by David Mack
Watching the ground and the Sagittarius recede, Terrell hoped Captain Nassir would embrace cold reason, abandon the landing party, and save the ship. But as towers of flame ripped apart the statite around the stationary starship, Terrell feared it might already be too late.
Distant explosions flashed on the Endeavour’s viewscreen. Watching with her fists and jaw clenched in fury, Khatami felt like an overwound spring being twisted tighter by each new bit of bad news her bridge crew reported, torqued one step closer to breaking by every crimson bloom the Tholians’ weapons ignited on the statite. Then, all at once, the Tholians’ massive barrage ceased—but the statite continued to fracture and flare with internal eruptions.
“What am I looking at?” she demanded.
Klisiewicz stared into the blue glow of the sensor display. “The Tholians have deployed six devices onto the underside of the statite. The devices have embedded themselves on the surface at roughly equidistant points from the center, approximately sixty degrees apart.”
She eyed the magnified image on the forward viewscreen. “What are they?”
The science officer straightened and turned toward her. “There’s nothing like these things in the memory banks. They’re generating harmonically reinforcing interphasic distortion fields. In about five minutes those things’ll rip the statite to shreds.”
“Did you say ‘interphasic’ distortion fields?” The word jogged Khatami’s memory of a classified briefing disseminated recently to Starfleet captains throughout the fleet. The Enterprise had encountered an interphasic rift that had proved highly dangerous to navigation. Though a general alert would eventually go out to the public, so far the phenomenon was still classified as top secret while Starfleet investigated all its possible properties and effects. The report filed by the Enterprise’s captain had suggested the interphasic rift might be a natural anomaly, but if the Tholians were wielding such forces as weapons, this was valuable intelligence that needed to be relayed to Starfleet Command immediately. “Estrada, have you raised the Sagittarius yet?”
“Not yet, Captain. Still trying.”
From the forward console, Ensign Sliney declared, “The Tholians are powering up their weapons, Captain!” Seconds later, six of the Tholian ships launched another sextet of the unknown devices into the underside of the statite, targeting them precisely to reduce the spaces between them to thirty degrees. Around them, the statite’s disintegration accelerated, and sensor alarms shrilled from numerous stations on the Endeavour’s bridge.
Returning to her chair, Khatami felt her pulse pounding in her temples. “Estrada! Hail the Tholian commander! Order him to cease fire and deactivate those devices immediately!”
Keying in commands, the communications officer replied, “Transmitting now.” The viewscreen flared momentarily as the Tholian fleet fired another barrage of charged plasma at the statite, which listed even more sharply off its axis. Then Estrada grimaced and swiveled around to face Khatami. “No answer from the Tholians, Captain.”
“Red Alert,” Khatami declared. “All hands to battle stations. Thorsen, raise shields. Sliney, move us into an attack posture.”
Stano interposed herself between Khatami and the view-screen. “Captain, if we fire on the Tholians, we might be starting a war.”
Khatami protested, “They fired first.”
“On an alien construct to which we have no claim. They can claim they didn’t believe the Sagittarius was there. They have diplomatic cover on this. We don’t.”
Precious seconds bled away as Khatami weighed the lives of the Sagittarius’s fourteen crew members, her own ship’s complement of more than four hundred personnel, and the potential casualties—military and civilian alike—that would be on her conscience if she gave the order that started a war. Then she look around Stano at Thorsen. “Target the twelve Tholian devices on the statite and fire phasers. Keep firing till they’re gone.”
“Aye, sir,” Thorsen said, already turning her command into action. The high-pitched whoop of the Endeavour’s phaser banks resounded through the hull as blue beams slashed through the darkness and began vaporizing the interphasic generators.
Firing on the Tholians’ weapons rather than their ships was a legal gray area. Khatami could argue her actions were not aggressive but defensive. If the Tholians chose to interpret this act as hostility and escalate this confrontation, the consequences would be on their collective conscience, not hers—but she was hoping they would take the hint and back off.
Klisiewicz checked the sensors, then aimed a wary glance at his captain and first officer. “The Tholian fleet is coming about and moving into an attack formation.”
So much for hope.
“That didn’t take long,” Stano said.
