Legacies #2

by David Mack

  Speechless, the female Klingon stewed in her rage as McCoy and Chapel walked back to the triage line. Once they were a few meters away from the altercation, Chapel confided to McCoy in an embarrassed whisper, “I think I broke my hand.”

  He smiled at Chapel, touched by her loyalty. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure, Doctor.”

  Twenty-six

  Wind and fire buffeted the bird-of-prey. Arrowing through the skies of Centaurus, falling like a meteor meeting its destiny, the Velibor resonated with the howls of displaced air and hull plates buckling under pressure. The enemy was at best a heartbeat behind and growing closer with each passing breath. Every part of the ship shuddered with dread at what was coming, from the dimming lights to the engines screaming like a choir of the damned.

  Mirat clutched the sides of the main console with both hands, doing his best to be a rock amid the chaos. “Pilus! Lock disruptors onto the Klingons’ compound!”

  “I can’t get a lock through the shields,” said the young tactical officer.

  This all would have been so much simpler with plasma torpedoes, Mirat fumed. It was just bad fortune that a wild shot by the Enterprise had deprived the Velibor of its most powerful weapon, leaving its disruptors to break down the ground-based energy shield over the university campus. Where the Transfer Key had struck with ease, the Velibor now would have to force a breach before it could finish this ugly, hateful mission for the Tal Shiar.

  “Concentrate fire on the shield,” Mirat said.

  Pilus scrambled to comply. “What part?”

  “Any part! Just hit it with everything we have! We need to overload its emitters. Helm, level out at eighteen thousand and circle the target so we can maintain fire.”

  Toporok, the helmsman, pulled the ship out of its near-vertical dive and banked the bird-of-prey into a tight circling pattern. “Ready, Centurion!”

  “Fire, Pilus! Alternate disruptor banks! Keep hitting that shield until it falls.”

  Across the main console, Subcommander Kurat updated the tactical display. “The Enterprise is starting its descent!” His eyes bulged. “It’s entering the atmosphere!”

  “Curious,” Mirat said. “Why descend when they can strike from orbit?”

  No one offered a guess, so the high-pitched cries of the Velibor’s disruptors filled the abrupt lacuna in the bridge’s backdrop of chatter. Shimmering streaks of orange crisscrossed on the viewscreen, always converging just in time to hammer the campus’s hemispherical energy shield, which was invisible until it was hit, at which point its outline was revealed by a fast-fading nimbus generated by the system’s energy-dissipation matrix.

  An internal hail flashed on Mirat’s screen. He opened the channel. “Report!”

  Ranimir answered, “We have power spikes in all systems! We need to break off!”

  “Not an option. How long until the torpedo launcher is repaired?”

  “We can’t make a full repair under these conditions!”

  “Then a partial repair. The Enterprise is almost on top of us. We need torpedoes!”

  Over the comm came static, a hiss of escaping gas, something spitting sparks. Then the voice of the beleaguered chief engineer. “I can have it up in ten minutes.”

  “Five minutes, or we’re all dead! Command out!” Mirat closed the channel. “Pilus! Status of the surface shield!”

  The tactical officer’s reply was cut short by a humbling blast that rocked the Velibor. Lights went dark on the command deck for several seconds before hiccupping back to life, only to reveal the smoke belching from multiple failed consoles. Then, as if anyone needed to be told, Kurat reported, “We’re taking fire from the Enterprise.”

  Pilus, at least, stayed focused on his task. “The shield is contracting!”

  “Keep at it! Hit it with all we have! We need that shield down now.”

  “Firing again,” Pilus said, triggering the next salvo from the disruptor banks.

  Another bone-rattling series of blasts shook the Velibor. Sparks rained from the overhead, and the veils of smoke in the corridors behind the command deck thickened to curtains.

  Sadira, who had been observing from the periphery of the command deck, inched toward the main console. “Centurion? Shouldn’t we engage the Enterprise?”

