The Latter Fire

by James Swallow

  Kirk winced as he saw the breaking glass draw blood from Rumen’s hands, but the Syhaari did not stop. Fluid leaked out of the broken screen, and a sharp, acidic smell filled the air.

  “I hear something,” called Arex, who crouched low by the far side of the hatch. “Yes, movement.”

  “Be ready,” Kirk told Uhura. “We get only one shot at this.”

  “Aye, Captain.” The communications officer held up Xuur’s headband, the central ornamental jewel aimed at the doorway. A mess of hair-fine optical cables connected it to a gutted communicator, and Uhura’s finger hovered over the device’s transmit key.

  With a low thud of magnetic bolts, the iris hatch unlocked and the curved metal petals retracted away into the walls. Revealed behind it were the forms of four Breg’Hel guards, each with their batons drawn and ready. In the perpetual gloom of the alien ship, their scaled bodies were wraithlike shadows.

  “Now!” shouted the captain, and he turned away, covering his eyes.

  Uhura stabbed the button and activated their makeshift weapon; the artificial gemstone in Xuur’s headband concealed an imaging module, but the component could also be forced to emit a frequency of light if correctly modified. A sudden flurry of brilliant white flashes strobed inside the dimly lit holding chamber, and the Breg’Hel guards with their large, unprotected eyes were blinded. The aliens squealed in pain and fell back—but not before Kirk, Arex, and Kaleo were upon them.

  Kirk’s fist connected with the scaly jaw of one guard, and the Breg’Hel staggered backward. He struck again, and the alien’s thick pink tongue flapped out of its mouth as it went down, out cold. Kaleo, reacting with great speed, disarmed another Breg’Hel and used the stunner in the tip of its baton to dispatch it. For his part, Lieutenant Arex took on the other two guards, landing multiple blows at once by using the low gravity to pirouette on his central leg. They quickly fell, and Kirk found himself nodding in approval.

  “Impressive moves, Mister Arex,” he noted.

  The Triexian gathered up a pair of fallen batons. “Learned in my youth, when I danced. I would offer to teach you, sir, but you lack the correct number of limbs.”

  Kaleo went to the door and beckoned the others into the corridor. “Quickly! We must not tarry.”

  Uhura stepped through and took a baton from Arex, with Xuur and Rumen following close behind her. The envoy was helping the Syhaari walk, and she had torn off a length of her sleeve to make into rudimentary bandages for the cuts on his hands. “What about them?” she asked, nodding toward the guards.

  “We’ll let them sleep it off,” Kirk replied, gathering up the Breg’Hel he had knocked out and shoving it back through the open hatch. Arex helped him with the others, and when all the guards were inside, Kaleo found the controls that sealed the door from the outside.

  “You escaped before?” Uhura asked Rumen. “How fast are they at responding to something like that?”

  “Fast,” said the Syhaari. “Groups of guards patrol all areas of the ship. They’ll know we have attacked their people.”

  “That empathic response again,” agreed Kirk. He glanced around; a number of corridors branched off from the area where they were standing. “Arex. Do you remember the way back to the landing bay where they brought the Icarus aboard?”

  “It’s ingrained in my memory, sir,” he said, tapping his bulbous brow.

  “Then it’ll be up to you to take the lead. This isn’t going to be easy, you’ll have to get the shuttle out and away, damaged or not . . .”

  “Have you forgotten there is probably a battle raging out there?” said Xuur.

  “We’ll make it,” insisted Uhura.

  Kirk nodded. “Contact me when you’re clear of the ship.”

  His officers froze. “You’re not coming with us?” said Rumen

  “I’m going back to the command center,” he told them. “I’ll get in the way, distract them, surrender myself to the Breg’Hel if it comes to that. Maybe even try another shot at talking them out of this madness.”

  “Captain, you can’t . . .” Uhura took a step toward him, but he waved her off.

  “The lieutenant is right!” Xuur’s eyes widened. “What’s to stop them killing you?”

