Massey and Thayer joined them on the bridge a few minutes later, exiting the turbolift and immediately assuming the conn and tactical.
“Can you get me ship-to-ship?” Reed asked.
“It’s borderline,” Massey replied, working to stabilize her panel, “but I think I can call up a visual frequency.”
Reed approached the captain’s chair, hesitating for a moment. Something about it just felt wrong, as if sitting there amounted to some kind of sacrilege, but she forced herself to do it, knowing that Evan Walsh would expect nothing less.
“Open up a channel.”
After a few starts, the image on the screen dissolved into a view of Celtic’s bridge. Walsh appeared there, larger than life, nodding with approval at his first officer.
“Welcome back to the world, Jenna.”
“Thanks, skipper,” Reed said. “It’s good to see you again.”
“You about ready to get that tub moving?”
“Checking on that. Stand by.” She hit the comm panel on her chair. “Engineering, bridge. How are we doing on navigation?”
“One miracle at a time, Jenna,” Harlow said, his voice piped in through the overhead speaker. “I’m routing helm functions through a portable node to bypass all these Borg mods, but the controls are going to be a little dicey.”
Reed turned to Thayer. “You getting any response?”
“It ain’t fancy,” the conn officer said, jockeying with the interface, “but I can lay in a course. Tell me where you want to go, I’ll point us in the right direction.”
“Propulsion?”
“Thrusters are functional. Still no response on impulse.”
Reed tapped a second channel. “Core, bridge. How are you doing down there?”
“Finding my limitations,” Locarno replied. “I’ve managed to isolate a few legacy subsystems, but the rest of the architecture has been completely redesigned. It could take weeks just to figure out where everything is.”
“Can you run the intermix models?”
“Yeah, but I’d have no way of confirming their accuracy.”
“I’d belay that, Jenna,” Harlow cut in. “Even a slight variance from an optimal flow state could cause those engines to overload.”
“Understood,” Reed said grimly, looking back at Walsh. “Sorry, Skipper. That’s as far as our luck goes.”
“Nothing’s easy, is it?” the captain said, then started barking orders out to his crew. “Shut down nonessential systems and divert all available power to the tractor beams!” The bridge lights dimmed over the captain’s head, while several of the consoles behind him went dark. Reports poured in from all over the ship, the background chatter informing Walsh that every last joule of energy was now at his disposal—turning Celtic into a flying engine with no deflectors, no weapons, and barely enough life support to keep everyone breathing.
His watch officer delivered the final confirmation. Walsh nodded and sent him on his way. “We’re ready. It’ll be slow, but we’ll get you out of the sector—far enough to keep Starfleet off our backs until we can get that ship under way.”
“Aye, sir. Mooring points are being relayed to you.”
“Receiving,” Walsh acknowledged, checking his own monitor. “Tactical, feed this information into the targeting computer and prepare to commence operation.”
“Got it,” Celtic’s tactical officer said, quickly programming a solution. “On your orders, Skipper.”
“Engage.”
Reston shuddered as the tractor beams took hold. Inertia anchored her in place for a few endless moments, but slowly, painfully the ship began to move. An alarm on Thayer’s panel marked their progress with a rapid series of pings, while the conn officer fired off thrusters to bring their course in line with Celtic.
“Picking up speed,” Thayer reported, the excitement in his voice building as he read from his console. “Five hundred kps . . . seven hundred—one thousand. It’s working, boss!”
“Very good,” Reed said, finally relaxing. She settled back into the command chair, and for the first time felt like she actually belonged there. “Match bearings and maintain a distance of twelve hundred meters.”
“Twelve hundred meters, aye.”
Reed heard the tactical panel sound off behind her.
“Frag me,” Massey intoned, a worried scowl spreading across her face. Reed turned back and saw the tactical officer tapping several buttons on her panel, her eyes darting back and forth as they tried to keep up with some unknown development. “This can’t be right.”
“What is it?”
“Threat indicator,” Massey explained. “Tactical systems are programmed to assume a defensive posture when there’s a breach in the security sphere. Must be a glitch.” She canceled the alert, only to have another one pop right up. “Dammit—there it goes again. I’m reading a single hostile contact, close proximity.”
A surge of dread crawled across Reed’s skin.
“Locate,” she snapped.
“Zero-zero-five, directly ahead,” Massey answered—then turned ashen as she looked up at Reed. “Jenna, it’s targeting Celtic.”
Reed whirled back around. On the viewscreen, Walsh proceeded as if nothing was wrong, his bridge crew completely unaware.
“Abort defensive stance,” she ordered.
Massey worked the panel to no avail.
“I can’t,” she said. “Local controls are frozen.”
Reed punched her comm button. “Engineering, bridge—tactical is locked out. What the hell’s happening down there?”
