distrellian.
Chekov smelled sweat and fear, some of it his. He glanced uneasily around at the buildings. Not a palace in sight, which either meant that the Stella android wasn't going after the Padishah, or that the Padishah didn't live in a palace. Where the android had gone was harder to determine, but Scotty solved that by consulting his tricorder.
"There," he said, pointing toward a long, low building across the wide street and down a few hundred feet. "Something with a fusion power pack just passed through here, at any rate, headin' that way."
"That's got to be her," Kirk said. "Come on."
"The building's shielded," said Scotty. "The shield extends right out into the street."
Kirk nodded. "Understood. That's undoubtedly why she beamed down here instead of inside. But that may buy us the time we need to stop her." He led the way through the crush of Prastorians, who parted before them and closed up the gap again behind.
It was nearly impossible to see far through the crowd. The Prastorians averaged a few inches taller than humans, and their stiff hair stuck up even higher. Sulu solved the problem by climbing up on an ornamental planter and peering over their heads. "There she is!" he called out, pointing off to the left of where they had been headed.
He jumped back down and they moved off after their quarry, bumping their way along and calling out "Make way," and "Excuse me," and occasionally "Move!" when someone blocked their path.
However, the Stella android was much more massive than her pursuers. She merely bowled aside anyone in her way until she reached the doorway in the long, blank wall of the building. They drew close to her while she tried to figure out how to open the door with the control panel on its face, but they were still yards away from her when she gave up with the controls and simply kicked down the door.
A flood of disruptor fire erupted outward through the doorway, narrowly missing the android, which leaped backward. Prastorians screamed as some of their own people were hit, and they backed away, pushing the ones behind them back with them.
The android, realizing her mistake, backed into the crowd as well.
"Now," said Kirk, shoving past the few remaining Prastorians between them and grabbing the android by the arm. She spun around, ready to knock him away, but stopped when she saw who it was.
She looked like she might finish the motion at any time. Chekov prepared to help subdue her if that proved necessary, but she decided to speak instead. "I don't care if you are the captain of a starship," she said in the shrewish screech that had previously been reserved only for Harry Mudd. "You'd better have a darned good reason for accosting a lady in the middle of the street like this."
Chekov nearly laughed out loud. Stella, a lady? But he kept his opinion to himself.
"Unfortunately, I do," said Kirk. "Whatever you're trying to accomplish here, just wait a minute. Harry's already dead, and you can't bring him back to life, so let's talk it over before you start an interplanetary incident here for nothing."
"Harry is dead?" the android asked, her Stella voice and personality making even that seem like some terrible failing on his part.
No more disruptor fire came from the doorway, but Kirk pulled her deeper into the crowd anyway. "I saw him die. We were ambushed in the palace on Distrel before we even made it to the Enterprise."
"That…cannot…be." Her voice slowed and grew monotonous. Apparently all her computing power was going into changing her mental map of the situation.
"It's true. We tried our best to save him, but he'd been hit too many times. He's dead."
One of the Prastorian women nearby had overheard him. "You were in the Distrellian royal palace just now?"
"Yes, I was," Kirk said brusquely. "And I lost a good friend there because of this ridiculous war of yours."
"That's unfortunate," the man next to her said, not sounding very sincere. "But think of the tales you'll have to tell each other when you're reunited in Arnhall."
"Yeah, right," Chekov said, sarcasm oozing from his voice.
"Ah, a skeptic." The Prastorian man turned to look at him more closely. "I have always wanted to meet one." He smiled wide while reaching to his waist, and his expression distracted Chekov just long enough that he didn't see the disruptor until the Prastorian had fired it at him, point blank, right into his chest.
It hurt like hell, but just for an instant.
Sulu had been watching the Stella android, which seemed to have seized up at the news of Mudd's death, when he heard the snarl of unleashed energy and Chekov's scream. Chekov fell to the paving stones, his chest smoking from the fist-sized hole blown into it. He had the most surprised expression on his face that Sulu had ever seen.
Sulu reacted without conscious thought. Some part of him must have known he couldn't draw his own weapon and fire quickly enough, so he chopped downward with his right hand and knocked the disruptor pistol from the Prastorian's grip, then grabbed that same arm with his left hand and spun the man around, bringing the arm up behind his back until it nearly touched the back of his head.
"Ow!" the man shouted. "What did you do that for? Let me go!"
Sulu didn't trust himself to speak. He grabbed the man's free arm and pinned that one behind his back too. Holding both arms in one hand, he pulled himself close to the Prastorian to use him as a shield in case the others tried to shoot.
They didn't seem inclined to do so. Most of them simply stared at him as if he'd lost his mind. A few even laughed.
"You—" Sulu tried to speak, but his tongue got all tangled up in his mouth. "You—" he tried again. "You killed Chekov!"
Indignantly, the man said, "Well, yes, but it was a practical joke, nothing more."
"A practical joke!" Sulu screamed. "I'll show you a practical joke." He yanked upward on the man's arm, but Kirk stopped him short of breaking it.
