Titan

by David Mack

  The others fell in behind her. She opened the main doors so the team could begin the process of advancing with cover. Last to the door was sh’Aqabaa, who asked Sarai, “You do know we’ll be outnumbered in there by about six to one, right?”

  “One problem at a time, Lieutenant,” Sarai said. “One problem at a time.”

  Twenty-eight

  * * *

  Every hit that rocked the Titan felt to Riker like a punch in his gut. No matter how many times he reminded himself that he was an admiral, that the Titan was Vale’s ship to command now, when the vessel was under attack his possessive impulses came to the fore.

  The overhead light in the turbolift car stuttered on and off as the ship thundered from punishing impacts on its shields and outer hull. The lift’s normal low hum turned sickly as its magnetic propulsion system struggled to maintain power. In spite of all that noise, Riker heard the ship’s spaceframe groan as it was put to the test by high-impulse combat maneuvers.

  Beside him in the lift, his aide, Ssura, clutched the safety rail. The Caitian’s tufted ears lay flat against his skull, and the fur on the nape of his neck stood up as if drawn by an electrical charge. He shot a worried look at Riker. “Admiral, we should really return to your quarters.”

  Another blast made the ship lurch and pressed them against the back wall of the lift car. Riker was sure he caught a suppressed growl rattling deep inside Ssura’s throat. “I need to know what’s happening, but the comms are down, so we’re going to the bridge. That’s final.”

  “Yes, sir.” A booming roar of collision was followed by a momentary fluctuation in the ship’s artificial gravity. For a moment Ssura looked as if he might vomit, then he recovered.

  The lift’s doors opened to reveal a scene of surprising calm on the bridge. Riker strode onto the bridge, and Ssura stumbled out of the lift behind him.

  Standing in the center of it all, Vale doled out orders with speed and clarity. “Evasive, starboard. Keru, aft torpedoes, spread Tango. Ops, divert auxiliary power to the aft shields. Torvig, switch to a chroniton-based scrambler, keep fouling their targeting locks.” Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Riker. “Sir, you should be in your quarters.”

  “Not until I know what’s—” He was cut off by the din of high-energy detonations hammering the Titan’s shields. Consoles along the aft bulkhead went dark, and a backup EPS conduit ruptured in the overhead, raining white-hot sparks on him and Ssura. They both scurried clear of the firefall, then Ssura swatted smoldering motes from his mane and his uniform. Even after the last phosphor was extinguished, the bitter stink of burnt fur lingered in the air.

  From the first officer’s chair Tuvok reported, “Warp drive is offline.”

  “That’s fine,” Vale said, “I wasn’t planning on running, anyway.”

  Torvig looked up from his console, his large eyes full of sadness. “Casualties in engineering, Captain. Two dead, eleven injured.”

  That news robbed Vale of some of her swagger. She asked Keru, “How much longer?”

  “Thirty seconds,” Keru said. “Assets are in position.” He muted an alert on his panel. “The Kulak’s coming around on our port side, locking weapons—”

  “Helm,” Vale said, “turn to face them, full impulse. Rager, angle all shields forward. Keru, phasers, continuous fire. Torpedoes, full spread, pattern Bravo.”

  Riker couldn’t stand being a spectator any longer. He rushed past Keru to stand at Vale’s side. “Head to head with a Breen dreadnought? Are you crazy?”

  Vale’s glare was as hard as dilithium, her tone as sharp as a Klingon’s d’k tahg. “Sir, with all due respect—shut up or get off my bridge.” She stepped away from him as the main viewscreen filled with phaser beams and the blazing streaks of quantum torpedoes.

  Torvig finished a task on his engineering panel and faced the captain. “Sensor blind ready.”

  Vale acknowledged the report with the barest hint of a nod, then said in a voice for everyone, “Okay, folks, just like we planned. Helm, first pass of the nearest defense platform in exactly one minute from . . . now.” She turned and looked at Tuvok, who got up and walked past Riker on his way to the turbolift without any reaction from the rest of the bridge crew.

