by Diane Carey
Would the inner hull on Zennor's ship give first, or would the starship's shields go? There was no way to judge that. It was a night at the gambling tables.
Plate after plate, the Enterprise chewed her way across the Rath's acres-wide hull, phaser fire burrowing between them and causing plumes of matter to erupt from in there. The big dark ship slid away and fell off its position, and he sensed that he knew where the havoc was right now. A dreadnought designed for invasion, vastly powerful, but untested in real battle, and a crew who had heard their whole lives about their destiny to invade but had never done any such thing, today were both finding out that plans and hopes alone do not serve. They had strength, delivered by the resources of a whole civilization, but they had no strategy, for they had never before needed one.
As the ruptures between the peeled-back scales began some serious billowing and gushing, Zennor's ship opened up again with another engulfing salvo of the burning power, and the Enterprise rocked hard to her starboard side, throwing everyone down hard. Not one of the bridge personnel was able to stay off the deck.
Kirk saw the bridge whirl around him, then blinked and found himself crushed into the crease between the upper and lower decks, under the rail on the starboard side. More smoke and sparks and putrid fluids and gases spewed all around him.
He reached up, caught the rail, hauled himself up, and instantly looked for Spock.
The Vulcan was on his hands and knees on the deck, slowly raising one hand and searching for the edge of his console.
"Spock, wait," Kirk said, and forced himself up there. "Slowly."
He got a good grip on Spock and took much of the Vulcan's weight as they both found their balance on a deck now tilted nearly forty degrees.
"Thank you, Captain," Spock wheezed, choked with pain again.
"Sit down and stay down. Don't get up again."
"Thank you." The first officer gladly settled into his now-dusty chair and closed his eyes for a moment, not caring that he had repeated himself.
"Stop thanking me," Kirk muttered.
"Captain, the weapons!" Donnier called, without a stammer. "We've lost weapons power! We can't shoot!"
"Confirm that, engineering." Whirling in the other direction, Kirk dropped again to the middle deck.
"Confirmed, sir!" Davis called over the surging howl of ruptured system.
"Not now … continue traction. Keep peeling those plates back. Bones, hail Kellen again."
"Kellen … yes, sir." McCoy swung around and almost lost his footing on the tipping deck, but waved away the smoke and found the same buttons he'd found before. "Ship to ship, Captain."
"General, do you have weapons power?"
"You were shooting. Keep shooting."
"I can't. My weapons are off-line. How are yours?"
"Mine are on, but I have no engine thrust."
"You don't need thrust for what I have in mind."
"You want me to do what you say? You want Klingon commanders to do your bidding?"
Kirk glared at the main screen as if at Kellen's face and imagined the general standing before him and expecting something spectacular.
All right. Fine.
"Yes, I want you all to do my bidding. I will take care of this problem for you, but I want senior authority, clearance to act on my own judgment, and absolution from any breakage of treaty until the Enterprise is safely on the other side of the Federation Neutral Zone, or I veer off right now and leave you to the Havoc. It's your turn to cooperate, General. I want you to make me Commodore of the Klingon Fleet."
Chapter Twenty-one
HE REFUSED to ask again. He let Kellen hang out there, without engine power, staring at the monolithic threat of the invasion dreadnought, and he bided his time.
"I concur."
Kirk gave his command chair a victorious pounding on the arm. "I accept. Inform your commanders."
"They know."
"Good. My first order to them is that they cease random fire and prepare for coordinated strafing with specific targets, on my orders only. I want you to divert all your power to weapons and stand by while I attempt one last time to talk to Zennor."
"Talk? You're going to talk again?"
"Yes, I'm going to talk," Kirk roiled indignantly, "I'm going to talk and you're not going to question me anymore. You have your orders. McCoy, hail Zennor and hail him good."
McCoy didn't respond, but jabbed at the communications board in what seemed childlike confusion, then looked up and shrugged with his eyes. "Channel's open, Captain."
He didn't add the implied I think.
Gnashing his teeth, Kirk felt his brows go down as he glowered at the Rath, the early fortress.
"Zennor, this is Commodore Kirk of the combined forces of the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Imperial Fleet. I know you can hear me. We've discovered a weakness in your armaments and I'm about to launch an assault against it. I give you one more chance to stand down and let me try to explain to you exactly what it is that you're acting upon. Legends and folklore over five thousand years old, stories told to children to frighten them into behavior … the stuff that ignorant people allow themselves to believe because they haven't learned any better. We've learned better … and now we have a chance to mend the wrong done to your civilization by people who are strangers to all of us."
His words rang, and tension set in. The Rath hung out there, several of its hull petals torn backward, bent up out of place, rupturing the floral symmetry of the huge conical hull.
"I'm offering you one last chance to build instead of wreck. Isn't that what you've wanted all along?"
Over the open channel came only the faint clicking and crackle of distant damage, of voices barely more than echoes calling out to each other in frantic desperation. So it was only bare hull in there after all and he had been right. There was a chink in the armor of the damned.
Changing the timber of his voice to something he reserved for other captains, he simply requested, "State your intentions."
Then all would know, and all duties would be clear.
