“What exactly are you doing at that command console?” Uhura’s question floated through the air, her tone becoming a challenge. “Do you even know what those controls are for?”
Kirk nodded to himself. “She’s telling us where he’s standing.” He moved to one side of the door, out of range of the autosensor that would open it on approach, directing Kaleo to do the same. He checked his weapon again. “If we weren’t swimming in subspace radiation, we could just beam them all out of there, let Scotty sort out the patterns in the buffer.”
Kaleo’s fur stiffened as a dark truth occurred to her. “Tormid will never surrender. He may force you to—”
“What are you doing? Get away from there!” Tormid’s voice was suddenly loud and harsh. “I warned you not to test me!”
* * *
The Syhaari took two long-legged steps toward Uhura and saw the blinking activation light atop the intercom panel. He glanced back at where he had been standing and scowled. “Clever. But your warning counts for nothing.” Tormid balled his fist and smashed the intercom with a single heavy blow. “You will pay for that,” he shouted, snarling over the constant atonal howl of the corrupted counter-wave broadcast.
Uhura spun away as he grabbed at her, planting a chopping karate blow in Tormid’s chest that landed poorly, sliding off his ribs. She had only a vague idea of how Syhaari physiology worked and no clue where vulnerable nerve points might be beneath his furry epidermis. On instinct, she went for the soft tissues of his throat, ducking and striking again. A half-spent breath exploded from his chest in a spit of pain, and the lieutenant knew she had hurt him—but the alien had at least twice her body mass in his rangy, muscular form and stamina to match.
Tormid clubbed her with the flat of his free hand and she staggered back, pain sparking in her skull. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the control room door hissing open on the far side of the compartment. Uhura reeled against the safety rail ringing the access shaft and shook off the blow.
“Drop the phaser!” called the captain, coming in at a pace with Kaleo on his heels.
Tormid’s lengthy arm snaked around Uhura’s throat before she could react, and the Syhaari pulled her into an uncomfortable embrace. He jammed the phaser into her cheek.
“No,” said Tormid. “I imagine the female will die if I fire into her skull, even if the weapon is on a stun setting. You, Kirk, drop your weapon.”
“This is over!” yelled Kaleo, stalking around the edge of the access shaft. “Can you not see that, Tormid? How much more must you destroy before you understand?”
“Be silent!” he roared. “You are tainted by these aliens, you weakling! I always said you were irresolute, but you have proven it by putting your allegiance with these hairless maggots! You are a traitor to Sya! You do not have the courage to do what must be done!” His finger tightened on the phaser’s trigger.
“Stop!” cried Kirk. “All right! You win!” He opened his hand and let the small palm phaser fall to the deck. “Let my officer go! Let her and Kaleo take Spock and Xuur, let them leave. I will be your hostage, Tormid!” He sagged, as if his will to fight had fled from him. “I’ll do whatever you want. As long as you don’t hurt any more of my crew.”
For a long second, Uhura thought that Tormid would shoot her anyway, just out of sheer spite. But then he placed a hand between her shoulder blades and gave her a vicious shove. “Get out,” he snarled, waving toward the fallen. “And take that refuse with you.”
Uhura glanced at her commanding officer, and he gave her a wan nod in return. She knelt, hauling the Rhaandarite envoy to her feet, and with difficulty, she shuffled to the door. It opened to reveal two security guards, with weapons drawn and ready.
“No!” Kirk held up his hands before they could advance. “Matsuo, Garner, stand down. No one is to open fire, is that clear? That’s an order.”
Kaleo, easily bearing Spock’s weight in her ropey limbs, moved to the door and handed off the unconscious first officer to one of the guards, then she stepped back and raised her hands as well. “I’m not leaving, Captain. If you stay, I stay.”
“You’re making a habit of that,” he noted.
“I accept this trade,” said Tormid. “It means that one of you is now expendable.”
Uhura saw the Syhaari shifting his aim back and forth between the two of them, considering which he was going to shoot. The door whispered shut and suddenly she was in the corridor, amid a refrain of groaning hull metal and warning sirens.
