Daniel was suddenly acutely aware that the members of his bridge crew were all staring at him, voicelessly begging him to tell them that what they had just seen was an illusion, a mirage, or a forgery. They looked to Daniel Atgard, the man that, to them, embodied the righteousness of the United Confederation of Planets, a personification of all that was good and truthful, an avatar of morality in an often immoral and corrupt Universe. He could almost hear their silent pleas for him to tell them it wasn’t so—all they had fought for, believed in, and devoted their lives to, was based on one unthinkable, horrific lie.
But he could not.
“So, Admiral,” began Le Jaunte, his evil grin once again filling the viewscreen. “What do you think?”
Daniel doubted Le Jaunte had ever been so happy in his life.
Impulsively, Zach cried, “It’s a fake! It can’t be true!”
“Ah, the naiveté of youth,” laughed Le Jaunte bitterly. “But I am afraid it is indeed authentic.” He stared poignantly at the Admiral.
“That’s not why you are doing this, Pierre,” Daniel replied, his voice sounding eerily poised, carrying its usual power and calm authority. “That has nothing to do with it at all.”
Le Jaunte smiled, as if actually gratified that Daniel was not fooled. His eyes again flashed with the same icy confidence he had always shown. Just before he began to speak, however, Daniel noticed something else: a tiny, almost imperceptible upward flicker of his eyes, akin to the movement of a man who was listening to an earpiece or somehow receiving hushed information. It lasted only a brief instant, but Daniel had seen it clearly nonetheless.
“I really would like to continue chatting with you, Admiral,” he concluded suddenly, “but I am afraid I have other, more pressing matters to attend to.” He smiled impishly. “But please do not think me a monster, mon amie. After all, I am not going to kill you.”
Le Jaunte’s ever-present smirk warned Daniel not to let himself become overly optimistic.
“In fact, I am just going to let you go,” he finished. “It will give you some time to think about what I have showed you.
“Oh, and by the way,” he added suddenly, as if remembering some trivial point, “it seems your current course will take you directly into the path of a large comet. And I am afraid you will impact it well before your shield or propulsion systems come back on-line. I am terribly sorry.”
“Why leave it to a comet?” muttered the Admiral despondently. “That’s not what you want, is it? Come, Pierre—let’s die together.”
Le Jaunte’s lips arched nervously upwards as he considered the Admiral’s words, but his thirst for vengeance was quickly overcome by his capacity for cowardice.
“Oh, no, no, my dear Admiral,” he quipped sarcastically. “I am afraid I really must be going. Ta ta, Daniel. It was so good to see you again, as always.”
With that, the viewscreen changed to show a faraway comet careening through space, trailing behind it a tail of dust and ice particles. Le Jaunte’s final, deranged gift to Atgard was this extra time to not only think about his own death and that of his crew, but also about the ghastly tape of the Korgian Annihilation, an image now burned eternally in his mind.
• • •
It was almost poetic, Daniel thought. Le Jaunte could not have beaten him any more soundly. He had not only, in effect, destroyed the ship and killed him, but, more importantly, he had broken his spirit.
Daniel now knew that Admiral Cole had murdered the Korgians, after it was clear that they had surrendered. They had not attacked the Indomitable as the legend had claimed—they had surrendered to her, prostrate and helpless before the terrible Omega Cannon. They had been bluffing—albeit a stupid, dangerous bluff—but they did not force the Confederation’s hand like the story that had been concocted had indicated. Daniel wondered how many people knew the awful truth—the Indomitable's bridge crew, Cole, Le Jaunte … who else? Was it Cole’s own moral turpitude that led to the slaughter or did the order to fire come straight from the top?
Daniel had, in essence, devoted his entire life to the Confederation. Like his father before him, he had practically grown up in the military, and had served as an officer in the Confederation for 33 years. He was one of the men most directly responsible for humanity’s rise to prominence, their hard-earned ascension to their current position as the most powerful species in the sector. He had always—always—thought he had been fighting on the side of right during those 33 years, promoting peace, not war; alliance, not subjugation; moral responsibility, not the callous disregard of an entire species.
