WildFire Book Two

by David Mack

  “Got it!” she said. “Nice job. Let’s go home.”

  Stevens confirmed the cargo claw had a secure grip on the warp core, right on the edge of a structural support element that could handle the stress. The odds of getting this right had been astronomical. Until now, he hadn’t dared to let himself believe they would actually succeed. Damn it, he thought. Why don’t I ever have this kinda luck when I’m playing dom-jot?

  He keyed the ship-to-ship comm. “Work Bug to da Vinci. Did somebody order a warp core?”

  * * *

  Gomez stood in the da Vinci’s main engineering compartment, staring down the cylindrical cavity that once held the ship’s primary warp core and matter/antimatter reaction assembly. The other members of the salvage team—Ina, Wong, Copper, Wetzel, Soloman, Hawkins, and Conlon—also were grouped around the edge of the artificial chasm, staring down at the darkness beyond its bottom extremity. Only a weak and invisible force field prevented the planet’s blistering, liquid-metallic atmosphere from rushing in and instantly vaporizing them all.

  No one moved, and no one spoke. Air had become dangerously scarce aboard the da Vinci, and had grown as hot and dry as a Vulcan summer. Several crewmembers’ nasal passages had begun to crack from dehydration. Gomez seemed to be suffering the most; she wiped away her latest nosebleed from her upper lip and unabashedly palmed the bright-red blood on her pant leg. She was confident no one would see; despite having brought every remaining chemical flare on the ship to main engineering, the room rapidly was dimming as the flares dwindled.

  Gomez would have preferred to install a warp core under controlled conditions at a starbase, or, in an emergency, in deep space. Installing the Orion’s salvaged core into the da Vinci here, in the lower atmosphere of a gas giant, without flooding main engineering, would require a real-time adjustment of the core shaft’s containment field; it would have to expand outward to envelop the core, then retract with it until it was locked into place. Because the hard connections to the main computer were still offline, it would have to be done manually.

  Hawkins had commented the procedure was similar to extending defensive shields around an allied vessel, so Gomez tapped him to be in charge of modulating the force field. At least he’s got a job that’s familiar to him, she thought as she looked around at the rest of the team.

  Except for Conlon and herself, the rest were not engineers. Ina and Wong at least had some advanced technical training; Soloman’s help would be critical to adapting the engineering software to the current crisis. But Wetzel and Copper were medical staff; Hawkins was a security guard. Installing a warp core, even just for a basic power supply, was no simple task. It was not a job to entrust to amateurs.

  Unfortunately, Gomez thought, amateurs are all we have left. She resolved to keep her instructions short and simple.

  “Work Bug to Gomez,” Stevens said over the comm. “We’re on approach. Standing by to deliver the core.”

  “Bring it in slow,” Gomez said. “Make sure it’s lined up.”

  “Coming in now. Get ready to grab it.”

  Gomez nodded to Hawkins. “Extend the force field.”

  Hawkins worked at his control padd. Gomez saw him blinking away exhaustion as he made multiple tiny adjustments.

  Gomez and her team stared down into the darkness; several seconds later the warp core emerged, like a phantom rising from an abyss. Unseen generators whined with a rapid oscillation as Hawkins used the force field to pull the warp core up into the shaft. “Stand by,” Gomez said. “As soon as it reaches the top, activate the magnetic locks in front of you.”

  Gomez watched anxiously as the core continued to rise. She kept anticipating a mishap, another catastrophe to compound all they had already suffered in the past twelve hours. But this time she was wrong. The top of the core ascended past her eye level, and climbed steadily upward toward the deuterium injector valves. A few seconds later, there was a dull thud as it reached the top of the shaft. Gomez and her team moved in concert, throwing the switches on the powerful magnetic seals that held the core steady at its central point, just below the dilithium crystal articulation chamber.

  The warp core was in place, but there still remained more than a hundred small, finely calibrated steps that needed to be executed, to within vary narrow tolerances, before the core could be cold-started. And, to Gomez’s chagrin, the chemical flares were fading faster than she expected, so much of this work would have to be done in the dark. She tapped her combadge.

  “Gomez to Work Bug. Good job. Get back here on the double. I need you all in main engineering.”

  “Acknowledged,” Stevens said. “We’ll be with you in less than five minutes. Work Bug out.”

  Gomez gasped for breath in between orders.

  “Conlon, get to the top and hook up the deuterium injectors…. Hawkins, Copper. Go up one level and secure the next set of magnetic locks…. Wetzel, Wong. Go down one level and do the same thing.

  “Soloman, restore core control circuits here, at the primary node only. Don’t worry about the backups…. Ina, reconnect the main EPS tap to the core shunt, over there, behind the dilithium crystal chamber. I’ll check the crystals.

  “Everyone ask me for more orders when you’re done. Go.”

  Fix the big things first, Gomez reminded herself. Power-related repairs only. She watched her team move to carry out their orders. There still was almost no talking; only a silent, intensely focused concentration that seemed to propel all the members of the team.

  Gomez was about to permit herself a swell of optimism when the silence was broken by the deep, agonized groan of the da Vinci’s hull beginning to implode, one section and bulkhead at a time, starting in the aft sections and progressing forward. The integrity field is retracting, she realized. Instead of an hour, we’ve got thirty minutes—if we’re lucky.

  At the moment, Gomez was no longer feeling lucky.

