by David Mack
“I see it,” Kavalas said. His slender digits moved over the console’s buttons and switches with speed and grace. Each function he activated was noted on the overhead screen. After several seconds of frantic action, he stopped and took half a step back from the console. “Damn it.”
“What’s wrong, Doctor? Why have you stopped?”
Kavalas slumped and hung his head in defeat. “The aliens who designed this thing . . . they’ve outwitted us again. Once engaged, this system isn’t meant to be shut down.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t be turned off, Doctor.” Hesh began studying the scroll of new data from the complex. “It just means we need to be more creative in our methods.”
“No, it’s hopeless.” Kavalas shook his head so hard that his eyestalks bobbled. “It’s over. We’re doomed. There’s no way to turn it off.”
Hesh flipped a few switches and noted the feedback on the virtual console. “That might be true, Doctor. But that doesn’t mean there’s no way to break it.” Encouraged by the results of his first acts of minor tampering, he escalated his sabotage. “If we introduce sufficiently serious asymmetries into its power matrix, we might be able to trigger a cross-dimensional implosion that will destroy the siphon and direct all its remaining energy, as well as most of that from its destruction, into a subspatial pocket dimension, where it will—”
“I believe you! Stop talking and do it!”
“I’m almost finished, Doctor. However, I require your administrative command code in order to engage the console’s override and destabilize the power matrix.”
Kavalas reached past him and entered commands in a blur. “It’s done! Finish it!”
“With pleasure, Doctor.” Hesh executed his improvised hack of the siphon’s systems with great haste and exacting precision. The power matrix proved more fragile than he’d thought and decayed into an entropic breakdown within seconds.
Using a reserved control pad on his console, Hesh tapped into the open comm channel to the landing party. “Sagittarius to Captain Terrell!”
“Terrell here. Go ahead.”
“Captain, I’ve triggered a series of catastrophic asymmetries in the complex’s main—”
“Sum up, Lieutenant!”
“I triggered the self-destruct.”
For one brief moment, Hesh thought he saw alarm on the face of Sorak and the chitinous visage of Nizsk. Over the comm, the captain asked, “How long do we have to get out?”
Hesh realized he had made one tragic miscalculation. “I would suggest you all run, sir.”
23
Veils of falling sparks stung Ilucci’s face and neck. He struggled to sustain a wild sprint through the shallow curve of the accelerator tunnel. Rising walls of noxious vapor and toxic smoke made his eyes water and his throat burn. The air was hot and thin, making him gasp like a drowning man, and he fought to avoid irregular gaps in the waffle-grate floor panels, which became hard to see as the handful of emergency lights still working in the tunnel faltered.
Where’s the stairwell? It has to be here!
He looked down and followed the data cables. As long as he didn’t lose sight of them, he knew he hadn’t missed the doorway back to the control center. A distant muted boom led to a persistent rumbling that rained dust and fragments of broken concrete onto his head. Through the haze and darkness he was encouraged by a hint of bright light—until its luminance swelled, and he heard the roar of rolling flames.
Falling was easy. Landing on his elbows and chin was hard. He pushed his face against the floor as a vermillion fireball tumbled past scant centimeters above him, crisping the hair on the back of his head. When darkness returned, he knew the conflagration had passed. He stood and lurched forward, fighting fatigue and asphyxiation with every step.
Several secondary eruptions rocked the complex, then the last few emergency lights expired, plunging the accelerator ring into total darkness. Only distant, intermittent flashes from blasts farther down the line hinted at the shape of the space.
Don’t panic, Ilucci told himself. You’re okay. He took a knee and patted the floor until his hands found the cables. Gripping one, he got up slowly to make sure it had enough slack that he could stand while holding it. Letting it slip through his half-open fist, he continued forward. Better than bread crumbs any day.
All hell broke loose—gouts of fire and storms of shrapnel—as Ilucci followed the slender thread of cable like a modern-day Theseus fleeing the Minotaur’s maze. Then came a monstrous bolt of electricity, a crackling branch of green lightning that slammed into him and launched him against the wall. After a hiccup of consciousness he was back on the ground.
