by David Mack
Ilucci held on to the ragged end of the bundle and used an automatic splicer to join it to the raw end of the length of cable he had pulled from the warp drive. The tool fused the cables’ ends perfectly in a matter of seconds. Ilucci tested it with a quick tug; the splice was solid. They now had one extra-long cable with a working plug at each end. He shouted over the roar of wind and the groaning of the hull. “Threx! How’re they doin’?”
“Almost done! They’re patchin’ in now! Hook it up!”
Ilucci let his cable bundle unspool behind him as he ran toward the starboard battery panel, which had weathered the fight with the Klingons far better than the port-side panel. If this worked, if the splice was as functional as it was tight, if the impulse coil hadn’t been damaged, and if there was still the least bit of juice left in the ship’s emergency batteries, they might just make it out of this mess alive. He rounded the corner to the battery panel and lifted the plug—
—and jerked to a stop as his cable ran out of slack, just centimeters shy of the panel.
“Threx! More slack!”
“There isn’t any!”
Ilucci stared at the plug in his hand and the ten-centimeter gap separating it from the batteries that could save the ship. Then he saw the countdown on the master engineering console: He had twenty seconds to find a fix for this mess, or else they were all about to die.
• • •
Vixen’s magnetohydrodynamic drive thrummed a few thousand cycles per minute faster as the amphibious rover pushed its way up the slope toward the beach. Between islands, visibility ahead of the craft had been decent when it wasn’t enmeshed in one kelp forest or another, but as it entered the shallows, it was enveloped by clouds of sand churned up by the crashing waves.
Theriault leaned forward, straining against her safety harness, hoping her eyes could pierce the swirling froth and floating dust. “We sure this is the place?”
Her question seemed to offend Dastin. “What’re you saying? You think I don’t know how to use a navcomp? Or pilot by instruments?”
“No, I’m just saying I can’t see a damned thing.”
A soft crunch from outside signaled that the rover had made contact with sand. The Trill scout opened the throttle. “Hang on. Next stop, the beach.”
A whine from the engine lasted a few seconds, during which the rover’s windshield broke through the waves into open air. Another wave broke against the back of the craft and washed over it from rear to front, briefly blurring the forward view. Then the veil of seawater retreated from the hydrophobic coating on the windshield, revealing the deserted beach where they had landed less than twenty-four hours earlier. Deep, hard-edged impressions left by the landing gear of the Sagittarius in the sand above the high-tide mark were still clearly visible.
Dastin pulled up onto a level stretch of the beach, far from the breaking surf, and stopped. “Last stop, folks. Welcome to No-Name Island, also known as your exfiltration point.” He popped open the driver’s door and climbed out, breathing a sigh of relief as he went. Tan Bao got out behind him while Theriault and Hesh exited on the passenger’s side of the craft.
They had not been submerged for long, but it felt good to Theriault to be back on land. Something about the literal and figurative pressure of being underwater affected her in a way that her cognizance of the vacuum of space outside a starship didn’t. She chalked up the difference to one of simple familiarity; she had been living aboard starships for well over a decade. Despite its myriad perils and unforgiving realities, space had come to feel like home to her.
Hesh drifted to her side. The young Arkenite looked out across the water, toward the island of Suba. “Not much of a first-contact mission, was it, sir?”
“I can think of a few that went worse.”
“Did any of them not involve genocide or the catastrophic loss of a starship?”
She ran down the list of FUBAR first-contact missions she could remember, some of them nearly a century old. “Well, um . . . there was the, um . . . no.” She reached for her communicator. “Maybe we should just focus on getting out of here.” A flick of her wrist opened the grille of the communicator, which double-chirped to signal it was ready to transmit. Theriault set it for the ship-to-shore frequency. “Theriault to Sagittarius. Do you copy?”
The compact device lay silent in her hand. She increased the gain on her transmission and tried again. “Theriault to Sagittarius. Captain Terrell, do you read me? Please respond.”