  The Breen dreadnought filled the viewscreen, and for a moment Riker feared Vale might actually intend to ram the Kulak. All Riker could do was stare, dumbfounded.

  What the hell is she doing?

  “On my mark,” Vale called out. “Three. Two. One. Break! Roll to port!”

  The impulse engines whined in protest as Lavena pushed the ship into a rolling turn to avoid a collision with the much-larger dreadnought. Then came the gut-quaking concussions of more disruptor blasts pummeling the Titan’s overtaxed shields—followed by a resonant, echoing boom that Riker knew from bitter experience meant the hull had been breached.

  “Hull breach, deck sixteen starboard,” Keru said. He looked up to add, “Hangar four.”

  “Viewscreen aft,” Vale said. The image switched to reveal a cloud of debris and cargo containers that had been ejected from the Titan. “All right, go evasive, full impulse, keep the port side and aft quarter toward the Breen. Give me a fast orbit of the planet, and try to use its moons’ magnetic fields to keep them from getting a target lock. Angle shields aft and port.”

  Keru fired the phasers several times in quick succession. “The Breen are dropping back.”

  Vale reacted without hesitation. “Helm, reduce speed, three-quarter impulse. Switch to evasive pattern Alpha. Keru, ease up on phasers.”

  Now Riker was sure that Vale had lost her senses. At the risk of being forcibly escorted off the bridge, he approached her and said under his breath, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “My job.” She shouldered past him and rested her hand on Rager’s shoulder. “Stand by.” To Lavena she said, “Second pass at the platform in thirty seconds, then retrace our steps.” A pivot toward Keru. “What do you say? Ready for this?”

  The Trill flashed a bright smile from behind his beard. “Gonna be a real close shave.”

  “As if you’d know what one was,” Vale quipped. “Look sharp, people. Here we go.”

  Ssura sidled up to Riker and directed his attention toward a nearby tactical display. “Admiral . . . we’re flying directly into the Kulak’s firing solution.”

  Riker shot a look at Vale. “Captain, if you don’t break off, we’re all dead.”

  She answered his concern with a thin smile. “One problem at a time, Admiral.”

  A meter shy of the next intersection in the bunker corridor, Sarai put her back to the wall while Ithiok shot a fingernail-sized adhesive comm relay into the corner. The devices were only a temporary solution to the problem of the bunker’s impenetrability to signals; each one had a battery that would keep the relay active for up to a day. Sarai had to hope she and the away team would not be inside the bunker long enough for that limitation to come into play.

  She looked back at Sethe, who had been tracking their progress with his tricorder, and asked him in a whisper, “How close are we?”

  “Around the corner, on the left, six meters.” He adjusted the tricorder’s settings. “No life-signs, but I’m tracking air disturbances. Someone’s moving in there.” Another tweak. “And I’m reading trace particles from standard-issue Breen military demolitions.”

  Ithiok pulled up her own custom-modified tricorder. “Confirmed. Jamming their detonator frequencies . . . now.” She tucked away her tricorder and hefted her rifle. “What’s our next play, Commander?”

  “We need control of the Husnock’s fleet command systems,” Sarai said.

  “And the Breen know that,” Kyzak said. “Even if we suppress their demolitions, they can still just shoot the hell out of that control center.”

  That didn’t sit well with sh’Aqabaa. “If ever there was a time we needed backup—”

  “Backup!” Sethe interrupted. He fought to contain his excitement and keep his voice down.
“That’s it, sir.” He pulled out his compsheet, unrolled it, and set to work as he continued. “The Husnock didn’t mess around when it came to systems redundancy. When I was looking for this control center, I thought I saw—” He turned the compsheet toward Sarai to show her a floor plan. “An auxiliary control center, six levels down, off the central lift column.”

  His enthusiasm was dimmed by Sortollo’s caution. “What if the Breen are already there?”

  “I don’t think they are,” Sethe said. “If they were, the most direct route would have been down the core access ramps, past two blast doors, both of which still read as closed.” The lithe Cygnian pivoted toward Sarai. “Commander, if Modan and I can get down to auxiliary control, we can patch you into the same systems the Breen are looking to destroy up here.”

