by David Mack
“That is an accurate assessment,” Spock said. “I suggest you continue, as we are running out of time to complete our mission.”
“You don’t say.” She reversed the positions of a row of sliders on the right wall.
After a few seconds, Spock reported, “The center circular blade has retracted, and the plasma arcs have multiplied and overlapped.”
One by one, Burnham tested all the controls in the pit, recording the effects and duration of each change. When there were no more levers to move, toggles to flip, or sliders to push, she programmed her tricorder and Spock’s to jointly compute the most advantageous configuration, and the most efficient order in which to set it. She reviewed the result with dismay.
“I have bad news,” she said.
Spock looked down over the edge of the pit. “Tell me.”
“The optimal configuration to create a gap large enough for us to somersault through the barrier will take me nearly a minute to arrange, following a very specific sequence, and adjusting various controls to partial settings. Once the last control is set, the path will be open . . . but only for about four seconds. Just enough time for you to get through.”
“And you?”
She shook her head. “I can’t climb out of this pit, sprint to the barrier, and jump through before it closes. I’m in good shape, but not that good.”
“Is there an alternative setting that would enable—?”
“No, I checked. Any adjustment intended to buy me more time disrupts the equilibrium and causes one of the systems to trigger early, which would prevent you from getting across.”
Spock absorbed that, looked at the barrier, then faced Burnham. “I suggest we exchange roles. I might be able to escape from the pit and pass the barrier before it closes.”
“No, Spock. I’ve already memorized the sequence. And as the senior officer, I’m responsible for your life. You’re going first, on my mark. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get ready. Because I’m starting the sequence.” She set herself to work executing the complex series of adjustments to the controls in the pit, aware that the moment she let go of each one it began its march back toward doom. One after another, she forced the levers, sliders, dials, and toggles into the configuration the tricorder had told her was their only safe choice.
She moved the last slider into place, three centimeters from its top position. “Go, Spock!”
Burnham sprang toward the pit’s ladder. From the corridor above she heard Spock’s running steps as he sprinted toward the paused barrier. As she pulled herself over the edge and out of the pit, she saw the soles of Spock’s boots as he dived through the empty space between stuttering blades and impeded plasma arcs.
Scrambling for purchase, Burnham fought to get traction, to get off her knees and run. By her second step the blades in the portal were shivering as if with anticipation of taking her life. The plasma was quavering, threatening to slip its magnetic bonds, as she took her third running step. In her head, the precious seconds counted down, and she knew she wasn’t going to make it.
But she was committed now; there was nowhere to go but forward.
Her foot landed and she tensed to make her leap forward.
Inside the barrier, the center blade began to rise—
—until Spock reached into the trap and jammed his tri-corder into its gears.
Burnham was airborne and passing through the barrier when she heard the grinding of metal and polymer beneath her, the hideous crunch and crackle of a tricorder being chewed into scrap, spitting sparks and shrapnel every which way, peppering her as she passed over.
An arc of plasma lashed out and cut a burn across her left thigh. The barrier’s rear blade nicked the tip of her boot and barely missed severing one of her toes.
Then she crashed to the deck, smoldering and bruised, scuffed and sliced, but alive. She looked back at the barrier, once more in full flower, a mesmerizing sculpture of fire and metal locked in a lethal dance.
Then she looked up at Spock. “Risky move, mister. You might’ve lost an arm.”
“It seemed the logical choice.” He offered her his hand. Burnham accepted his help, and he pulled her to her feet.
She dusted herself off. “Like father, like son.”
Her comment perplexed Spock. “Pardon?”
Only too late did she realize she had broached a subject better left unspoken. She looked away, unable to meet his searching gaze. “Forget I said anything.” Eager to abandon her faux pas, she resumed walking toward the Juggernaut’s core. “Let’s just get this done and go home.”
Spock said nothing as he followed Burnham on what she hoped was the final leg of their shared journey, but she imagined she could feel his justifiable curiosity hounding her every step.
Sarek was right, Burnham lamented. I really need to learn the value of silence.
19
* * *
“Get ready to be impressed,” Cross said, leading Kolova to immediately lower her expectations instead. The governor-in-exile watched the ex-Starfleeter make a few last-second adjustments to her jumble of tech tucked into a shadowy corner below the city’s auxiliary reservoir.
Pale blue beams shot from an emitter mounted on top of Cross’s computer. They danced and sparred with one another as they struggled to resolve themselves into recognizable shapes.
Cross tweaked settings on her gear. “I just need a second to sync the audio with the hologram.” Nudging dials a few degrees one way or the other, she added, “I had to strip out the color subcarrier data to stabilize the signal after I broke the cipher. But we should have the last full communication between the ships in orbit and whoever they were talking to on Earth.”
While the communications expert coaxed the hologram into stability, Kolova glanced over her shoulder. A sea of faces, each a portrait in anticipation, pressed their attention inward.
The palpable tension worsened as Cross continued to finesse the settings of her system. From behind Kolova, Bowen grumbled, “Is this gonna work or not?”
