Legacies #2

by David Mack

  She kneeled beside a shuddering Tellarite to tie a tourniquet on his leg that would stanch his blood loss long enough to evacuate him to a city hospital. A Klingon who was holding his midriff together with both hands and sheer stubbornness tried to shout her away, but she knew he couldn’t stop her from rendering medical treatment without letting his intestines spill out, so she sprayed an aerosolized antibiotic over his injuries, then closed the wounds—albeit temporarily—with a liberal dose of liquid dermis.

  Then she pivoted to her next patient—and found herself poised between Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan and his wife—both of them unconscious, scorched, and bleeding from multiple shrapnel wounds. All her training abandoned her for seconds that her fear stretched into an eternity. Her fear overcame her paralysis, and she shouted to everyone and no one, “Over here! The ambassador’s been hit! I need a stretcher! Get me a surgical kit! And find me a Vulcan blood donor!” Twisting left, then right, she found no one rushing to her aid. “Dammit, people! Ambassador Sarek is hurt! I need tools, drugs, a doctor—anything!”

  Sarek’s eyes fluttered open. He caught Joanna’s wrist. “I . . . am stunned . . . but will live. Help . . . my wife. Please.” Joanna hesitated, then chose to trust the ­famous Vulcan. She pivoted away from him to tend to Amanda, who remained unconscious. When the folds of the ­woman’s dark outer garment were pulled aside, the bloody wound beneath became clearly visible.

  Another detonation, much closer this time, shattered windows and shook the ground. Screams were followed by the percussion of running footsteps—the music of panicked flight.

  Fighting back against a flood-crush of primal urges that told her to run, Joanna calmed herself and pressed her hands against Amanda’s chest, to cover wounds that pulsed with dark red blood, all while the older woman’s pulse faded with each struggling beat of her heart.

  * * *

  “Keep after them, Sulu!” Kirk was half out of his chair, grasping one arm as he leaned forward to point at the madly banking Romulan bird-of-prey on the main viewscreen. “Chekov! Don’t let them make another pass over the campus! We can’t give them another shot at the Klingons!”

  The screeching of the Enterprise’s phasers traveled up from several decks below to echo inside the bridge. On the viewscreen, twin beams of fierce blue energy shot forward and converged on the Romulan ship’s aft quarter in a brilliant white flash. A secondary explosion tore a hull plate off the bird-of-prey, which trailed smoke as it yawed to starboard and climbed into an evasive corkscrew maneuver.

  With one hand to the transceiver in her ear, Uhura swiveled away from the communications panel. “Captain, reports of multiple civilian casualties on the surface.”

  “Noted, Lieutenant.” Kirk had seen the Velibor’s disruptor beams lance through crowds of innocent people on the New Athens campus. Watching buildings erupt into deadly shrapnel, seeing trees burst into flames, he had known blood would be shed and lives would be lost. His mission had been to prevent such a calamity; now his remit was to minimize the damage and neutralize the threat, as quickly and with as little risk of additional collateral damage as possible. “Scotty, tell your people on the ground to get the campus shield back up, on the double.”

  “They’re doing the best they can, sir,” the chief engineer protested.

  A viewscreen full of blue sky turned to star-flecked darkness as the Enterprise pushed through its own awkward rolling climb, in pursuit of the Velibor. Banshee howls registered the engines’ displeasure. Just as quickly as the cerulean glow of atmosphere had faded it returned, engulfing the viewscreen as the Romulan vessel slipped past the top edge of the frame, only to be recovered briefly before vanishing once more to screen right.

  Atmospheric turbulence buffeted the Enterprise’s hull and made its duranium plates rattle like bone china during an earthquake—an experience Kirk recalled from a formal dinner during his Academy days in San Francisco, and one he would have been happy to forget.

  Clouds parted ahead, no doubt shredded by the super­sonic passage of starships running with shields raised. Kirk strained to spot the Velibor over the curve of Centaurus. He wondered whether he had lost the enemy ship in the skyline of New Athens.

  “Chekov, where the hell are they?”

