by Diane Carey
Poor Burnell’s face crumpled. “What?”
“Every few minutes, you say, ‘Dammit, Pavel, you can’t do that!’ ”
“Uh . . .”
“All I need now is someone to tell me I am illogical. Never mind—I will do that myself. You—come over here.”
Molyneaux, running on one breath and turning a couple of shades of green, stumbled to him. “Yes, sir?”
“This is the photon firing control. It is now armed. When I give the order, you will fire it. Do not hesitate.”
“Oh, sir—”
“Not ‘Oh, sir.’ ‘Aye, sir.’ ”
“Aye, sir . . . what can we do if we can’t move the ship, sir?”
“There are always alternatives. This is nothing compared to the time I was in a bar fight. Klingons, outlaws, whiskey, chief engineers—I know what to do.”
He finished arming the torpedo and hurried to stand right between the helm and weapons stations. He put one hand on Burnell’s shoulder and the other on Verdicchio’s. One of the Orion ships shot past so close he felt its wingtip on his cheek.
He started by squeezing Burnell’s shoulder. “When I give Molly the order to fire the forward torpedo, you will move the ship forward. You see those two Orion ships right in front of us? You will go right between them. Understand?”
“Move the ship forward, between the two Orions . . .aye.”
“You will have twenty seconds, no more. I want you to go forward at emergency one-fifth impulse.”
Burnell’s wide face turned pasty. “That’s awfully fast, sir! I don’t know if I can hold it with the ship in this condition!”
“All you have to do is go straight. You don’t even have to turn! Yes?”
“Y-yes . . .”
“And you,” Chekov plowed on, squeezing Verdicchio, “will fire phasers directly forward on my mark.”
“Aye, sir, do you want me to target the Orion on the right or the left? I don’t think I can hit both of them at the same time . . . I’ve never done this bef—”
Chekov shook his head. “You will not be shooting at a ship. You will be shooting right down the middle.” When both boys snapped to look up at him, he gave them his best wise-old-sage glance and firmly repeated, “Exactly down the middle. No questions.”
They settled tensely down and even seemed to physically shrink.
“Aye, sir,” Burnell muttered, “no questions.”
“Sir?” Molyneaux interrupted. I’m reading something funny . . . an incoming signal on long-range. Wow, it’s coming in fast!”
Chekov looked around. “Describe it.”
“Warp six point one . . . emissions Federation standard, Starfleet signature . . . mass approximately two hundred thousand metric tons—”
“Ah, about time!” Clapping his hands once, sharply, Chekov almost startled Verdicchio out of his chair.
Molyneaux leaped out of her seat. “Enterprise? It’s them? Coming to help?”
Chekov made a nonchalant expression. “Of course. What else would have that mass-to-thrust ratio? You see? I told you don’t worry. You worry anyway. What is their ETA?”
“Oh—it’s . . . thirteen minutes!”
“Won’t be soon enough,” Burnell mourned.
True enough. Thirteen minutes was plenty of time for the Orions to finish their job. Chekov pointed at Molyneaux. “Sit down. Back to business. Begin to count now! Verdi, forward thrust!”
Around them the battered Impeller thundered with residual power, all systems seeking energy sources wherever they could get them. Life-support howled in the bulkheads. Engine thrust pulsed like a fibrillating heartbeat. On the forward screen, a sense of sluggish movement made the view of the enemy ships and the privateer Hunter’s Moon wobble in a spacesick way. Flashes of greenish yellow light showed them the Orion conduction mesh building up to suck energy out of the cutter and burn further through her hull.
“Five seconds,” Molyneaux reported. Her hand was poised over the photon firing control.
On the screens, the Orion ships drew closer. The cutter was on a course right down the alley between the two Orions, though they didn’t seem to notice yet that the cutter was moving at all. Likely they were concentrating on the privateer, which continued to dog them in spite of the conduction mesh gradually murdering it.
“Ten seconds!” Molyneaux gasped.
“More thrust,” Chekov ordered. “Increase speed to one-quarter sublight!”
“One quarter,” Burnell responded, numb.