“Loosen the strap on your jock,” Cross snapped back. “If you could do this, I wouldn’t be here. So do me a favor, and shut up while I’m working.” Her fingers struck like lightning as she keyed in a long sequence of commands with terrifying precision. The holographic projector’s beams brightened, and she declared, “Make a hole, folks! It’s showtime!”
The crowd stepped back from the suddenly coherent projection. Now present in their midst were pale blue ghosts of Captains Georgiou and Pike, and a square-jawed Starfleet admiral.
“Patching in the audio,” Cross said. “It’s gonna be a bit thin. Best I could do.”
She flipped a switch, and the ghosts acquired voices.
“—see what the goddamned problem is,” the admiral said, his anger evident in spite of his voice sounding tinny and distant, robbed of its lower frequencies. “For that matter, I don’t understand why you haven’t destroyed that thing already.”
Georgiou protested, “The situation is more nuanced than that. In addition to the risk to the colonists, we’ve also found new evidence of a previously unreported indigenous civilization from nine million years ago. To lose the chance to study and document—”
“Hang on, Captain,” the admiral said. “The presence of our colony by far outweighs the archeological value of some obscure pile of bones your science officer dug up. So what makes you think that this ‘new evidence’ would have any effect on an order I’ve already given?”
“I’m just trying to say that the situation is more complex than it—”
“No, Captain, it isn’t.” The admiral frowned. “Starfleet Command and the Federation Council are in agreement on this: The Juggernaut absolutely must not be allowed to leave that planet, no matter the cost. That’s why we tasked Captain Pike with destroying it.”
His argument visibly annoyed Georgiou. “With all respect, sir, my ship was the first to respond to this crisis. And while I
respect that Captain Pike has been trusted with command of a Constitution-class vessel, the fact is that I have seniority of command.” She threw a conciliatory look at Pike. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Pike said, dismissing her worry with a wave and a nod.
“Be that as it may,” the admiral said, “if the Juggernaut gets off Sirsa III, millions of innocent lives will be at risk on worlds in adjacent star systems. The Federation simply can’t have a massive alien killing machine running amok within our borders.”
“I understand that, sir,” Georgiou said. “Which is why two of our officers infiltrated the Juggernaut and are working even now to disable it before it does further damage.”
The admiral wore a creased mask of doubt. “Are you sure they’ll be able to accomplish that mission? Have you been in contact with them since they went inside?”
“We’re still waiting to resume contact,” Georgiou said, “but I have every—”
“Not good enough,” the admiral cut in. “There are too many lives on the line to put my trust in long shots, Captain, so let me make this as direct as I can: If that behemoth powers up its stardrive, you are to take any and all measures necessary to destroy it, up to and including the implementation of General Order Twenty-four. And since you’ve made an issue of your seniority, let me add that ultimate responsibility for accomplishing this mission now rests with you, Captain Georgiou. If the Juggernaut escapes from Sirsa III, and by some miracle you’re still alive, rest assured that your career in Starfleet won’t be. Do I make myself clear, Captain?”
“As a bell, Admiral.”
“Then I’m glad we’ve had this little chat. Now stop wasting each other’s time and mine, and get to work destroying that thing while you still can. Anderson out.”
The admiral’s image flickered, then disappeared. Cross paused the hologram’s playback. “There’s more,” she said, “but the autotranscript says it’s just a bunch of boring tech stuff.” She swiveled her chair away from her consoles to confront Kolova and the crowd. “The thing y’all should be shitting bricks over right now is Admiral Anderson giving them the go-ahead for General Order Twenty-four.”
A knot of concern tightened in Kolova’s stomach. “Why? What’s that?”
Cross rolled her eyes. “Oh, just a few lines in the Starfleet Charter that compel starship commanders and their crews to exterminate all life on a planet by orbital bombardment.”
Eyes widened with horror throughout the crowd. Bowen mastered his fear with anger. “Are you serious? Would they really do that?”
“I’m as serious as a warp-core breach,” Cross said. “And yeah, they would. They’ve got a direct order from an admiral and sign-off from the Federation Council. Which means if they don’t think they can take the Juggernaut in a fair fight, they’ve got permission to blast this whole planet—and every last one of us—into radioactive glass, if that’s what it takes to kill it.” She tapped a fingernail against a screen showing a map of the region around the capital, including the bay where the Juggernaut now floated, just a few kilometers offshore. “And if any of you are wondering, right now we’re all sitting at ground zero for maximum glassage. So smoke ’em if you got ’em.”
That was the last straw for Kolova. She was done being patient, being meek, playing defense. “Everybody grab a weapon. I don’t give a damn what you find, as long as you’re armed before we reach the surface.”
Her chief of staff wore a worried look. “Why? What are we doing?”
Kolova took a plasma pistol from a stranger standing next to her, and she tucked the weapon into her belt. “If Starfleet plans to put us in harm’s way, I say we make sure they keep some skin in this fight too.”
* * *
If hours of triage and emergency medicine in the New Astana Medical Center had confirmed anything for Doctor Nambue, it was that it took far less time and expertise to inflict massive casualties than it took to diagnose and treat them. He and the other medical personnel from the Shenzhou and the Enterprise had been up to their elbows in burn wounds, lacerations, and broken bones for the past two hours, and the parade of wounded civilians had yet to abate.