  The young Russian stammered, “I . . . I don’t know, Captain. They are not on my targeting scanner!”

  “Behind us,” Spock declared in a firm but level voice.

  “Scotty,” Kirk snapped, “more power to—!” Before he could say aft shields, a crushing blow rocked the Enterprise from stern to bow. The jolt launched him from the command chair. He landed on the deck, his shoulder against the forward console, between Chekov and Sulu.

  On the upper level of the bridge, Uhura, Scott, and a relief officer had also been hurled from their chairs, while Spock clung to the edge of the console and the hood over his sensor display. The first officer reported above the continuing rumbles transiting the hull, “A hit by one plasma torpedo. Minor damage to the hull, aft shields are losing power.”

  Kirk pulled himself up the forward console until he was standing. “Sulu, evasive maneuvers. Get us back into firing position. Mister Scott, we need you back in engineering.”

  The engineer sprang from his seat and strode into a waiting turbolift. “You read my mind, Captain. Full damage reports in three minutes.”

  Another jarring blast sent Kirk staggering backward, this time to fall against his own command chair. “Hard to port! Chekov, suppressing fire—and don’t hit any civilians!”

  “Trying, Captain! But there’s still heavy air traffic over the capital—”

  “Just . . .” What could he say? “Do your best.” A new idea struck him. “Sulu, can you force us into a stall during a climbing turn? Trick the Romulans into closing the gap to give Chekov a better shot?”

  “I can try,” Sulu said, already plotting the dangerous stunt.

  Spock left his station to counsel Kirk in confidence from beside the command chair. “Captain, in an atmosphere, such a maneuver could inflict catastrophic stress on our dorsal connecting hull. In a worst-case scenario—”

  “I might snap the saucer clean off,” Kirk said under his breath. “I know, Spock.”

  Again, a punishing detonation hammered the Enterprise’s shields, stuttering the overhead lights and sending the bridge consoles into flickering spasms of malfunction. The normally unflappable first officer remarked with an almost glum affect, “The bird-of-prey is making short work of our defenses.”

  “Good,” Kirk said. “Every shot they land on us is one they aren’t taking at the surface—and I mean to keep it that way as long as possible, until we can finish them.”

  Sulu looked over his shoulder at Kirk. “Ready for the stall.”

  Kirk seized his chair’s armrests and let Spock hurry back to his own post on the bridge’s upper deck. Then he ordered Sulu, “Execute.”

  Unlike the momentary disruption caused by sudden shocks such as disruptor blasts or torpedo detonations, the sustained overload of the ship’s inertial damper system by a wild maneuver inside a gravity well was a uniquely gut-wrenching experience. Kirk tried to steel himself as he watched Sulu enter the commands at the helm—but when the ship’s momentum arrested as its bow climbed and yawed into a near standstill, then rolled through its free fall, he remembered the nausea and vertigo of his first day of zero-g training.

  His breakfast did all it could to push its way back up his esophagus. It took every bit of discipline and experience Kirk possessed to keep his morning meal in his stomach.

  Then Chekov cried out, “Firing!”

  All that was visible on the main viewscreen was a blur of motion and color, pulses of sapphire and emerald light, crimson flashes—and then a hash of static and distorted images as the latest enemy salvo pummeled Kirk’s ship.

  Next came the crushing pressure of acceleration, until the inertial dampers
recovered and made it possible for Kirk to breathe again. “Spock, report!”

  “Two direct hits on the Velibor. Her shields are buckling.”

  “And how are we?”

  This time, Spock’s demeanor took a turn for the grim. “Numerous hits in the engineering section. Shields are failing, and main power is at fifty percent and falling.”

  Kirk’s eyes were fixed upon the retreating aft quarter of the Velibor, which vanished into a cloud bank dozens of kilometers ahead. “They’re faster than we are, more agile. But we have more mass, more power. Let’s start using it. Sulu, do whatever you have to, but do not lose that ship. Chekov, keep firing until we get their shields down, then put a tractor beam on them.”

  The ensign asked, “Then what, Captain?”