“Stand by, bridge!” the engineer replied, trading shouts with Casari. From the desperation in their voices, it sounded like a full-scale disaster in progress. “I don’t know how, Jenna, but the node I installed just up and reprogrammed itself. Could be some kind of virus. Whatever it is, the thing is fast.”
Reed steeled herself, even though her mind was in total panic mode.
“Thayer, do you still have the helm?”
He shook his head gravely. “Nonresponsive.”
The ship suddenly, violently lurched to starboard. Massey left her feet, hitting the deck and tumbling down to the command level. On the viewscreen, Celtic took an even worse hit, the aftershock knocking almost everyone out of their chairs and shorting out consoles all across the bridge. Walsh scrambled for a fire extinguisher, spraying the conn and dousing the sparks that exploded from there, his movements leaving a ghostly trail across the garbled transmission.
Reed rushed over to help Massey.
“What was that?” she yelled at Thayer.
“Impulse turn!” he stammered, in a haze of confusion. “The engines fired all by themselves, boss—evasive maneuvers, trying to shake us loose!”
“Shut it down!”
“Helm negative! Still not answering!”
Reston tilted hard to port. Even more havoc broke loose on board Celtic, conveyed in bits of audio scattered across a stroboscope of nightmare images. In the middle of it all, Reed spotted Walsh searching for her through the viewscreen, his voice cutting in and out as he screamed over the insane pandemonium on his own bridge.
“Jenna . . . for God’s sake . . . stop—”
“Evan!” she pleaded in return. “Break off now! Get the hell out of there!”
Reed didn’t even know if Walsh could hear her, but she heard him when he gave the order to kill the tractor beam. Celtic cut the transmission at the same time, the small ship appearing on Reston’s viewscreen as she throttled up her engines and started pulling away.
“Engineering, bridge,” she said. “Disengage navigation and tactical.”
“I’ve already pulled the node, Jenna!” Harlow replied. “It didn’t have any effect! Those subsystems are still active, jacked through another location!”
“Where?”
“The starboard core!”
“Jesus,” Reed whispered, looking up at the viewer. She prayed Celtic would be gone, but instead, the ship loomed larger and larger as Rest
on picked up speed to pursue. “Core, bridge—initiate emergency failsafe! Halt all processes!”
Locarno didn’t answer.
“Are you listening, core? Take it down now!”
Reston poured on even more speed, swinging around Celtic in a wide arc.
“Weapons going hot,” Massey said. “Phasers acquiring target.”
“Goddammit, Nick! Where are you?”
Feedback pierced the overhead speaker before it went dead. Reed shot to her feet, hurling herself over the deck railing and taking the tactical controls for herself. She mashed her hands against the panel, which ignored her commands. All she could do was watch helplessly as Reston closed in, her forward phaser banks charging to full power.
And then lightning split the darkness.
A single burst—impossibly hot, impossibly bright—seared the distance between the two vessels, scoring a perfect hit before Reston roared over and then away from Celtic. It happened so fast that Reed couldn’t fathom how such a strike could leave any serious damage. A fleeting sense of hope swelled within as Reston withdrew to a safe distance, coming about like a hit-and-run predator to survey the condition of its prey—but that notion soon collapsed when Celtic crossed back into view, and the full extent of Reston’s lethal blow revealed itself in horrifying detail.
A thin column of atmosphere vented from Celtic’s bridge, like blood hemorrhaging from a jagged wound. The ship listed into a slow roll, her thrusters firing off at random even as her impulse engines struggled to keep her on a level course, but it soon became apparent that Celtic was just tumbling through space. Reed stepped forward to peer through the fog, making out the bits and pieces of debris that trailed the ship—until it dawned on her that in the flotsam, she could trace the unmistakable shape of human bodies. Almost all of them were dead, killed instantly by the force of impact and sudden decompression; but at least one still lived, arms and legs thrashing for a few agonized seconds before succumbing to the frozen vacuum.
Reston fired again.
The phaser beam struck Celtic’s warp nacelle, blowing a hole clean through to the other side. The hit knocked her into a flat spin, streams of hot energy plasma spilling into the void. Impulse engines flickered as she made a feeble attempt to right herself, her aft photon launcher spitting out a single torpedo to provide some cover. The shot careened off into nowhere, but Reston punished her nonetheless. One final salvo took out Celtic’s impulse deck—a spectacular detonation that left the ship dead in space.
The battle had taken all of one minute.
Reed stumbled back, her jaw agape.
“My God,” Massey whispered, tears streaming down her face. She resumed the tactical station, quickly getting a read on their status. “Holding position, phasers standing down. Power diverting to the main weapons pod.”
