After Kestra’s death, Troi had given My Bear to Commander Li for her daughter.
He set the toy targback down amid the wreckage. Once he and Vaughn were through, someone was supposed to come and sort through all this. Troi was grateful that his assignment to Vaughn’s detail meant he would be spared that duty. Once was more than enough.
The one part of his job he hadn’t done was to do a full check of the southwest quadrant. He clambered over pieces of plasti-form and shards of blades and precious stones—the store over the collapsed part of the building sold weapons and jewelry; both proprietors and one customer were among the dozen dead—to see if he could better determine the cause.
Unfortunately, the weakened beams in question were under more material than he could move safely, because of both the weight and the number of items with sharp edges. Besides, it was only a matter of time before the building collapsed the rest of the way—the remains of the foundation couldn’t bear the added concentration of mass for much longer.
Luckily, Troi didn’t have to move it himself. He trained his tricorder’s sensors on the broken beams under the wreckage, then tapped his combadge. “Troi to Sulma.”
“Sulma here.”
“Chief, I need some help here. Can you tie in to my tricorder?”
“Hang on.”A pause. “Yeah, okay, got it.”
“Can you lock onto the pieces of metal I’m scanning and beam them to a position about three meters to my left?”
“Don’t see why not. Hang on.”Another pause. “Got it.”
“Thanks, Shawn. That’s a big help.”
The transporter chief laughed. “No big deal. It’s not like I’m doing anything difficult. Not like that time Commander Li needed me to beam that funky alien gourd off her arm. Anyhow, energizing.”
Seconds later, several bent, broken, and shattered fragments of metal materialized three meters to Ian Troi’s left.
“Thanks again, Shawn. I owe you lunch. Troi out.”
Now Troi did an in-depth scan of the beams. The tri-corder still couldn’t identify the third metal in the alloy—but it did identify some resonance traces that matched a similar investigation they’d done in the Barradas system near the Romulan border a few months earlier. “Oh, this isn’t good.”
“What isn’t good?”
Troi turned to see that Vaughn had come back inside the force field.
Before Troi had a chance to answer the question, Vaughn added, “Just so you know, I’ve cleared the area of all onlookers. There’s one Klingon guard outside the force field, but otherwise, it’s just you and me for dozens of meters around.”
Smiling at his friend, Troi said, “The joys of a sparsely populated colony that has transporter technology. No need for crowding. In any case, I’ve discovered two things.”
“Which is the one that isn’t good?”
“Both, unfortunately. One is that the rest of this is going to come crashing down in the next half-hour or so. We’ll want to bring the force field in a little, use it to minimize the damage to the surrounding area.”
“Good idea. What’s the other thing?”
Pointing at the shattered framework, Troi said, “This wasn’t because of shoddy construction. That beam was weakened by an explosion.”
“What? How the hell did we miss that?”
“It was a very small bomb with a very low yield and a detonator that works well at this size. That’s all they needed, as long as they put it in the right spot. This beam, as it happened, was.”
“What kind of explosive?”
“Standard triceron. That’s not the kicker, though. You ever hear of molecular-decay detonators?”
“I’ve heardof them.” Vaughn shrugged. “I know that they’re virtually undetectable and that Romulans are the only ones who’ve been able to get them to work reliably.”
Smiling grimly, Troi said, “Only half right. Yes, Romulans are the only ones who use them, but they’re not as undetectable as they used to be. A few months ago on the Carthage,we figured out how to detect them in the Barradas system.” He held up his tricorder display so Vaughn could see it. “I’m picking up residue of one now.”
“That doesn’t make sense. The Romulans have pretty much kept to themselves since Tomed. Why would they get involved in thismess?”
Troi shrugged. “I don’t know, Elias, but this is definitely a Romulan operation.”
“Or someone trying to set up the Romulans.”
“I doubt it.” Troi barked a laugh. “I mean, if someone else figured out how to rig an MD detonator, I doubt they’d use it for something like this. They’d go around selling it to the highest bidder—or at least using it for an explosion with a bit more oomph than this.”
Vaughn let out a breath through his teeth. “Probably, but I have to consider all the possibilities. You’re right, though, Romulan sabotage is the obvious answer. Which leads me to wonder what theywant with Raknal V.”
Troi shrugged. “Maybe they just want to—” Before he could continue, his tricorder beeped an alarm. “Elias, someone’s penetrated the force field.”
“What?”
Expanding his tricorder range outward, he asked, “You said you posted a Klingon guard?”
“Qaolin’s people did, why?”
“The only life signs I’m picking up are you and me—and our intruder, but it’s masked with some kind of screening field.”
Vaughn started to look around, seeming to take in the entire three hundred and sixty degrees around him at once. Then he sprang into action rather suddenly, leaping to push Troi to the ground. “Get down!”
Even as he did so, Vaughn unholstered his phaser and fired it.
Green beams of coherent light sizzled over Troi’s head, which meant the weapon they came from could well have been a Romulan disruptor. Or, as Elias pointed out,Troi thought, someone trying to set the Romulans up.
Somehow, despite the weight of Elias Vaughn on top of him, Troi managed to get a look at his tricorder. It was still picking up the life reading, and also the masking field. Whoever was firing at them didn’t want to be identified by species. Troi had no idea what that meant in the grand scheme of things, but that was Elias’s problem.
Troi’s problem was getting out of this alive.
Vaughn had gotten into a crouching position, covering Troi’s prone form, and fired again. Right after he did so, the life sign reading fluctuated. For a moment, it registered as Vulcanoid. My God, it really could be a Romulan.
“We’ve got to get out from the open,” Vaughn said. “We’re sitting ducks out he—”
Then a green beam struck Vaughn, and he went down—albeit with no obvious physical trauma. Since when do Romulan disruptors have a stun setting?
That question was the last thing Troi thought before a green beam struck him in the shoulder. As blackness started to claim him, he heard a rumbling sound. The building’s about to collapse!He tried to make his arms and legs move, but they refused to respond to his brain’s commands. The ground started to shake under him even as consciousness slipped away, and he felt something heavy smash into his chest…