He struggled to open his eyes. His mind felt adrift in the dark, not even half aware of his body. It was a struggle to force his right arm to paw the ground in search of his lifeline to escape. Then a bright light blinded him, and he wondered if he was passing over to some other plane of existence, in defiance of all his rational expectations.
The captain’s voice dashed his hopes for an afterlife.
“Master Chief! Are you all right? Speak to me!”
A mumble over a tongue that tasted like tin. “I’m toast. Leave me.”
Terrell grabbed him by his jumpsuit’s collar and wrenched him up to a sitting pose, then hefted the stocky engineer over his shoulders in a classic firefighter’s carry.
The flashlight beam bobbed as Terrell carried Ilucci back down the accelerator tunnel. If Ilucci had thought the darkness was disorienting, catching fleeting glimpses of upside-down details in the murk was even more confusing. Then they reached the dim glow of the doorway, and Terrell grunted as he started climbing the stairs with Ilucci on his back.
“Skip, put me down.”
Another labored upward step. “Can you walk?”
“Dunno. But even if I have to crawl, it’s better than making you haul me up the stairs.”
The captain set Ilucci on his feet. A wave of vertigo left Ilucci unsteady and holding on to the handrail, then he nodded at his commander. “Let’s move.”
Terrell bounded up the stairs two at a time. Ilucci trudged up the steps, but within seconds the captain realized Ilucci was falling behind. He came back, looped Ilucci’s arm across his shoulders. “Stay with me, Master Chief.” Together they climbed toward the exit.
“Dammit, Skip, I’m just slowing you down.”
“I know.” A cocky grin. “You’re my handicap, Chief. How would it look if I was the first one out of danger?”
“Well, okay.” Ilucci pushed himself to pick up the pace, for both their sakes. “As long as I’m the one doing you a favor, I can live with that.”
“Not if you don’t get a move on, you won’t. And neither will I.”
Their hard upward march became a tortured jog. “Roger that, Skip.”
• • •
No one would ever mistake Torvin for an athlete, but if there was one physical activity at which he excelled, it was running for his life. In his youth, he had beefed up his stamina and honed his knack for hurdling over obstacles by fleeing bullies in the sublevels of the decaying arcology he had called home. As a member of Starfleet, he did most of his running to evade alien monsters and reach minimum safe distance from explosions of one sort or another. On this particular day of adventure in the Federation’s service, it was the latter that had him hauling ass and keeping up with the longer-limbed Lieutenant Dastin.
No sooner had Hesh told the landing party to evacuate the complex than the explosions had started. Fire belched from the control center’s tiers of workstations, and smoke poured from every ventilation grill. Then had come a massive concussion from deep below, somewhere in the bowels of the dark energy siphon’s machinery, and the rest of the complex had begun collapsing in on itself—starting with the ceilings in the main corridors, which caved in at multiple points, leaving Torvin and Dastin
in a frantic race to find a safe path out before the rest of the complex converted itself to smoking rubble.
Dastin bolted past a T-shaped intersection with hardly a glance to his right. Torvin, who was not quite as fast as the field scout, noticed a faint glimmer at the end of the other passageway. Stumbling to a halt, he called out, “Sir! This way!”
It was almost funny watching Dastin halt his headlong flight. Going from full run to dead stop left him swinging his arms to recover his balance. He jogged back to Torvin, who pointed through the smoke. “See it, sir? That’s light from the storm outside.”
“Good eye! Let’s go!” They resumed running. Dastin pulled out his communicator and flipped it open on the move. “Dastin to Sagittarius!”
Sorak answered. “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”
“The direct route from the control center’s blocked. Inform all personnel still inside the complex to follow the outer passage to the second transverse, then follow it to the exit.”
“Understood. Be informed, Mister Dastin, you have three minutes to reach the ship.”
“Thanks for the tip! Dastin out!” He closed the communicator with a flick of his wrist.