  “Not yet. One miracle at a time, Major.” Another barrage from the Enterprise shook the bird-of-prey. “Kurat, damage report.”

  “Our shields are holding.” Surprise lifted his brows and added a note of hope to his voice. “The Enterprise isn’t firing at full power.”

  “Just as I thought,” Mirat said. “They don’t want to risk civilian collateral damage if they miss. The same reason they can’t use photon torpedoes—a detonation this close to a city would level it. Pilus, keep disruptors on the campus shield.” He opened the internal comm channel. “Ranimir! Plasma torpedoes! Status!”

  The engineer sounded frazzled. “Still a few minutes away.”

  “Work faster, damn it!” As Mirat closed the channel, he noticed Sadira was still staring at him. “What do you want?”

  “The plasma torpedoes—you’re not going to fire them at the city, are you?”

  “Of course not. How stupid are you?” He pointed at the tactical display. “They’re for the Enterprise, so we might actually get out of this alive. We need to take out the Klingon delegation, then break off the attack. That way, it’ll look to their High Council like the Federation betrayed them and tried to blame it on us.”

  She nodded. “Most wise, Centurion. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”

  A look around confirmed the rest of the crew was focused on their duties, so Mirat locked his hand around Sadira’s throat and forced her back to the shadowy edges of the command deck. He put her back to the wall and let his hate-warmed breath wash over her face as he leaned in to make his point. “I’m not doing this for you, Major. I’m completing a mission for the Star Empire, in the way I think gives my ship and my crew the best chance of survival. If not for the pain it would bring down on my family, I’d have already gutted you like a bait fish and shoved you out an airlock. Do we understand each other, Major?”

  She hid her fear like a master. No tears, no tension, barely any reaction at all. It was true, all that Mirat had ever heard about the clandestine services: the Tal Shiar trained its people well. Sadira lifted her chin and spoke without a trace of vibrato. “As long as the mission succeeds and the Empire is served, I don’t care what your motives are . . . Centurion.”

  He backed away from her. “Good.”

  From behind him, Pilus called out, “The shield is down!”

  Mirat spun on his heel and marched back to the main console.

  “Commence strafing run. Target all Klingon ­life-signs—and fire at will.”

  * * *

  Blue skies and a cool breeze gave way to the roar of disruptor blasts and the acrid bite of smoke. Crimson beams slashed massive, burning wounds into the ground and through the buildings that bordered the quad. Trees burst into flames. Stone façades crumbled. Innocent people ran for their lives, desperate to escape the spreading conflagration.

  Heedless of the danger, Sarek dashed through the chaos with Amanda and the rest of the Federation delegation close behind him. He darted from one fallen civilian to another, stopping each time just long enough to assess their injuries and give orders.

  “Where are you hit?” Sarek asked, kneeling beside a young Andorian shen.

  She nodded at her lower left leg. “There.”

  Despite his lack of medical training, Sarek could see the wound was serious; there was evidence of partial disintegration and third-degree burns. “Can you walk?”

  “With help,” the shen said in a calm, level voice, exhibiting a degree of emotional discipline Sarek found quite admirable.

  He beckoned his Bolian assistant. “Isa!” On
ce she was close enough to hear his instructions, he continued, “Help her inside the alumni center.”

  A roaring blur coursed past overhead and scored the front of the alumni center with a fresh salvo of disruptor fire. Isa and the shen both winced at the attack. The young Andorian turned a pleading look back at Sarek. “Is there anywhere else?”

  “Nothing close enough to offer shelter.” To Isa he added, “Get her inside and head for the subbasement. The foundation will provide additional protection.” He helped Isa lift the fallen shen, set them in motion toward the only viable shelter, then searched the smoky quad for his wife. Squinting against the sting of hot fumes wafting past, he found her.

  Amanda was a dozen meters away, tending a young male humanoid whose right arm had been vaporized, leaving a smoldering stump of charred flesh at his shoulder. Around her, the other Federation delegates had each gravitated to other wounded civilians, including at least one seriously wounded police officer. Campus security guards fanned out across the quad, dodging panicked students and faculty who ran in random directions, without strategy or agenda, just an instinctual desire to be anywhere that wasn’t under attack.