There was no sound but the crashing of waves against the beach and the wind through the trees. Anxiety widened Hesh’s already large eyes. “That seems an unfortunate omen, sir.”
“I’m aware of that, Lieutenant.”
Tan Bao and Dastin walked quickly toward her and Hesh. The Trill called out, “Is that the ship? How long till they get us off this rock?”
“The ship is not responding,” Hesh said, trumping Theriault’s opportunity to put a positive spin on the unhappy news. “The reason for their lack of response is not yet known.”
Theriault cuffed the science officer’s shoulder. “He wasn’t asking you, Lieutenant.”
Hesh froze as he realized his faux pas. He said nothing as he avoided eye contact with her and the rest of the landing party, choosing instead to spend the next minute inspecting his boots. Unfortunately, from Theriault’s perspective, the damage had been done.
Tan Bao aimed his own nervous stare across the sea toward the big island. “What if those things get beamed back down? What if they come after us?”
Dastin was less optimistic. “Nguyen, are you kidding? Nimur and her gang are the least of our problems. What if the ship left without us? What if we’re stranded? I didn’t pack more than a day’s rations, did you? What if the fruit here tastes like mugato shit?”
The nurse squinted at Dastin with mock suspicion. “Do I even want to know why you’re familiar with the flavor of mugato excrement?”
“Actually,” Hesh interrupted, “my scans of the local environment suggest there is sufficient potable water and consumable food on this island to last us indefinitely. Furthermore, based on the levels of fructose in the native fruits, and their relatively modest levels of various acidic compounds known to produce sour flavors, it seems likely the local produce will prove more than acceptable to our respective palates.”
The Arkenite’s reward for an attempt at peacemaking was baffled glares from Dastin and Tan Bao, and a scrunched grimace of confusion from Theriault.
Dastin shook his head. “Never let facts derail a good rant, Hesh.”
“I do not understand.” Hesh thought for a moment, then seemed to have an epiphany. “Wait. You have told me about this. You were ‘busting’ on each other.” Slow, pained nods of confirmation from Tan Bao and Dastin. “My apologies.”
“Forget it,” Dastin said.
A crackle of static spat from Theriault’s still-open communicator. She lifted it, hoping to hear a reply from the ship, but there was nothing on the channel except noise. She set the gain on the transmitter and was about to hail the Sagittarius again when she heard a distant scream in the sky. She looked up, more out of reflex than because she expected to see anything. A sick feeling swirled in her gut as she saw a fiery streak slash across the heavens high overhead. The burning trail cut a sharp arc through the purpling dusk and then made a sharp and decisive diving turn.
Watching the fireball descend, Theriault became aware that the landing party had pressed in close behind her, all of them with eyes turned skyward. For the first time that she could recall, there was fear in Dastin’s voice.
“Is . . . is that . . . ?”
Hesh lifted his tricorder. Its high-pitched oscillations lasted only a few seconds. “It is too far away for me to make a definitive scan. However, radiation emissions are consistent with a vessel approximately the mass of the Sagittarius, and containing a matter-
antimatter reactor. Its trajectory will put its crash site on the far eastern shore of the populated island.”
The incandescent blaze went into a straight dive and picked up speed as it neared the planet’s surface, indicating that it was in the throes of an uncontrolled descent, a slave to gravity. It dipped beneath the dark edge of the horizon and vanished. For several seconds, the only evidence of its passage was the fading streak of ionized gas it had left in the atmosphere.
Then came a harsh white flash from beyond the horizon, followed by a mushroom cloud.
The landing party stood and stared, shocked and silent for nearly half a minute. Then the far-off rumbling of the blast reached them, and Theriault felt a tear form in the corner of her eye.
She wiped it away with the side of her palm and reminded herself she was in command.
“Dastin, help me build us a shelter. Hesh, scrounge up some of that fruit you were talking about. Tan Bao, see if you can find a source of potable water. And let’s be quick about it. It’s getting dark, and I think we might be here a while.”