“By the way, Mr. Spock, don’t you think it’s time Mr. Chekov got promoted? Yes, Captain, very logical.”
As the cutter drew quickly toward the Orions, Chekov leaned forward and found himself wickedly grinning. A strange and unexpected change was showing up in his behavior. His chest no longer hurt with struggling breaths. His hands were calm, even warm. His thoughts were in perfect order. Everything seemed clear, even easy. As the situation grew worse and worse, he became more calm.
That had never happened before.
Of course, he’d never been in command before, had he?
Pleased to discover a talent he didn’t know he possessed, Chekov congratulated himself at his level temper. He had an idea of what could happen, what might happen if everything went right, and had himself convinced this was the time to do something crazy and off the books.
Or was he just good at faking it? How often had Jim Kirk been faking it?
“Fifteen seconds!”
Without turning to her, his eyes fixed on the forward screens, Chekov ordered, “Fire photon torpedo!”
With a twisting expression, Molyneaux held her breath and punched the controls. The torpedo spewed out on a pin-straight trajectory between the two Orions, barely missing the privateer on the right side. In a flash, the cutter was past Hunter’s Moon, using its burst of speed to race down the corridor after the photon torpedo.
“Follow it right down the middle!” Chekov ordered Burnell, making a slicing motion with his flattened hand. “Verdi, fire phasers! Detonate the torpedo!”
This was no time to have to repeat himself. Caught up in the absurdity of the order, Burnell plowed the cutter between the Orions just as Verdicchio fired the phasers.
Before them, at proximity distance, the photon torpedo erupted into a deadly plume, detonated on the run, without an impact. Since there was nothing to stop it, the destructive power blew forward, its sun-bright glare forcing them to look away.
“Open fire, direct starboard and port, full phasers!” Chekov shouted over the squeal of the emergency alarms breaking out all over the ship. “Brace for the wash!”
As the unshielded Impeller barnstormed through the turbulent detonation cloud, buffeted violently, the children fought the natural fishtailing and opened fire on both Orion ships as ordered. Fingers of energy corrupted the vessel around them, torturing them with waves of electrical charge. The torpedo had not only momentarily overloaded the Orions’ shields, making them vulnerable to point-blank strikes, but also blinded them to the cutter’s location.
“Twenty seconds!” Molyneaux called.
“Cut thrust!” Chekov called. “Cease fire!”
The howl of power fell abruptly off, leaving only a snap and flail of residual flow here and there. The ship became almost peaceful, and simply coasted on through the photon wash, leaving the crippled Orion ships turning dazedly behind.
“Severe damage, all systems,” Burnell reported. “The net’s almost melted through our exostructure. Another burst and the hull’s going to start collapsing.”
“What about the Orions?”
“They don’t look so good,” Verdicchio reported. “They’re falling away.”
Molyneaux turned. “But the other three are coming forward to meet the starship!”
Burnell’s wide face crumpled as he looked up. The young officer’s question, innocent in its wisdom, put a lance through Chekov’s heart.
“But Captain Kirk doesn’t know about that net, does he?”
/> Privateer Hunter’s Moon
“Impeller hit them while they were blinded! Two of them are retreating.”
“Keep broadcasting, Sylvie, no matter what happens. Troy, keep striking at the other ones. Fire at will, all you can.”
“Our hull’s melting.”
“Let it melt.”
“Firing.”
“I’ll have to remember that one. . . .”
Sucking small breaths and dealing with relentless pain from broken bones, Michael Kilvennan clamped his left arm to his ribs and haunted the only working screen left on his quarterdeck. They were watching themselves die by bits. Or worse—maybe they weren’t scheduled to die like the Impeller was. The privateers and the Conestoga were probably on the same list. Up for sale.
“Michael—I’ve got—I’ve got a . . .” Lying on the deck, Troy Augustine was barely conscious, bleeding from both legs, gashed in the side of his head, breathing in shattered gasps, but watching the secondary access windows on the direct feed. “Signal,” he shoved out before coiling in a spasm.