But he had been wrong. His entire life’s work had been a lie. He had been working for the very Confederation that was, as Le Jaunte and apparently even the Lucani Ibron had realized, the galaxy’s worst enemy.
Daniel hung his head disconsolately, an odd feeling in the weightlessness of the ship. He wondered how long he had until they impacted the comet or ran out of breathable air. He hoped it was soon.
“Admiral?” asked Zach carefully as he turned to face him in his chair. “What are we going to do?”
The Admiral chuckled briefly, his eyes still on the floor. “What are we going to do?” he repeated bitterly. “We are going to die.”
“Damn it, Daniel!” yelled Anastasia suddenly. “Snap out of it! There will be plenty of time for despair after we die.”
Daniel looked up at her, stunned out of his stupor. Her expression was filled with fire, but an oppressive hopelessness hung over the Admiral, smothering his very soul.
“C’mon, Admiral,” Zach urged again, his innocent optimism somehow irritating to the Admiral’s sunken spirits. “There’s got to be something we can do. I mean, we don’t have shields, or life support, or fresh air, or propulsion, but—”
The Admiral’s head snapped up. “What did you just say?” he asked, suddenly animated. “What was that?”
“Um, I said we don’t have shields, life support, air, propulsion—”
“That’s it!” he cried, tearing at his restraining harness like a frenzied animal. “Zach, you’re a genius!”
Zach, like the rest of the crew, thought the Admiral had finally lost it. He looked back at him as if he had simply gone insane.
• • •
“I need you, Nathan,” the Admiral called, finally ripping off the emergency harness. He held onto the chair as he adjusted his body, which reluctantly readapted itself to its zero-gravity training. He eventually maneuvered himself into position and pushed off gently from the chair, sending himself floating toward the bridge doors.
“Yes, sir,” replied Nathan, his snaking tentacles adeptly finding the harness release hatch. He used the suction-cupped tentacles to move himself away from the chair and toward the floor, where he could travel along the ground with relative ease. Fedorans were, after all, highly effective in zero gravity, and could even survive in a vacuum for almost an hour at a time.
“Daniel, what are you doing?” Anastasia asked as he floated by her. “Do you have a plan?”
“I hope so,” he replied. “I’ll worry about the comet. You try to get our systems back on-line. Start with life support, and try to get some emergency heaters.” The temperature aboard the ship had already dropped noticeably, sending a chill through Daniel’s body, though it was a chill that was not wholly caused by the temperature.
Daniel turned as he approached the bridge doors, opening the panel to their right. He braced his left hand on the ceiling for support, sending a shooting pain through his recently broken finger. Ignoring his discomfort, he pulled down on the manual release lever with his other hand, causing the doors to slide apart and allowing Nathan to scoot deftly under him and into the hallway. The Admiral followed him, pulling himself through the doorway and grasping the first of a long series of rungs that were embedded in the top of the corridor.
“Go to the hangar bay,” directed the Admiral, hauling himself along the rungs and down the passageway, but not fast enough to keep up with Nathan. The p
rocess was tedious, creating fresh pains in his still-aching arms and finger, but luckily the hallway was not incredibly long.
Nathan disappeared around the bend in the corridor, and by the time the Admiral had arrived, he had manually opened the heavy double doors. The Admiral followed him in, directing Nathan to close the doors behind them.
The ZF-255 took up most of the bay, but it was not the reason the Admiral had come to the hangar. He quickly moved himself along the wall to the equipment closet, pulling out a spacesuit and carefully beginning to maneuver himself into it.
“What are we doing here, Admiral?” asked Nathan. “Are we going to use the ZF-255 to destroy the comet?”
“No, we’re not,” replied the Admiral, sliding his legs into the spacesuit. “I already used both of its missiles. Would you be so kind as to pull us both over to the outer doors?”
