by David Mack
She tore her eyes from the viewscreen and strained to make sense of the helm’s jumbled readouts. Several subsystem monitors scrolled blocks of random digits and machine-language symbols, unbroken cascades of gibberish. The attitude controls were sluggish at best, not that Nizsk had any clue how to apply them based on her console’s data.
Wavy ripples of interference warped the image on the viewscreen, and then the whole scene broke apart into static. That was all Nizsk could take. She swiveled her chair far enough to turn her torso to face Theriault. “Commander, my flight instruments are scrambled. I can pilot the ship manually, but I need a forward view on the screen to do so.”
The first officer snapped at Dastin, “Get the viewscreen back! Whatever it takes!”
“On it!” He lurched away from the sensor post to an auxiliary command station and began his own struggle against a fouled computer interface. Around the bridge, command systems went haywire. The same nonsense string of computer code that clogged the helm readouts took over half the overhead display screens. Entire consoles flickered, as if at random.
It was madness—and, most insane of all, Sorak and Razka were acting as if this were nothing unusual. Nizsk chalked up Sorak’s sangfroid to his Vulcan discipline, but Saurians had no Kolinahr training to call upon, so how was Razka staying so calm when all around him was degenerating into chaos? At least Theriault and Dastin exhibited some degree of alarm that felt apropos in the moment.
Nizsk’s mental digression was cut short as the viewscreen snapped back to an image of the tempest raging outside. “Establishing manual helm control,” she declared. “I need a topographical overlay, please.” While she waited for the virtual wireframe of the planet’s surface to be added to the viewscreen, Nizsk transmitted a manual sensor check—a “ping,” in old Starfleet parlance, she had learned—to scout for obstacles and establish their actual altitude.
Assuming these systems are working at all.
Behind her, Theriault called over the mournful cry of wind and the ship’s barely functional impulse engine, “Helm! Status report!”
“Sensors indicate we remain on course, in a hard dive toward the facility. Altitude, five point six kilometers and falling fast.” She silenced an urgent alarm on her console. “Navigational deflectors failing. We might be in for some turbulence.”
“Keep her steady, Ensign! How long until we break through the clouds?”
Dastin answered, “Eighteen seconds! But right after we do, we’ll hit the inner edge of the distortion field. And if you thought the start of this ride was bad, you’re gonna hate the end.”
Mad bolts of blue lightning stabbed at the ship. They leapt from the darkness and cocooned the scout ship in a web of creeping electric tendrils that dominated the viewscreen. Then the ship slipped free of the storm, pierced a glowing veil of light, and plummeted toward the surface, which was suddenly much closer than Nizsk had expected. She tried to slow their descent, only to find herself betrayed once again by the helm’s erratic performance.
“Braking thrusters are not responding,” she announced.
Ever a professional, Theriault stayed cool as she issued what might well prove to be her final orders. “Chief, warn the captain we’re coming in hot, and coming right at him.” Her next words resounded from the ship’s overhead PA system: “All hands, brace for impact!”
20
The rest of the landing party was out the door before Terrell could tell them to stay inside, so he did the only thing he could: He followed them. Three long strides outside the exit, Ilucci, Taryl, and Hesh had all come to a halt to stare straight up. Terrell stopped and tilted his head back to gaze skyward. That’s when he saw a fireball plunge through the lightning storm.
Not again. Seeing the Sagittarius wreathed in fire resurrected unpleasant memories for Terrell of his ship’s crippling crash-landings on Jinoteur and, more recently, on Arethusa. Rooted in place, it took him a moment to recover his wits. “Everyone back inside!” He swung his arm to shepherd them back through the door. “We need to take cover!”
Taryl pointed at the blaze. “Look!”