  “We don’t have time to argue!” Kirk snarled. “You have your orders, carry them out!” He pointed a finger at Xuur. “And before you tell me you don’t have to obey, Envoy, I’ll remind you to review your Starfleet regulations. In a situation like this, the captain’s word is final.”

  “It is,” said Kaleo, handing off Rumen to Arex. “Which is why I am coming with you.”

  “Sister, no!” said the other Syhaari, placing a hand on her chest. “You cannot, not while you—”

  She silenced him with a gruff snort, brushing off his hand. “The decision is made, Rumen! Kirk returns to face these creatures and one of us should go with him.” Kaleo met Kirk’s gaze with a defiant glint in her eye. “Anything else would be in defiance of a captain’s orders.”

  “So be it,” said Kirk, but the words had hardly been spoken before he heard the clatter and rustle of movement somewhere farther down one of the stone corridors. “Uhura. The Icarus is under your command now. Get her home. Tell Spock everything.”

  She gave a nod. “I’ll see you again, sir, soon.”

  “I hope so, Nyota. I hope so.” He watched the others move off, and then turned back to Kaleo, testing the weight of the stunner baton in his hand.

  “The odds are stacked against us once again,” said the Syhaari. “It’s almost starting to feel like that is the way of things.”

  He eyed her. “You have a tendency to put yourself in harm’s way, Captain Kaleo. Why is that?”

  Her round face split in a toothy smile. “Look in a mirror, Captain Kirk, and ask that question of yourself.” She gestured with her baton as the sounds of Breg’Hel reinforcements grew nearer. “They’ll be here in moments. Which way to the command center?”

  Kirk beckoned her. “Follow me.”

  Eleven

  A killing radiance exploded from the malignant haze surrounding the leviathan as it rolled through the void, pushing into the defense lines over the planet Gadmuur.

  With an actinic flare of power, the colossal creature spat a discharge of arcing electrical energy into the largest of the Syhaari orbital shipyards. A curved web of metal gantries, cables, and ovoid command modules, the space platform was designed to service dozens of spacecraft at once, but now—mercifully—it was empty, evacuated in a panic only hours earlier.

  None of that mattered to the alien intruder intent only on mass destruction. The leviathan’s lightning surge flashed over the orbital station’s open structure, leaping and sliding down the length of it, leaving devastation in its wake. Control pods blew apart, vomiting their contents into the vacuum, jets of gas and fluids leaving clouds of glittering vapor as they expanded outward. Support frames designed to hold rangers and explorers collapsed in on themselves, twisting in the grip of warring magnetic fields, ripping away and tumbling into Gadmuur’s gravity well. The platform began to deform and come apart, shedding plasma fire, fragmenting until the elegant basket-weave shape of its original form was a mess of colliding girders, flash-frozen chemicals, and second-order detonations. Knocked out of its orbit by the attack, the ragged slick of debris that remained started its final passage around the third planet.

  Wreathed in fire, the leviathan shimmered behind the luminous sheath of its own energies, and trailing behind it came the ships of the Breg’Hel. Fresh jags of power rippled out from the core of the living planetoid, licking at the wreckage-choked sky all around it.

  “The orbital station was empty,” Ensign Haines reported, in a dead voice. “But that’s barely a kindness. When a few thousand tons of platform on terminal trajectory cuts through Gadmuur’s atmosphere, there’ll be nothing to stop it laying waste to hundreds of kilom
eters of the surface along the descent line.”

  Spock remained expressionless, watching the death throes of the shipyard. Perhaps, with two or three more ships like the Enterprise, perhaps if they were not in the midst of an invasion, it might have been possible to get ahead of the mass of the obliterated platform and do something to nudge it into a different orbital path. He made a quick calculation; no, even beaming photon torpedoes into the wreckage to try and break it up would make the matter worse, resulting in damage scattered over an even wider area. He hoped that the colonists down on Gadmuur would be able to clear the path beneath the falling debris—but for now their fate was of secondary consideration to him. His first duty was, as always, to the Enterprise and his orders.

  “That target was an illogical choice,” he said aloud, glancing across at Lieutenant Sulu. “There was no tactical value in destroying it while other defender vessels are still active nearby.”

