by David Mack
She struggled to keep her grip on consciousness. I won’t go out like this! The nausea was overwhelming. Her skin felt like it was on fire. Can’t panic, can’t panic, can’t panic, can’t panic….
She became dizzy, then thought she might be floating, but since she couldn’t feel her feet she couldn’t be sure. The edges of her vision began to fade and push inward, and she felt herself sinking into the comfort of oblivion.
No! Fight, damn it! Fight!
The tunnel bordering her vision grew longer with each moment, and her desperate inner voice felt small and impotent against the promise of darkness.
Not like this…not like—
* * *
Gold strained to see the double helix of light through the constantly shifting wash of static that dominated the da Vinci’s main viewer. “Ina, can you clean that up?”
“Filters are at maximum, sir,” Ina said.
“McAllan, what are we looking at here? Is that beam coming from a weapon?”
The tactical officer studied his console and frowned at the lack of information it offered him. “Not sure, sir. The beam is absorbing all our scans, and we can’t look deep enough into the atmosphere to find its source.”
“I’m going to need more than that to—” Gold stopped as the main viewer showed the mysterious tendril of energy dim and fade away beneath the Orion, vanishing like a phantom into the swirling hydrogen mists. “That’s either very, very good,” Gold thought aloud, “or very, very bad.”
* * *
Duffy slogged down the flooded corridor at the fastest pace he could manage, his muscles burning with fatigue as he forced himself forward through the thick semifluid hydrogen. His hot, ragged breaths fogged the transparent aluminum faceplate of his helmet as he stumbled across the walls and ceiling, and broke his constant, sideways falling with his arms while the ship rolled slowly around him. To move more quickly, he had reduced the settings of his magnetic boots to the minimum he needed to keep his footing, and he had decided that whatever the planet’s gravity said was “down” was fine by him.
He reached the intersection closest to the forward torpedo compartment at the same time as Gomez, who had adopted the same tactic for moving through the corridors. He fell into step behind her as they approached the open door to the torpedo room. It was still open, and the compartment beyond was completely dark. Gomez and Duffy moved quickly inside, the beams of their palm beacons crisscrossing in the reddish amber murk.
Gomez gestured with her tricorder toward the back of the room. “Back there,” she said, her voice echoing inside Duffy’s helmet. Corsi was slumped in a sitting position against the far wall. Duffy shone his search beam into Corsi’s face. The blond security chief was unconscious. Gomez continued scanning with her tricorder. “She’s alive—barely. Let’s get her out of here.”
Duffy and Gomez each grabbed one of Corsi’s arms, pulled her to a standing position, and began pulling her toward the corridor. “Gomez to Stevens, report.”
“I’m docked at the rendezvous point,” Stevens said. “Soloman’s aboard and Pattie’s standing by to dock Bug One as soon as I’m clear.”
“Tell Soloman to take Bug One with Duffy. You’ll be bringing Corsi and me back to da Vinci.”
* * *
Work Bug Two bobbled and rolled violently as it sped toward the da Vinci, now less than a kilometer away. Stevens was making no effort to fly smoothly or gracefully—just as quickly as the Work Bug’s engines and the planet’s atmospheric turbulence would allow. Forks of neon green lightning sliced past the cockpit windshield, but Stevens’s only fear right now was time—or, more precisely, how little of it Domenica might have left unless she reached the da Vinci sickbay.
A violent upswell spun the Work Bug nearly two full rotations around its forward axis, its thrusters screeching as Stevens fought to regain control. The utility craft had barely recovered its heading before Stevens once again pushed the thrusters to full-forward.
“Stevens, go easy,” Gomez said. She was kneeling over Corsi, doing what little she could with a first aid kit to help the fallen security chief, who was in deep shock—or worse.
No, not worse, Stevens told himself. She’ll be okay. Just keep going. Just get there.“I’m all right, Commander,” he said, not believing it at all.