“What do we do, Lieutenant?” said Matsuo, kneading the grip of her phaser.
Uhura straightened, knowing that she had to take command of the situation. “Get a medical kit,” she ordered. “We have injured here.”
Matsuo dashed away to a nearby emergency supply locker, and Uhura found the other security guard staring at the closed door. “But what about Captain Kirk?”
“He knows what he’s doing,” she told Garner.
I hope, Uhura added silently.
Fifteen
The leviathan crossed the edge of the atmospheric interface in a brilliant crimson flash, cutting a great wake through the sky of Syhaar Prime that could be seen across the planet’s northern hemisphere.
Fire rained down on the surface as the titanic creature willingly seared itself against the friction, and in its passing towering energy spikes ripped open clouds and sent streamers of electrostatic discharge in every direction. Unprotected systems, overwhelmed by the ambient energy, burned out. Lights across hundreds of settlements and outer domains darkened as power was lost.
For the frightened Syhaari in the cities and the forests, there was little they could do but look upward and see the great blood-colored orb passing overhead. Like the baleful eye of some mythic giant, it stared down on them, an omen of a terrible fate.
For those in space, following the planetoid as closely as they dared, the horror was every bit as real. For the observers—the Andorian diplomat ch’Sellor, the elder Gatag, and the engineer Hoyga among them—the terrible consequence of the leviathan’s mad fury unfolded before their eyes. The sudden gravitational effect of the living planetoid’s near passage was sending out earthquake shocks and stirring freak tidal activity, and already sensors were detecting the start of state-changes in Syhaar Prime’s upper atmosphere as uncontrolled torrents of subspace radiation tore through ozone layers and polluted the night sky. Like a predator raking its claws across a prey animal’s flesh, even a passing encounter with the leviathan would cause catastrophic damage. The planet would bleed out and perish unless the beast’s rampage could be stopped.
But with no way to contact the brave souls who had dared the attempt to silence the storm of rage, they could do nothing but watch and wait for the end.
* * *
Tormid fired a blast of light into the security pad near the door and sparks gushed from the magnetic locking mechanism. “It pleases me you are here,” he said, sneering. “It is fitting that you see the failure of your ideals at close hand.” He took a step toward Kirk. “How does it feel, human? To know that the lofty principles you espouse mean nothing now? That perfect Federation you tried to subsume us into, it is a shared delusion, a product of naïve dreamers.”
Kirk kept his hands raised. “You don’t know us at all,” he said firmly. “I’m sorry to say I’ve met your kind before, and each time I hope it will be the last. But here you are again. Believing you are enlightened. Blinded by your arrogance.”
“Which of us is the arrogant one?” Tormid asked, shooting a venomous glare at Kaleo. “I, who want only to see my people prosper? Or you, Captain Kirk, coming to the Syhaari Gathering with your high-handed intent, deigning to grace us primitives with the gift of your attentions?” Before Kirk could respond, he went on. “Did it ever occur to you that some of us do not want your help?” Tormid pointed at Kaleo. “She and others like her, they were the ones who summ
oned you. Greedy for your favor after being dazzled by your grand starship.”
“But not you?” said Kirk, sensing a way to attack the scientist’s ego at its most vulnerable point. “You wanted us to come here just to see what you could get from us, am I right? You think us weak because we showed Kaleo’s crew compassion, and you wanted to see just how much advantage you could take!”
“If you give away power, you do not deserve it,” sniffed Tormid. “Knowledge must be ripped from the universe by force, it is never given without price! I have always taken what was needed when the opportunity arises.”
Kaleo made a sound halfway between a snarl and a sob. “From the bodies of the dead?”
“The Breg’Hel are invaders!” he thundered back at her. “Destroyers!”
“Only because you gave them no other choice!” Kirk came forward before Tormid could turn the phaser on the other Syhaari. “You act like you’re an intelligent being, but you’re shortsighted and ignorant. You never once considered the consequences of your actions! All this, every life lost and ship destroyed”—he aimed a finger at Tormid’s chest—“it’s on you.”
