Seekers: Second Nature

by David Mack

  “Lock and fire again. Spread pattern Qaw’Hoch, disruptors for flank coverage.”

  Another barrage of torpedoes sped away from the Voh’tahk as crimson streaks on the viewscreen. The dense red cluster scattered into far-flung ruddy sparks as viridescent pulses from the cruiser’s disruptor cannons arced through the emptiness around them. Then came another blinding matter-antimatter supernova that washed out the viewscreen for a fraction of a second.

  Kang winced but forced his eyes to stay open and fixed upon his prey, even though the two ships were little more than grayish blurs darting in and out of sight. “Mahzh, report.”

  “Both ships slowing. Homghor is venting coolant from its impulse system. Sagittarius is leaking plasma from its port warp nacelle.” He reacted to a sensor update. “They’re changing course—orbiting the planet. Sagittarius is closing on the Homghor and locking weapons.” Another alert buzzed on his console until he silenced it with a swat of his hand. “The Endeavour is six minutes out and scanning the system.”

  A channel light blinked on the communications panel. Kyris pressed her hand to her earpiece to block out ambient noise from the bridge while she listened. “The Endeavour is hailing us, Captain. Its commander orders us to cease our pursuit and break orbit.”

  “It’ll be a bright day in Gre’thor before I take orders from a Starfleet captain. Tell the Endeavour its scout fired on the Homghor, and we are responding in kind. End of message.”

  On the viewscreen, the Sagittarius chased the bird-of-prey once more through the planet’s multicolored rings of ice-crusted rocky debris. Both vessels left slowly dissipating vapor trails—one a bluish twist of expanding coolant, the other a dusky streak of ionized plasma.

  As the Homghor pushed itself through a hard turn, slowed, and made a shallow dive into Arethusa’s atmosphere with the Sagittarius mere seconds behind it, Kang saw the moment he’d been waiting for. “Mahzh! Spread pattern yay’joq—directly ahead of the Homghor!”

  “Locked!”

  Now the novpu’ and the Starfleeters would both learn the price one paid for being an enemy of the Klingon Empire.

  “Fire!”

  • • •

  The unearthly, minor-key wailing of the Sagittarius’s engines grew louder and pitched farther up the tonal scale with each passing moment. Terrell clung to the command chair’s armrests as he shouted to be heard over the fusion-powered din. “Port yaw, ten degrees! Lock phasers!”

  Each roll and hard turn of the scout ship overloaded the inertial dampeners, and the turbulence had become far worse now that they had penetrated the planet’s mesosphere. Terrell was certain he heard the hull plates shuddering against one another, and he felt the temperature rising from the intense friction of atmosphere against the ship’s duranium skin.

  Sorak’s stately voice cut through the clamor: “Incoming! Brace for impact!”

  “Pull up!” Terrell needed to stop the bird-of-prey, but not enough to let his ship go down with it, not if there was any other path to victory. “Evasive, starboard!”

  White light burst from the viewscreen as a deafening concussion rocked the ship. For one heart-stopping moment, Terrell thought his ship had been shot out from under him—then the glare on the screen faded to gray static, and the eardrum-punishing thunder dwindled to a steady rumbling—revealing the sudden downward pitch of the engines’ whine.

  He thumbed open a channel to engineering. “Damage report!”

  Ilucci hollered over a nightmare of hissing, grinding, and shrieking mechanical noise. “We took that one on the nose, Skip! Starboard nacelle’s ruptured, warp core’s down!”

  Terrell watched the image on the viewscreen switch to a head-on angle of the planet’s surface—which meant the ship was plunging nose-first toward the sea. “What about impulse?”

  “We were hopin’ you wouldn’t ask.” A low boom over the comm coincided with a frightening tremor that shot through the deck and dimmed the overhead lights. Over the comm, frantic shouts full of jargon and curses were muffled by crackles and pops. Ilucci coughed. “Just lost the fusion core. Main power’s toast. We’re on batteries.”

  No main power. That meant no phasers, no torpedoes, no shields. Whether Terrell liked it or not, his battle with the bird-of-prey was over. It was time to salvage his own ship, if it was still possible. “Helm! Can you maneuver on thrusters?”

