by Ilsa J. Bick
“Not that I can see, sir.”
“Damn,” Halak muttered. “All right, hail them, Thex.”
Strong gaped. “You’re not going back for them?”
Halak turned on him. “Of course I’m going back for them. They need our help. I gave you an order, Mr. Thex.”
“Aye sir.” Swallowing, Thex hesitated, looked at Strong.
“You have a problem, mister?” asked Halak.
“No, sir, it’s just,” Thex wet his lips, “well ...”
“Of course, there’s a problem!” Strong hissed. “They fired on us! We don’t know who they are, what they want!”
“Objection noted!” said Halak in a voice that dared Strong to contradict him. “Anything else?” When Strong said nothing, Halak jerked his head in an abrupt nod. “Good. Now, hail them, Thex!”
“Hailing. No response. They haven’t abandoned ship.”
“How much longer before we’re in range to beam them aboard?”
“Another twenty seconds. Estimate engine overload in thirty seconds.”
“Cutting it too damned close,” Strong murmured blackly. “Too close.”
“Stow it, Strong! Thex, tell them to prepare to be beamed aboard.”
Thex sent off the request. “They received our signal, Commander. No response.”
“You’re too close,” said Strong, his voice beginning to rise, “they’re going to blow, and you’re bringing us in too close!”
“Try again, Thex.” Then Halak heard Thex gasp. “What is it?”
“Commander, there’s an energy surge!”
“I knew it. They were playing dead, they’re powering up weapons!” Strong’s hand flashed over his firing controls. “Firing phasers!”
“No!” Halak shouted. He moved to override Strong’s phaser controls, too late. “No, Strong, stop!”
Their phasers sizzled. Horrified, Halak watched as the blast caught the scout amidships and knifed through the hull, shredding it like tissue paper.
“What are you doing?” Halak screamed. For a wild, insane moment, he wanted to punch Strong in the jaw. “They weren’t targeting us!”
Strong’s eyes bulged. “I’m s-sorry. I thought they’d laid a trap, I thought they were playing dead, I thought ...”
“Commander!” It was Thex. “There she goes!”
“Damn!” Halak whirled around in time to see the shuttle go in two successive bursts. Frantically, he wrenched the shuttle about, trying to outrun the aftershocks. “Damn, damn!”
“Shock waves!” Thex cried.
The first shock wave caught them astern, the concussive force rippling over the ship and shaking them as if they were in the grip of a giant hand. Alarms screamed. Strong smacked hard against his console and rebounded to the deck with a cry of pain. Something behind Halak shorted; he heard a yelp from Thex, and there was a smell of singed wire and ozone and burnt flesh. Another shock wave slammed them amidships. Halak fought for control, but the ship bucked, heaved, yawed, and then the ship banked sharply left, their gravity cut out for an instant, and Halak went flying. He crashed to the deck, the force of the impact knocking the wind out of him.
For an instant, he simply stopped breathing. The ship was spinning, and he felt his body flatten out against the starboard bulkhead. He knew, instantly: Their inertial dampers were gone. They were spiraling out of control.
Through a haze of pain, he heard the computer intone a warning. “Warning. Hull shear stress approaching tolerance limits. Warning ...”
Abandon ship. Halak shook his vision clear. We’ve got to abandon ship.
But he couldn’t move. His chest felt as if it was on fire, and he struggled, tried to get his burning lungs to pull in air. Finally, he drank in a great, wheezing gulp.
“Argh!” he cried. His neck arched, and he felt the muscles of his chest spasm. He labored to pull in another breath. “Strong, Strong!”
The centrifugal force that had him plastered to the deck made it almost impossible for him to move his head. Achingly, inch by agonizing inch, he fought against the invisible hand that pinned him in place and pulled his head around until he was looking aft, toward the command console. He saw two things. Strong was sprawled in the space between the pilot and copilot chairs. And Thex was lying, facedown, on the deck, to his left and just out of reach. The Andorian wasn’t moving.
“Strong!” Halak wheezed. “Strong, we’re spinning counterclockwise. Shut down the starboard thrusters! Throttle up on the port thruster, break the spin!”
