A broad hatch in the middle of its secondary hull slid open, and Pennington saw several members of the ship’s crew gazing up, returning his stare. He waved. A brawny, bearded man with heavy ocular ridges waved back.
Over the intercom, Quinn drawled, “Unless yer plannin’ on teaching ’em sign language, you can lower the fuel pod now.”
Pennington swallowed his reply and turned the key to feed out the winch cable slowly, to minimize the payload’s swing as it descended. The bearded Denobulan inside the Starfleet ship waved to signal everything was okay. As the fuel pod neared the opening at the top of the other ship, the Starfleet personnel gathered around and guided the large cylinder carefully inside their vessel.
The Denobulan held up his hands, wide apart, and slowly moved them closer, advising Pennington of the distance remaining to the Sagittarius’s deck. The young Scot watched carefully, his hand poised to halt the cable feeder. Then the bearded man clapped his hands together and turned his palms upward. Pennington turned off the cable feeder and spoke toward the intercom. “Touchdown.”
“Nice,” Quinn said. “Good to know at least one of us has a knack for landings.”
Pennington grinned at the compliment and looked back down at the Starfleet ship. They had finished detaching the harness from the fuel pod. The scruffy Denobulan signaled him to retract the cable. Pennington gave him a thumbs-up and turned the winch key in the other direction to take up the slack.
Minutes later, after he had closed the ventral cargo bay doors, he climbed back up to the main deck and returned to the cockpit. “So,” he said as he fell into his seat, “is that it?”
“Not quite,” Quinn said. “I was waiting for you. Their captain wants to talk to both of us.” He reached forward and pressed a key on the console. “Captain, we’re both here.”
“Gentlemen,” said a dignified-sounding voice with an accent that Pennington couldn’t place. “This is Captain Adelard Nassir. First off, I want to thank you both, on behalf of my crew, for bringing that antimatter on the double.”
“Yer welcome, Captain,” Quinn said.
Nassir’s tone became somber. “Since we’re already in your debt, and seeing as you men are civilians, I feel like I have no right to ask another favor of you…but my first officer is several kilometers downriver, stranded and wounded.”
Quinn shifted his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “You need us to pick him up and bring him back?”
“It may not be that simple,” Nassir said.” We’re not alone down here, gents. Every second you stay, your lives are in danger. Rescuing my officer might be more than just a taxi run.”
With a glance in Pennington’s direction, Quinn said, “Well, I can’t speak for my friend, Captain, but if you’ll point me toward your man, I’m ready to go get him.” To Pennington he added, “Tim, if you’d rather stay here, I’ll understand.”
“If it’s all the same to you, mate,” Pennington said, hearing the words tumble out of his mouth before he knew what he was saying, “I’ll come along.”
A string of data appeared on one of the small, cracked monitors mounted in the hump between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. “We’ve sent you Commander Terrell’s communicator ID frequency,” Nassir said. “Lock that into your ship’s sensors, and it’ll lead you right to him.” They heard the captain clear his throat. “I can’t thank you men enough for this. Good luck, and Godspeed.”
“Back atcha, Captain,” Quinn said. “Rocinante out.” He flipped the channel closed, pivoted the nose of the ship northward, and keyed the main thruster. “Tim,” he said, “lock in that guy’s communicator signal, will ya?”
As Pennington patched the communicator’s transponder data into the ship’s main sensor array, he snuck suspicious glances over at Quinn. “Look who’s all gung-ho to play the hero’s role.”
“Ain’t the first good deed I ever did,” Quinn said, checking his gauges. “Just been awhile, that’s all.”
Unable to keep a sly grin from his face, Pennington remarked, “It just doesn’t seem like you.”
“Tell me something,” Quinn said. “What’d you want to be when you were a kid?”
He wondered if Quinn was setting him up to be the butt of a joke, but his intuition told him Quinn was serious. “I wanted to be a reporter,” he said.
“Yeah? That worked out well for you, then.” Adjusting his cigar between his teeth, he said, “I’ll let you in on a secret, newsboy: when I was a kid, I did not dream of growing up to be a drunk and a loser. We reach?”
Under all that bluster, Pennington mused, there might just be a decent human being trying to get out. Or maybe he’s just playing me, as usual. “If you were so keen to be a hero, why didn’t you do that instead?”
Without a grin or a hint of sarcasm, Quinn replied, “No one ever asked me.”
For a moment, Pennington wondered if perhaps he had been too quick to judge this scruffy, smelly, boorish man. Told that he would be flying his ship and himself into peril, Quinn hadn’t hesitated to accept the risk. It had been Pennington who had committed himself in order to save face—and, he realized belatedly, to avoid disappointing Quinn. To avoid shaming his friend. Which one of us is the real hero?
Before he could let his mind slip into a debate on that topic, he noticed the sky growing dark and flashing with lightning. The massive storm front that he had seen during their approach to the Sagittarius was directly ahead of them—and growing closer with each passing second.
Captain Kutal stood in the middle of the Zin’za’s bridge and felt his good mood deflate into disgust as he read the urgent message that had just been received from Imperial Intelligence. “They can’t be serious,” Kutal grumbled.
He handed the message to BelHoQ. The first officer read it quickly, then sagged with irritated disappointment. “Helm,” he barked. “Take us out of warp.” Qlar, hunched over the forward console, hastened to obey. Moments later the stars on the main viewer went from streaked to static.
“Answering all stop, sir,” Qlar reported.
The captain walked back to his chair and slumped into it. BelHoQ followed and stood facing him from the left. The first officer kept his voice low. “An ambush? Sounds like someone at I.I.’s been hitting the warnog again.”
Kutal feigned surprise. “You don’t think it’s possible?”
“Possible? Maybe. Likely? No. Starfleet couldn’t deploy enough ships here for an ambush without our knowledge.”
“I know that,” Kutal replied, his voice an anger-sharpened rasp. “Not unless they’ve started using devices like the one we encountered on that ship outside the Palgrenax system.”
His speculation seemed to concern BelHoQ. Weeks earlier they had hunted down a ship of unknown origin that had possessed a technology for rendering itself all but invisible to sensors and visual scans. If the Federation proved to be the inventor of such a profound tactical advantage, it could easily spell disaster for the Empire.
BelHoQ calmed himself and spoke in a cool, measured tone. “Standard procedure calls for a full scan of the system before we proceed.”
“Afraid we might be outnumbered, BelHoQ?”
Unruffled by the jibe, BelHoQ answered, “No, Captain. I just want to know where all the targets are—so I can decide which one to destroy first.”
Kutal chortled with genuine amusement and appreciation. “Very well. Run your scan. We’ll hold station here until we’re ready to move into orbit.”
As BelHoQ stepped away to coordinate the intensive sensor sweep of the star system, Kutal stared at the bold white orb of Jinoteur in the center of the main viewer. We can afford to take our time, he reassured himself. We know exactly where the Starfleet ship is—and it’s not going anywhere.