"Hero of the Empire" Fiction Excerpt

The opening 400 or so words for my SNW 10 sub "Hero."

Storyline: Commander T'Pol, a Vulcan officer, struggles alone to thwart human rebels from conquering Earth...in an alternate universe with a Terran Empire that oppresses nonhumans.
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Hero of the Empire
by Boris Layupan

T’Pol’s heart hammered in her throat.

The Starship Defiant orbited Earth, prepared to bombard the planet into submission. She had no time to lose.

T’Pol slowed her pace in the ship corridor before her two guards. “You must assist me in preventing Lieutenant Sato from overthrowing the emperor and Starfleet.”

T’Pol’s marine MACO captors, both human, grunted derisively. Corporal Mackenzie, a lithe, muscular blond female in brownish-grey combat fatigues with a skull patch on her sleeve, trailed T’Pol on the left side. Mackenzie prodded T’Pol in the back with the end of her phaser rifle.

“Empress Sato’s expecting you on the bridge,” said Mackenzie. “Move along...Commander.”

T’Pol resisted an urge to thrust the weapon into Mackenzie’s mouth. The unseemly impulse was a telltale of her eroding emotional control, the result of much too close association with the humans of her universe. What would it be like to deal with the benevolent, egalitarian humans of the parallel universe this starship came from?

“I ask forgiveness,” said T’Pol, increasing her pace just a fraction. “It was kind of Lieutenant Sato to allow me to live to witness her conquest of your homeworld.”

The second MACO, Corporal Chang, a wiry oriental human male, chuckled. “I didn’t know Vulcans had a sense of humor, Commander.”

Chang wore the red shirt and black trousers of the Defiant’s original security complement as if it were a badge of honor. T’Pol wasn’t one to criticize as she wore the light blue skirted uniform of a Defiant female science officer.

Her top was stained green, though. A cut on her cheek from where Hoshi Sato had slashed her with a dagger had dripped blood before clotting at last. It’d happened when Sato apprehended her for conspiring against Jonathan Archer on the Avenger, their former escort.

T’Pol fingered her throbbing wound. She would take Sato to task for it very soon.

“As you say, Corporal,” said T’Pol, her tone agreeable.

In the next heartbeat, she crouched to her knees, pivoted back, and spun her left leg around to sweep both MACOs by their ankles. The two corporals cried out and their weapons clattered onto the deck as they fell back.

T’Pol pounced in between the MACOs. She took hold of each at the junction where their necks met their shoulders and pinched the nerve clusters bundled there.

Both MACOs slumped unconscious.

T’Pol scanned the matte-white corridor ahead and behind her. Empty. On a ship designed to be manned by over four hundred personnel, the eighty odd survivors of the Enterprise and Avenger crews were, as a human saying put it, a drop in the bucket.

A red door lay to the left two meters ahead. She grabbed both MACOs by an ankle. Her Vulcan strength put her in good stead as she lugged the corporals to the door.
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