Torvin was in the lead as they each sprang from a fallen slab of ceiling concrete and rebounded off the nearby wall to vault over and around a large obstruction caused by a roof collapse. Only as he landed on the far side did Torvin glance back and see a green hand reaching out from beneath the titanic mound of debris. He caught Dastin as the man landed beside him and pointed. “It’s Taryl! She’s trapped!”
“Help me dig her out!” Dastin threw himself at the jagged hunks of broken concrete, which were mixed with a twisted jumble of construction materials. Torvin fell in beside him, and within seconds they had hurled aside everything they were strong enough to move, revealing the crux of the problem: A heavy crossbeam had landed across Taryl’s legs, trapping her. Dastin tried to pull her free, but she was stuck fast.
Torvin eyed the wreckage. “We need a lever! Something strong enough to move that beam.” He spotted a long section of broken metal pipe and jumped toward it. “Find something to put under it!” He snapped up the pipe and turned to see Dastin pivoting in confusion. Torvin pointed out a hunk of concrete that looked strong enough to act as a fulcrum but also small enough for Dastin to move. “That one! Put it right there!”
He waited until Dastin positioned the fulcrum chunk, then he set the end of the pipe under the crossbeam and positioned its length above the second pseudo-boulder. Then he pulled on his improvised lever with all his might—and nothing shifted. Not one millimeter.
Dastin grabbed the pipe with him and added his strength. This time the crossbeam shifted with a gritty scrape. “Pull her out,” Dastin said through clenched teeth.
“Can you hold it alone?”
Wincing from the agony of exertion, Dastin nodded. As Torvin let go of the pipe, Dastin shifted himself underneath it to let his own weight do some of the work.
Torvin ran to Taryl, grabbed her wrists, and dragged her out from under the crossbeam. At the first safe moment to do so, he shouted, “Clear!” Dastin let go of the lever. The crossbeam thundered to the floor, sending tremors through the floor and filling the corridor with gray dust.
The two men each draped one of Taryl’s arms across their shoulders—Torvin on her left, Dastin on her right—and resumed their flight to the exit, making the best speed they could with her as a dead-weight passenger between them.
She let out a small groan as they portered her out the complex’s door into whipping wind and rain. Her eyes cracked open, and her head rolled drunkenly from one side to the other. She squinted at Dastin. “You saved me?”
“Not me.” He nodded at Torvin. “Tor’s the reason you’re still alive.”
She swiveled her head his way. “Thought it was your lucky day. Guess it’s mine, too.”
The young engineer had nothing witty, romantic, or charming to say, so he just smiled.
I guess so.
• • •
Terrell and Ilucci lumbered out of the complex into a raging downpour and blazing electric fury. Groans of roaring wind and rain had enveloped the facility, erasing the storm’s once-calm eye. Just a dozen meters away, Torvin and Dastin handed off the half-conscious Taryl to Doctor Babitz and Nurse Tan Bao inside the cargo hold of the Sagittarius.
Razka sprinted through the lashing torrents to meet the captain and chief engineer. “Give me your other arm, Master Chief!” Ilucci lifted his left arm. Razka ducked under the outstretched limb, then rose up beneath it to help Terrell bear the man’s weight. “Everyone else is already aboard! We need to move! The complex is imploding!”
Precisely on cue, a fearsome blast lifted the roof of the main building behind them. A column of orange flames, black smoke, and smoldering wreckage flew up into the tempest, which scattered the conflagration in all directions, a grand guignol of fiery destruction.
Fueled by fear and adrenaline, Terrell and Razka hefted Ilucci off the ground and quickened their retreat to the ship. Massive blocks of red-hot metal, broken concrete, and smoke-wreathed ejecta ranging from furniture to mangled electronics slammed down all around them, a steady barrage that pursued them as they fled. Twisted and burning, an office chair caromed off the nose of the Sagittarius. A scorched office machine shattered into countless fragments as it crashed against the ship’s starboard nacelle.