Reed didn’t listen. She was already at the science station, clicking through a chain of interfaces until she found one that gave her access to the ship’s sensors. Releasing a wave of active scans, she trembled while she waited for the signals to bounce back. There, amid all the clutter, tentative life signs emerged from Celtic’s battered hull.
Survivors . . .
Reed obsessed over those readings, even as a powerful tremor welled up through the decks. She blocked out everything around her, even as the bridge swelled with a tsunami of coherent white light. And she dared not look at the viewscreen, even as she ran for the turbolift—because she knew the purpose of the terrible shriek that followed, and what the cutting beam would do to what was left of Celtic.
She had to stop it.
If it wasn’t already too late.
Ten decks below, the lift doors opened into a maze of swirling red lights and alarm klaxons. Reed plunged headlong into that chaos, phaser in hand, heedless of direction but unable to stop. She caught a glimpse of a deck plan against one of the bulkheads, and followed the arrows that pointed to the starboard computer core. By the time she reached it, Reed’s heart was banging against her ribs like some caged animal, her body racked by adrenaline tremors. Discharges of electric blue spilled through a window that looked into the core chamber, illuminating plumes of smoke that leaked out from underneath the closed doors—but a rusty odor and the sudden constriction of her lungs told Reed that this was no fire.
Krylex mist . . .
The gas sucked oxygen out of the air, making her double over and cough. Reed took one last deep breath and made a dash for the door, prying open the access panel and trying to disable the magnetic lock. She punched in the default code, her fingers shaking as she stole glances through the glass to see if anyone was still inside—but all she saw was a churning cloud of toxic chemicals, lit up like a thunderstorm in the black of night.
Until a dark mass launched itself at her.
Reed jumped back at the sight of it, her vision blurring as hypoxia started to creep into her brain, but even in her stupor she could see that its motions lacked reason or conscious thought. It raised one hand and clawed at the window, hooked fingers leaving behind smears of blood as it dragged itself off the floor. At first, Reed thought it was one of the Borg, from the pallid complexion of its skin to the thatch of veins that crossed its eyes—but then she suddenly recognized its features, concealed behind the breathing mask that covered its face.
Nick Locarno rolled away as Reed pointed her phaser at him.
She shattered the window with a short burst, shards of transparent aluminum raining down around her. Reed then crawled forward, grabbing Locarno by the arm and dragging him away from the lethal cloud. She propped him up against a nearby wall, his head lolling as he drifted in and out.
“Nick!” Reed implored. “Stay with me, Nick!”
“Celtic . . . tractor beam . . . triggered a defense routine.”
Reed shook him hard, trying to get through.
“Tell me how to shut it down, Nick.”
“Failsafe . . . didn’t work . . .”
“What do I do?”
Locarno slumped over, losing consciousness. Leaving him, Reed staggered back to the opening and stood there, krylex mist billowing all the way up to her waist. She was vaguely aware of the phaser still in her hand, of her thumb pushing the power up to maximum, but had no clue of where to take aim—or if it would do any good. All she could do was level the weapon at the largest component she could find, while a fury she had never known burned her from the inside out.
“Just DIE!” she screamed.
And mashed on the trigger.
Initiation
The turbolift doors opened onto the bridge—the post Jenna Reed had abandoned, something Evan Walsh would never have done. She already hated herself for that, even before the crew—her crew—turned their stares on her, just long enough to convey their awareness of her sin. Reed knew they wouldn’t forgive her, nor did she want them to. They needed their anger, just as she needed to maintain control—or at least the illusion of it.
Confronted with the horrors unfolding on the viewscreen, however, it was all Reed could do to keep it together. Shuffling forward, she joined the others in bewildered silence as they witnessed the final destruction of Celtic. The fires on board still burned, leaving trails of expanding smoke between the pieces of her hull, each section neatly severed from the others. They drifted apart slowly, rending the shape of the old vessel until nothing recognizable remained—just a collection of scattered parts meant for assimilation, deck lights flickering in the frozen dark as Celtic consumed the last of her remaining power.
Reed didn’t even presume to mount a rescue. The cutting beam had done its work.
Nick Locarno, who had remained behind in the lift, now emerged to see the damage for himself. His face was drawn, his eyes red, bloodied beneath the surface from ruptured capillaries—but still he managed to shed tears, the pain only heightening his disbelief. He rammed a fist down on the nearest console, drawing everyone’s attention—including that of Rayna Massey, who flew into an instant rage at the sight of him.
“You!” she hissed.
Massey slammed Locarno against the bulkhead before anyone could react, her fingers dug into the skin of his throat. Had she coordinated her attack, she might have killed him right there, but Massey just pounded on him, tearing at whatever she could find, scratching him deep before Reed and Thayer could pull her off.
Star Trek: Seven Deadly Sins Page 40