Khatami forced an empty smile. “Good. Now they have something new to shoot at. Keep them busy as long as you can, and let’s hope the Sagittarius can use this time to escape.”
Stano’s eyes widened as the Tholian fleet loomed large on the main screen. “Great plan, Captain. Now who’s going to rescue us?”
Before Khatami could lighten the moment with a witty retort, the Tholians opened fire, and then all she could hear inside the Endeavour was a roar like thunder.
“On the count of three!” shouted Terrell, watching the rover’s slow roll. “One! Two! Three!”
He and the other members of the landing party in his vehicle huddled together in the middle of the ATV’s passenger area and fired their environmental suits’ maneuvering thrusters straight up, holding open the thrust valves until he ordered, “Stop!”
Looking over the vehicle’s edge, zh’Firro exclaimed, “It worked! We’re moving back toward the ground!”
Terrell exulted but kept his relief to himself. The rover’s descent was fast enough to get them back within less than ten seconds, but slow enough that the impact wouldn’t inflict serious damage on the vehicle or them. “All right, Master Chief,” he said over the open channel, “your turn. Look for a full burn of about six-point-one seconds.”
“Copy that, sir.” To his passengers, Ilucci added, “Look sharp, guys.” Keeping one eye on the ground and the other on Ilucci’s rover, Terrell heard Ilucci start his countdown right on time. “Five. Four.” He was just starting to say three when both rovers went into free fall.
Ziggy slammed to the ground hard, and Terrell, zh’Firro, and Threx held on to their unfastened harness straps as the vehicle tumbled sideways, tossing them like rag dolls in slow motion inside the roll cage before coming to rest upright inside a cloud of fast-settling dust. As the fine gray haze dissipated, Terrell saw Roxy lying on its side a few dozen meters behind them. Half-buried in the regolith were the unmoving forms of its passengers.
“Master Chief! Theriault! Razka! Someone respond!” Terrell tried to start Ziggy’s engine, but the rover’s controls remained dark.
Beside and behind him, Threx and zh’Firro stared mutely toward their fallen comrades. Then the burly Denobulan pointed. “They’re moving!”
Boosting the gain to his suit’s transceiver, Terrell said, “Master Chief? Are you mobile?”
In the distance, the portly chief engineer emerged from behind Roxy’s bent chassis. “I think we are, but Roxy’s toast.”
The statite’s horizon began to shatter and blow away in blinding flashes of light, one roughly every two seconds. Terrell shouted, “Back to the ship! Move!” He bailed out of Ziggy and forced his bruised, aching body to sprint toward the Sagittarius. In moments, zh’Firro had outpaced him, but Threx struggled to keep up; his beefy frame was made for power, not speed.
As they neared the ramp to the ship’s cargo hold, Terrell heard Captain Nassir’s voice crackling over the comm. “. . . to landing party, please respond!”
“We’re here, Captain,” he replied, gasping for breath as he followed zh’Firro up the ramp. “A few more seconds and we’ll all be aboard.”
Nassir, who almost never raised his voice, shouted, “We need to go, Clark!”
> Terrell looked back and windmilled his arm, signaling Ilucci, Theriault, and Razka to hurry. The Saurian scout was well ahead of the science officer and chief engineer when the ground between them heaved upward and then erupted in a blast of light, heat, and molten rock. A wall of flames and superheated gas slammed into Razka’s back and launched him toward the Sagittarius. He landed, unconscious inside his smoldering environmental suit, mere meters from the ramp. Terrell ran to the fallen scout, grabbed him beneath his arms, and dragged him backward up the ramp into the ship. Threx and zh’Firro stood at the bottom of the ramp, both looking past Terrell for any sign of Ilucci or Theriault.
Over the comm, Nassir commanded, “Close the aft hatch! We’re taking off!”
“No!” zh’Firro cried. “Theriault and the chief are still out there!”
“Close that hatch! That’s an order!”
Terrell set down Razka and turned to see zh’Firro and Threx staring at him, their gazes feral and desperate, both pleading with their eyes for him to do something. Stealing a look out the open hatchway, he saw Ilucci and Theriault both down and not moving, surrounded by a hellscape of fire and fracturing ground. He made up his mind.