  Sarek squatted opposite Amanda, who administered a hypospray of analgesic medicine taken from an emergency first-aid kit they had pulled off a wall in their residence building. She looked into the frightened man’s eyes as the medicine flooded into his shocked system. “This should relieve a bit of the pain, or at least make it easier to manage.” The youth’s eyes took on a glassy affect. Amanda grabbed his chin and turned his head to face her. “Stay with me, Joel.”

  It was evident to Sarek the young man was slipping into shock. He waved over an officer from the campus’s security department. “This man needs medical attention.”

  “So does everyone else,” the guard replied, masking his fear with sarcasm.

  “This man’s wounds are critical,” Amanda insisted. “We have to get him to a hospital.”

  A thunderous explosion echoed across the campus, and a ruddy fireball drew Sarek’s eye. Whoever was strafing the campus had just blown a hole in the university’s hospital complex.

  The security guard coughed out a lungful of smoke. “You ask me? He might be better off where he is.” Then he pointed. “Here come the medics now.”

  A crowd of nearly three dozen people sprinted toward the burning quad. Decked out in white medical jackets over scrubs of blue, green, or pink, they came bearing satchels and cases, stretchers and surgical kits, blankets and water.

  Flames erupted from the shattering windows of the Klingon delegation’s residence hall, followed by dense gouts of black smoke. A dusty cloud vomited into the sky from the top of the building, suggesting to Sarek its roof had just collapsed—or been destroyed. Either way, the interior of the building was likely to be a crumbling disaster, with several Klingon diplomats trapped inside it. Faced with the shape of the attack, Sarek now realized the Klingons were its principal target, and all the other wounded merely collateral damage.

  Sarek stood but motioned for Amanda not to follow him. “Stay with him.” The medics drew near. “I must help the Klingons.”

  Amanda reached out, as if she could arrest him with a word or a gesture. “Sarek!”

  There was no time to wait for firefighters to respond to the disaster; it was all unfolding far too swiftly for civilian organizations to cope with effectively. If the Klingons were to have any hope of escaping from their residence building, someone needed to come to their aid now.

  After running halfway across the quad, Sarek spied a Starfleet security officer tending to a fallen comrade. The Vulcan ambassador stopped at their side and held out his hand to the security officer. “Hand me your phaser.”

  Squinting with suspicion, the lantern-jawed human man replied, “Are you crazy?”

  “I am Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan. Hand me your phaser or I will have you cashiered out of Starfleet before your shift ends.” His hand remained outstretched, his palm open.

  Whether he was reacting to Sarek’s force of personality or the power of his reputation, the security officer drew his weapon and handed it to Sarek. “I’ll need that back, sir.”

  “Of course. Thank you, Ensign.”

  Sarek raced across the quad toward the blazing husk of the Klingons’ dorm. He vaporized the front door with one high-power shot from the phaser, then took the deepest breath he could hold for more than three minutes, and charged into the inferno.

  Ceilings fell in from above, floors tumbled away underfoot. In every direction, flames danced and stung Sarek’s face with deadly heat. His eyes watered from the toxic fumes, and even though he held his breath and resisted the urge to gasp and inhale, he felt a cruel burn of superheated air snake up his nostrils and down his throat.

  He knew the lifts would be useless. The Klingons must have figured that out by now, he reasoned. A hit from his shoulder opened the door to one emergency stairwell. On the other side he found a furnace whose hungry pull nearly dragged him into its blazing heart. He pulled the door shut and moved on to the next emergency staircase.

  He kicked open the next door to find the stairwell mostly clear of heat or smoke, but also steeped in darkness. From somewhere above the ground floor came the chatter of angry voices. Sarek started up the stairs and shouted into the gap between switchback flights, “Who is there?”

  Loud coughs preceded the reply: “Councillor Prang!”