He waited.
Under his skin he sensed Zennor's eyes, watching the Enterprise just as now he watched the Rath, peering at each other over the short gap of space, the long gap of time, wondering if the weaknesses they saw in each other were real, and if the time to crow was over.
"We will build."
Hope flared and Kirk leaned forward. Zennor's voice was underlaid by the groan of damage over there, the whoop of alarms, and the frantic voices of the alien crew.
"Upon the ruined cities of the conquerors' children, we will build our rightful place. There is no giving up. History renews itself and breathes life into the doomed. This is the Battle of Garamanus. This is our place and we will defend it. First we will smash the Klingon civilization, and then we will come for yours."
The flare guttered and sank away. Kirk sighed, shook his head, pressed his lips flat, but there wasn't anything else to say.
"I regret … it has to be you," Zennor added then. "I did not expect to like the conqueror."
The station-sized ship began to hum and glow again in a now-recognizable process of building to open fire.
Kirk nodded as if Zennor could actually see him. "I'm sorry too."
He motioned for McCoy to close channels.
"Kirk to Kellen. Brace yourselves and prepare to open fire."
"Ready."
"Mr. Donnier, tractor beams. Mr. Byers, full power to thrust. Let's pull that ship apart. General, open fire."
The starship whined and dug in its heels, pit-bulling the hull plates of the Rath up two by two. The Klingon ship blasted photon salvos with accuracy down into the grooves left exposed as each plate was squalled backward. The blue balls of energy plowed straight down inside, to detonate deep in the grooves, pounding the inner hull of the Rath to bits and sending destructive explosions ricocheting around in there.
Kirk crimped his eyes in empathy. He knew what was happening to the
interior of the Rath. But there was also a naughty I-told-you-so swelling in his chest, and that was the feeling he grabbed on to for stability.
Zennor's ship glowed and vaulted another heavy attack at the Enterprise and Kellen's ship.
The bridge lights flashed, then went out completely for a moment, leaving only the bright glow of the main screen and the scene on it. A moment later, small emergency lights came on along the deck and about halfway around the ceiling area, just enough to work by. Around him the crew's faces were sculpted to the bones by hellish red lights from below and creamy yellow lights from above, the hollows of their eyes made deep by shadows and their noses and chins turned to sickles.
"Captain, shields just fell!" the relief engineer called. "We've got no protection anymore."
"Spock, confirm that."
"Confirmed, sir. No shield power left at all."
"Perfect. If they hit us again, it's all over."
"Sir," the engineer called again, "Mr. Scott says we've lost the conduits to the warp drive. The engines are good, but we can't engage them. We'll need twenty minutes to reestablish."
"We've still got impulse, correct?"
"Yes, sir, we've got that."
"Understood. General Kellen, maintain fire. Attention, Klingon fleet. All available ships begin strafing maneuvers now. Come in at full impulse speed. Target specified areas of weakness between the abutting ends of the plates."
Zennor's ships built to fire again and tried to pick off the Klingon ships as they rushed in like streaks of light, but at high speed they were better able to avoid the washing yellow-purple energy blasts, or at least to take only glancing blows. Two Klingon cruisers were slammed out of the way in the first attack, but others made it through and hammered the exposed inner skin of the Rath with blunt photons.
The Fury ship started to move, to fall away, trying to gain some room, but the Enterprise stayed with it, and Kellen's ship continued to fire down into the fissures caused as the starship pulled up petal after petal.
The bridge crackled and fumed with new damage, but the starship kept working. Kirk imagined the flurry belowdecks to keep the systems on-line long enough to succeed. Engineers would be tripping over damage-control parties, who would be stepping between clean-up crews. Everybody was hustling today.
"Sir, they're starting to pitch," Byers called out over the whistle of a leak on the port side.
Before them Zennor's huge vessel began to tip downward and to roll sideways, bucking and twisting like an elk trying to throw off a clinging bobcat, but Kirk wouldn't call off. Zennor didn't have tractor beams and his technology hadn't anticipated them. That was why this could work.
"Look!" Donnier choked, and pointed.
"Flux emanations are off the scale, sir!" Chekov sang out, and also looked at the main screen.
Zennor's ship, the whole vast length and breadth of it, was beginning to glow, but not like before. This glow came from inside, shining out of the edges of all the petals in the wide midsection, bright neon yellowish white, and it was expanding through the ship, spilling forward under the plates. Several of the plates were blown completely off as the violence traveled.
"Building up to overload," Spock concluded as he looked at his sensor screen. Sharply he looked up. "Detonation any moment now."
Nobody had to tell Kirk that. Halfway across the galaxy or not, he knew a main power core meltdown when he saw one.
"Mr. Byers, full about! Ship to ship—General, we're evacuating. Notify your fleet to clear the area at high warp. Broadcast long-range warnings—"
"We have no thruster power. You go, Captain Kirk, and we will continue firing until we all are a ball of fire. We will personally take that demon ship to its own prophecy!"
"They don't need an escort. Donnier, shift tractor beams to the general's ship."
"Shifting beams, sir."