Through the swirling haze Stevens recognized the familiar shape of the da Vinci, less than four hundred meters away.
With a little luck, I can have us in the shuttle bay in ninety seconds. He stole a quick look back at Corsi, whose porcelain-smooth skin had become terrifyingly pale. He hoped that for her the next ninety seconds wouldn’t equal a lifetime.
Chapter
8
She suffered a severe neuroelectric shock,” Lense said, looking away from the diagnostic screen to face Gold and Gomez, who stood on the other side of the biobed, eyes fixed on Corsi, who lay unconscious. “Her central nervous system was badly disrupted, and there was damage in her prefrontal lobe and motor cortex. I’ve repaired most of the major problems, but she’s still comatose.”
“For how long?” Gold said.
“Hours. Days. Maybe the rest of her life.”
Gold shook his head, unable to find words for his dismay.
“Can you tell if this was caused by a natural phenomenon or a weapon?” Gomez asked. Lense shook her head.
“Hard to say. There was no specific point of impact, so I’d say it wasn’t a directed attack. But I really can’t rule out any possibility.”
Gold glanced at Lense. “Let me know the moment anything changes,” he said, gesturing toward Corsi.
Lense nodded. “Of course.”
Gomez stayed at Gold’s shoulder as he took a few steps away from the biobed, then paused. “Bring the rest of the away team to observation in ten minutes,” he said quietly.
“Aye, sir.” Gomez exited quickly. Gold lingered in sickbay for a moment, then moved toward the door. He stepped into the corridor, then looked back. He watched silently as Lense stood over her patient and gently stroked a wayward lock of blond hair from Corsi’s temple.
The sickbay door slid shut, and Gold found himself alone in the corridor. If Corsi didn’t make it, she would not be the first person to die in the line of duty under his command. But bitter experience had taught him that each loss affected him differently—especially when it was someone he considered a friend.
* * *
Stevens was the last member of the away team to reach the briefing room. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, his voice quavering with what Gold surmised was suppressed worry over Corsi. “I just stopped in sickbay to—”
“Stevens,” Gold said in a tone of voice that was deliberately gruff, “what’s the Orion’s status? When can we pull her out of here?” The verbal slap seemed to have the effect Gold had sought. With effort, Stevens regained his composure and looked his captain in the eye.
“She’s got severe structural damage at most of her major stress points, sir,” Stevens said. “The engineering section is completely compromised, and the primary hull has enough damage that if we try to attach towing lines, she’ll just rip in half.”
Gold turned his gaze toward P8. “You would agree?”
P8 uttered a brief series of clicking noises. “Yes, Captain,” P8 said. “Stevens is correct. We will not be able to tow the Orion using duranium cables.”
“What about this light you and Stevens encountered? How did it disrupt power and comms?”
“Unknown. We were unable to scan the phenomenon,” P8 said.
“We need to know if it was a natural event,” Gold said. “It could just be an atmospheric effect caused by the Wildfire device. But if it’s a weapon…. Did it show any sign of intelligent control?”
Stevens and P8 looked at each other. Stevens shook his head, and P8 waved two sets of arms in a gesture equivalent to a humanoid shrug. “We really can’t be sure, sir,” Stevens said.
“Can you tell me anything about it? Anything definite?”
> “It was bright,” P8 said.
Gold frowned, then aimed his furrowed brow at Soloman. “Were you able to recover the Orion’s logs?”
“Not all of them,” Soloman said. “I downloaded the flight data and most of the primary sensor logs. The mission was aborted before I could copy the crew’s official and personal logs, which you indicated were low-priority.”
“I understand,” Gold said. “Good work. Have McAllan start analyzing them as soon as possible.”
“He’s already started, sir.”
“Since we can’t tow the Orion back to orbit, our only priority now is to recover the Wildfire device,” Gold said to everyone as he activated the monitor on the wall behind his chair. It showed a map of the planet’s atmospheric currents. An ominous patch of shifting reds and oranges, indicating violent thermal disturbances, lay ahead of the da Vinci’s projected course.