“The Breg’Hel did terrible things,” said Kaleo, “but they did them out of fear, fear of us. And fear is why you killed them in the first place.”
“You didn’t wait to talk with them, you didn’t even try to make a peaceful first contact.” Kirk met Tormid’s seething gaze. “You let your fear rule you, and everything you’ve done since then has been in denial of that truth.”
“I am not afraid,” Tormid growled, aiming the phaser. “Not of you.”
“Liar!” Kirk shouted the word back at him. He sensed Tormid’s anger was about to break its banks, and he kept pushing. “You’re afraid of change. Afraid of faces that you don’t recognize, voices you’ve never heard before! You live inside the Veil, in a tiny bubble of space, and you think that is the whole universe, that you’re somehow master of it all. But you’re afraid of the galaxy out there and everything in it. You lack the insight to see that all of us are striving for the same things, that we have more in common than we do in disparity!”
“The human is right,” said Kaleo, a look of pity in her eyes. “You call yourself a scientist and an explorer, but you’re neither. In every way, you . . . are a small mind.”
“You dare!” Tormid’s self-control broke, and he whirled, bringing the weapon to bear on Kaleo; but as he squeezed the trigger pad, Kirk was launching himself at the Syhaari, slamming into him with enough force to knock his aim off target. A blue streak of coherent particles struck a panel near Kaleo’s head, blowing it open.
She ducked and scrambled away, hesitating for a split second as Kirk followed through on the attack. The Enterprise’s captain grabbed at Tormid’s gun arm with one hand, and found purchase in a fistful of fur with the other. “Kaleo, go!” he shouted. “Revert the transmission, before—”
Tormid let out a savage roar and punched him hard in the sternum. Kirk felt something crack and a sharp, stabbing pain, but he pushed on. Slamming the Syhaari’s arm against the safety rail around the access shaft over and over again, he fought to keep up the pressure on his opponent and not falter.
Dimly, he was aware of Kaleo racing to the main deflector control console. Got to give her time, he told himself, and with another surge of effort he smashed Tormid’s wrist against the rail. The Syhaari bit out a cry of pain and his long fingers jerked open in a spasm. The phaser fell and clattered over the edge of the shaft.
But the victory was short-lived. Tormid’s free hand came up again, this time in a wide, open-fingered blow that swallowed up Kirk’s face in a suffocating grasp. The two of them spun about, reversing position, and the captain was flattened against the safety rail, the angular metal of it digging into his spine.
The thick flesh of Tormid’s heavy palm cut off any attempt Kirk made to draw a breath, and he felt himself losing ground, his boots skidding on the deck. Blindly, Kirk brought his hands together and threw them forward again in a double-fisted punch that found a soft, fleshy patch near where a human would have a solar plexus. Landing a blow there seemed to have a similar effect, and Tormid wheezed, releasing his grip on Kirk’s face but not the pressure on the captain’s torso.
Kirk tried to struggle free, catching sight of Kaleo bent over the command panel. He could see her drawing down the overloaded power controls and hear the falling cadence of the counter-wave as it shifted away from its screaming, destructive pitch and back toward more moderated tones.
Tormid saw it too, and writhed, caught between his intention to end Kirk’s life and his plans for killing the leviathan. “Stop!” he spat. “Do not interfere!”
“Too late,” Kirk managed, through a gasp. “You’ve failed!”
“Not yet,” growled Tormid, and he put his full weight into the fight.
Kirk felt the air leave his lungs as Tormid crushed him against the rail. Fire burned across his chest and his balance disintegrated. He slipped, his body going over the edge, his arm flailing into the open space of the access shaft. A steady pulse of glowing light—the mains feed to the sensor dish—illuminated the ducting beneath, but the color was fading from everything around him. Grayness gathered at the corners of Kirk’s vision.
A jolt of fear shocked through him: Of all the places to die, I never expected it would be somewhere like this.