“The hatch won’t close, sir,” he lied. “The controls are jammed.”
Nassir replied, “Get inside, I’ll close it from up here.”
Terrell slapped Threx’s shoulder and pointed at a nearby locker for emergency gear. The senior engineer’s mate nodded, understanding Terrell’s intentions perfectly. Terrell motioned for zh’Firro to follow him, and she did so without hesitation. On his way down the ramp, he said, “Engineer Threx is fixing the ramp now, sir!” As he and zh’Firro hit the ground, Threx wedged a large, heavy tool into a critical segment of the ramp’s hydraulics.
Even through his suit, Terrell could feel the heat and radiation that were tearing the statite to pieces under their feet. Every running stride was a fight to stay upright as the ground buckled and sagged, then expanded and erupted. Walls of fire burst randomly from growing fissures, and Terrell knew that he and zh’Firro wouldn’t be able to count on taking the same route back to the ship, because it likely would no longer be there.
They reached Ilucci and Theriault. The engineer was facedown in the dirt, and the lieutenant was sprawled on her back in an awkward pose. Terrell didn’t bother to check for vital signs. He’d come out here to bring his people home, dead or alive. He kneeled and hefted Ilucci over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He turned to see zh’Firro had done the same for Theriault. With a nod, he signaled her to lead the way back. The lithe Andorian wasted no time and began the hard run back to the ship.
Dodging the random hazards of the dying statite had been hard enough with his hands free, but struggling under Ilucci’s dead weight, Terrell found the fiery maze insurmountable. Every turn he made led to a dead end, every path zh’Firro blazed turned to slag before he could follow it to safety. Within seconds he was ten meters behind her and turning in panicked circles, frantically searching for a way back to the ship. Steeling his nerve, he hoped the Starfleet environmental suits were as well insulated as their design specs claimed—and he made a straight dash through the flames toward the Sagittarius.
He regretted his choice almost immediately. He felt the sting of searing heat over his entire body, except where he was covered by Ilucci. Painful burning sensations prickled his face and back, jabbed his arms and legs like needles fresh from an acid bath, and filled his suit with the horrid stench of singed body hair. By the time he broke through the far side of the firewall and stumbled the last few meters to the ship, he was sure the bottoms of his feet were covered in broken blisters. He fell to his knees halfway up the ramp, and Threx and zh’Firro leapt forward to grab Ilucci and carry him inside to safety.
Terrell crawled up the ramp into the cargo hold. As he collapsed in exhaustion onto the deck, he felt a rumbling through the ship’s hull and knew it wasn’t another quake. The engines were powering up. He shot a look at Threx, who grabbed the bulky metal rod he’d wedged into the ramp’s hydraulics and pulled on it—only to find it was jammed.
Goddammit, Terrell cursed to himself, this is no time for irony! He forced himself to stand, stumble across the shuddering deck to Threx’s side, and grab the rod. Adding his strength to the Denobulan’s, he gritted his teeth and pulled until he was sure he’d given himself a hernia. Then the rod broke free, and the sudden release sent Terrell crashing back to the deck. Lying beside Ilucci, Razka, and Theriault, he watched the ramp lift and close, and he keyed his suit’s transceiver. “Terrell to bridge. Ramp closed.”
“Clark, get up here, on the double.” The captain sounded pissed off.
“On my way.” He shut off his comm and groaned. No rest for the wicked.
The environmental status light beside the ramp switched from red to green, indicating the cargo hold had been repressurized. As Doctor Babitz and medical technician Tan Bao scrambled down the ladder with medkits in hand, Terrell gratefully emancipated himself from the stifling bulk of the headpiece, then stripped off the rest of his suit and left it on the deck. Dressed only in his regulation gray undergarments, he winced as he climbed the ladder to the main deck.
Seconds later, he stepped onto the bridge. Nassir was in the command chair, and Dastin was at the helm. On the main view-screen, the crumbling disk of the statite was being pulverized by the pulsar’s emissions as it tumbled downward on a collision course with the neutron star. The captain turned slowly to face Terrell and fixed him with a stinkeye glare. “A jammed hatch, Clark? Really? That was the best excuse you could come up with?”
Terrell shrugged. “Time was a factor.”
