by Dayton Ward
“No reason? In case you’ve forgotten, Captain, I’m in charge of all field missions directly related to Operation Vanguard.”
“Unless I’ve missed a memo from Starfleet Command stating that you’ve been promoted to the admiralty, I don’t give a damn what your billet is. My orders are to provide you with facilities, communications, and regular updates, and to offer tactical and material support to SI’s operatives in the field.”
Xiong paced angrily and pushed a hand through his black, brush-cut hair. “We’re so close, Captain. So close to unlocking all these mysteries, all these technologies, all this pure knowledge. The last thing we ought to do is risk blowing it all to hell because some fool with more brass than brains tells us to.”
“I don’t see why you’re getting all worked up over this. It’s no different than the self-destruct package Starfleet builds into every starship and starbase.”
Arms raised and fingers curled with suppressed rage, Xiong looked ready to explode. “It’s completely different! Sacrificing a ship or a starbase only means losing matériel, fuel, and personnel.”
Khatami was aghast. “Oh, is that all?”
“Listen to what I’m saying. Starships can be replaced. Starbases can be rebuilt. Lost lives are a tragedy, but others will continue what they’ve begun.” Once more he stepped too deep into Khatami’s personal space. “But if we destroy unique artifacts of the Shedai, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever see their ilk again.”
She pressed her palm to his shoulder and nudged him back half a step. “And what if the Klingons capture one of those unique artifacts? What do you think they’ll do with that kind of knowledge, Ming? Develop it in peace for the good of the galaxy at large, or turn it into a weapon that’ll wipe us off the map?”
“I’m well aware of the destructive potential of Shedai technology, sir.”
“Then you ought to know why we can’t ever let the Klingons have it.”
He shook his head. “I can’t condone the destruction of antiquities. Not even for national security. These are pieces of history we’re talking about, Captain.”
It was Khatami’s turn to shake her head. “Wrong, Lieutenant.” She shouldered past him, and the maintenance bay’s door opened ahead of her as she made her exit. “What we’re talking about is cultural survival.”
Bridy stood behind Quinn’s chair, looked through the Dulcinea’s cockpit canopy, and saw nothing but a placid starscape. She glanced at Quinn. “Where is it?”
“Trust me, darlin’, it’s out there.” He tapped a few instructions into the forward console, and a holographic wireframe appeared as if conjured outside the ship. It depicted the profound curvature of local space-time into a funnel shape. “The Orions’ sensor data says it’s right there—larger than life and twice as ugly.”
She threw a confused look at Quinn. “What does that even mean?”
“Just a cute way of sayin’ it’s really big.”
“Mm-hm.” She turned her attention back to the stars. “There’s supposed to be a wormhole less than a quarter million kilometers away, but we aren’t seeing any distortion in our view of the stars. Does that mean it collapsed?”
Quinn shrugged. “It might. Or maybe it only opens once in a blue moon.”
“Or when something crosses its event horizon.”
Bridy settled into the copilot’s seat and accessed the subspace comm. “Start plotting a course. I’ll send our coordinates to Endeavour on a coded channel.”
“Hang on, whoa, stop. Are you out of your mind?”
Continuing to prep her message to the Endeavour, Bridy said, “We need to know if the wormhole’s still there, and if it is, we need to be sure it’s stable.”
“By flying into it? Sorry, no.” He leaned back from the helm and crossed his arms. “I think we oughta just hang tight and wait to see if it reopens on its own.”
She shook her head. “Not good enough. For all we know, this thing’s on a cycle measured in centuries, or even longer.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m a patient man.”
“One, I know that to be a lie. Two, even if you’ve learned to be patient, the Klingons haven’t. We need to confirm this find and plant our flag right now.”
“Screw that. Our orders were to steal the data and crack the code. We did that. We’re done now. Job over. It’s time to go home and start our new lives as boring, happy civilians nobody shoots at.”
Bridy sent her message to the Endeavour, then turned to face Quinn. “I don’t have time to argue with you. It’s the bottom of the ninth, we’re on the ropes, and I’m not gonna drop the ball when I have a shot at the goal. Do you get me?”
