by David Mack
Shabalala was growing frustrated. “Can’t we spoof their sensors? Make them think we’ve got heavy reinforcements?”
“We don’t have the faintest idea what their sensor protocols are,” Haznedl said. “Unless we learn all about their technology in the next five minutes, I’d say forget about it.”
Ken Caitano from security grinned at Gomez. “Guess it’s a bit late to say we’re sorry, huh?”
Gomez smiled good-naturedly at him. “A diplomatic solution is probably off the table, yes.” Looking around at the rest of the damage-control team, she said, “Three minutes, people. We need an idea now.”
“Too bad we’re not running the other way,” Wong said. “They’re fast, but in the slipstream we were faster.”
Engineer Cade Bennett’s face lit up. “Hang on—could we make our own artificial slipstream?”
“Sure,” Martina Barre said. “We probably have a few spares in the cargo bay.”
From across the shuttlebay came Tev’s exasperated sigh. All conversation ceased. The crew turned in unison toward the grouchy Tellarite. Gomez felt her ire rise as if by instinct. Facing him with a withering glare, she said, “Yes, Tev?”
He droned as if he were being asked to address a class of unruly children. “If the Silgov fleet pursues us into the slipstream,” Tev said, “the phenomenon’s peculiar subspace physics would make their ships exponentially faster than ours.”
“We already know they’re faster than us,” Gomez said. “That isn’t helping.”
Tev grimaced as a condescending, petulant whimper of annoyance issued from the deepest reaches of his sinus cavity. “Grease under their wheels, Commander,” he said. “Lure them into the slipstream at maximum velocity, then collapse our own warp field and let them race past us. They will be several dozen light-years away before they can correct their error.”
“Hang on,” said gamma-shift operations officer Alexandre Lambdin. “We had to modulate our subspace field harmonics to within a picocochrane to get inside the slipstream. How are we supposed to lure them in unless their warp-field harmonics match up?”
“A trap door,” Tev said. “We use our own warp field to create a zone of instability in the slipstream’s threshold, fracture it for a split second with a modified phaser discharge, then collapse our warp field before we enter the slipstream.”
Transporter Chief Laura Poynter looked dumb-founded by the suggestion. “Would that work?”
“Of course it will work,” Tev said. “Provided the rest of you pay attention while I explain…”
Listening to Tev hand out duty assignments with arrogant surety, Gomez stifled her surging desire to throw him into the brig. Issuing orders and taking action without obtaining her approval was the very thing for which she had just excoriated him, and now, mere minutes later, he was doing it again.
The fact that Tev could be so casually brilliant irritated Gomez as much as everything else about him. She waited while the Tellarite taskmaster finished giving the crew instructions. When he got to her, he seemed on the verge of delivering another order. No doubt reading her mood from the scowl on her face, he paused, then said in a less confident voice, “With your permission, of course, Commander.”
Swallowing her anger, she said calmly, “Sounds like a plan. Let’s get to work.” She put on her helmet, and the rest of the damage-control team followed suit. Leading them out of the shuttlebay, she silently lamented that fixing Tev’s defective understanding of the chain of command was far more complicated than any engineering task for which she had been trained. The brash second officer shouldered past her into the narrow corridor. Watching him move away toward main engineering, she realized that correcting his major mental malfunctions very well might be a task best left to someone else.
A professional.
Chapter
5
Alone in the lab, Faulwell compared the symbols on the pyramid in front of him to the ones found more than a century ago on a massive obelisk on a planet dozens of light-years away. He shook his head in frustration. For all their technological prowess, he wondered, why couldn’t the Preservers have simplified their system interfaces? He rotated the pyramid—whose instructions he had deciphered enough to close the artifact, for easier inspection—and followed a string of text that wrapped around its middle section. Its metal surfaces were cold in his hands.