  Nizsk struggled with four of her six limbs to lift the scout ship out of its dive. “Negative, sir. Insufficient power. We need the impulse engine! Even one-tenth power would be enough.”

  The roar of atmosphere against the hull grew louder by the second. Overhead, the main lights stuttered and went dark, leaving the bridge crew illuminated only by faint spills of light from their consoles and the flickering video hash of the main viewscreen.

  Terrell hoped the channel to engineering was still open. “Master Chief? We can’t pull up on just thrusters. Can you run the impulse coil off the batteries?”

  “Negative—the lines have been severed!”

  “How long to run a patch?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  Nizsk looked back from the helm. “We will hit the surface in four.”

  Terrell knew Ilucci had heard that. “Master Chief?”

  “Roger that, Skipper. One miracle, comin’ up. Engineering out!”

  A dark streak cut a smoky diagonal line across the viewscreen. Terrell pointed at it. “What was that?”

  Sorak slapped his stuttering console until its display stabilized. “That was the Homghor, sir. It suffered a direct hit. All its primary systems are offline.”

  Down in flames and falling like a rock. Terrell heaved a grim sigh. Watching the bird-of-prey plummet to its doom gave him no sense of accomplishment, no pride of victory. All he could think of was how terrified anyone still alive on that ship must have felt at that ­moment.

  The Sagittarius jolted, as if it had been struck by something solid. Then the ship jerked and rocked again as plasma manifolds ruptured in the overhead, showering short-lived sparks across the bridge and everyone on it. Terrell acted by reflex, swearing under his breath as he swatted white-hot phosphors from his head, shoulders, arms, and thighs. “What hit us?”

  “Disruptor blasts from the Voh’tahk,” Sorak said. “It seems Captain Kang plans to make sure we do not recover from our current dilemma.”

  Taryl vented her disgust. “Kicking us while we’re down? So much for Klingon honor.”

  Terrell almost had to laugh. “Their notion of honor and ours tend to differ, Ensign.”

  Nizsk gave up trying to make the helm respond to her commands and resigned herself to reading off the countdown until their collective demise. “Three minutes and thirty seconds.”

  As fervently as Terrell wanted to believe his engineers could work yet another miracle, he had to proceed on the assumption that they couldn’t. “Chief Razka, Ensign Taryl. Round up any non-essential personnel and report to the escape pod.”

  The Saurian and the Orion both were out of their seats before Sorak stopped them. “Belay that order. Our unshielded entry into the atmosphere compounded damage already sustained to the pod’s release mechanism. It is jammed and cannot be ejected, not even manually.”

  The field scouts returned to their stations and sat down. Terrell watched the details of the surface grow sharper through the hazy veil of static on the viewscreen. “Commander, is our subspace antenna still working?”

  The Vulcan nodded. “Aye, sir.”

  “In that case, I think we’d better send out an S.O.S.—while we still can.”

  • • •

  Darkness, sickening smoke, and fire surrounded Nimur. Orange flames licked at her flesh but brought little pain. She was pinned against one of the walls inside the ship, held fast by some invisible force even greater than the one she now wielded. It had seized her and her Wardens just after
a booming crash had buffeted the vessel and extinguished its lights. The pressure that had snared her was so great she could barely draw breath, and it took every bit of fight she had left to raise her voice above the eerie howling that engulfed the metal sky-ship.

  “Senjin! Make the Klingon speak to his ship! Make it stop!”

  The Warden grimaced and struggled to reply. “The captain is dead. The fire took him.”

  Nimur cursed the dead Klingon commander for his weak flesh. “Then we need to make it obey us!” She recalled the phrases they had forced the Klingon to reveal, the ones that had enabled him to control the ship by verbal commands alone. “Computer! Engage override!”

  She waited several seconds, but nothing happened; her desperate order went unheeded. As far as she could tell, it had gone unheard by anyone except her Wardens. Whatever part of the ship had obeyed Durak, it was as dead now as he was.

  Cracks cut across the walls. Wind screamed through the spreading fissures. The rush of fresh air fed the flames around Nimur, stoking them into a yellow-white blaze.