“Thank God!” Choked by his own injuries, Kilvennan slipped to the deck on one knee, braced a hand on Troy’s shoulder, and looked at the staticky little readout screens, no bigger than the palm of his hand. Even through the static, clear signals bubbled of a solid object racing toward them at a ridiculous speed.
Troy’s eyes watered as he fought raw pain in his legs. “Who’s that?”
“The cavalry, pal.” Kilvennan patted Troy’s arm in quiet victory. “Sylvie, thirty degrees down. Get out of his way.”
“Then it’s him?” Troy struggled, his voice cracking. “It’s Kirk? He actually—got our signal?”
“Yeah . . . yeah, Troy, he got our signal, thank God. . . . Let’s get out of his way.”
“Michael,” Sylvie Graves called from overhead, “the three other Orions are turning into formation to meet the incoming signal. The starship’ll come out of warp right into that conduction net!”
Troy flinched and raised his head. “Hey—what—! Sylvie, do you see this?”
“What’s happening?” Kilvennan dropped to one knee beside Augustine and peered into the casing at the direct feed.
Racing toward them at warp eight-point-seven—past their maximum safe cruising speed, but necessary to close two weeks’ worth of distance—the red dot giving off the Enterprise’s identification signal had begun to draw out into a thin line, like taffy being pulled longer and longer. He squinted, confused. Why would a hard signal stretch like that? Malfunction?
As he was about to stand up again, check the readings against their damage, the long red blip changed again, cracking at its thinnest points, pulling apart as if a giant hand had taken a scissor to the ribbon. Four, five, seven independent blips slowly drew apart from each other. Eight. Nine.
Kilvennan felt his throat tighten. “What the hell . . .”
Above him, Sylvie Graves gasped at the readings. “The starship’s structure is breaking up! It looks like the hull’s falling to pieces!”
Chapter Fifteen
Enterprise
“ENGINES ARE at critical, Captain. Redline on all systems.”
“Just bite on something and hold warp nine, Sulu.”
Sulu didn’t give a response this time. Speed was actually about to break warp ten. He just hadn’t quite been given that order yet.
The starship raced at fantasy speed. Her engines whined angrily as the helm demanded a curved course at emergency high warp. Almost impossible. If it hadn’t been Sulu handling her, Kirk would’ve been forced to order a reduction before turning.
He had to turn. He had to get there. Kilvennan’s distress signal had possessed a pitiful whimper of desperation.
Spock was watching him. Kirk deliberately didn’t look up there. Yes, the ship might break apart. They’d accepted that.
She also might not. This was one of those moments when Kirk felt the bond with the Enterprise that proved they were both alive. This synergy of spirit and hardware could only happen to a man and a ship that fit each other just so. Beneath her sparkling refit, under her new hull plates and touchpads, the starship proved she was still his old stress-tested mate of many adventures. All the weak parts had been long ago hammered out of her, leaving the residual strength deep in her bones upon which he dared depend. No cosmetic appliance could erase the bones that made her the one and only Enterprise.
She would hold warp almost-ten on a curved course as she carried him deeply down and around the enemy’s flank for a surprise attack from behind.
She would hold together . . . she would.
The Orions
“What’s going on? What am I looking at? Explain it to me, you greasy wad!”
Billy Maidenshore grabbed Tu’s slimy muscular arm and yanked at him dangerously. On the screen they were reading the approaching starship, racing in at warp speed, but the readings were splitting up, breaking apart, splintering. Was it an illusion?
The Orions were turning, breaking off their attack on the Conestoga and the privateer ship to face the starship coming at them. The Impeller was faltering off someplace to starboard, suffering her horrible wounds. Kilvennan’s privateers weren’t fairing much better. The Conestoga was theirs, free and clear, except for that damned starship racing in!
“Can’t you get away?” Maidenshore bellowed at the Orion crew.
“I may not have to get away,” Tu said as they watched the screen. “The starship begins to break apart.”
“How do you know that? Show me!”