Terrell and Razka dodged side to side, forced into a slalom by the blazing obstacles that abruptly littered their path. Another boneshaking blast knocked the air from Terrell’s lungs and flattened him, Razka, and Ilucci a few meters shy of the ramp. He wanted to curse, but he struggled to draw breath, much less speak. Then he noticed the world around him had gone strangely quiet, and he realized the blast wave had left him half-deaf.
Through the swirling dust and stinging rain, he saw Razka and Ilucci were both stunned, just as he was. So much for making a graceful exit.
Hands reached down and grabbed Razka and Ilucci. Terrell had barely registered that Dastin and Tan Bao were dragging the two noncoms back to the ship when Doctor Babitz flipped him over and wrapped her arms around his chest. He had always thought of the germophobe physician as slight and bookish, yet she hauled him with speed and rock-solid balance across muddy ground and up the ramp.
He couldn’t hear a word she said as she laid him on his back in the cargo bay, so he turned his attention to Lieutenant Hesh, who used an entrenching tool—Starfleet’s overly fancy word for a sharp-edged shovel—to sever the data line that linked the ship’s computer to the complex’s backup control center. He tossed the complex’s share of the cable out of the ship and pressed the button to raise the ramp.
Doctor Babitz waved one of her medical gadgets next to Terrell’s head. In a matter of seconds, the hearing in his left ear recovered enough for him to hear the instrument’s whirring, the hydraulic whine of the ramp being pulled up, and the resonant thunk of it making contact with the hull. As the good doctor worked her medical magic on Terrell’s right ear, Hesh stepped over to a wall panel and thumbed open an intraship channel. “Hesh to Bridge. All aboard, ramp secure.”
“Copy that,” Theriault said, her voice clear over the speaker. “Brace for some chop—we’re taking off!” Hesh closed the channel, darted to the ladder, and took hold of its rungs.
Even if Terrell had still been deaf, he’d have recognized the impulse engine’s familiar vibrations through the deck beneath him. He turned his head to see Doctor Babitz treating Ilucci’s right ear. The ordinarily prim and pristine surgeon was dripping wet and muddy. Even her trademark blond bun had come partially undone. Seeing her disheveled made Terrell grin. “Finally got your hands dirty, eh, Doctor?”
A sly smile peeked out from behind her façade of clinical detachment. “Anything for you, Captain.” She shifted her humming gizmo to treat Ilucci’s left ear.
Il
ucci turned his head toward Terrell. “Thanks for not leaving me, Skip.”
“You’re welcome. By the way—that’s two you owe me, Master Chief.”
“No offense, but I hope that’s a marker you never have to cash in.”
Terrell breathed a long sigh and closed his tired eyes. “Amen to that.”
• • •
Transfixed by the vision of fire and rain on the main viewscreen, Theriault white-knuckled the armrests of the command chair. “Nizsk? We really need to go. As in right now.”
“I have only partial power.” The helm officer made frantic adjustments at her console. “Until I balance the thrust, I will be unable to maintain level flight.”
Impacts pealed through the hull as more detritus blasted from the complex bounced off the ship. “I don’t care about level, Ensign, I just want to be somewhere other than here.”
“Aye, sir. Engaging thrusters. Brace for liftoff.”
The purring of the impulse core became a sickly whine as the ship struggled to slip gravity’s surly bonds. For a few seconds, the ship levitated upward while maintaining a level attitude. Then the horizon climbed toward the top of the screen, leaving nothing on the viewscreen but the fast-collapsing ruins of the dark energy complex.
Theriault’s eyes widened in alarm. “Helm? What’s happening?”
“As I tried to say, Commander, attitude controls are not responding.”
“And we’re staring at the ground because—?”
“Because the bow of the ship is pointed directly at it.”
“That’s what I was afraid you were—”
Words failed her as the image onscreen became a vision of hell. The complex caved in and vanished into a great swirl of earth and flame. At the heart of the vortex was a dark sphere, a void in the fabric of reality. Tendrils of indigo light danced around it, appearing and disappearing without apparent pattern or purpose, but they annihilated anything and everything they touched.
Next came the screaming. Horrific otherworldly wails of noise assailed the ship, which shuddered and started to sink toward the yawning pit of destruction.