He sprayed a coating of synthetic skin over a blistered wound on a woman’s arm, then put a hypospray to her jugular vein and with a gentle push injected her with a mild dose of analgesic mixed with anti-inflammatory medicine. “You’ll be fine,” he told her, marshaling his most calming bedside manner. “In a few seconds, the pain will fade away. Lie back and try to rest. A nurse will be by to check on you in a couple of hours.” The woman smiled, nodded once, then slipped into blissful unconsciousness.
She has no idea how I much I envy her right now, Nambue thought as he gathered up his medkit and moved down the line to the next patient waiting for care.
Across the narrow corridor from him, the Enterprise’s chief medical officer, Doctor Philip Boyce, hunched over a groaning young man while setting the fellow’s broken tibia. “This is gonna smart,” Boyce warned him—and then he forced the bone back into alignment with a sharp snap. The patient did his best to swallow a scream of pain, while Boyce dug a hypospray from his satchel. “Normally, I’d give you a shot of Tennessee anesthesia, but I’ve been told the locals frown on my brand of classical medicine.” He put the hypo to the man’s neck and injected him. “That oughtta take the edge off, son. See you tomorrow.”
The two CMOs faced each other, and Nambue tried to endear himself to his curmudgeonly counterpart with a disarming smile. “Busy day.”
“Is that what you kids are calling a crapshow these days?” The white-haired physician scowled and shuffled down the hall to his next patient.
Mildly embarrassed but too professional to let it show for long, Nambue moved in the opposite direction, in search of his next patient. There was no shortage. The drones from the Juggernaut had racked up a disconcerting list of dead and wounded in just two incidents, and the automated attackers had inflicted serious damage on the medical center itself. Barely half of the facility was still operational. Only the fact that its most critical areas had been situated underground or on the first floor, in heavily shielded parts of the building, had enabled its staff to go on treating new patients without respite for the past several hours.
Nambue stopped beside a gurney on which lay a rust-haired, freckle-faced teenaged boy whose lower left leg was charred black. “Hello,” Nambue said. “I’m Doctor Anton Nambue. Are you in pain right now?”
“No.” The boy shook his head.
No pain—that’s not good. Nambue activated his tri-corder and scanned the youth’s injury, though he suspected he already knew what he would find. In a matter of seconds his fears were confirmed. Deep third-degree burns, massive tissue damage, nerve damage, and cellular damage consistent with a high-energy disruptor discharge. He considered soft-pedaling the bad news, then thought better of it. He put away his tricorder. “Son, I have bad news. We need to amputate your lower left leg. You’ll have to be fitted for a cybernetic replacement.”
“I know,” the teen said. “I looked up my symptoms on the comnet while I was waiting.”
“Too smart for your own good.” Nambue loaded a new ampoule into his hypospray. “This is a broad-spectrum antibiotic. It’ll prevent infection from setting in before we get your new leg fitted.” He tapped the hypo to the lad’s thigh. The drugs were delivered with a soft hiss.
“Thanks, Doc.” The boy pointed past Nambue. “Look out!”
Nambue turned—and met the stock of a blaster rifle with his chin.
The world was a soft blur, his chin a beacon of throbbing pain. Floating and falling—he couldn’t tell them apart at first. Then he struck the cold tiled floor, and for a moment stretched by his fear he perceived every crack and speckle in the handful of tiles within a few centimeters of his face. Then everything was back in motion, and vertigo took him.
Lights drifted past above him.
No, he told himself, fighting for clarity, I’m being dragged under them.
A semblance of awareness reasserted itself as he was thrown against the back of a freight elevator. Blinking, he realized he was surrounded by other Starfleet personnel—nurses, medical technicians, paramedics, doctors—from both the Shenzhou and the Enterprise. He saw no sign of their respective security detachments, but to his right, in the corner of the lift, he spied Doctor Spyropoulos, moaning and cursing under his breath. He tried to get the man’s attention with a harsh whisper. “Greg! Are you all right?”
“I’m not even supposed to be here,” Spyropoulos mumbled. “What the hell is going on? I’m not even a doctor, dammit. I’m just a dentist!”
If not for the glares of warning from the two armed colonists standing over the hostages, Nambue might have taken that moment to give Spyropoulos a brief lecture on the cruel whimsy of a bitch named Irony. Have to save it for another time, he decided.
A third man with a blaster rifle stepped inside the lift and said in a Cockney accent to his two comrades, “Guv’s waiting. Let’s take this lot down.” One of his accomplices closed the lift gate, and the other pressed a button to send the car to the deepest sublevel it serviced.
Shadows and distant flickers slipped past outside the lift car as it sank into the darkness beneath the capital. The hospital’s sharp perfume of antiseptics and astringent was replaced by the odors of mechanical oil and lubricants, the stench of harsh chemicals and untreated sewage.
By the time the lift halted, Nambue was sure they must be deep underground. Cockney Man opened the gate. His two fellow kidnappers aimed their weapons at Nambue and the others. One of them told the prisoners in a voice of low menace, “Don’t do anything stupid.”