Tu pointed at the large circular table-screen between them. “This is the starship on its approach trajectory. It broadcasts the Enterprise identification beacon. See how it separates . . . three . . . five . . . nine . . . separate blips now, where moments ago it was one. They are destroying themselves rushing in this way.”
Maidenshore tried to understand, but alarms were going off in his head. One blip, moving at warp six, now nine blips spreading apart. Behind the Orions, the suffering Impeller and Hunter’s Moon were nearly helpless, throwing only potshots. The sting had been almost perfect. The Conestoga full of fat civilians was all his, ready to go to the stockyard.
Now the starship plummeted toward them and Tu and the other Orions had turned to concentrate their spiderweb technology forward to capture it, and the starship was cracking up before it even got to them.
Was he born under a lucky star? That lucky?
He seized Tu’s arm a second time, more fiercely. “It’s a trick. He’s faking you! Turn around, turn around!”
Tu’s arrowlike orange eyes squeezed tight. “Human, release me and stop babbling! I will face my enemy!”
“I’m telling you it’s a fake, you idiot!” Maidenshore roared, desperate to be believed. “He’s tricking you somehow, somehow it’s a fake, somehow it is!”
“My enemy blows his engines apart by pursuing me too hard,” Tu roared back, “and you tell me this is magic? You know nothing about ships.”
“I know about salesmen,” Maidenshore insisted. “I know about acting—I know about humans! Don’t believe what you see! Do something unexpected, right now!”
“Stand back from me.” Tu shoved him away. His many-fingered limb pointed at the table-screen, where nine clearly separate blips were swifting moving farther from each other in a scattered pattern, like water spraying. “The starship is breaking into pieces. Believe it. We win without firing a shot.”
Unable to make a technical case, Maidenshore backed up against the curved side of the Orion pilot station. He knew a fake-out when he saw one, and he knew a sucker too.
Or Tu.
When his shoulders bumped against the curved wall, he felt the first hard shot hit the Orion ship—and hit it from behind, where nobody but himself thought it would come.
A direct hit to the engines. Even a landlubber knew what that meant. Not enough power for the shields. Fighting capacity in the dumper. Turn and run, or get stomped.
Tu cried out with surprise a
nd fury.
Maidenshore mentally tried to make himself smaller for a minute, to avoid getting attention. The Orions were busy. That was both bad and good—it would give him enough time to cook up a fresh story.
Hunter’s Moon
“Could they have overwarped?” Michael Kilvennan’s skin crawled as he watched the ugly splatter that a moment ago had been a single large-mass ship racing toward them at warp five. “I’ve never seen that happen. . . . Oh . . . that’s brilliant.”
On the deck, Troy Augusting gasped, “What’s—what’s happening to it! Michael, the whole starship’s falling apart!”
“It’s not a starship,” Kilvennan said, strangely calm as he watched the screen. “Look at the propulsion meter. They’re all equal. Every piece has an engine. Damn, that’s smart! It’s just a formation of shuttles broadcasting the Enterprise ID code! Shuttles flying at burn-out speed. Sucker’s smart . . .”
Troy choked up blood and spat it out, then struggled to keep his burning eyes on the graphic displays. “Bunch of shuttles to face down three Orions?”
Clamping his arm tighter to his ribs, Michael pushed off Troy, ignoring his first mate’s seizure of pain at the sudden movement. “Syl, get us the hell out of the way! Drop, quick! Leave the Orions’ stern without cover, get it?”
Scarcely was the order out, scarcely had the privateer even moved, when phaser blasts raked through open space, grazing them at proximity range.
Half the privateer’s quarterdeck was swallowed by black smoke. Choking, Michael dragged Sylvie away from the toxic cloud, and hit the manual vent control.
“What the hell was that?” Sylvie gagged over the whine of suction fans.
“Sneak attack!” Michael shouted. “Look!”
On their one remaining visual screen, the three Orion ships glowed and staggered under phaser fire from their aft quarters. Behind them, gliding now at sublight, the Enterprise was still firing at them, point-blank. The nearest Orion ship cracked in half, exploded from inside, then exploded a second time from even deeper inside. Probably the engine room.