Quinn heaved an exasperated sigh. “Honey, if you want to keep using sports metaphors, you really need to learn something about sports.”
“Don’t change the subject. Just set the course and punch it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“It might shock you, dear, to learn that I know how to fly the ship.” She punctuated her point with a teasing smile. “So, what’s it gonna be?”
He frowned and laid in the course. “Lady, you’re a pain in my ass.”
“You know you love it.”
The deck shivered under Bridy’s feet as the Dulcinea’s impulse drive kicked in. Then a burst of light flooded the cockpit. As it faded, she saw the majestic, blue-and-white whorl of a wormhole’s mouth spiraling open all around them. The ship’s hull rumbled ominously. “Gravitational flux,” Quinn said over the noise. Flipping switches, he added, “Compensating.” A momentary fluctuation in the inertial dampers made Bridy’s stomach jump into her chest for half a heartbeat. She swallowed hard and shook it off.
Quinn shot her a pleading look. “Last chance to change your mind.”
She gripped her chair’s armrests. “Take us in.”
“I hope you’re right about this,” Quinn said.
Then he guided the ship forward and plunged it through the wormhole’s mouth into the brilliant, twisting abyss that lay beyond.
Stephen Klisiewicz looked up from the sensor hood and turned toward the center seat of the Endeavour’s bridge. “Captain? Our listening posts on the Klingon border are picking up major activity.”
“Main viewer,” Khatami said. Klisiewicz routed his sensor feed to the forward viewscreen, making it available to all the other bridge officers. The captain looked left, toward the ship’s first officer. “Number One? Analysis?”
Stano stood with her hands folded behind her back and her dark hair swept back in a neat bob, a portrait of composure. “Looks like an expeditionary force from the Klingons’ Fifth Fleet, out of Q’Tahl.” She fixed her blue eyes on Klisiewicz. “How many ships, Lieutenant?”
“Hard to say, sir. At least three, all fast movers. They just hit warp eight.”
The captain nodded. “All right, so we know they’re in a hurry. Lieutenant McCormack, chart their heading and give me some idea where they’re going.”
“Aye, sir,” said the fresh-faced young navigator.
A soft chirp from the communications console heralded an incoming signal. Lieutenant Hector Estrada swiveled his chair toward the bridge’s command well. “Captain, we’re receiving a coded message from the Dulcinea. It’s marked ‘Priority Victor-Alpha.’ ”
Khatami rose from her chair. “Route it to Science Two,” she said, climbing the steps to the bridge’s upper ring. The captain and first officer converged on the backup science station and keyed in their security clearance codes. Tense seconds passed as the two women huddled over the console and conferred in whispers. Klisiewicz couldn’t hear what they were discussing, but he held a sufficiently high security clearance to know that Victor-Alpha was the current designation for matters related to Operation Vanguard.
Stano and Khatami turned toward the main viewscreen. “McCormack, report,” Khatami said.
“No populated systems on the Klingons’ current bearing.” The navigator added a projection of the Klingon ships’ course to the i
mage on the forward screen. “They seem to be heading into deep space.”
The captain and first officer exchanged grim and knowing looks, then descended together into the command well. “Mister Estrada,” Stano said, “what was the time stamp on that message from the Dulcinea?”
“Nine minutes ago, sir.”
“Raise them on subspace, Lieutenant, priority one.”
“Aye, sir.”
Khatami sat down in her chair, and Stano stood ready on her right. The captain’s mien was serious, her voice stern. “Helm, set course, bearing one-six-one mark one-zero-four, maximum warp, and stand by to engage on my order.”
Lieutenant Neelakanta, an energetic young Arcturian, entered the new heading with speed and precision. “Course laid in, Captain. Standing by.”
The captain looked back at Estrada. “Report.”
“No reply, Captain. Repeating the hail.”
Anticipating the captain’s next request, Klisiewicz initiated a long-range sensor scan of the Dulcinea’s last-known position. Only then did he realize that the civilian ship’s last coordinates lay in the path of the approaching Klingon ships.
At the communications console, Estrada shook his head. “No response, sir.”