Nassir reproached him with a look. “Try to come up with something better for the log.”
“Yes, sir.” Terrell felt himself sway, and he blinked to focus his eyes as he fought off an attack of vertigo. “Permission to go to sickbay and collapse?”
“Granted.”
Bad news came to Khatami from every direction. On her right, Klisiewicz tore his eyes from the science console to warn, “Starboard shields buckling!” At the forward stations, Thorsen called out, “Enemy ships too close for torpedo lock!” Shouting over Thorsen, Sliney declared, “The Tholians have split into three groups and are flanking us!” Over the intraship comm, chief engineer Bersh glov Mog bellowed, “Hull breaches on Decks Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen!”
“Thorsen, switch to phasers! Target the group off our port bow!”
Thunderstrokes of enemy fire pummeled the Endeavour’s hull and drowned out the angry screech of its phasers. A split-second of weightlessness was Khatami’s only warning before the deck pitched, courtesy of a momentary overload of the inertial dampers. She clutched the arms of her chair while her bridge crew struggled not to be hurled from their seats. The overhead lights dimmed for several seconds as the bridge consoles stuttered and threatened to go dark, and for a moment the only light was the ruddy glow of the Red Alert panels on the bulkheads.
Systems all over the bridge flickered, then thrummed back into service. Another low shriek of the phasers reassured Khatami that her ship was still combat-worthy. “Helm, hard about! If you have to ram through the enemy formation, do it, but block their shot of the statite!”
Eyes fixed on the main viewer, a despondent Thorsen replied, “Too late, Captain.”
The screen showed the splintered remains of the statite being blasted into dust by the pulsar’s regular bolts of supercharged particles. With a majestic flash, the statite vanished.
Thorsen looked back at Khatami. “The Tholian fleet’s disengaging, Captain. I guess they’re calling this mission accomplished.”
Klisiewicz checked his sensor readings. “The other nodes in the statite cloud are falling into the star, Captain. So much for studying the—” He let the sentence trail off as he worked furiously at his console, adjusting the settings on the sensors.
As impatient as Khatami was to know what had snared the science officer’s attention, it wa
s Stano who prodded, “Talk to me, Klisiewicz. What’ve you got?”
Joy widened his eyes and lifted his voice. “The Sagittarius! She’s clear of the pulsar’s emission axis and breaking orbit of the star at full impulse!”
Immediately quashing the good mood, Thorsen declared, “Tholian fleet coming about on an intercept course for the Sagittarius!”
Khatami seized the moment. “Helm, put us between the Sagittarius and the Tholians. Estrada, let Sagittarius know we’ll guard their aft quarter. Thorsen, route all shield power to the aft emitters, and have all torpedoes transferred to the aft launchers, on the double.” She keyed open an intraship channel. “Bridge to engineering. Stand by for maximum warp.”
“We’ll give you all we’ve got,” Mog answered.
Holding one hand over the Feinberger transceiver in his ear, Estrada reported, “Captain? Sagittarius says, ‘Thanks for the escort, and try to keep up.’”
“Tholian vessels closing fast and charging weapons,” Thorsen interjected.
“Load aft torpedo tubes,” Khatami said, “and stand by to fire a full spread, Pattern Romeo.” With a look she cued Stano to step out of the command well to the upper deck, watch over Klisiewicz’s shoulder, and let her know when the Tholians closed to optimal range.
Sliney locked in a set of coordinates on the helm console. “Sagittarius has set course for Vanguard. They’re powering up their warp nacelles.”
“Stay with them, Mister Sliney.”
“Aye, sir.” On the main screen, the Sagittarius went to warp speed in an iridescent flash, and Sliney jumped the Endeavour into subspace right behind the scout ship.
Thorsen noted with dry efficiency, “The Tholians are matching our course and speed.”
Stano nodded at Khatami, indicating that the Tholian battle group was in range.
“Fire,” Khatami said. “Aft angle on-screen.” The viewscreen switched to show the volley of photon torpedoes that raced away from the Endeavour and detonated in the Tholians’ path. She hoped a show of strength would discourage their pursuit, but when the blinding glare faded, the Tholian vessels were still there and closing with slow, steady menace.