Star Trek Into Darkness Page 0,24

blast of cool moist air immediately struck him. Clutching the rifle tightly, Kirk took careful aim and began firing at the undamaged jumpship.

Rising, Pike made a break for the hallway. Damaged legs failed him and he didn’t make it, taking a glancing blow from one of the dozens of bursts that were being unleashed by the jumpship. He went down hard, and tried to pull himself along the floor as the room continued to disintegrate around him.

Kirk soon saw that his shots were doing little if any harm, producing nothing but sparks on the flanks of the armored jumpship. Staring into the darkness, he could clearly make out the figure of the pilot seated in the cockpit. For a moment, John Harrison was staring directly at him. There was no anger in the man’s expression, no unrestrained fury. For all the emotion he was showing as he continued raining mass murder on the interior of the tower, Harrison might as well have been a machine. In the brief instant he locked eyes with the desperate Kirk, there was no sign of strain, no indication of stress. No humanity.

Putting down the useless rifle, Kirk retreated into the building. There had to be something else he could use to put an end to the massacre. Something, anything. He looked around wildly. There was nothing in the offices he had entered that could be used to take down a flock of seagulls from the Farallons, much less a Federation jumpship. Desks, projection units, personal effects—he was about to give up and race back to check on Pike’s condition when he spotted the fire panel in the far wall.

Fashioned of an unyielding carbon fiber designed to withstand the enormous pressure it had to contain, the thin fire hose coiled in the wall recess could fill a burning suite of offices with retardant in a matter of seconds, smothering an incipient blaze before it had a chance to spread. Unspooling it, Kirk frantically wrapped it around the rifle. That the weapon was still perfectly functional was evident when he used it to blow out the section of wall that framed the broken window.

Spock raced over to the severely wounded Admiral Pike; their eyes met in recognition an instant before yet another lethal burst from the jumpship struck both the floor of the room and the crawling Pike, sending him spinning to one side.

Marcus, to his credit, had not fled the room. Standing by the entrance to the hall, he fought to direct the activities of an increasing rush of personnel, waving and gesturing frantically. “Get those people out of here!”

As the jumpship was forced to dodge ever wider to evade the increasing stream of defensive fire from inside the building, Spock managed to reach Pike. Already in shock, mouth agape, the admiral now focused his gaze on something distant and unseen. Grabbing him under his arms, the science officer dragged his limp body out of immediate danger.

Rushing to the edge of the now-windowless gap and sliding to his knees, Kirk clutched the tied-off rifle. Eighty stories below, the main quad beckoned. Lights everywhere swept the sky as they tried to focus on the jumpship, whose weaponry continued to pour death and destruction into the tower. As ground-based defenses began to gather around the base of the tower, Harrison kept his craft bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter. He would dart upward, then down at a sharp angle, cut around one flank of the building before returning to let off another burst at the interior.

Forcing himself to bide his time, Kirk waited until the jumpship came closer. Then he rose and flung the pulse rifle as hard and far as he could in the direction of the deadly craft’s starboard cylindrical air intake. One of the office desks would have served his purpose even better had he been able to tie it to the fire hose, but though strong, he was no Vulcan. The rifle would have to do.

Striking the jumpship’s intake, the weapon was immediately sucked inside. Its arrival presented no difficulty to the craft’s sophisticated propulsion system. Neither did the slender fire hose that remained fastened to the weapon. The considerable section of wall to which the sturdy end of the high-tech hose was secured, however, was a different matter entirely. As the massive chunk of free-pour polycrete and reinforcing metal mesh was ripped from its place, Kirk had to dive to one side to avoid it. Just missing taking off his head, the