Inexorably, Tormid was pushing him toward a terminal fall. Stronger than a mere human like Kirk, all the powerfully built Syhaari had to do was keep up the pressure, and in a moment gravity would finish the job for him.
Gravity.
Less than a thought, more an instinct, a defiant impulse drew on some deeper reserve of Kirk’s strength. He used it all to propel himself forward for one brief moment, knowing that doing so would shift his weight and make his fall a certainty—but in that motion, he grabbed at handfuls of Tormid’s tunic and pulled hard.
Knocked off balance by the sudden action, the Syhaari lost his grip and came with Kirk over the edge of the safety rail. There was nothing to stop them plummeting three decks down into the pulsing power feed. Gravity took hold and both opponents vanished into the shaft.
Kirk thought he heard Kaleo cry out his name. Then he was tumbling through the air, tangled with Tormid’s spindly limbs as they cracked against the walls and spun away.
He twisted as they plummeted, drawing on experience from a youthful, reckless dalliance with orbital skydiving to remember how to manage the fall. Kirk’s outstretched hands smacked a protruding support frame, and by reflex his fingers contracted. It took his weight, and it was all he could do not to fall away again when the pain of the hard contact sparked through him from the site of his broken ribs.
Below, Kirk heard rather than saw the crash of breaking metal as Tormid’s unarrested plunge ended with him smashing through the hex-grid safety grille. There was a deep, resonating buzz as living matter connected with the power train—and then nothing.
* * *
Great tectonic shifts quivered over the surface of the leviathan, and across the frequencies of subspace, the living planetoid howled in pain. Its primitive animal mind, unable to process what had happened to it, struggled to do anything other than scream at the void and attack everything around it.
It had been driven by the cries broadcast from the stone-metal-fragments that trailed about it, first forced from its feeding grounds in panic and then harried across the empty wastes of interstellar space where nourishment was scarce. And just as it encountered a dust cloud that might sustain it, the screaming clarion that compelled it drove the leviathan to fury, making it lash out.
Again and again, the anger-pain had come, until at last a kind of berserk madness had taken hold. All meek and passive thought-action crumbled and left only fury behind. It became an inferno that fueled itself. Destruction and violence were all that it craved—its own destruction most of all. Perhaps on
ly then, the agony would cease.
Amber fire collected in massive auroras about the planetoid’s equator, building and building into a store of energetic potential. Unleashed in a barrage of lightning strikes, it would be able to rip open the surface of the planet below, punish it for the strangle-grip of its gravity, strike back at the creators of the pain, at everything.
The pain—
Something was changing. Deep inside itself, in the caverns where rock and crystal and electrochemical masses made the leviathan live, a song was being sung.
And in that moment, the rage held.
* * *
Every effort was like a knife through his chest, and Kirk tasted blood in his mouth. But it was impossible to stop, beyond him to halt for even a moment to try to catch his breath. To do so would be to risk losing his grip and falling, and now it was only dogged forward momentum that carried the captain on. Hand over hand, he climbed back up the shaft, through the smoke sizzling from the damaged power feed, fighting down every racking cough in case the next one made him black out.
After what seemed like an eternity, his hand slapped on the deck, and Kirk hauled himself onto the deflector control room’s upper deck.
Kaleo was still at the console, desperately fighting it as streamers of red warning strobes lit up the command panel. She caught sight of him, at once alarmed and relieved by his ragged appearance. “James! Where is Tormid?”
Kirk didn’t answer, instead using all his available strength to rise to his feet. “Stay there,” he told her, moving to the secondary console. “We need to work together to . . . to make it safe.” Immediately, Kirk saw that the complex interwoven frequencies of the counter-wave were dropping out of unity, fraying like threads pulled from a worn tapestry.
Uhura would be able to fix this in a nanosecond, he thought to himself. But I don’t have the time to get her back in here. “Follow my lead,” he called out, panting through his pain. “Moderate the power levels, just as before. I’ll compensate from this station.”
The Latter Fire Page 26