Scribbling on a sheaf of linen-textured paper (which he normally reserved for his letters to Anthony on Starbase 92), he rendered a translation of what he suspected was a formula for calculating the correct time and place at which to deploy the pyramid around Mu Arae. As far as he could tell, the device had only two innate functions—one to put the planet in the box, and another to remove it. Once the pyramid was safely in position, he reasoned, the planet’s release would be as easy as entering the expansion sequence.
He was about to conduct a test of his hurried translation, then stopped himself as his fingertip hovered over the first symbol. Probably not a good idea to expand this thing inside the ship, he realized. Then a troubling notion occurred to him. This has to be deployed in space. Which means I have to be out there to manually enter the code. But what’ll happen to me?
Realizing that his entire plan had just acquired a potentially fatal complication, he gathered up his notes and sprinted out of the lab. Less than a minute later, he was scrambling into sickbay, where the still incapacitated Araneus lay sprawled over most of the main room. Konya, who had seemed asleep, looked up at Faulwell with an alert expression. Sighing, he reached out toward Araneus. “Hang on,” Konya said to Faulwell. “I’ll try to wake him gently.”
Araneus shuddered horribly, and its legs twitched as if they possessed a grotesque life of their own. In a thin and hollow voice, it said, “Who are you?”
“My name is Bart Faulwell. I’m the one trying to decipher the code on the pyramid.”
“You can…save my people?”
The sad desperation of Araneus’s query tugged at Faulwell’s sympathies. “I’m trying,” he said. “But I need an answer to a question.”
“Ask.”
“Where and when were you told to unlock the pyramid?”
“Space,” Araneus said. “Orbit.”
“You’d manually enter the key code while space-walking?”
“Yes.”
Though he dreaded the answer, he asked anyway. “What were you told would happen to you when the planet expanded?”
Long, rasping sounds from inside Araneus’s throat preceded his reply. “Did not ask. Not important.”
Faulwell’s shoulders sagged. Though it was possible that the Preservers had designed the pyramid to expand the planet without harming its courier, it was just as possible that the ancient, inscrutable beings had decided that one casualty was an acceptable collateral loss in exchange for saving a world. It was entirely possible that whoever was sent into orbit to enter the code would not come back.
Before he could brood too long on that bad news, a muffled blast shook the da Vinci from the outside, and Piotrowski’s voice sounded over the intraship comm: “All hands to battle stations!”
Captain Gold shouted to be heard above the rapid sequence of exploding enemy ordnance that hammered the da Vinci’s shields. “Tactical! Report!”
“They’re too fast, Captain,” Piotrowski said. “Our torpedoes can’t get a lock!”
“Target an area of effect,” Gold ordered. “Spread pattern Echo.” Another barrage from the Silgov fleet rattled the ship and dimmed the overhead lights. “Rusconi, drop to impulse!”
Entering the command into the helm, Rusconi confirmed, “Aye, sir. Full impulse.” The da Vinci lurched out of warp.
Gold felt the wave of apprehension sweep the bridge. “Let’s see if the Silgov are as nimble at impulse as they are at warp. Helm, full evasive. Alter course and speed at will.”
“Aye, sir,” Rusconi said.
As the ship’s inertial dampers strained to compensate for its chaotic pitching and rollin
g, Gold tightened his already white-knuckle grip on the arms of his chair. It amused him to note that his artificial left hand imitated the cosmetic effects of stress perfectly. Whoever made it thought of everything, he thought with a wry chuckle.
“Saldok,” Gold said to the Benzite ensign seated at ops. “How’re we doing with Tev’s trap-door modifications?”
Reviewing the status reports on his console, Saldok said, “Modifications to the forward deflector dish are hampered by the need to keep our shields raised, sir. But Lieutenant Conlon reports we should be ready within a minute or two.”
More muffled blasts hit the ship. An alert shrilled from the tactical console. “They’re flanking us,” Piotrowski said. “Six marks, coming in fast from starboard!”