In an agony of suspense, Halak watched as Strong clawed his way up the back of his chair. It was like watching someone doing ballet in molasses. Strong fumbled at the controls.
“Shutting down starboard thrusters! Port thruster, engaged. Now!”
Halak felt the ship quake. There was a shriek of protest from the computer. The bulkhead vibrated, and Halak felt the shudders running up and down his spine.
Suddenly, the pressure from the invisible hand on his chest lessened. Weakened. Was gone. Gasping, Halak sagged to the deck. For a moment, all he heard was the sobbing of his own breath.
Then, the computer shrilled: “Warning. Environmental systems failure. Hull stress has exceeded maximum tolerance levels. Hull breach imminent in three-point ...”
“Kill that thing, Strong.” Halak let his head fall back for an instant. He knew how much time they had. Not much.
“Thex.” Halak groped at the Andorian’s neck for a pulse. He felt it: faint, thready. Reaching around, Halak heaved Thex over. Halak’s breath sizzled through his teeth. An ugly black rose of burnt cloth and skin blossomed on the Andorian’s chest.
“Strong, we have to get out! Get off a distress call to the Barker!”
The lieutenant’s chest heaved, and Halak saw that Strong’s face was slicked with blood gushing from a laceration in the man’s scalp. “Strong!”
“I’m okay,” said Strong, his voice hitching with pain. “I’m okay, I’m okay. There,” his fingers crawled over the controls, “done. Sending out a general distress. There goes life support.” Strong wiped blood from his eyes. Blinked. “Hull stress ...”
“Forget that!” The ship shimmied, and Halak staggered, clutching at a bulkhead for balance. He clawed his way to the equipment locker, slammed his fist down, and broke the seal. The locker sighed open. Reaching in, Halak dragged out an environmental suit. “Help me!”
“But, Commander,” Strong was holding his head and blood leaked around his fingers, “there’s no time!”
“Did you hear me, Lieutenant? Get over here and help me!”
Clamping his mouth shut, Strong said nothing more. Together, they shoved the inert Andorian into an environmental suit.
“All right, slap on a compressive and suit up!” Halak ordered, jamming on Thex’s helmet. He eased the Andorian to the deck. “Go, go!”
Jamming the white rectangle of a compressive bandage on his scalp, Strong shrugged into his suit. Halak fought with his suit, pawing clumsily at the legs, the arms; he was still dizzy and off-balance, and he could tell from the way the ship bucked, the groan of metal, that it couldn’t last much longer.
Without being told, Strong hooked his hands under Thex’s right arm, and Halak took the left. They dragged the Andorian upright.
“All right,” Halak rasped. His own breaths were loud in his ears. Looking over, he saw Strong’s grim, blood-streaked face staring at him from behind his faceplate. Halak read the look. They’d be lucky if anyone heard in time.
Eight hours of air. Halak activated the emergency transport. Then we suffocate.
The ship around him shimmered, dissolved, broke apart. The deck fell away from beneath his feet. And then there was blackness. The ship was gone.
Chapter 20
“And the next thing I knew we were floating in space,” said Halak. He’d omitted anything to do with his real mission, or his concerns about having been recognized by Qadir’s men. He was under orders not to divulge the truth of that Ryn mission to any
one, up to and including his captain. And, of course, SI knew nothing about his past. But the remainder of his story was true; his coal-black eyes had never left Burke’s face, and his voice rang with conviction. “No lifeboat. We clipped our suits together. But we were stranded, not even sure if our suit’s distress beacons would make it to the Barker.”
“So your situation was desperate,” said Burke, flatly. Throughout Halak’s recitation, her brown, appraising gaze betrayed no emotion save a faint derision.
“You could say that,” Halak said, without irony. “Thex died two hours after the ship disintegrated. We bled what was left of Thex’s air into our systems.”
Halak looked over at Garrett, his tone becoming a little defiant as if deflecting a perceived criticism. “Thex wouldn’t need it, and Strong’s suit was leaking, probably damaged in the beam-out.”