  “Then,” Kirk said, “we teach them what it means to get dragged out to the woodshed.”

  Twenty-seven

  No matter how many accolades the captain heaped upon Montgomery Scott, at moments such as this the engineer felt less like a miracle worker than he did like a conductor leading an orchestra composed of chaos, blood, and fire.

  The master systems display in main engineering was a snapshot of the Enterprise, from the inside out. All the major components of the ship, and their countless ­interactions—from here Scott could witness them all at a glance: the power-relay undervoltages between sections C and D below deck nineteen; the power-coupling overloads in starboard phaser control; the failure of the CO2 scrubbers serving the auxiliary control center; firmware failures slowing the response time of the forward phaser bank’s targeting system; jammed valves fouling the deuterium flow to the main impulse reactor up at the rear of the saucer section. He saw them all, and much more, with what was at times a horrifying clarity.

  A ferocious cannonade rocked the ship. Scott held the edges of his console and prayed to his beloved: Hold together, my beauty. I believe in you.

  Alarms flashed across his system board. Fires had broken out on multiple decks. He triggered manual warnings, as a precaution in case the ship’s automated alerts had malfunctioned, then opened an internal channel to the firefighting dispatcher: “Scott to damage control! Fires on decks twenty and twenty-one, all compartments aft of section delta!”

  “Acknowledged,” came the response. “Firefighters responding.”

  Just as he closed that comm circuit, the captain’s priority channel from the bridge flashed for Scott’s attention, accompanied by Kirk’s stressed voice: “Bridge to engineering!”

  He opened the two-way comm circuit. “Scott here.”

  “I need more speed at impulse, and I need the tractor beam ready at full power!”

  More enemy fire racked the ship and reduced auxiliary stations on either side of Scott to heaps of sparking junk. “I’m doing all I can just to hold her together, sir!”

  “This isn’t a request, Mister Scott! We have to match the Romulans’ speed and be ready to drag them back to orbit. And it needs to happen in the next three minutes.”

  It was clear the captain had a bee in his bonnet; when that happened, there was nothing for it. What he wanted had to get done, come what may.

  “Aye, sir. I’ll do what I can. Scott out.” The chief engineer sighed as he closed the channel. Then came the next series of blinking red warnings on his master systems display—a series of alerts he had hoped never to see lit up in dire crimson. The antimatter containment pods were swiftly losing power. If their magnetic fields dipped below safe levels for even a microsecond, the resulting mutual annihilation of matter and escaping antimatter would release enough uncontrolled energy to reduce the Enterprise to a cloud of superheated vapor.

  Scott’s blood ran cold as he remembered where the ship was. In atmosphere, we’ll go up like a bomb! We’ll cook this planet in a flash!

  He opened channels to every damage-control team he had. “Scott to all DC teams! We’re losing antimatter containment! I need fast-response on deck twenty-one! Acknowledge!”

  Someone should have answered immediately. Instead, precious seconds wasted away, until Scott tore his eyes from the warnings of antimatter containment failure to see another system failure light: internal comm circuits for his master systems display.

  There was no more time to delegate.

  Scott bolted from his station and ran aft. As he passed another engineer, he pointed the young woman back the way he’d come. “Alspach! Man the MSD! Get its comms working!”

  The flummoxed blond lieutenant shouted at fast-retreating Scott, “Wait, sir! Where are you going?”

  “To keep us from going up like a bonfire!”

  Ahead of him, a medic was treating an engineer felled by a burn to the side of his face. Scott slowed just enough to snag the other engineer’s tool kit off the deck and sling it over his shoulder, then kept sprinting aft, to the nearest access panel that led into the bowels of the ship, down to the antimatter pods.

  The panel was hot enough to sting his hand as he pulled it up and pushed it aside. A blast-furnace gust struck his face. Scott worried his hair might singe as he lowered himself into the cruel heat that filled the belly of the Enterprise.

  Can’t worry about that now.

  Descending the scalding hot rungs of the ladder, Scott felt his palms blister. Every breath was an assault on his respiratory system; his nose parched within seconds, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, which left his throat burning with pain. Arcs of electricity danced around him and stung his face with sharp licks of forked lightning.