  “Hurry, Councillor! This exit is still clear!”

  “But the stairs are not!”

  Two and half flights up, Sarek saw the obstruction that had hindered the Klingons’ escape. A stray disruptor shot had reduced the stairs to a twisted knot of concrete and steel.

  Sarek adjusted the settings on his borrowed phaser. “Stand away from the edge! Now!” Above, he heard the scrapes of shuffling feet. The moment they settled, he fired.

  A single bluish-white beam disintegrated the cluster of wreckage blocking the path—but also left a full flight’s gap in the stairwell, a perilous vertical drop from where the Klingons were to where Sarek stood. “The rest of the stairs are structurally sound. You will have to drop down.”

  He expected argument, perhaps an expression of denial. Instead, the Klingons sent their two strongest delegation members first—Prang, followed by Orqom. Next, Marbas and Gempok lowered a wounded colleague over the edge and let him drop—so that Prang and Orqom could catch him. They repeated the process once more before following the others down.

  A quick head count left Sarek concerned. “Three of your delegation—”

  “Are dead,” Prang said. “And unless we move, we’ll join them in Sto-Vo-Kor. Move!”

  They were pragmatic, results-oriented, and coped with the present while thinking of the future and letting go of the past. Perhaps these were people Sarek could negotiate with after all.

  Moving as a unit they left the staircase and navigated the burning ruins of the building’s ground floor. Collapsing timbers blocked their route to the front door until Sarek blasted the debris into free radicals. Then they left the imploding building double-file and regrouped on the quad, well away from the biting heat of the fire.

  Amanda jogged toward Sarek from the far end of the quad, while the Klingons brushed the soot and dust from their clothes. Councillor Prang regarded Sarek with a new eye, one less tainted with hostility or suspicion. “After all our slights against you and your mate, you would run into a burning house for our sakes.” A slow nod. “Maybe you are someone we can make a deal with, Vulcan.” He offered Sarek his open hand.

  Sarek took Prang’s hand and shook it. “I look forward—”

  Fiery pain, a roar that swallowed the world: those were the last things Sarek knew before the darkness took him.

  * * *

  In all of her nineteen short years of life, Joanna McCoy had never seen an explosion bring down an entire building in a flash
of fire and fury.

  She and the other volunteers from the university hospital were far enough from the blast not to feel its first pulse of heat, but its shock wave threw them and everyone else to the heat-brittled grass of the quad. She winced at the knifing pain in her ears, then watched in horror as the residence hall—where she had lived before being temporarily displaced to make way for the peace conference—fell in upon itself. Then a cloud of ash and dust, of pulverized concrete and aerosolized flesh and blood, rolled away from the razed structure’s smoldering footprint.

  Utterly opaque, the cloud consumed everything in its path. It swept over the Klingons who had just escaped the building as well as Ambassador Sarek and his wife.

  Then it reached Joanna, and all she could do was plant her face in the ground and wrap her arms around her head. Hot winds coated her in the greasy filth of the implosion’s aftermath. Joanna didn’t dare breathe in for fear of filling her lungs with fine particles of death.

  Gravelike quiet settled over the quad. She lifted her head.

  Around her, few people were moving. A pall of smoke lingered over everything, and the golden haze of dust obscured anyone and anything more than a dozen meters away. Joanna searched her tunic’s pockets for a sterile face mask, then freed it from its hermetically sealed wrapping and pulled it on over her mouth and nose. The toxic fog stung her eyes, but she let her tears flow and kept her thoughts focused on those with more grievous problems.

  On her left, a staggering medical technician. He didn’t appear to be wounded. Joanna snapped her fingers to get his attention. “Hey! You with me?” He nodded, so she pointed at a ring of stunned civilians closer to the fallen building. “Get over there and triage the wounded. We need to figure out who’s critical and who’s ambulatory. Move.”

  Overhead, the skies thundered with distant explosions, but she had no time to dwell on that. Scores of wounded and dying people lay at her feet. She had work to do.