  The ship lurched and rocked, and the invisible hand holding the Changed against the back wall evaporated. They tumbled forward, slammed against the elevated command chair and its platform, caromed off railings and consoles, and landed in a heap against the opposite wall. Only minutes earlier the central panel on that wall had been like a window on the universe, looking down at their world from high above. Now it was dull and blank, just an empty frame.

  Disoriented and stumbling like someone drunk on fermented nectar, Nimur seized Senjin by his shoulders and shook him until he focused on her. “We need to get off this ship!”

  “How?”

  “The same way we came here, with the portal device.”

  The Warden shook his head. “We don’t know how it works. Or if it even still does.”

  She pulled him to his feet. “We have to try! Get the others up and follow me.” She waited until they were all standing and looking at her. She pointed up, at the back of the ship that was now above them thanks to the ship’s surrender to gravity. “We need to get back there.”

  A Warden protested, “There are no handholds! How are we supposed to climb?”

  “We can lift each other! Concentrate! We need to work together!” She closed her eyes for a moment and purged herself of fear. Then she reached out and embraced the Wardens with her power, and a wave of relief washed over her as she felt their mental energies uniting with one another’s and with hers. In her mind she divested herself of the burden of weight and willed herself to rise, slipping free of the leaden chains of the world below—and she did.

  Her feet rose from the metal wall and she climbed up and away, as free as smoke on a breeze. Behind her followed the Wardens. Senjin had tethered himself to Nimur, and the others followed single-file behind them, each one helping to pull up the next.

  They snaked through the ship’s empty passageways and through a narrow ladderway to the next deck. Nimur led them by memory alone, retracing the steps from their first rampage through the ship, until they were gathered once more in the room where they all had appeared after being stolen from the sea. She pointed Senjin toward the panel she assumed controlled the Klingons’ mysterious portal. “Wake it up! Hurry!”

  He tapped at the console, slammed his hands against its sides, and finally punched and kicked it out of sheer frustration. “It’s as dead as the rest of this ship!”

  Loud booms resounded through the vessel’s fracturing hull. Walls and floors buckled. Narrow strips of the hull tore free and broke away, driven by gusts of wind and plumes of fire, revealing slivers of Arethusa’s twilight sky streaked with sun-splashed clouds.

  Black, acrid smoke filled the small compartment, and tongues of flame licked through the open doorway from the corridor, which transformed within seconds into a roaring conflagration.

  The youngest of the Wardens, a sinewy youth named Masul, gave in to panic and shouted like the frightened child he had been only hours earlier. “Nimur! What are we going to do?”

  “The only thing we can do,” she said, determined to face the inevitable with her pride intact. “We’re going into the fire.”

  • • •

  Kang watched the Homghor and the Sagittarius plunge toward the planet’s surface, each ship wreathed in flames and trailing grayish-black smoke all the way from the mesosphere to the sea. He had dealt each mortally wounded ship a deathstroke with blasts from the Voh’tahk’s disruptor cannons, just to make certain neither vessel returned to haunt him.

  “Mahzh. Any sign of them restoring main power?”

  The weapons officer gazed at his sensor display. “None.”

  “Time to impact?”

  “Approximately two minutes.”

  The captain looked at the command monitor beside his chair. The Starfleet battle cruiser would arrive in just under four minutes. Though he would have preferred to observe the final moments of the Homghor and the Sagittarius, to be certain the deed was accomplished beyond reversal, he couldn’t afford to wait that long to confront his next opponent. “Well done, soldiers of the Empire! A battle well-fought! But it’s not over—in fact, it’s only just begun. Helm! Increase to full impulse. Get us into position to meet the Federation battle cruiser.”

  The Voh’tahk’s engines wailed and its hull groaned as it accelerated far past its rated orbital velocity. It was the sound of a ship’s limits being tested—music to Kang’s ears.

  On the main viewscreen, he perceived the faintest gray dot moving among the stars and ever so slowly growing larger and brighter. At last, he would have an opponent worthy of him.

  “Mahzh, as soon as it’s in range . . . lock all weapons on the Endeavour.”