They all turned as one and faced upward. The nimbus of flames evaporated to reveal the Sagittarius. It corkscrewed through the air for another second, then its nose shifted by the smallest degree, signaling a break in its wild nosedive. Its forward maneuvering thrusters fired, and a resonant hum filled the air as the ship’s impulse engines struggled to lift it out of free fall. Terrell clung to his doubts for the ship’s safety until the last moment, when it leveled out, showing its extended landing struts, and its ventral braking thrusters vomited burning plasma.
He winced at its booming touchdown, a brutal landing that sent great tremors through the ground and kicked up an expanding oval of dust that swept over him and the landing party. Half-blind and fighting to breathe, he waved away the choking haze and staggered toward his ship. Ilucci and the rest of his team lurched along on either side of him. He pulled his communicator from his belt and flipped it open. “Terrell to Sagittarius! Report! Is everyone okay?”
“Depends,” Theriault said. “Are we using a sliding scale of ‘okay’?”
He closed his communicator. She’s cracking jokes. They’re fine. Though he couldn’t see the ship, he heard the hydraulic whine of its ventral ramp being lowered open, and a few seconds later he saw a cool blue glow of light that he recognized from the working lights in the ship’s cargo bay. Moments later, the cloud dispersed, and he saw Theriault descending the ramp to meet the landing party. “Rolling out the red carpet, Number One?”
“More like buying time to mop up before you see the mess we made.” She tensed in fearful expectation. “Sorry I landed against orders, but we didn’t really have a choice.”
Terrell didn’t know where to start. “No complaints from me.” Ilucci, Taryl, and Hesh sprinted past them, up the ramp. “Turns out Ilucci needs some of his tools.”
Ilucci shouted down from the ramp, “I also need my team, Skip!”
“Roger that, Master Chief!” To Theriault he added, “Get the engineers down here.”
“Torvin and Threx are in sickbay. Doc says Tor might be okay in a few hours.”
“All right, just Cahow, then. But get her now. Every second counts.”
Theriault stepped away and opened her communicator to summon Cahow. Terrell hurried up the ramp into the cargo bay, where Hesh, Taryl, and Ilucci raided storage crates for parts and tools. The chief engineer hurled aside unwanted items with a vengeance while barking orders. “Hesh, get a phase discriminator! Taryl, find me a plasma buffer!”
Reluctant to get in the middle of their salvage scrum, Terrell stood back and asked, “Anything I can do to help?”
“Not unless you’ve got a gravitic resonator in your—hang on.” He dived into a deep crate and came up with a hefty and peculiar-looking gadget. “Got it!” He landed on his feet as Cahow slid down the ladder into the cargo hold. “Karen! Grab that bag of tools and follow me. Taryl, Hesh, follow us as soon as you find those parts.”
Hesh held up his own scavenged prize. “Right behind you, Master Chief.”
“Coming,” Taryl said, pulling a cylinder-shaped device from another crate.
“Let’s move!” Ilucci led the others down the ramp and back toward the research facility. “We’ve got nine minutes to cause a controlled overload without blowing ourselves up.”
• • •
If there was one thing Ilucci had learned was essential to serving as a Starfleet chief engineer, it was to never let on when he had no idea what the hell he was doing.
Half the components and subsystems in the Austarans’ dark energy reactor were utter mysteries to him. He had never seen technology remotely like this: exotic materials, incomprehensible wiring schemes, parts with no discernible function. Devising a plan to sabotage this Byzantine monstrosity without provoking a global cataclysm an
order of magnitude more swift and certain than the one already unfolding was a matter of guesswork. The only things more baffling than the facility’s hardware were its firmware and software, neither of which made any sense to him.
Not that he could say any of that.
If he had more time . . . if the planet wasn’t in imminent danger . . . if there was even an inkling of a better idea in play, he wouldn’t be risking everything on this mad gamble. He knew it wouldn’t take much to turn a controlled overload into a world-shattering explosion. On any other day, he would never take such a wild risk with so much at stake. But then he thought about the probability warping distortion field produced by the facility’s core, and he figured that in this one instance, he might actually have a fifty-fifty chance of success.
Better odds than I had at that casino on Carillon, he reasoned.