"Don't," Kirk said, pushing down on Sulu's hand. Sulu didn't lower it, but he didn't push upward any higher.
"But—but he—" Sulu couldn't say it again. Not Chekov! Killed in cold blood over some stupid mistake that he didn't even know he'd made, a mistake that Sulu still didn't understand, would probably never understand.
Kirk was having trouble finding his voice as well, but he swallowed hard and said, "It's too late for him. Don't get the rest of us killed too."
The man he was holding tried standing on his toes to relieve the pressure on his arms. "Oh, come now. Surely you can't all be skeptics. I didn't think there were that many on the planet."
"We're not from around here," Kirk snarled at him. "In case you hadn't noticed. Bring him along, Mr. Sulu. He can stand trial for murder on the ship. Mr. Scott, bring Chekov." He glared at the Prastorians who surrounded them, and slowly, deliberately, drew his phaser. "Now, let us pass and nobody else will get hurt."
But the Prastorians merely laughed. The woman who had first spoken to them said, "Look, now, he was just making a point. Your friend is probably—"
Whatever else she said was drowned out in a roar of voices and screams from across the street. The zzzt of disruptor fire carried through the screams, and someone nearby shouted, "Incoming!"
The woman who had been arguing with Kirk turned without another word and ran off toward the commotion, drawing her disruptor as she ran. She didn't get twenty feet, though, before an energy beam caught her in the shoulder and she staggered backward and fell to the ground.
"Distrellians!" someone else yelled, and through the gaps in the milling crowd Sulu could see people wearing dark blue uniforms pop into existence and begin firing their weapons at whoever stood in front of them.
The Enterprise crew stood in the worst possible place. The blank white wall of the building behind them stretched away for a hundred feet in either direction, putting them on display like targets in a shooting gallery, and its energy shield extended out into the street, preventing beam-out. Their best hope of survival was to fight their way directly across, toward the attacking Distrellians, and get out from under the shield so the Enterprise could pull them to safety.
Fortunately, that was the direction most of the Prastorians were going. Obviously welcoming their chance to die gloriously for the cause, they rushed ahead with disruptors blazing, shooting down the invaders the moment they appeared. Not without taking heavy casualties themselves, but that didn't slow them for a second. They attacked like wasps, more and more of them piling into the melee in a seemingly endless supply until their victims were hidden behind the crush of bodies.
Sulu shoved his captive along ahead of him, happy to use him for a shield. Scotty followed close behind, Chekov's body slung over his shoulder in a fireman's carry; and Kirk brought up the rear, tugging the Stella android, which had still not recovered from the news of Mudd's death. She tottered along precariously, not resisting but not helping at all, only taking a step when Kirk's forward motion overbalanced her and she was forced to move in order to stay upright.
The noise and confusion worked to their advantage at first—nobody paid much attention to the aliens in their midst when they had deadly enemies to kill—but the closer they drew to the line of fire, the less that mattered. Disruptor fire ripped past on either side, some of it coming from behind as overeager Prastorians tried to get in lucky shots from cover. Sulu kept his head down and bulled on through, his skin crawling in anticipation of that one fatal shot that would find him amid all the others.
What he felt first, however, was the fiery heat and jolt of impact as his prisoner took an energy beam in the stomach. The Prastorian doubled over and fell to the pavement, exposing Sulu to more fire, but Scotty's surprised yell made him ignore his own danger and whirl around to help his crewmate.
Scotty seemed uninjured, but his eyes were wild and white all the way around. It took Sulu a moment to realize he wasn't carrying Chekov anymore. He looked down, expecting to see his friend's body on the paving stones, but Chekov wasn't there, either.
"He vanished," Scotty said, shouting to be heard over the cries of battle all around them. "Just…vanished."
"Are we out from under the shield yet?" Kirk demanded. "Maybe the Enterprise beamed him aboard."
Scotty glanced at his tricorder, left activated on his belt. "Not yet. We've still got fifteen feet to go." He looked up, his eyes widened, and he shouted, "Look out!"
He grabbed for Sulu's arm and tugged him to the side, but he wasn't quick enough. Sulu felt the searing fire of a disruptor charge rip through his right side. His breath left him in a convulsive scream, and when he tried to breathe in again he found that he could not. Either his diaphragm was paralyzed or his lungs had collapsed, he didn't know which.
He did know that he had maybe twenty seconds of consciousness left before he became another dead weight for Scotty to carry, so he did the only thing he could think of to help save his own life: He drew his phaser—awkwardly with his left hand when his right refused to cooperate—set it to maximum stun, and fired ahead to clear a path for him to run across the street.
He could hardly walk, much less run. He staggered ahead, his entire right side in agony, stumbling over the bodies of the dead and the people he had merely stunned.
But he had drawn too much attention to himself. Distrellians and Prastorians alike turned to see who was this new enemy in their midst, and he couldn't shoot fast enough to take them all down. He saw ten, twenty arms raise in unison, and from the disruptor pistol in each of them, white hot death shot forth and blasted him into oblivion.