"We'll tow you out of the immediate impact range, General. With full shields you should be able to survive the blast."
"Use your warp speed to get away, Kirk. All warriors die."
"Yes," Kirk said. "But it's my turn today, not yours. Our shields are down and we've lost warp maneuvering power. We can't get far enough away from here to survive without shields."
The crew tried to keep their faces still, but their postures were revealing. Kirk was careful not to turn his head, so none would feel lessened in his captain's eyes, even as he spoke of their impending deaths.
The best crew in Starfleet. Didn't mean they were icicles. He regretted not coming up with a word or two of shallow comfort. They needed to hear that in his voice, but he had none. The only gift he could give them was that they would die while saving others.
"We can tow you to safe range and your shields will protect you." He glanced around at the sweaty faces of his crew and noted how young they all were. "Everybody has to die sometime. At least we're dying for a good reason."
"Idiot." Kellen's insult was almost warm. "Do you think you're dying today? Shields on extension mode."
As the two ships drew away from the Rath at painfully slow speed, the Fury ship glowed brighter and rolled in space furiously now. More and more hull plates blew off as explosions tore through the inner core. A moment later, the point of the horn-shaped bow blew off, leaving a shorn stump through which plasma and radiation boiled freely into space.
"Captain," Spock began, "General Kellen's ship has extended their shields around us."
"That stretches him too thin," Kirk commented, but didn't bother to call Kellen.
As he looked from Spock to the main screen again, the Rath reached its critical mass. The hull plates blew off all over it.
Then, an explosion the size of a continent erupted across open space, devouring the purple structure until nothing could be seen but tumbling plates, spraying matter and energy, and bright incendiary destruction.
Shock waves rocked the starship and the battle cruiser, shoving them bodily backward through space. Kirk clung to his chair as pressure hit him hard and artificial gravity on the ship crushed him toward the deck as it tried to compensate.
The Enterprise went up on a side, almost ninety degrees. The crew tumbled, but they knew what to grab for and managed to pull themselves into place as the deck began to right.
The Klingon shields crackled and sparked around both ships, but held. Wave upon wave of energy plied space across them in a vast sphere.
Kirk waved at the electrical smoke and blinked as it burned his eyes. On the screen, the Fury ship was gone.
Hell had gone to hell.
What is death but parting breath?
—"MacPherson's Rant,"
a folk song
Epilogue
"SECURE FROM RED ALERT. Establish contact with the shuttlecraft and have them report on any rescues and return to the ship as soon as possible. We need a damage-control party on the bridge."
The bridge gasped and spat around them, but there was a sense of control again. Pausing to cough out the acrid smoke that was tickling his lungs, James Kirk prowled his bridge and checked on his people one by one. In their sweat-streaked faces he saw the charity they offered him for the decision he had been forced to make, their willingness to do it all again if necessary, and a respect he found somehow saddening.
One by one they assured him they were all right and would now begin the slow process of piecing together the damaged systems that had brought them through all this alive.
There wasn't one of them who would jump ship at the next dock after all this. These were the kind of people who discovered themselves better for having fielded mortal danger. No matter the fright, they hadn't crouched scared or shrunk from the face of it or let it petrify them out of doing their jobs. Not even Donnier and Byers, who had found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing things they'd never imagined they would have to do. But if the ship had been wrecked under them, they'd have died with their hands on the halyards. That was something to write home about.
One by one he con
gratulated them, and finally made it around to Spock.
"Mr. Spock."
"Captain."
"Final analysis?"
"Zennor's ship has been completely decimated. Their dreadnought attachment was apparently a massive power factory, and once unshielded and ignited …"
Spock paused and shook his head, communicating silently the ferocity of such a chain reaction.
"I am certain it was very quick," he added.
Gratefully, Kirk made a small, inadequate nod. "Thank you. But Zennor made his own choice. I'm sorry it had to happen, but I won't blame myself."
Spock seemed relieved by that. "Both the shuttlecraft Columbia and Galileo are on final approach, and both report having picked up survivors from several Klingon lifepods. Galileo reports she's towing what may be a lifepod from Zennor's ship, but there are no life signs aboard."
"I want to have a look at that. Tell them not to open it until I get there."
"Yes, sir."
"Captain," McCoy interrupted, using his good hand to hold the communications earpiece to his ear. "General Kellen's requesting permission to come aboard."
Kirk glanced at him. "Fine. But tell him to come unarmed this time and expect to be under armed escort at all times."
McCoy paled at having to tell that to a Klingon general, but turned back to the board.
"Captain," Spock went on, "I have also picked up telemetry broadcast by Zennor just prior to the final explosion, but it has not been sorted out yet. The signals were scrambled and quite complex."
"Telemetry? Meant for us?"
"No, sir. I believe he meant it for broadcast back to his own people."
"Do you think the message got through?"
Spock canted his head to the side, then winced and straightened it again. "No way to tell I know it was successfully broadcast, but there was no evidence that the fissure opened to receive it. Still, their technology is largely an unknown."
"See if you can make any sense of it. I'll be on the flight deck. Have the general brought there when he comes aboard. McCoy, with me. And, Spock … thank you again."