The captain and Doctor Kavalas watched from a few meters away as Ilucci stood back from the open interface panels in the reactor control room. He followed the cables from the tap he and Cahow had jury-rigged to help the interface panel better manage the immense power loads he was about to shunt through it. “Karen, is the plasma buffer hooked up?”
“Yes, but the discriminator’s being difficult. It’s set right, but it won’t—” He cut her off by kicking the discriminator, which purred to life. She glanced at its status display. “That did it.”
“First rule of engineering,” he muttered, knowing she’d fill in the rest by rote: If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it had to be replaced anyway. He turned to shout over his other shoulder, “Hesh! How’re we doing on the gravitic resonator?”
The science officer’s voice echoed up the stairwell from the accelerator ring sublevel. “Up and working, Master Chief! We’re heading up!”
“All right,” Ilucci said, surveying their rush-job handiwork. “If this works the way I think it will, we should be able to boost the jolt to the dark energy siphon by about three hundred percent without increasing the strain on the fusion reactor.” He frowned at the primitive-looking interface components. “As long as that hodgepodge of antiques—”
“Antiques?” Kavalas scowled with wounded pride. “That rack is state of the art!”
“My mistake,” Ilucci said. “As long as that hunk of junk doesn’t melt down when we throw the switch, we might just bring this little nightmare to an end.” He hooked a thumb over one shoulder. “Everybody out! Now! Get back to the control center, it’s shielded.”
Terrell stepped over to Ilucci’s side. “What about you, Master Chief?”
“No time to rig a timer, Skip. Someone’s gotta throw the switch. Might as well be me.”
The captain downplayed the moment in his usual low-key fashion. “See you topside when it’s done, Master Chief.”
“Copy that, Skip.” He held up his communicator. “Ping me when everybody’s secure.”
Terrell followed the others out of the reactor control room, all of them moving at a quick step. Ilucci plodded over to the interface panel and rested his hand on the master toggle for the relay he and the others had set up. A timer on the interface board counted down the seconds remaining until the next major collision of distortion wave fronts.
Why do we always cut these things so goddamned close?
Seven seconds on the clock and his communicator beeped twice.
He flipped it open. “Ilucci.”
“All set, Chief! Go!”
Ilucci switched the heavy toggle from OFF to ON, then leapt away from the interface panels to hit the floor and cover his head with both arms. He felt every exposed hair on his head and forearms stand on end, dancing in the supercharged atmosphere, and a galvanic tingle skittered over his flesh like a million fast-moving insects. Even through his closed eyes he saw a white-hot flash, but the meltdown of the interface was much quieter than he expected. A muffled bump and a fwoosh of flames, followed by a hiss of automated fire-suppression systems kicking in. Scalding motes of burned wiring and shattered transistors rained down on him like pyroclastic ash from a volcano made of computer parts. He swatted the burning bits of debris from his arms and the back of his neck, then looked up to survey the damage.
Twists of smoke snaked out of the phase discriminator. Green flames licked up the sides of the plasma buffer, which had cracked around its middle. Blackened circuit boards and molten wiring were all that remained of the interface panels for the reactor controls. Overhead, light fixtures flickered behind an obscuring blanket of smoke. It was a discouraging display.
He opened his communicator. “Ilucci to Captain Terrell. Did it work?”
The captain was not in good spirits. “Hard to say, Master Chief. As soon as we put out the fires in the first-tier workstations and get the lights back on, we’ll try to find out.”
That was a bad sign. Ilucci hightailed it back to the main control center, where the situation was just as the captain had described. The lowest tier of workstations had been reduced to blackened husks. Scorch marks on the floor corresponded to blown-out lighting fixtures overhead. Taryl wandered the room with a fire extinguisher, dousing the last stubborn embers as she went. Hesh and Cahow worked together at a station on the third tier, comparing notes in hushed tones while the captain tended to a minor burn on Doctor Kavalas’s hand.
