Star Trek Into Darkness Page 0,76
him, Khan raised an eyebrow in a disarmingly Spock-like manner. “You’ve done this before?”
“Yeah,” an increasingly tense Kirk told him, “it was vertical. We jumped onto a . . .” His words trailed off, along with the memory, and he returned his attention to the barrier directly in front of them. “It doesn’t matter.”
Khan eyed him a moment longer, then gave a mental shrug and addressed his own suit’s comm pickup. “Mr. Scott. Did you find the manual override?”
On the massive warship, Scott was racing frantically down the empty, disarmingly vast corridor that was hangar seven. “Not yet, not yet! I’m in the hangar. Give me a minute. A lot o’ this is familiar, but there’s a lot that’s new to me, too. Too much that’s new!”
Looking to right and left, he searched desperately for a manual control panel. It should have been . . . there. It wasn’t. Turning in a frantic circle, he thought he saw the console. A quick check revealed plenty of differences from a panel with similar functions on the Enterprise—but enough that were familiar. Several in particular were virtually identical. They were all he needed—he hadn’t come here to stand in a suit and manually bring a shuttle aboard.
So intent was he on studying the controls that he didn’t notice a portal open at the back of the hangar and behind him.
On the Enterprise bridge, Spock felt he could no longer ignore reporting what he was seeing on the monitors. “Captain, before you launch, I feel I must restate that there is considerable debris still drifting between our ships. At your calculated departure velocity, contact with even a seemingly insignificant fragment would be cat—”
“Don’t say ‘catastrophic’!” Despite the best efforts of his suit’s automated internal climate control, Kirk was sweating. “Are we good to go or not?”
“Yes, Captain. If you choose to define ‘good’ as taking into account—”
Kirk interrupted the science officer’s unnecessary and decidedly unwanted explication by checking in with the chief. “Scotty, you ready for us?”
“Give me two seconds!” came the decidedly frenetic response. Under his breath and away from the communicator, the chief added to no one but himself, “Ya mad bastard!”
On the bridge, McCoy leaned toward the command chair and its occupant. “Tell me this is gonna work.”
“I have neither the information nor the confidence to do so, Doctor.”
McCoy’s expression twisted as he straightened. “As always, you’re a real comfort.”
Lying prone in the disposal chute, Kirk heard what he desperately wanted to hear from the chief. “Okay, okay—I’m set to open the door.”
Kirk glanced over at his companion. “You ready?”
“Are you?”
Damn the man! Kirk thought to himself. How can he be so calm under such circumstances? How human is he? Recalling McCoy’s comment about the prisoner’s blood summoned forth a host of questions—none of which Kirk presently had the time or inclination to ask. But later, when this was all over . . .
He addressed his suit’s pickup. “Okay, Spock—pull the trigger.”
“Yes, Captain . . . launching activation sequence on three . . . two . . . one . . .”
The airtight door in front of Kirk and Khan opened. There was a silent blast of compressed air from behind them that was intended to ensure that no refuse drifted back into the circular opening, and both men shot out into space as if blown from a cannon.
Into space, where pure tangled menace awaited.
XIV
Funny thing about acceleration, Kirk thought as he and his companion were shot out of the refuse tube: Though wholly an external stimulus, it has powerful effects on the mind. While being unceremoniously blasted out of a garbage chute lacked the aesthetic of tromping on the accelerator of an antique sports car, both generated similar feelings. He would much preferred to have been in that car now, powering across the flat Iowa landscape instead of . . .
But that was a long time ago, and that bitch reality kept poking him in the side with the ugly stick of immediacy.
Looking to his right, he could see Khan speeding along beside him as together they rocketed toward the looming warship. Rapidly changing light and reflection made it impossible to clearly make out the other man’s face. What was this warrior from the past thinking? Was he excited, energized, afraid, indifferent? On more than one occasion, Kirk had tried to read him, and failed. Having murdered Christopher Pike and too many others, Khan was now assisting Kirk in trying to save the Enterprise and its crew. Did a