“C–certainly sir,” he replied, just a hint of hesitation working its way into his voice. Again positioning himself face-down and grasping the floor with his tentacles, Nathan moved under the Admiral and allowed him to hook his leg underneath his own. Nathan scissored his legs together, holding the Admiral by his foot, and began crawling toward the bay doors. It did not take the Fedoran long to crawl across the room, his muscular tentacles finding ample purchase on the hangar’s grated floor. Daniel struggled to seal up the suit by the time they had reached the far wall.
Upon seeing the Admiral open the auxiliary panel to the side of the bay doors, Nathan let out a curious whimper. “Air propulsion, sir?” he asked, belatedly realizing what Zach had said to tip the Admiral off to the idea. “Are we going to try to alter our course by letting out the air in this room?”
“Yes, we are,” replied the Admiral, moving himself down to where he could reach a cargo line that floated several centimeters above the floor. He yanked on it, and, when it held taut, he began to hook it to a ring embedded on the belt of his spacesuit.
“But surely we need all the air we have, Admiral?” Nathan asked nervously. “Without the oxygen recyclers on-line, it will only be a matter of hours before—”
“Would you rather crash into the comet?” Daniel asked, securing the line tightly. The line was thin, but was made of a braided composite alloy. For some reason, Daniel’s mind drew a blank as he tried to remember its rated strength factor.
“You do not really want me to—” Nathan began, cutting himself off as he realized that it was exactly what the Admiral wanted him to do.
“I’ll hold you while you open the doors,” explained the Admiral, helping Nathan get upright and spinning him so he faced the lever. “And the quicker the better, if we want it to change our course enough to avoid the collision.”
Daniel was glad that he could no longer see the expression on the Fedoran’s face as he grasped the lever with his strong tentacles. “Are–are you sure you have me?” he stammered.
“Positive,” replied the Admiral, trying to put as much confidence as he could into his voice. He wrapped his arms completely around Nathan’s thick torso, clasping his hands as tightly as he could. Fortunately, time, adrenaline, and the cold air had combined to make his broken finger all but numb by now.
Nathan let out another nervous whimper, but it was quickly drowned out as the heavy doors began to part and the air began to hiss through the opening, the cord attached to Daniel’s belt coming taut with a jolt. Once the doors were open half a meter, the force of the escaping air and the roar of the wind were almost unbearable, trying valiantly to suck the entire contents of the hangar out into the vacuum of space. Daniel squeezed his hands tightly, his entire, tired body violently protesting the effort. Just as the pain in Daniel’s finger became unbearable, the gusting winds began to dissipate and Nathan quickly jacked the lever back up, sealing the doors. There was a sudden, peaceful calm in the hangar bay, and the Admiral slowly released the massive Fedoran. Daniel had no idea if the gust of air was sufficient to move them out of the comet’s path, but even if it had, the lost air of the relatively large hangar meant that they now probably had less than an hour to get the life support systems back on. If they could not, then the last thing they would all surely think as they slowly froze to death and ran out of oxygen would be that they should have simply let themselves be killed by the relatively painless collision with the comet.
• • •
Once out of the hangar bay, the Admiral sent Nathan back to the bridge, continuing down the corridor toward the engineering bay. He arrived to find the doors open and Darren and Ryan frantically working at an open access cover on the main power grid. Ryan looked up as Daniel approached, still clad in the spacesuit, though the helmet hung back from its hinge at the neck. “We sent Alexis up to the bridge, sir,” Ensign Taylor reported, still partially concentrating on the instrument in his hand. “We’re trying to at least get back emergency power and life support.”
“I can handle it from here,” said Darren, not looking up from the dimly-glowing grid. “Finish hooking those generators up to the life support systems. If we don’t at least get oxygen and temperature control back, we won’t have time to worry about anything else.”
Ryan nodded and pushed himself across the room to a pair of floating portable generators that were hastily rigged to another access panel in the far wall. The generators, metal cubes one meter to a side, each had a display panel that showed a green energy bar, indicating how much power they had remaining. Once Ryan hooked them to the life support systems, those bars would turn from green to yellow to red to nothing all too quickly.