“We don’t have much time,” Gold said. “We and the Orion are being pulled toward some nasty weather that leads down to the deepest layers of the atmosphere. Orion probably won’t survive the trip. We have about thirty minutes to go over there, get the warhead, and get back. Blue, you’ll be flying Duffy back to the Orion. Bring him back safely, please.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Duffy, stay behind a moment. Everyone else, dismissed.” Gold and Duffy waited while the rest of the group filed out of the briefing room.
Gold handed a padd to Duffy. “These are the security codes for the Wildfire device. Don’t reveal them to anyone.”
Duffy stared at the padd and scrutinized the codes. “Fairly standard,” Duffy said matter-of-factly. Gold regarded the young officer with a grave expression.
“Duffy, before Corsi’s transmission was cut off, she told Gomez she believed the device had been armed. If that’s true, you’ll need all sixteen of those codes to shut it down.”
“No problem.”
“I don’t want any heroics from you, Duffy. If you don’t think you can shut it down before Orion hits the vortex, get out of there. Once the device hits detonation depth, we’ll have less than three hours to get out of orbit.”“
How long will it take the device to reach detonation depth?”
“What, I’m a fortune-teller? Depending on the size of the thermal vortex, it might reach the core in an hour, a day, or never. But if you’re aboard the Orion when it takes that ride, it’ll be a one-way ticket. Understand?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
“Good. Get down to the shuttle bay and suit up. You have three minutes.” Duffy followed Gold out the door into the corridor, where they turned in opposite directions. Duffy stopped Gold with a question.
“Why me, sir?”
“Excuse me?” Gold said, turning to face him.
“Why did you pick me for this mission?”
“Your experience with protomatter-based systems and your ability to perform well under pressure.”
“Oh,” Duffy said, a bit embarrassed. “I thought you were going to say ‘Why not.’”
Gold nodded and answered over his shoulder as he walked away. “That was my other answer. Two minutes and thirty seconds, Duffy. Don’t be late.”
Chapter
9
The thermal eruptions around Work Bug One were becoming more frequent and more powerful with each passing minute, and P8 Blue was using four of her limbs to hold herself steady as the industrial utility craft shivered from each massive thunderclap. The buffeting currents were threatening to shear Bug One away from the Orion’s forward starboard docking port, whose interlocking metal rings screeched in protest as their limits were repeatedly tested.
P8 made yet another adjustment to the Work Bug’s null-field settings, hoping she could minimize the effects of the turbulence and the volume of the thunder that followed each slashing bolt of lightning. The immense, green electrical discharges were also becoming more intense, and now were arcing around the Orion in a nearly constant, blinding macabre dance.
The Nasat engineer wished she could simply pull her appendages inward and roll into her defensive posture, but if she did she would be unable to watch the console and monitor Duffy’s vital signs, which currently appeared to be normal and steady. P8 noted the timer counting down the minutes and seconds remaining before Orion intersected the thermal vortex that lay ahead, and she keyed the comm switch. “Bug One to Duffy. Fourteen minutes, Commander.”
Several seconds passed with no reply. P8 checked Duffy’s vital signs, which still appeared normal. She was about to repeat her transmission when his voice crackled weakly over the staticky channel.
“I know,” Duffy said. “Stand by.”
P8 let out a few worried clicks as she listened to the grinding of metal against metal coming from the docking port. She was a structural engineer by training and knew that what she was hearing was a very bad sound. Stand by, she thought cynically. Easy for him to say.
* * *
Every muscle in Duffy’s body felt like it was being tied into a knot as he strained to separate the control cone of the Wildfire device from its protomatter payload. Duffy had ascertained the device was in the final stages of pre-launch when disaster struck the Orion, which meant the device was fully armed. The only way to disarm it now was to separate its trigger from the protomatter that would fuel the artificial stellar ignition.