  It was a long-shot plan, but what it lacked in detail it made up for in audacity, and that was good enough for Sarai. “Okay, the two of you head down to auxiliary control. Dennisar, you’re with them. If you meet resistance don’t do anything crazy, fall back to us.”

  “Copy that, sir.” Dennisar took off down the corridor, past the intersection, with Sethe and Modan close at his flanks. Within seconds the trio had finessed open a blast door and disappeared into the deeper levels of the Husnock bunker.

  Sarai addressed the other members of the team. “The rest of us need to keep the Breen busy up here as long as we can. Any second now they’ll figure out we’re jamming their remote detonators, at which point I suspect they’ll go for their backups—molecular detonators. If we’re still in the room when those go off . . . I’ll just say it’s been an honor serving with all of you.”

  Sortollo braced his rifle’s stock against his shoulder. “Let’s do this.”

  The others followed his lead. Even Kershul, the combat medic, had her rifle in position. Sarai tried to signal her to stand down. “You should hang back, Kershul, in case we—”

  “Unless you order me not to join you, sir, I’m going in.”

  “Then I order you to hold position here, at the doorway,” Sarai said. “Give us covering fire and watch our six. Make sure the Breen don’t sneak in reinforcements behind us.”

  No argument, just a quick nod. “You got it.”

  “Okay, move up to the doorway, then Kershul covers as we enter. I’ll take point. Go.” Crouched low, Sarai jogged around the corner and headed for the doorway. With every step her heart slammed like a war drum inside her chest, its frantic tempo driven by adrenaline. The rest of her team moved with her, everyone falling into place with near-silent precision. Sarai was the first to the doorway, with Kershul at her back. She waited until everyone else was with them against the wall. Once the corner was turned, there would be no chance of avoiding a fight.

  With a gesture she queried her team: All set?

  In unison they signaled back, Good to go.

  There was no time for second-guessing, no room for doubt. Sarai willed herself into action, turned the corner, and moved inside the control center.

  It was a crescent-shaped space with four wide, curved tiers of workstations facing a wall of long-dark viewscreens. Thanks to the shroud-penetrating filter built into the helmet of Sarai’s orbital skydiving suit, she saw the frost-blue apparitions of more than thirty Spetzkar inside the facility. Most of the Breen were in groups of three, four, or five, with a few lone stragglers tending to tasks in the far corners of the large, high-ceilinged space.

  Sarai reached cover behind a meter-thick bank of dormant computers without being noticed. Less than four seconds later sh’Aqabaa was on her left and Sortollo on her right.

  As Kyzak darted through the open doorway, one of the Breen spat a buzzsaw din of vocoder noise, an electronically scrambled shout. Then came a wild barrage of disruptor shots, all hounding Kyzak on his mad dash to safety behind a different bank of workstations.

  Then Kershul returned fire from the doorway, splitting the Breen’s focus.

  Sarai spun about and got up in a crouch to fire over the top of her impromptu barrier. Sortollo and sh’Aqabaa did the same. As the Spetzkar leaped for their own places of cover, Ithiok darted through the doorway to take position beside Kyzak.

  Sortollo squatted low and reached for his last photon grenade. Sarai seized his arm to stop him. “Are you crazy? What’re you doing?”

  “Trying to even the odds!”

  “By setting off their demolitions with us inside the room?”

  Thwarted and annoyed, Sortollo tucked the grenade back onto his belt. Phaser shots from Kershul raced over his and Sarai’s heads, to harass Breen on the center’s upper tiers. He and Sarai resumed peppering the room with arbitrary scourges of phaser fire. “Commander,” the human said, “I don’t mean to be critical here, but we’re outnumbered five to one. Did you even have a plan for this when we came in here?”

  “Of course I did,” Sarai said as she picked off two Spetzkar with a double headshot. “Fight ’em ’til we can’t.”

  One more good hit and we’re finished. It was one thing to have faith in the officers under one’s command, but for Will Riker it was a test of his nerves to stand by and say nothing as he watched them steer what once had been his ship toward its apparently imminent destruction.