  Sulu confirmed that with a nod. “Aye, sir. Three formations of Syhaari rangers are in close proximity to the leviathan, but it ignored them all to go after the station.”

  “It can’t be attracted by size or by the highest energy output,” reasoned Scott. “If that were so, it’d be chasing us.”

  “Target is moving again!” called Lieutenant Leslie. “Homing in on one of the ranger formations. They’re burning hard for high orbit, trying to make a break for it.”

  “Distance?” asked Scott, but Spock knew the damning answer before Leslie responded.

  “Out of our range, sir.”

  After intervening in the disastrous first attack, the Enterprise had extended away from the melee in space to repair the shields and stay beyond the reach of the intruder’s deadly firepower—but the starship was still close enough to witness every moment of the leviathan’s brutal assault.

  “It’s too late for them,” Sulu said bleakly. As he spoke, pinpricks of fire blossomed on the main view­screen as the planetoid unleashed a monumental, frenzied storm of overkill on the smaller ships. The flight of Syhaari vessels was gone in an instant, leaving only radioactive dust behind.

  Each attack that came from the leviathan seemed more wild than the last. Where at first its behavior had exhibited some manner of direction behind it, it was becoming increasingly clear to Spock that the vast extrasolar life-form’s ferocity was slipping out of control. What happened next all but confirmed the grim hypothesis that he was already forming.

  “Look there!” called Scott, pointing at the viewer. “D’you see it, Commander?”

  Spock nodded. He could pick out a single alien vessel, one of the asymmetrical craft belonging to the Breg’Hel. The engineer had caught sight of it as it moved out of formation in the leviathan’s wake, and now it was clear to see, light flashing off the crystalline elements of the hull.

  “Scanning,” said Haines. “I’m detecting irregular fusion pulses from the craft. Perhaps a drive system malfunction, sir . . .”

  “Until now, those craft have not ventured beyond a zone of magnetic interference emanating from the poles of the leviathan,” noted Spock. “This is an unusual event.” He could see that the other Breg’Hel craft were scrupulously maintaining their own positions well within the magnetic zone; it could only be a blind spot that the massive cosmozoan’s consciousness somehow did not register.

  “It’s turning.” Scott studied a tactical plot on a secondary monitor. “Or at least, it’s trying to.”

  “Reading a localized power surge,” said Sulu. “The leviathan . . . I think it senses the Breg’Hel ship.”

  With what could only have been a very deliberate, directed act, the planetoid flicked a spear of lightning out from its surface and bifurcated the errant Breg’Hel vessel. Stony matter and shards of energized crystal were scattered, the craft obliterated as quickly and as violently as the Syhaari ranger ships had been only moments earlier.

  Scott let out a breath. “They’re driving that thing somehow, running it angry like a mad bull,” he said. “And that’s what happens if you get caught on the horns. The beast doesn’t see any difference between friend or foe.”

  “That ship, it fell out of position and paid the price,” added Sulu. “Letting that creature run wild, it’s madness!”

  “If they are driving it, as you say, Mister Scott, then they must be using some instrumentality to do so.” Spock rose from the command chair and turned to face Lieutenant M’Ress at communications. Before the Icarus had departed on its ill-fated diplomatic mission, Spock had made sure the Caitian had been fully briefed by Lieutenant Uhura—specifically on her attempts to isolate any signals passing directly between the leviathan and the Breg’Hel. “What have you found?” he asked M’Ress.

  Her ears swiveled and wilted slightly, the Caitian equivalent of a frown. “I’ve been running signal traffic analysis since the first approach, sir,” she told him. “There’s certainly something there. Trace pulses, in the same ranges as that declaration message that Uhura decoded. But I can’t isolate them. There’s just too much additional noise.”

  “Define ‘noise,’ ” said the science officer.

  M’Ress’s paw twitched in agitation. “Commander, the leviathan itself is emitting a constant stream of incoherent transmissions on tertiary subspace wavebands. It . . .” She halted, trying to frame her words. “Sir, it’s as if the creature is constantly howling.”