“It’ll just take a couple of minutes,” mumbled Ryan, fiddling with an unseen control buried within the access hatchway. “I’m going to restore the oxygen recyclers and bring the heat up a bit. The optimum efficiency settings are 75 percent normal exchange and 15 degrees Celsius, sir … unless you would like me to set it to something different?”
The Admiral was highly intelligent in many areas, and had ample knowledge in many fields, including electrical engineering, but he realized that this did not preclude the fact that trained experts almost always knew more about their specific field than he did. Daniel had always known when to trust the expertise and recommendations of his crew. After all, he was an Admiral, not an engineer.
“Whatever you think will keep us alive the longest, Ryan,” he said, turning toward Lieutenant Alexander. “How are you doing on the power grid, Darren?” he asked.
“Well, sir, this thing is fried better than a Hunrithian myops that flew too close to a magma geyser,” he replied, throwing in one of his usually colorful metaphors. “It reminds me of the time my old ship passed through those ion clouds by Yhafil IV, except this is much worse than that ever was.”
“Can you fix it?” asked the Admiral, not exactly sure what happened to the main power grid when it passed through the ion clouds by Yhafil IV. “Can we get main power back?”
“Well, I don’t know what I can promise you, Admiral,” he replied, staring intently at the grid, “but main power looks shot. I might be able to get auxiliary power if I re-polarize the grid emitters and reroute power from the capacitors, but we would have very limited hyperspace capability. Of course,” he added, flashing a glance at the large, unlit contraption jutting out from the floor in the center of the room, “the Quantum Refractor would be out of the question.”
“Of course,” replied the Admiral. “Just try to get us hyperspace and supralight communication as soon as possible.”
“Oh, the SLC antenna was destroyed beyond repair, sir,” Darren added casually. “Even if we had enough power, we’re limited to normal radio communication until we have it replaced. We can’t call home for a while, I’m afraid.”
“Perfect,” Daniel muttered, under his breath. “How long do you think until we’ll have the hyperspace engines back?”
“It should take about five minutes to re-polarize the grid, Admiral, though I did it in three one time back aboard the Ulysses. The capacitors should only take another minute or so.”
&n
bsp; “Good. I’ll expect hyperspace in five minutes, then,” he concluded, turning to return to the bridge. Sniffing the air, he noticed that it suddenly seemed less stale than it had been and the temperature seemed to have increased at least enough to begin to drive the numbness from his bones. Pushing off from the wall nearby, he added, “And get us some gravity as soon as possible, Darren. This is a pain in the ass.”
• • •
With great discomfort, the Admiral made it back to the bridge, the warmer air bringing the throbbing back to his broken finger. Daniel momentarily struggled to remember if he had broken it in his rage after seeing Le Jaunte, or if it was from back on the planet of Tu’oth’roor. Only the persistent aching of his entire body reminded him that he had been running for his life on that planet not nearly so long ago as it suddenly seemed.
Daniel could see that Alexis was on the bridge, floating face up beneath Nathan’s tactical console, hovering a few centimeters off the deck. She flashed the Admiral a smile as he drifted back through the open bridge doors. “This zero gravity stuff is great,” she quipped. “Much easier on the back.”
A slight smile fought its way to the Admiral’s lips. Alexis always had been able to make him smile, even in the worst of circumstances. Fittingly, thought the Admiral, these truly were the worst of circumstances.
“We should have auxiliary power back in less than five minutes,” the Admiral said, making his way back to his seat. He strapped himself in, the secure feeling of the restraint harnesses comforting after his recent movements in zero g.
“Will we have hyperspace?” asked Anastasia, reaching into her lap and flipping Daniel a small personal heater. The heater floated slowly toward him, and Daniel noticed that Anastasia had already distributed one to each member of the bridge crew. Though the temperature was far more bearable now, the small heater helped to drive the accumulated cold from the Admiral’s weary body.
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