The first twelve steps had been easy for Duffy. He simply followed the codes Gold had given him, entering them in sequence into the device’s holographic interface. But now, four steps away from finishing the procedure, his progress had come to a halt over a simple lack of leverage.
The device rested on the loading rail into the firing tube, which was at roughly chest height for Duffy. Between the height of the loading rail, the proliferation of debris cluttering the small compartment, and the fact that without main power the device would have to be decoupled and taken off the rail manually, Duffy was in a difficult position.
He adjusted the settings of his magboots and half-walked, half-pulled himself up the wall where the loading rail entered the firing tube. Then he took two careful steps, placing one foot on each side of the metallic rail, and began slowly shuffling toward the device. Within a few seconds, he had managed to seat himself on top of the warhead trigger and, with enormous effort, bent his leg farther than he thought anatomically possible and braced his foot against the front edge of the protomatter payload casing. Gripping the edge of the warhead with both hands, he began to push with his foot.
Duffy held his breath and exerted himself with a migraine-inducing grunt. He felt a wave of pain start in his groin and extend into his temples. He tried to use the pain to his advantage, as a focus for his efforts. Come on, dammit! Shake loose before I hurt something important.
His grunt evolved into a shout of agony and frustration as his first attempt failed. His breath burst from his lungs, and he gasped quickly, determined to try again as soon as the red spots swimming in his vision faded a bit. He blinked once and noted the countdown on his helmet’s visor display. He had eleven minutes to get this warhead off the Orion before it got sucked down a one-way turbolift to hell.
He drew in a deep breath and felt the tension coiling in his gut as he braced his foot for a second go. Another grunt welled up from somewhere just below his diaphragm. He suppressed his fatigue and pain as he struggled against what he was quickly coming to think of as “the immovable object.”
His left foot slipped off the edge of the device. He lost his balance and tumbled backward off the rail, flailing in a slow-motion descent through the dense hydrogen murk, onto the detritus-strewn deck.
Shaking off the fall, he swept the beam of his palm beacon through the compartment. The narrow band of polarized light revealed a grim tableau of skeletons entangled in ODN cables, ruptured bulkheads, and dormant consoles. Then he saw something, half-buried, that might prove useful. He scrambled on all fours over to the corner of the room, and pulled a narrow piece of broken duranium hull plating from beneath a pile of fib
er-optic wires. The metal was roughly a meter and a half long, and just over two centimeters thick—an ideal lever.
Duffy carried his new, makeshift tool over to the Wildfire device, his confidence bolstered. Time for a rematch, he thought. He wedged the lever between the warhead and its payload and summoned his irresistible force for another round versus the immovable object.
* * *
The mood on the da Vinci bridge was tense but subdued. On the main viewer, the Orion was barely visible through the swirling currents and increasingly violent lightning storm, and the muted rumble of thunder had swelled into an ominous, near-constant presence, like the hammer of a titan beating the da Vinci in an irregular tempo.
Gold walked slowly around the perimeter of the bridge, past several dimmed consoles. Every nonessential system had already been taken offline to add power to the da Vinci’s structural integrity field, yet the hull continued to moan from the immense pressure of the gas giant’s atmosphere. He noted that some of the bridge officers seemed unfazed by the tumult—Ina and McAllan both maintained a coolly professional demeanor—while others, such as Soloman and Wong, seemed now to be wishing they had never joined Starfleet in the first place.
Gold joined Gomez and McAllan at the tactical console. Gold saw McAllan had divided his display into two equal halves. On the left he was reviewing the Orion’s flight data from the moments before its disastrous power loss; on the right he was monitoring the current status of Work Bug One and the structural integrity of the Orion, as well as keeping an eye on the countdown to the Steamrunner-class ship’s impending descent into the planet’s core.
“Any theories yet?” Gold said, careful to keep his voice down. McAllan remained focused on the changing screens of data from the Orion’s flight recorder.
“I don’t think you’ll like it,” McAllan said quietly.