Mutely, Garrett nodded. She was shaken. She knew the story from reading Halak’s official reports as well as her private talk with Captain Connors. Connors hadn’t faulted Halak, and neither did she. Thex hadn’t needed air. Halak and Strong had. These were the cold, simple equations of life and death in space.
Halak was telling the truth. Her gut told her so. His recitation was too fluid; everything hung together. Garrett’s quick glance around at her officers—Tyvan, Stern, even the lieutenant making recordings—confirmed they believed him, too. So why was Burke quizzing Halak? How did this relate to Batra? Farius Prime?
“Why not simply switch out Lieutenant Thex’s seals for Strong’s?” asked Burke, as if she found Halak’s decision distasteful. “Bleeding air is a bit dramatic.”
“Dramatic.” Halak’s expression revealed what he thought: Here was an officer with a desk job. No matter if he switched seals or bled air, Thex was just as dead. “You think switching out seals isn’t dramatic? One slip up, and you’re dead. But, yeah, I thought about it. I discarded it.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to compromise Strong’s systems more than they already were. His wasn’t a simple seal failure. If it’d been that easy, we’d have rigged a stricture above the leak. So we bled the air, and I gave Strong the lion’s share. Then we dialed down oxygen, trying to conserve as long as possible. The problem was my repurification system was damaged, and I started building up carbon dioxide.”
“Ugly,” Stern murmured. “Carbon dioxide poisoning isn’t pleasant.”
“Plus, we had other problems. I didn’t want us to be too far from where our shuttle exploded. Barker would be looking for a debris field. But the hell of it was that staying close meant we were at risk from the debris field itself, and radiation. Local space was lousy with it. Add in ambient gamma radiation from the Ryn sun, and I figured that if we didn’t suffocate, we’d cook.”
“Why not phase your suits’ electrostatic charges into a force field?” Burke asked in that same bland, faintly judgmental tone. “That would have bought you some time.”
“Sure. We thought of that. But our priority was contact with the Barker. Phasing electrostatic fields would have drained our suits’ battery packs, made our carrier waves much weaker. With all that radiation, I wasn’t sure our distress beacons would pierce the interference locally, much less make it to the Barker. We elected to phase our carrier waves, instead. A gamble, but it was the only choice, really.”
“But you won,” said Burke. “The Barker caught your boosted signal.”
Halak shrugged irritably. “If you call losing crewmates winning. I don’t.”
“Yes, that’s right. I forgot. Strong’s air ran out before Barker got there.”
“That’s right.”
“And yours didn’t.”
“No.”
“That must have been unpleasant, listening to your crewmate suffocate.”
Halak’s expression was stony. “Very. Especially when he cracked the seal on his helmet.”
Dear Lord. Garrett closed her eyes. She’d seen what happened to the human body under sudden decompression in a vacuum.
Halak continued, his black eyes burning with contempt. “Ever been there, Lieutenant? The guy’s out of air. He can’t breathe. He’s got this insane idea that if he can just twist that helmet loose he’ll be able to. Even hanging in space, vacuum all around, he thinks that. It’s not logical.” Halak’s dark eyes raked over Sivek’s expressionless features before returning to Burke. “But it happens.”
Sivek’s only reaction was to blink. Burke didn’t acknowledge the reproach. “And you didn’t try to stop him.”
“Goddamn you.” Anger flooded Halak’s features, turning his sallow olive skin a copper color. “Of course, I did. But he straight-armed me. I don’t know what type of deep-space experience you haven’t had, Lieutenant, but when you’re weightless and someone gives you a push, unless you’ve got a thruster pack there’s no way you’re going to change course real fast.”
“So he unclipped you. In the middle of suffocating to death, where the only thing on his mind was getting air, he still had the presence of mind to make sure you couldn’t stop him.”
“No, he didn’t unclip me. He pushed, and then he cracked the seal, but when he did that, his systems shut down. After that, I had to rephase my carrier wave with Thex’s. Somehow I did it, though I honestly don’t remember much. I was pretty far gone. Barker showed up when I had about a half hour of air left. At least that’s what the doc told me. I had passed out. Next thing I knew, I was in sickbay.”
“And that’s all.”
Garrett spoke, her voice hard. “There has to be more, Lieutenant?”