“Got ’em,” Rusconi said as she accelerated into a dizzying corkscrew maneuver that doubled them back toward the majority of their pursuers. She deftly tapped her little finger on a blinking control pad, and the stars blurred on the main viewer. The image sharpened back to normal, and Gold noted that his tactical display showed the Silgov fleet behind them and scrambling to reverse course. A half-second warp-jump, Gold noted as Rusconi plotted her next maneuver. Though she couldn’t see him, he smiled at her with proud approval. She’s good.
His moment of elation was short-lived.
“Multiple incoming,” Piotrowski declared.
Saldok’s webbed fingers slapped commands into his console. “Routing secondary power to shields.”
Rusconi piloted the ship through a trifecta of warp jumps, each time evading the brunt of a Silgov barrage by a swiftly decreasing margin. Gold recognized the Silgov’s tactic—the da Vinci was being herded into a crossfire. It would take the Silgov several minutes to close this noose, but with their superior numbers and greater speed, the capture of the da Vinci would be inevitable. Even now, the Silgov’s relentless assault was rapidly weakening the shields, one blast at a time.
“Rusconi, Piotrowski, use every dirty trick in the book,” Gold said. “Every second counts.”
Returning to his chair, Gold listened as the two women plotted their next roll-and-fire counterattack. As Saldok warned of another impending Silgov fusillade, the captain steeled his nerves and waited for the blow to fall.
A conduit exploded in a bulkhead just as Stevens ran past it. Stumbling, he nearly fell, but Ken Caitano reached out and steadied him.
“Easy,” Caitano said. “You all right?”
“Fine,” Stevens said. “Thanks.”
Caitano jogged down the corridor to start repairs on the conduit. Stevens continued toward his own assignment, decoupling the phaser generators and linking the weapons to the warp nacelles’ EPS system. Using the phasers as a pinpoint warp-field disruptor was far-fetched, possibly disastrous if the system overloaded, and undeniably ingenious. It sickened Stevens to have to give Tev credit for it.
Inside his pressure suit, the reek of sweat grew stale as he struggled to make minute adjustments in the high-energy system without the benefit of fine motor controls. The gloves of the pressure suit were okay for heavy labor but unsuited to precision work. Tiny wires slipped repeatedly from his grasp.
He was cursing bitterly under his breath as his suit’s helmet comm warbled. “Gomez to Stevens, report.”
“Primary generators decoupled,” he said, partly distracted by the fact that he was trying to work and talk at the same time. “Load-balancing the EPS tap now.”
Gomez sounded worried. “How long?”
“A few more minutes.” He swallowed a litany of vulgarities as his gloved finger proved too fat to reach an isolinear chip in a rear control bus.
“We’re losing shields,” Gomez said. “Tev’s standing by at the warp core. We need that phaser link online now.”
“Working as fast as I can, Commander. Just let me—”
Feedback howled over Stevens’s suit’s comm as another brutal explosion rocked the da Vinci. Inertial dampers overloaded, and he tumbled chaotically and hit the wall. A bulkhead-gray blur of motion rushed toward him, then a dull crush pushed him past his already blurred edge of consciousness.
Ricocheting off the corridor wall, Caitano saw the forward bulkhead of the phaser control bay break loose and pummel Stevens, who collapsed to the deck, pinned beneath the massive chunk of duranium.
Turning toward his Nasat damage-control partner, the young security guard shouted, “Pattie!”
Clicking and whistling in bright, excited tones, P8 Blue scrambled over a tangled mass of ceiling struts that had collapsed into the corridor between them.
Caitano pointed to Stevens. “He’s in trouble! Come on!” He sprinted ahead through a growing wall of flames that blocked the door of the phaser control bay. P8 followed close behind him, curling herself and her custom-made pressure suit into a ball as she bounced over the half-blocked threshold. Caitano had found P8’s use of pressure gear odd until the Nasat reminded him that her carapace offered her no protection from fire, charged plasma, or radiation. Grabbing the edges of the bulkhead plate, the duo strained together to lift it off Stevens.