Klisiewicz glanced into the blue glow of the hooded sensor display, then looked up as Khatami turned toward him. “No sign of the Dulcinea, Captain.”
Stano and Khatami traded worried looks. The first officer asked Klisiewicz, “Is it possible they warped out of sensor range?”
“Not unless they can move at warp eleven.”
Khatami leaned forward. “Mister Neelakanta”—she pointed dramatically at the main viewscreen—“engage.”
14
In all his years of piloting small starships, Quinn had never heard anything like the din surrounding him as the Dulcinea hurtled in a mad spiral through the wormhole. The ship’s hull moaned like an angry ghost, her engines screamed like frightened children, and her consoles crackled and spat sparks every which way.
Despite his best efforts to control the ship’s wild pitching and rolling, it grazed the blinding, blue-white swirl of the wormhole’s membrane and then caromed off, its movement made even more erratic by the fleeting impact.
A hiccup in the inertial dampers or artificial gravity (or some other system Quinn always took for granted until it was gone) knocked Bridy on her ass. Clawing her way up from the deck, she growled, “Dammit! Keep her steady!”
He glared at her. “Great idea, sweetheart! Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Watch our yaw!”
Quinn keyed compensating maneuvers into the helm faster than he’d ever done before, but the ship reacted like a turtle slogging through mud. No matter how hard Quinn tried to get ahead of the wormhole’s horrendous gravitational distortions, he remained fractions of a second too slow to prevent the worst from coming to pass. He grabbed his armrests. “Hang on!”
Dulcinea careened off the side of the wormhole’s throat. A screech of stressed metal was drowned out by a deafening boom of collision. Overhead lights and console displays stuttered and went dark, leaving the cockpit illuminated by the spectral blue radiance of the wormhole.
Bridy stretched past Quinn to reach the copilot’s console, her movements strobed by the wormhole’s flickering light. Then she patched in the ship’s auxiliary power, restoring the lights and most of the controls. “Mains are fried,” she shouted over the howling chaos. “Losing antimatter containment!”
Dead ahead, the terminus of the wormhole was little more than a pinprick of white light at the end of a churning maelstrom. “Just give me a few more seconds!”
“We won’t make it!” She armed the fuel-pod-ejection trigger.
“Don’t! We’re almost clear!” Space-time distortions rocked the ship as the wormhole’s far mouth spun open, spat it out, and sent it tumbling madly into a firestorm. All Quinn could see outside the cockpit was half-molten rocky debris, glowing-hot clouds of ionized gas, and multihued flashes of lightning.
Every gauge in the cockpit redlined. “Containment’s failing,” Bridy said as she ejected the ship’s antimatter supply.
“All power to shields!”
“Patching in reserves.”
The universe flared white, and then a thunderclap pummeled Quinn like a sonic hammer. All around him, the ship’s onboard systems let out sad, whimpering noises before expiring with a slowly fading hum. At least the helm’s still responding, Quinn consoled himself—before it, too, began deteriorating. Coaxing every bit of performance possible from his wounded vessel, he guided it through a passage between two quarters of a shattered planet whose scattered chunks were gradually being pulled away from one another. Dulcinea trembled as boulder-sized hunks of rock and ice were deflected by its navigational force field.
Without taking his eyes off their perilous environment, Quinn said to Bridy, “I need a damage report, a-sap.”
“On it.” She got up and moved from one cockpit console to another. “Warp drive’s down. We’ve got a few minutes before the impulse coil fails. Life support’s barely there. And we lost the subspace antenna.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about the cargo?”
“It’s fine.”
“All right, then. We just need to find a place to set down and patch this ol’ girl back together.” Outside, the haze of radiant dust began to dim. “We’re almost out of this soup. See if you can get the sensors running and find us a planet—preferably one with a breathable atmosphere.”
Bridy was staring slackjawed into space. “Uh, Quinn . . . ?”
“What?”
“Look.”
He followed her gaze. “I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly.”
When he turned his attention back to the view outside the ship, he understood. Then his jaw dropped half open in shock. “There are no stars.” Beholding the empty heavens with dread, he muttered, “Where the hell are we?”