“Much,” said Burke. “I have proof that nearly everything Commander Halak just told us is a lie. No,” she held up her hand when Halak opened his mouth to protest, “that’s unfair. Lieutenants Thex and Strong did die, just not the way Halak tells it.”
“Proof?”
Burke bobbed her neat blonde curls. “Absolutely,” she said, steepling her fingers like a professor making an important point she doesn’t want her students to forget. “Captain, autopsy results on Lieutenant Thex indicate that his wounds were not that severe. And Strong’s tissues do not indicate characteristic changes you would expect to see in severe hypoxia. Thex should’ve lived. He didn’t. Strong wasn’t suffocating, but he died, too.”
Garrett struggled to keep her disgust for Burke under wraps, and failed. “Are you suggesting, seriously, that Halak stole Thex’s air? That he murdered a member of his crew? Maybe both of them?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Garrett’s tone was deadly. “How? What’s more, why?”
“My scenario runs like this: Thex was unconscious. It wouldn’t take much for Halak to convince Strong that Thex was dead. Then, under the pretext of sharing Thex’s air with Strong, Halak cracked the seals on Strong’s helmet. Halak had never intended for either of his crewmates to survive.”
“Captain,” said Halak, his voice strangled. “Captain.”
Burke pushed on. “Then he bled Thex’s air into his suit.”
“Well, that’s dumb. Why not take both?” asked Stern.
“Because then he couldn’t be half-dead, could he? That might raise too many eyebrows.”
“That’s the how,” said Garrett. She made a shushing motion with her hand at Halak, who subsided. “Now, what’s the why?”
The edges of Burke’s lips flirted with a smile, as if she knew that Garrett’s not letting Halak interrupt meant that she’d scored points. “Commander Halak’s situation was desperate, but for reasons quite different from what he’s presented.”
“But there was an inquiry, Burke. Halak was cleared.”
“Corruption breeds powerful allies, Captain.”
“Corruption.” Garrett’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
Sivek stirred. “If I may?” At Garrett’s nod, the Vulcan stood and approached the conference room viewscreen.
“I had the opportunity to download a series of encrypted computer records that verify everything Lieutenant Burke alle
ges.”
“Encrypted? From where?”
“From Commander Halak’s personal log.”
Garrett’s eyes widened. “You took it upon yourself to break into Commander Halak’s personal log? On whose authority?”
“I gave Sivek the go-ahead, Captain,” said Burke.
Garrett felt her blood pressure rising. “Without consulting me?”
“Captain, Starfleet Intelligence’s mandate supercedes command prerogatives in matters of security,” said Burke. “But I did clear it with Commander Batanides, if that’s any consolation.”
“It’s not,” said Garrett, though she knew that Batanides owed her no explanations and didn’t need to ask her permission. “I should’ve been told.”
“Point taken,” said Sivek. His sleek black coif gleamed like the skin of a well-oiled seal. “And what is done is done. In any event, embedded within Commander Halak’s personal logs were encrypted entries that confirm and augment computer records retrieved from the shuttle Commander Halak appropriated on Farius Prime.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” said Garrett. “We searched that shuttle. Are you telling me that you found things we didn’t? How? Where?”
“Intelligence operatives are trained to look for that which has been overlooked,” said Sivek. He had the computer display a star chart on the conference room’s viewscreen. “I have to apologize, Captain. These will necessarily be crude because they’ve not been completely analyzed. In addition, I’m not at liberty to reveal the entire contents of the files we uncovered. This might be a little confusing, or you might find there to be leaps in logic. That can’t be helped.”
“Thanks,” said Garrett. “I’ll try to bear up.”
“First, from Commander Halak’s personal logs: this is a map of sectors seventeen through nineteen.”
Garrett’s expert eyes scanned the chart. “Ryn space.”
“Precisely. Stardate markers indicate that was recorded nine months ago. Now, here,” the Vulcan indicated a yellow-coded star system, “is the Ryn system: the Ryn sun, Ryn III, and its two moons. And here, these green ellipses, you see the range of Ryn scout vessels, their patrol routes, and the orbital paths of planetary security systems.”