• • •
“Helm is not responding! Still no main power! Twenty-five seconds to impact!”
Terrell heard Nizsk’s frantic reports from the helm, but he had no more orders to give her, no advice that could delay calamity. They had already been robbed of the option to bail out in the escape pod. They were all going down with the ship, captain and crew alike.
Momentum pinned Terrell into his command chair, to which he clung with every sinew in his hands and arms. The sickening sensation of free fall warned him that the ship’s inertial dampeners were close to failing. Even if, by some miracle, the Sagittarius regained enough power to pull out of this death-spiral into the sea, there was a serious risk the g-forces associated with such a maneuver might crush the ship’s humanoid crewmembers into pulp.
We should be so lucky as to have that chance.
The main viewscreen had long since turned to dark static-snow, a fact for which Terrell was almost grateful. Watching a planet’s surface rush up to meet one could be a hypnotic experience, exactly the sort of thing to make one’s mind go numb at what might prove to be a critical—or final—moment in one’s life. That was not how Terrell wanted to meet his ending. He was determined to die with his eyes open, to go down fighting with every last ounce of strength he possessed. He refused to die as a mere spectator to his own fate. He would feel it.
Time crawled as death beckoned. Terrell took note of every fleeting expression on the faces of his bridge crew. The rigid tension of Razka, who sat poised over the communications panel; the barely contained melancholy and terror of Ensign Taryl; the frantic labors of the otherwise inscrutable insectoid Ensign Nizsk, fighting to make the helm answer her commands; and the preternatural, hard-earned calm of Lieutenant Commander Sorak, whose Vulcan training had given him the tools to control his fear and face the inevitable with eerie sangfroid.
Nizsk’s high-pitched shriek pulled Terrell back into the moment: “Fifteen seconds!” As if the Kaferian had uttered a magic spell, consoles around the bridge sputtered to life, along with the helm. Nizsk keyed in commands and cried out, “Hang on!”
The impulse engines whined, and the hull creaked and moaned as if the ship were a dying leviathan suffering a final indignity. Some of the consoles that had just been revived stuttered back into their dark slumbers, and the centripetal force of their course change crushed Terrell against his command chair so hard he couldn’t breathe.
Images flashed across the main viewscreen, snippets of the view outside the ship. At first it was just a teal wall of static, and then Terrell saw the line of a horizon as his ship turned its nose away from a direct impact with the sea. Gravity’s deathgrip relaxed its hold on Terrell as a dark smear on the screen resolved itself into a tiny landmass—an island—and rushed forward to meet them as they skimmed the water’s surface at a distressingly low altitude.
“Helm, pull up!”
“Not enough power, sir! We have to set down!”
Terrell hoped he had heard Nizsk incorrectly. “Where, Ensign? There’s no clearing!”
“It’s there or in the water, sir.”
Long years of training at Starfleet Academy had taught Terrell that water landings were often the preferred choice in crash-down scenarios. He looked over his shoulder at his Vulcan second officer. “I’d take water, wouldn’t you?”
Sorak was unusually emphatic in his reply. “Given the current state of our hull? No.”
There was no time to argue, so Terrell trusted the old Vulcan’s wisdom. “If you say so.” He raised his voice for Nizsk. “Put us in the weeds, Ensign!”
“Landing gear deployed! Firing braking thrusters!”
The sparkling emerald expanse of the sea blurred past until only the forbidding silhouette of the jungle island remained ahead of the Sagittarius. Then they slammed into the wall of trees, and the violent deceleration launched Terrell from his chair. He and the rest of the bridge crew were thrown against the forward bulkhead, which quaked from the constant, excruciatingly loud, bone-jarring cacophony of impacts. The overhead lights went dark, leaving only the dim glow of emergency lighting to trace the outline of the bridge.
A final thud of collision signaled the halt of the ship’s uncontrolled skid through the jungle. It took a few moments for Terrell’s eyes to adjust to the much dimmer lighting on the bridge. He listened for sounds of breathing or distress. “Everyone, sound off by rank.”
