She followed him across the bridge and inside the guts of the half-built ship just in time to see his feet leave the top step of a ladder at the end of a narrow passageway. Determined not to let him increase his lead or lose her inside the maze of the spaceframe, she pushed herself to keep up a breakneck pace. Three steps short of the top of the ladder she caught sight of the spy and fired. The Klingon dodged around a corner, and Bridy’s phaser beam missed him and struck a small hydrogen pod at the far end of the passageway.
Bridy saw the flash and felt the explosion’s impact but heard nothing. The next thing she knew, she was on her back, lying on the deck at the bottom of the ladder, her vision purpled and swimming with crimson spots, her ears ringing, and her body feeling as if it had just been crushed in a vise.
That could’ve gone better,she chastised herself. Overcoming her body’s desire to succumb to inertia, she forced herself to stand, only to find her balance less than reliable. Her head swam, and a sick feeling churned in her stomach. She struggled up the ladder. Can’t quit now. Have to keep going.
She staggered down the corridor, which was peppered with fire, and turned right to follow the path the Klingon had taken. It was a dead-end corridor ending at a ladder, which led to an open hatchway on the ship’s dorsal hull. Bridy lurched awkwardly toward the ladder, holstered her phaser, and climbed. As she neared the top, she ducked a disruptor pulse that ricocheted off the hull near her head. She drew her phaser and fired a few blind shots in the Klingon’s general direction, then pulled herself up and over the edge.
He was twenty meters away, scrambling between gaps in the ship’s patchwork of a dorsal hull, heading for its bow.
Got him,Bridy gloated as she aimed at his back.
An explosion rocked the starship frame, which groaned like a wounded giant and listed sharply to port. A huge reddish plume of fire rose from its bow.
Bridy and the Klingon spy slid across the hull as it rolled toward the wall of the pit. Flailing for purchase, Bridy made a split-second decision to let her phaser fall so she wouldn’t. Clinging to the edge of a hull plate, she watched her weapon bounce off the ship and vanish into the dust cloud rising from the pit below. Her only solace was seeing the Klingon’s disruptor follow it into oblivion.
The spaceframe began to warp and buckle. Large swaths of hull plating crumpled, broke off, and tumbled away as the ship collided with the pit wall.
Something exploded in the bottom of the pit, and a large section of the skeletal ship’s midsection buckled inward. Within seconds, Bridy found herself dangling by one sweaty hand from a crack in a hull plate as her communicator tumbled from her belt and vanished into a roiling dust cloud that was rising to engulf her. Then the ship began a moaning nose-dive into its construction quarry.
A few dozen meters ahead of Bridy, the Klingon spy slid wildly down the dorsal hull toward the ship’s bow, which struck the far wall of the pit, launching him up and over the point of impact. He rolled through his hard landing on the gritty concrete and came up running.
At the same moment, Bridy was going down with the ship.
The imploding spaceframe collapsed under its own weight into a jumble of bent wreckage. Bridy scuttled clear of one crushing impact as the ship’s exterior scaffolding crashed down on top of it and followed it into its fiery grave. Then she realized she was lying atop an installed escape pod. Struggling back to her feet as the ship tilted aft, she fought her way across the disintegrating hull until she found a gap and dropped through it, into a half-walled corridor choked with gray smoke and dust that stung her eyes.
She tumbled and lurched back the way she had come, taking half her strides on the deck and half across the bulkheads, until she found the escape pod. The ship had no power but she hoped that, like the emergency systems on Starfleet ships, the pod would have its own self-contained ejection system. She scrambled inside, and frantically pulled its hatch shut behind her. Then, with her hand poised on its launch handle, she looked out its tiny exterior viewport, waiting for a glimpse of sky so that she wouldn’t simply launch herself at high speed into a concrete wall. Through the flames and sooty smoke she caught the faintest hint of pale blue, and she pulled the ejection lever.
The pod shot away from the spaceframe with a deafening bang, and the sudden acceleration slammed Bridy against its hatch. Everything seemed to move in slow motion—Bridy tumbled, the pod rolled, the viewport showed open air and dusty land—and then its systems powered up, and the sensation of free fall vanished. Its thrusters snapped on with a gravelly roar as it initiated its landing protocol—but then the pod crashed nose-first to the ground, and all its internal displays flickered and went dark. The inertial dampers failed, and Bridy covered her head with her arms as the pod bounced, rolled, and ricocheted across the starship-construction yard. Each collision rang the pod’s hull like a hammer on a church bell. Even after the pod finally skidded to a halt, the ringing continued inside Bridy’s aching skull.
More than slightly dazed, Bridy triggered the pod’s hatch release. The heavy metal portal blasted away, leaving its aft portion completely exposed. She staggered out, blood-spattered and slightly charred, then lifted her tricorder only to find it smashed beyond repair. Well, that’s just great,she fumed.
A variety of humanoids scrambled in her direction. Some looked as if they were coming to render aid. A pair of armed and armored Gorn looked intent on arresting her. She didn’t have time to deal with any of them. Pushing her way through a gauntlet of concerned humanoids chattering at her in languages she didn’t understand, she looked around, straining to pierce the bright haze and catch any sign of her target. She was just in time to see the Klingon hobbling out the far end of the industrial yard onto a busy main boulevard.
Gotta give him credit,Bridy decided as she ran after him, he’s got stamina.
The cries of sirens split the air behind her, and the next thing she heard were disruptor shots tearing past her. She didn’t bother to look back. It would only have slowed her down, and she had bigger problems to worry about than Gorn police.
Ahead of her, the Klingon ducked and bobbed at a brisk pace through dense tangles of pedestrian traffic. He was no longer running, which suggested to Bridy that he didn’t think he was still being followed. He probably thinks I’m buried alive by now,she reasoned, slowing her pace and taking care to keep the Klingon in sight while keeping herself concealed. She exercised caution at each corner, searching for the Klingon’s reflection in storefronts before poking her head into the open to confirm his position.
Within minutes he had led her into a sector of Tzoryp dominated by broad industrial buildings with offices stacked atop street-level warehouses. The sidewalks remained well populated with food vendors’ carts, queues of job-seekers outside several businesses, and doorways inhabited by members of the city’s pungently indigent underclass.
On the far side of a narrow avenue, the Klingon ducked through a wide-open warehouse entrance and vanished inside its shadowy interior. Bridy tugged her hood forward to hide her face as she sidled into a sliver-thin alley between two buildings directly opposite the warehouse, whose signage consisted of symbols from a variety of alien languages. The only set of characters she even remotely understood were those written in tlhIngan’Hol. Her translation skills were far from perfect, but she was fairly certain the sign advertised a pest control service. She smiled. What a perfect cover,she realized. It gets them access to just about every place in the city and lets them have a license to store chemicals and low-grade explosives, and they even get to kill things from time to time.