  Just a little farther . . .

  His boots touched down on the catwalk between two rows of antimatter pods. Painful coughs racked his chest and doubled him over as he trudged ahead toward the severed relay he knew was threatening to reduce the ship, its crew, and every living thing on Centaurus to dust. Irregular jets of white-hot leaking plasma crossed his path, nearly close enough to strip the flesh from his bones. Navigating the accidental death traps was like braving the Devil’s funhouse.

  Almost there . . .

  He reached the juncture, barely able to breathe, his legs threatening to betray him at any moment. His eyes scratched in their sockets like they were made of sandpaper as he searched the area for the severed power line that had put so many lives in jeopardy. Then he found its halves, dangling beneath his catwalk.

  Of all the bloody stupid places to put a—

  He decided to save his complaints for after the work was done. There was no remedy for his current predicament but an act of inspired foolhardiness. He squatted and lowered his legs over the sides of the narrow catwalk. Underneath it he crossed his ankles. Then he pulled off his toolkit, selected the right implement for the job, and leaned over the side.

  Half a second later he dangled, upside down, from the catwalk, supported only by his own crossed ankles and quaking leg muscles. In his right hand he held the coupling fuser; with his left he seized the nearest end of the severed line.

  Aided by the kind of ease that only comes from decades of practice, he secured the first end of the line in the fuser, then reached for the other end. It swung and eluded him at first, but a few choice epithets known only to true Scotsmen proved enough to scare the swaying cord into his hand. He lifted it to the fuser and repaired the broken coupling with the press of a button.

  An inverted sit-up enabled him to set the fuser back on the catwalk; a second sit-up let him reach the edge and pull himself back onto the walkway. As he lay gasping in the brutal scorch of the ship’s lowest deck, too tired to move, sprays of fire suppressant rained down from above, followed by rushes of cool, filtered air that washed away the sting of unseen flames. Supine and spent, Scott afforded himself a rare five-second break to enjoy the moment.

  Now I feel like a miracle worker, he mused behind a satisfied grin.

  * * *

  To some people, operating the helm of a starship looked like nothing more than pus
hing buttons and flipping switches, but Sulu knew better. From his seat on the bridge of the Enterprise, he felt the ship’s every movement as if it were an extension of his own body.

  More than one doctor had suggested he was imagining that connection, but he knew they were wrong. A galvanic tingling made hairs on the backs of his hands stand tall when he fired the phasers. When he pushed the ship through hard turns and wild rolls, maneuvers for which its stately frame had not been designed, the groaning of its spaceframe felt the same to him as the aching in his joints when he lunged beyond his comfort zone while fencing, or landed without grace after being thrown by an opponent during judo practice.

  Today he was putting the Enterprise through its paces in a way few helm officers had ever tested a starship as large as the Constitution-class heavy cruiser. So far it had survived every punishment he had imposed—but the pursuit of the Velibor wasn’t over yet.

  “Range closing to five hundred kilometers,” Sulu said loudly enough for everyone on the bridge to hear. “The bird-of-prey is shifting its heading back toward the New Athens campus.”

  Captain Kirk watched the elusive silver shape dart through cloud banks on the main viewscreen. “We need to make sure they don’t get there. Chekov, hit them again.”

  The navigator adjusted the controls at his station, then halted his efforts with irritation. “Still too much air traffic, Captain! If I miss, I might hit civilians.”

  Spock pivoted away from his console. “We have another problem, Captain. The firing of phasers and disruptors in the planet’s atmosphere has generated unusually high levels of ionized particles, which are interfering with the planet’s civilian data network.”

  “Add it to Mister Scott’s repair list,” the captain said. “Job one is capturing the Velibor intact and recovering the Transfer Key. Speaking of which, we need to get closer, Sulu.”

  “Trying, sir.” There was no more speed left to wring from the ship’s impulse engines, but Sulu did his best to coax one more bump of acceleration from the overtaxed fusion cores.