“Sorak here, sir.”
“I’m okay, sir,” Taryl replied.
“Ensign Nizsk, still at my post.”
Razka rasped, “Bruised but ready to serve, Captain.”
Terrell drew a deep breath, blinked once, and was relieved to be able to distinguish the unique profiles of all his people. “Good flying, Nizsk. Sorak, Razka, get me damage and casualty reports, on the double. Taryl, go outside and scout the area in a half-kilometer radius.”
Everyone acknowledged with overlapping muted replies of “Aye, sir,” and went to work. Terrell, suddenly aware of a painful twinge in his left knee, limped back to his command chair and slumped into it, grateful to be alive.
That’s one wish granted. Now let’s see if I can get all my people off this rock in one piece.
• • •
Sweat ran in heavy beads from Ilucci’s scalp. His thinning hair made his perspiration’s descent to his forehead easier each year. Only his unkempt eyebrows had kept him from being blinded during the majority of his working hours.
Above his head dangled the battery panel, to which he had connected the high-load cable that his engineers had risked their asses to patch directly into the impulse coil.
With seconds to spare, he had realized that if there was no more slack to be wrung from the cable, then it would have to come from the panel. And that was when he had recalled that one of the peculiarities of Starfleet design was that starship construction crews rarely cropped the cables behind most utility panels if they could use a standard-issue one-meter cable, coil the excess, and tuck it behind the panel to save time during the final stages of assembly on a ship of the line. Every panel Ilucci had ever serviced aboard the Sagittarius—not to mention every other ship he’d ever served on—had embodied that lazy, wasteful practice.
That “wasteful” bit of institutional sloth had just saved the ship.
As the seconds had counted down to disaster, he had torn the battery control panel off the bulkhead, and then he had pulled the input jack for the transfer cable free of its mount. To his relief, it had been backed by a typical excess of nearly thirty centimeters of slack wire.
Ilucci had guffawed like a maniac as he plugged in the high-load cable and then fell to the deck. Then he’d heard the whining of the impulse engines. What a beautiful sound.
Next had come the wild percussion of collisions, and the roar of the hull gougi
ng a path across solid ground. Now the ship was silent, full of smoke, and miraculously still intact.
He glanced over his head at the loose panel, which was anchored by nothing except the high-load power cable he had jacked into it. It was in violation of nearly half a dozen Starfleet safety regulations. Technically, he had turned his entire engineering deck into a case for his own court-martial.
He rested his head against the bulkhead and shut his eyes. If they want to write me up, that’s fine by me. But for the next five minutes, I’m taking a nap.
23
Tensions had been high on the bridge of the Endeavour before it had received the mayday from the Sagittarius. Now the ship was at Red Alert and on a direct course for danger. Panels on either side of the main turbolift flashed with crimson light, but all of Captain Atish Khatami’s attention was on the ominous threat pictured in the center of the main viewscreen—and the troubling fact that, to all appearances, the Klingon cruiser was the only ship in the vicinity.
Her first officer, Lieutenant Commander Katherine Stano, looked up from the hooded sensor display. “The Voh’tahk is holding position but coming about to face us.”
Khatami recognized the Klingons’ maneuver as pure posturing. “They’re daring us to make orbit. Helm, steady as she goes. Lieutenant McCormack, arm phasers and torpedoes but don’t lock them onto the Voh’tahk until I give the order.”
“Aye, Captain,” replied the freckle-faced young navigator. Her colleague at the helm, the Arcturian pilot Lieutenant Neelakanta, confirmed the order simply by following it.
The pair had served together the past few years at the helm of the Constitution-class starship and had gelled into an effective partnership, even if at first glance they might appear mismatched. Young, slight of build, and red-haired, McCormack looked like an out-of-place farmer’s daughter, while Neelakanta resembled—to Khatami’s eyes, at least—a half-melted bald man made of dull red wax, his long face defined by its overlapping, drooping layers of flesh.