Bridy looked perplexed. “No idea. We might be so far from the center of the universe that none of its light has reached here yet, or we might be in a pocket universe branched off from our own.”
“A universe with no stars? Eternal darkness? I’m not what you’d call a believer, but are you sure we didn’t die and go to hell?”
“No, I’m not.” Bridy perked up as she pointed at the sensor display. “Hang on, correction: There is one star—a white dwarf, temperature ninety-seven hundred Kelvin. Bearing one-seven-seven mark one-five-oh, distance one hundred eight-point-six million kilometers.” She cast a fearful glance at Quinn. “And it has one planet, orbiting at a distance of five-point-two-four million kilometers, right in the middle of the habitable zone. Atmosphere is M-Class nitrogen-oxygen.” Then she called up another screen of data, which showed a familiar energy waveform. “It’s the Jinoteur Pattern. And guess where it’s coming from.”
Quinn swallowed, only to find it difficult because his mouth had gone dry. “What do you wanna bet that ain’t a coincidence?”
“You know we have to go down there. We need to track this to its source.”
“Dammit, I knew you’d say that. Not that we have much choice. We need to get this busted bird planetside on the double.” He sighed, then plotted a heading to the signal’s point of origin. “It’s gonna be a rough landing, honey. You’d better make sure everything’s still tied down and shut tight.”
Bridy got up, took one step aft, then stopped. “I’ve seen you botch normal landings when the ship wasn’t fried. Are you sure you can do this?”
“Positive.”
“Without getting us killed, I mean.”
“Ask me again in thirty minutes.”
Twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds later, Bridy was too busy hyperventilating to ask Quinn much of anything.
Turbulence buffeted the Dulcinea as it arrowed through the upper atmosphere of the white dwarf’s solitary, tiny planet. Critical failures cascaded through the ship’s major systems, leaving only maneuvering thrusters
and the primary sensors functioning for what promised to be a brutal planetfall.
Quinn shouted over the roar of wind and engines, “How’s the signal?”
“Five by five.” Bridy checked its origin against the ship’s heading. “Dead ahead, range nine hundred sixty kilometers.”
“Right.” He started flipping toggles on the helm. “Braking thrusters in ten seconds.” The ship pierced a thick layer of cloud cover and then leveled out above a desolate, arctic plain. Massive peaks of jagged black stone made Bridy think of daggers thrust up by a giant’s hand through the planet’s snowy surface. Studying the wild landscape, Quinn frowned. “Not many good places to land.”
“I’ll watch the ground, you watch the instruments.”
“I would if they still worked.” He slammed his palm against the console in front of him, but his attempt at percussive maintenance seemed to have no effect. “How’s the ground looking?”
“A lot closer than it did five seconds ago.”
He primed the braking thrusters. “Hold on to your ass.”
The engines boomed, and the rapid deceleration threw them forward. Bridy winced as her seat’s safety harness straps dug into her chest. Outside the cockpit the landscape spun, black rock and white ice melting into a gray blur.
Bridy pointed at a fleeting image of level ground. “There!”
“Too far!” Quinn fought with the ship’s controls to little apparent effect. “Main thruster’s gone! We got five seconds to set down before we fall down!”
“Starboard! Get the nose up!”
She grabbed the console white-knuckle tight.
Quinn pulled the ship through a hard turn that arrested most of its forward momentum. Dulcinea’s landing thrusters sputtered erratically as Quinn guided it to a mountainside ledge barely as wide as the ship itself. All at once the engines cut off, and the ship dropped the last half meter onto a deep bed of ice-crusted snow. The thud of impact reverberated and then stopped—enabling Bridy to hear a low, dangerous rumbling from high overhead. She and Quinn looked up in unison through the top of the cockpit’s canopy at the snow-capped peak looming over their precarious perch. They waited for several seconds, neither speaking nor breathing, while waiting to see whether the mountain would welcome the Dulcinea by burying it. Then the distant tremor faded, leaving only the faint creaking of the ship’s overtaxed hull as it settled into its new resting place.