At first the ponderous slab refused to budge, then it rose a few centimeters. Burning pain surged deep inside Caitano’s trembling arm muscles as he used his foot to slide a loose piece of equipment under the bulkhead, wedging it into place. P8 grabbed Stevens’s arms and began pulling him clear.
“Get him to sickbay,” Caitano said as he hurdled over the fallen wall section to the open panel where Stevens had been working. “And seal the door on your way out.”
P8 started to protest, “Don’t be—”
“That’s an order.”
“I outrank you,” P8 said, just before a surge of plasma-fueled fire tumbled her out of the bay, back into the corridor. Apparently no longer interested in arguing with him, P8 sealed the door. Satisfied that this fire would now be contained, Caitano set to work.
Reaching through the narrow panel, he found that his gloved hands were unable to reach the back of the control board to make the final adjustments. He turned away to remove his gloves. A gust of heated air blasted greasy black smoke and aerosolized particles into his faceplate, coating it with an opaque layer of greasy filth. Attempts to wipe it clean proved fruitless. Great, he mused sarcastically. Now I can’t even see the things that I can’t reach.
Captain Gold’s voice squawked inside his helmet. “Caitano, Blue says you’ve taken over for Stevens.”
“Affirmative, sir,” he replied while unfastening the seal on his helmet.
“We’re about to lose shields and main power, son. It’s now or never.”
“Hang on, Captain.” He pulled off his gloves and felt the searing heat that now filled the room. “Bringing the link online now.” Flinging aside his helmet, the hissing crackle of flames assaulted his eardrums. He pushed his hands back inside the machinery and squinted through the stinging shroud of thickening smoke. His every gasp for breath scorched his throat. Working by touch, he shuffled isolinear chips, removed safety lockouts, and opened the power conduit that would turn the phasers into an extension of the da Vinci’s warp-drive system.
The new link throbbed to life.
Caitano pulled his hands free and sealed the maintenance panel. Slapping the comm switch on the wall with his palm, he said, “Caitano to—” A hacking cough interrupted him. “Caitano to bridge! Link online!”
Garbled and muffled by the rising roar of the fire, the captain’s reply was inaudible. Caitano turned to try and stumble toward the exit, but a new avalanche of broken deck plating and sparking cables blocked his path. Flames stabbed mercilessly at him from every side. He spun toward the collapsed forward section, hoping to spy a way out, but tripped over Stevens’s tool kit. Landing face-first, his chin struck something hard. He gagged as the acrid stench of burning hair filled his nostrils. Panic set in when he realized it was his own hair that was starting to singe.
As the blaze encircled him, he hoped that his efforts had not been in vain.
Their tenac
ity is remarkable, Maleiras reflected as she watched Coleef pilot the Starlit Wing through its frantic pursuit of the Federation vessel da Vinci. The small starship lacked the velocity to outrun the Silgov fleet, and despite the power of its weapons it was no match for an entire armada. She had half-expected its commander to surrender once his ship had been over-taken—and she was secretly pleased to have been wrong.
Sesslom—the grime of his repair efforts now scrubbed away, returning him to his normally immaculate self—monitored the primary sensors, as well as the tactical feed from the Justice Maker. Looking up from his console, he reported, “The da Vinci’s shields are collapsing, my lady.”
Alas, all your valiance has been for naught. She acknowledged the report with a nod, then turned toward Coleef. “Bring us about, and fall back half a tolloc, in case the da Vinci doubles back on its current heading.”
“As you command, my lady,” Coleef said as she altered course.
Maleiras pondered what attitude Viceroy Narjam might effect when demanding the da Vinci’s surrender in a few moments.
Then the diminutive vessel looped around and charged through the center of the Silgov fleet’s battle formation. The tactic surprised her. A suicide run? Such an end for the da Vinci and its crew struck Maleiras as senseless and tragic. Bitter sadness coursed through her. Have we become the fiends from whom we fled? Are we no better than the Vekhal? Taking what we want and leaving only death in our wake?