  Spock considered her words. If the leviathan was enraged, if it was in pain, such behavior would make sense. “Let me hear it.”

  “Aye, sir.” Warily, M’Ress touched a control and suddenly the Enterprise’s bridge was filled with a peculiar, phantasmal moan. The tone conjured up recollections of waves striking a stone beach, of ghostly echoes through caverns and wind across wastelands. To Vulcan ears it was a uniquely mournful, yet coldly enraged sound.

  Spock remembered another line of the Tennyson poem from which Captain Kirk had drawn his name for the cosmozoan. “‘In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.’”

  “Sir?” said M’Ress, unaware of the reference.

  “It is unimportant,” said Spock. “I have heard enough.”

  “Like the voice of a revenant,” muttered Scott as M’Ress switched off the audio link. “What have they let loose here, sir?”

  Spock’s eyes narrowed. “I fear it is a force they cannot control, Mister Scott.”

  * * *

  “Are you certain this is the best course of action?” said Kaleo, nervously glancing down the rough-hewn corridor. She gestured at the sealed hatch blocking their path. “If we proceed, we enter a nest of yoleh.”

  “I assume that’s not a good thing,” Kirk replied, adjusting the power setting on the baton in his hand.

  “Yoleh,” she repeated, making a small shape with her fingers. “Fat, stinging insects that attack in swarms when threatened. You have something like that on your human worlds?”

  “I understand the analogy.” He nodded. “But we’re running out of options. Sooner or later, the Breg’Hel will recapture us. We have to make a statement now, while we still can.” He paused. “Kaleo, do you trust me?”

  Her head bobbed. “Yes, James, I do. Even if you are a peculiar-looking alien and bald of face, I trust you. I owe you that.”

  Kirk smiled. “I told you before, you don’t owe me anything. But if you offer me your trust, I’ll promise you won’t regret it.”

  She eyed him. “You are persuasive. I see why the Rhaandarite is attracted to you.”

  “What?” His smile fell away. “I think you’re mistaken.”

  “And I think you’re denying something you already know.” Before he could answer, she waved a long-fingered hand at the hatch. “Go on. Open it, before I change my mind.”

  “Cover your eyes.” Kirk looked away and jabbed the tip of his baton into a control pad sculpted out of the carved wall. Sparks flew and suddenly the hatch chugged open, the metal
lic petals of the iris clanking as they retracted.

  Beyond was the command core of the ship, the dim space lit by glowing screens and bulbous bioluminescent plants. The Breg’Hel crew were caught by surprise, unprepared for two aliens to suddenly storm into the heart of their vessel, in the middle of a tactical engagement.

  Kirk saw the yellow-skinned security officer Zud’Hoa react to the intrusion, drawing a brace of telescoping batons and launching forward. The Breg’Hel sprang into a defensive stance between the two intruders and the elders Kirk had spoken to before.

  Kirk called to them before things got out of control, letting the universal translator shift his words into their speech. “Ret’Sed! Ead’Aea! This has gone on too long. The aggression must end!”

  Zud’Hoa made a growling sound in the depths of its throat. “You speak of aggression, but we all feel the blows you struck, now-known! You are no better than that-kind!” The Breg’Hel aimed a baton at Kaleo. “Violent barbarians. You must be punished.”

  “You gave us no choice,” said Kirk. “I regret what I did . . . but I was not willing to let my people languish in a cell while you attack the Syhaari.”

  Another of the command crew, until now frozen in silence at one of the tubular console displays, abruptly spoke up. “There is disorder in the reception bay! The small-craft of the now-known is attempting to depart, despite the damage it suffered.”

  Kaleo menaced the console operator with her stolen baton. “Step away from those controls,” she ordered. “You will let them leave.”

  “Do as the alien says,” said Ret’Sed, after a moment.

  “I will release the hatch.” The operator tapped out a code string across the touch-sensitive screens, then backed off, skittering away up a curved incline.

  Kaleo chanced a look at the oval screens and gave a disgusted grunt. “These readouts mean nothing to me . . .” She paused, thinking, then raised the baton. “If I destroy the panel, they won’t be able to renege—”