  All of his decades of experience told him that no good would come of interfering in Vale’s command during a pitched battle. The survival of the ship and its crew hinged on the efficacy of its chain of command. If he meddled, he would not only undermine her authority as the Titan’s commanding officer, he might endanger the ship at a crucial moment.

  But standing at the rear of the bridge, all he could do whenever the ship trembled from another blast by the Kulak’s disruptors or its torpedoes was fear for the safety of Deanna and their young daughter, Tasha. They both no doubt were huddling in their quarters, deep in the best-protected sections of the ship, but that gave little solace to Riker as he envisioned the Titan erupting into a cloud of superheated gas the moment the Breen landed one more lucky shot.

  He knew exactly what he would do if he were in command. He—

  No, he told himself. Not your command. Don’t get in Christine’s way.

  Damage reports flew by Riker as quickly as the sparks from erupting consoles, and a momentary fault in the inertial dampers threw him and the rest of the bridge crew to starboard. He landed hard on the deck, but when Keru moved to help him, he said only, “Mind your post!” The security chief took Riker at his word and put his full attention back on the battle, where it belonged. This was no time for Vale’s senior officers to suffer from divided focus.

  Thunder and dimming lights, another violent lurch—now Riker was tossed aft, against a bulkhead. As he fought his way off the deck yet again, he heard Rager report from ops, “Aft shields collapsing, hull breaches on decks fourteen through sixteen, sections eleven and twelve. Main power dropping, tapping impulse to compensate.”

  “Helm,” Vale said, rising from her chair. “Take us around the platform again, best speed. Keru, all phasers aft—I want them to be the only thing the Breen can see.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Keru said. “Watch me razzle as I dazzle.” Keying in commands with speed and dexterity, Keru orchestrated a masterful barrage of phaser fire—one that, as Riker had feared, struck the Kulak’s forward shields without result.

  On the main viewscreen, the Husnock orbital defense station swelled as the Titan sped toward it, then it seemed to turn on its side as the Luna-class starship rolled its starboard side toward the planet’s surface and away from the Breen’s steady fusillade of return fire.

  Watching the scene unfold, it felt to Riker like déjà vu. This was where the Breen blew a hole in our side last time, he realized. And now Christine’s making all the same errors again.

  It made no sense to him. He knew her tactical training was better than this.

  A debris cluster blurred past on the viewscreen, and then Riker saw Vale shoot a nod at Keru, who tapped his console twice. The image on-screen switched to an aft view of th
e pursuing Breen dreadnought—just as it was engulfed in a flash that whited out the screen.

  Then the shock wave of the explosion slammed into the Titan, and everything went dark. If not for the glow of falling sparks, the bridge would have been as black as the inside of a fist.

  Lights and power came back in fits and starts. By the time the main viewscreen flickered back to life, only half of the bridge’s consoles were functional.

  Riker watched the Kulak drift out of the fire cloud with its bow tilted upward, and the ship was in a slow roll and tumble that suggested it had lost its ability to maneuver, even if just for a few seconds. In that moment Riker saw that the dreadnought’s ventral hull had been torn open in multiple places, many of which were venting plasma and vapor.

  Keru declared with pride, “Her shields are down!”

  Just like ours, Riker thought, but he couldn’t help but be impressed by the trap Vale had set. She had feigned taking a hit so she could secretly mine the theater of combat with quantum torpedoes disguised as debris, and then Keru had armed and triggered them at the last second.

  He was about to cross the bridge to congratulate her when, on the viewscreen, the Kulak righted itself and shifted course to resume its straight-on attack heading.

  Vale turned a hopeful look at Keru. “Tactical, status.”

  “Shields and weapons offline,” Keru said.

  Still not betraying the least sign of dismay, Vale settled into her seat. “Helm, report.”

  Lavena answered, “Impulse coils overloaded, warp drive offline.” She looked back, and even through her aquatic breathing mask Riker could discern her fear. “We’re dead in space.”

  A warbling signal on the tactical console. Keru silenced it.