  22

  “Pull!” Ilucci and Threx lifted another unbolted duranium deck plate free of the Sagittarius’s spaceframe. As soon as they had it upright, Threx used his formidable muscle mass to heave the cumbersome rectangular slab of metal aside against the bulkhead. Once Ilucci was sure the deck plate was clear of the work area, he waved Cahow into the crawl space beneath the engineering deck. “Hustle, Cahow! Hop to!”

  The flaxen-haired petty officer adjusted her welding goggles and jumped feetfirst into the crawl space, then limbo-danced her way under a crossbeam and around a perpendicular support strut. As soon as she was past the obstructions, she pulled a plasma torch from a chest pocket on her coveralls and started cutting through the shielding above the impulse coil housing.

  Just a meter aft of Cahow, Crewman Torvin was already ensconced in the narrow gap between the main deck and the engineering deck, the blazing light of his own plasma torch reflecting off the black goggles shielding his young eyes. He and Cahow were both cutting in clockwise circles relative to the ship’s nose; he had started his cut at the nine o’clock position, and she had started at three o’clock. Each would finish where the other had started.

  Ilucci waved for Threx to follow him to the warp core. “Scrounge the high-load cable from the starboard conduit! All you can get! I’ll raid port-side!”

  “You got it, Master Chief!”

  Threx and Ilucci split up at the intermix chamber and each attacked one of the plasma relay conduits, which fed power from the warp core to the nacelles. By the book, it would take over an hour to pull out the relays’ high-load power cables. They had sixty seconds.

  Ilucci kicked open the deadbolt that kept the conduit’s access panel closed during routine operations, then reached inside with both hands and seized the wrapped bundle of high-load cables, whose twisting-ribbed texture he knew as intimately as the scratch of stubble on his chin. He unplugged one end of the bundle from the intermix chamber; that had been the easy part. The hard part would be separating it from the warp nacelle—a process that was sure to leave one end of the cable without a functioning plug interface.

  Roaring to summon every bit of his strength,
he pulled on the bundle of cables and tore it free of its anchors. The first pull gained him half a meter of slack. He backed up and pulled again, and this time he put his legs and his back into it. A couple more meters came loose.

  Almost there. He adjusted his grip and his center of balance, and as he pulled he shouted a string of obscenities he was sure his mother would find bloodcurdling.

  Two more meters of quality cable tore free of the conduit. That would be enough. He cut the salvaged cable free. Then he held on to the bundle’s end as he sprinted back to the opening he and Threx had made in the middle of the engineering deck. The lanky Denobulan was right beside him, hauling his own length of roughly salvaged power cable.

  Down in the crawlspace, Torvin and Cahow were both within centimeters of finishing their cuts. Ilucci’s impatience boiled over. “Move it! No extra points for neatness, dammit!” He pointed at the nearby workbench. “Threx, get set to place the mag-handles!”

  Threx dropped his length of cable, clambered down into the workspace, and planked himself atop the crossbeam. Ilucci dropped his cable, ran to the workbench, and grabbed two magnetic work handles. He activated the first one and tossed it to Threx, who stuck it onto the part of the shielding plate the engineers were cutting free. Then Threx reached up, and Ilucci passed the second handle down to him. By the time Threx had the second handle affixed to the plate, Torvin and Cahow finished their cuts. Threx lifted the plate and shifted it clear of the opening.

  A blast of heat rushed up at the engineers. Beneath the crudely cut, not-quite-circular opening was the ship’s impulse coil assembly. It was a hot space to work in under the best of conditions, but the ship’s unshielded dive through the planet’s atmosphere had heated the compartment to potentially lethal levels.

  Ilucci glanced at the chronometer. Fifty-five seconds to disaster. No time to play it safe. He pointed into the furnace-like compartment. “Go! We’ll feed the cable down to you!”

  On some level, Ilucci expected Torvin and Cahow to balk, even if just for a moment, but they slithered through the gap into the inferno without hesitation, questions, or a single look back. As soon as they were inside, Ilucci passed most of one bundle of cable to Threx, who handed it down, plug-end first, to the junior engineer’s mates.