Ilucci thought it best to steer clear of the captain until he had more constructive news to share. He made his way up the stairs to Hesh and Cahow. “What’s the word?”
Cahow glared at him through a loose, soot-stained lock of her flaxen hair. “Let me put it this way, Master Chief: You were half-right. It caused a catastrophic shutdown.”
Hesh added with equal disillusionment, “Unfortunately, a feedback pulse caused a fatal error in the fusion reactor, which is now in meltdown. The dark energy siphon, however, remains active and is on a buildup to another major wave front collision in twenty-nine minutes.”
Ilucci looked around the room and felt the weight of everyone’s baleful looks. All he could think to do was show his empty hands in a pantomime of surrender. “Sorry, guys.” A despondent sigh. “It sounded like a good idea at the time.”
21
The captain had called for all hands on deck, and that was exactly what he was getting. Theriault watched the procession enter the control center. Sorak, Dastin, and Razka led the way. Behind them followed the eight Austaran astronauts. Then, to her surprise, bringing up the rear of the procession was Crewman Torvin, who shuffled along, wincing with every step he took. The others she let pass by, but him she intercepted. “Crewman? What are you doing here?”
“Reporting for duty, sir.” He swallowed a low groan of discomfort.
She nodded for him to step aside with her, to talk in private. “You should be in sickbay.”
An adamant shake of his head. “I’m okay. Doctor Babitz patched me up.”
“And did she clear you for duty?” The abashed look on the young enlisted man’s face gave her the answer. “You left against medical orders, didn’t you?”
It was obvious to her that he was in pain and keeping himself in motion by force of will alone. “I won’t lie, sir. The burns on my back hurt. They hurt a lot. But I can still help. I know we don’t have a lot of time. So if I’m gonna die, I’d rather be up and working when it happens.”
How could she send him back to the ship? She nodded toward the group. “Fall in, Tor.”
“Aye, sir.” He navigated around her in halting steps and joined the others.
She followed him to the huddle, whose ranks had swelled to the point of being unwieldy. Including herself, ten of the fourteen members of the ship’s crew were present, plus the eight astronauts and Doctor Kavalas. She found her place beside Captain Terrell in the middle of one side of the group’s irregular oval. “Okay, we’re all here, and the clock’s ticking. Master Chief, I need your sit-rep on the attempt to overload the dark energy siphon.”
&n
bsp; Ilucci crossed his arms, apparently uncomfortable being the center of attention at that moment. “Well, to be blunt, I kind of humped the bunk on this one. Instead of knocking out the dark energy core, it looks like my surge from the fusion reactor pumped it up a level. So instead of having just under an hour until its next major spike in output, we have less than twenty minutes.” His report was met by heavy, disapproving silence. As he stepped back, he muttered with self-directed sarcasm, “Please, no applause. Just throw money.”
Filling the void of attention in the center of the gathering, Sorak stepped forward. “We have just under twenty minutes to counteract the effect of the improbability field being produced by the dark energy core. After that, the buildup to the coronal mass ejection from Anura’s parent star will be irreversible. Approximately three minutes after that, the ejection will commence. Once it separates from the star and begins its journey, there will be no stopping it.”
Dastin was glum. “Sounds like we have just enough time to kiss our asses good-bye.”
Taryl looked stunned. “So? That’s it? We’re giving up?”
“The hell we are,” Terrell said. “We have nineteen minutes left, and I mean to use them.”
The astronaut commander made an odd clicking noise that Theriault interpreted as his species’ version of a sarcastic laugh. “Doing what? Cutting my people’s time in half again?”
Terrell was undaunted by Beiana’s cynicism. “Commander, I know things look bad. We have no hope of escape, and we seem to have no solution to the problem. But fighting amongst ourselves won’t accomplish anything, and neither will sticking our heads in the sand. And in case you haven’t noticed, my crew and I are in just as much danger as you are. So if you think we lack the proper motivation to find a solution, I assure you—you’re mistaken.”