Chapter 328: Easily Resolved
The battle inside the Enterprise was less a contest and more a one-sided crushing.
On the bridge, the moment Mann's squad materialized in the transporter beam, the slaughter began.
The Klingon guards only had time to see a few blurry dark silhouettes and sudden deadly flashes of light. Their neural reaction speed, in the face of highly cybernetic warriors—especially those with activated Sandevistan systems—was as sluggish as if they were standing still.
Mael and Valerie transformed into two afterimages of death.
Their movement trajectories surpassed the limits of Klingon visual capture. The sonic blade and mantis blades, humming with high-frequency vibrations, sliced through the enemies' necks accurately and efficiently.
There were hardly any decent screams, only the dull thuds of heavy bodies hitting the floor and the clatter of disruptors slipping from grips.
In just a few breaths, the Klingon soldiers who had been controlling the bridge and throwing their weight around were all lying in pools of blood. Heads were separated from torsos, their faces still frozen with the fierce expressions of the previous moment.
Sulu, Chekov, and the other crew members, forced to huddle in a corner of the bridge, couldn't even fully comprehend what had happened. Their vision simply blurred, and the oppressive threat of death vanished into thin air, leaving only a few rapidly cooling Klingon corpses and the thick stench of blood permeating the air.
Mann didn't even cast a second glance at the bodies on the ground. His deep voice issued orders through the squad's comm channel: "Valerie, Jack, clear the left corridor. Dorio, Falco, the right. Ensure all paths leading to the bridge are secure. Shoot to kill any armed Klingon you encounter."
"Yes, Captain!" The squad members scattered quickly like cold-blooded scavengers, beginning to purge the remaining enemies in the areas surrounding the bridge.
Their actions were efficient and coordinated, bearing a nearly instinctive killing technique forged in countless street shootouts and gang wars. It was starkly different from the combat style the Federation crew was accustomed to, which leaned more toward suppression and control.
Meanwhile, in the engine room, the battle was also nearing its end.
Kirk led a hastily assembled squad of over ten people out from a flanking corridor, the red beams of their phasers accurately striking the Klingons attempting to establish a defensive position.
At almost the same time, Engineer Scott's roar of "For the Enterprise!" echoed from inside the engine room, accompanied by even denser phaser fire.
Caught in the middle and attacked from both sides, the Klingon squad's bravery quickly crumbled after losing the element of surprise and their tactical advantage, overwhelmed by the fierce counterattack of the Federation crew desperate to save their ship.
Soon, the last stubbornly resisting Klingon soldier was personally struck down by Kirk.
"Scott! Report the situation!" Kirk asked loudly, quickly stepping through the smoke-filled engine room.
"The engine control system has some minor scratches, and the shield generators overloaded, but the core structure is intact! Give me ten minutes, and I can get this old girl dancing again!" Scott's voice carried the excitement of surviving a disaster and the unique focus of an engineer.
Just then, Mann's steady voice came through Kirk's communicator: "Captain, the bridge and surrounding areas have been cleared. We are pushing toward the mid-section of the ship. The remaining resistance is sporadic and chaotic. We expect to complete the full sweep within three minutes."
Kirk's taut nerves finally relaxed a fraction.
He looked around at the crew members reclaiming their stations and beginning emergency repairs, then looked at his communicator, as if he could see Mann's squad ruthlessly purging threats within the steel veins of the ship through it.
The operation to retake the Enterprise was nearing its end in an unexpectedly short amount of time.
Just as the battle inside the Enterprise quelled at an astonishing speed, in the surface camp on the Genesis planet, Akira was executing the other part of the plan.
Through the tracking program he had quietly implanted during his previous communication with the Klingons, and using the Genesis planet's energy field as a relay, he easily infiltrated the rudimentary computer networks of the two Klingon cruisers in orbit.
The ship systems the Klingons were so proud of—their defensive measures seemed primitive and laughable in front of a Tech-Priest from the Dark Age of Technology, well-versed in the essence of data and logic plagues.
Their firewalls were like a layer of paper, instantly pierced and disintegrated by Akira with overwhelming force.
Encountering almost no decent resistance, Akira's will swept through every control node of the two warships.
Engine output was forced to zero, weapon system energy circuits were physically severed, shield generators were overloaded and taken offline. He even cleverly welded shut or locked the emergency manual control levers and physical circuit switches using precise energy pulses.
The comm channels were filled with the Klingons' roars of shock and anger, along with their desperate attempts, but it was all to no avail.
In mere dozens of seconds, the two warships that were brimming with murderous intent just moments ago turned into two completely paralyzed metal coffins floating in orbit. Aside from the life support systems, which were deliberately preserved, they had lost all functionality.
"Target units have lost combat capability; control systems are completely locked down," Akira's synthesized voice calmly reported to Kirk, who had just returned to the comm channel after finishing the sweep of the Enterprise. It was as if he had merely completed a routine system debugging.
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the channel. Clearly, Kirk was digesting this information.
Then, Kirk's voice came through, carrying a trace of disbelief and immense relief: "Good job, Magos. Maintain the current status, we..."
"I suggest initiating their self-destruct sequences," Akira interrupted him, his tone devoid of any fluctuation, as if proposing a perfectly reasonable technical solution. "Permanently eliminating the source of the threat is the most efficient. It will take an estimated one point two seconds to overwrite the commands."
"Wait! Magos Akira!" Carol beside him hurriedly dissuaded him. "Capturing these two ships and the Klingons aboard holds much greater value! We can extract intelligence from them, understand the purpose of their operation, and even use them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Klingon Empire! Destroying them will only escalate the conflict and bring about unnecessary subsequent clashes!"
Akira's crimson optical lenses turned slightly toward the pale-faced Carol. His internal processor rapidly weighed the pros and cons of "eliminating a potential threat" versus "acquiring strategic resources and avoiding uncontrollable diplomatic risks."
For a Tech-Priest accustomed to eradicating problems with absolute power, the "value" Carol proposed required recalculation.
After a brief silence, his synthesized voice sounded again: "Logical evaluation complete. Retaining the targets as an intelligence source and political asset yields a higher probability of long-term benefits than immediate destruction. Self-destruct command canceled."
He accepted Carol's suggestion, but the basis for this decision was still cold calculation of gains and losses, not any form of humanitarianism or diplomatic consideration.
The threat in orbit was resolved in this silent yet utterly overwhelming manner.
The two Klingon cruisers, along with their crews, became prisoners floating in the orbit of the Genesis planet. And all of this was achieved solely through a brief data intrusion by the mechanical Magos in the ground camp.