  * * *

  Falling…

  Duffy snapped back from a daydream he suddenly couldn’t remember. He felt the brutal, crushing hand of the atmosphere relaxing its hold on him. Must be close to the device, he reasoned. Suit’s powering up its integrity field.

  He could barely hear his own breathing. The prolonged, intense pressure had left his ears ringing and feeling like they were filled with concrete.

  He keyed the visor display and saw the tactical readout from the Wildfire device. He was less than ten meters from it and approaching quickly. He waited until he was nearly on top of it before reaching out. He felt his hands make contact, and he grabbed hold of the twisted duranium rod that was still fused to its outer casing. The sole achievement of my last attempt to defuse this thing, Duffy mused as he held on to it.

  He fired small maneuvering thrusters on his suit and steadied himself directly above the device’s control pad. Only one chance at this, he thought as he noted the suit’s power gauges decreasing rapidly. Gotta get it right the first time.

  He had completed twelve of the sixteen steps needed to disarm the device during his first attempt aboard the Orion, before a stray blast of lightning had nearly cooked him alive. Now he had only to pry open the casing and enter the final four code sequences directly on the warhead control interface. On the Orion, with no leverage and only his own strength, he’d been unable to force open the device’s outer casing. With that in mind, he’d taken the precaution of enhancing the suit’s myoelectric components, to amplify his strength far beyond its normal range. Gripping the duranium rod in his left hand, he placed his right against the open edge of the device casing and pushed the two apart.

  The device opened easily, giving him access to the warhead control interface. For a moment he saw an outline of the device through his visor, then realized it was probably just a glitch in the visor display, caused either by the immense atmospheric pressure, the extreme heat, or the suit’s rapidly depleting power reserves. Or maybe I’m hallucinating.

  Duffy entered the final codes carefully but quickly. He wasn’t con
cerned about beating the detonator, which still had nearly twenty-four minutes remaining; he was worried about his suit’s impending power failure. By even his most optimistic calculations, if he kept the integrity field at full power, the suit would run out of energy in less than four minutes. At the minimum survival level, he might last another twenty.

  He submitted the final disarming protocol for approval. Several seconds later, the device acknowledged the codes and verified it was aborting the countdown and shutting down all its systems. Duffy breathed a relieved sigh as the device’s power signature vanished from his suit’s sensor display. He gradually reduced the power to his suit’s integrity field and boosted the power to his comm as he opened a channel.

  “Duffy to da Vinci,” he said, realizing for the first time that his suit was less than ten minutes away from running out of air. He’d have to keep this short.

  “Go ahead, Duffy,” Gold said, his voice sounding distant to Duffy’s compromised eardrums.

  “Device…disarmed.”

  * * *

  Gold was grateful for any small bit of good news right now.

  “Good work, Duffy,” Gold said.

  “Doc?” Duffy said, his voice quavering oddly. Gold didn’t know if it was Duffy’s voice that sounded odd, or if it was the transmission that was distorted. “Something’s happening….”

  Fearful looks passed between Gold and Lense, who had watched helplessly when Duffy’s vitals went haywire during his dive toward the planet’s core. She stared at her monitor, her eyes focused on a point Gold would have guessed was a kilometer beyond the jumbled scroll of bio readings being relayed sporadically by Duffy’s pressure suit.

  “What’s happening, Kieran?” Lense said.

  Gold felt Abramowitz and Faulwell grow tense in response to the troubling silence that followed Lense’s query. Then Duffy’s voice trembled again over the comm.

  “Light…getting…brighter.”

  Gold leaned close to Lense and looked over her shoulder at the bio readings. As if I understand any of this, he thought sourly. He muted the comm.

  “Doctor?” Gold said. “What’s his status?”

  “Vitals are becoming unstable. His CO2 levels are rising.”

  Abramowitz turned her seat toward Gold and Lense. “He might be encountering the same phenomenon that Soloman saw,” she said. “He might be making contact.”

  “Possibly,” Lense said. “But more likely he’s suffering from pressure psychosis. Captain, we should get him back aboard as soon as possible.”

  Gold felt Lense watching him as he stepped away without answering her.

  The hull of the da Vinci howled as another flooded, outer section buckled inward, folding in on itself as the planet’s atmosphere tightened its lethal grip. Gold placed his remaining hand against the unusually warm bulkhead.

  I know how you feel, he thought. Part of him wanted to believe his ship could hear him and would take heart. Fight, old girl. Hold together.

  Gold moved to the ops console and opened a ship-wide channel. “All hands, this is the captain. Lt. Commander Duffy has succeeded in disarming the Wildfire device.” Gold checked the console’s display. “We have approximately fourteen minutes before we run out of power. Make them count.”

  * * *

  Gold’s announcement was still echoing off the barren walls of main engineering as Gomez looked up from the dilithium crystal articulation frame.

  Fourteen minutes? she thought. Is he kidding me?

  Stevens, Blue, and Robins had made it back several minutes ago; she had detailed Stevens to hook up the antimatter injector assembly and Pattie was directing the rest of the nonengineers in reconnecting the electroplasma system to the reactor. Conlon would be finished with the deuterium injector in a few minutes, then would go below to help Stevens. Soloman was promising core control functions in three minutes.

  Even with all that done, there would still remain the delicate and potentially disastrous task of manually calibrating and controlling the matter/antimatter reaction process to restart the core. Gomez was ready to do it herself—she was an expert in warp drive engineering—but she would feel a lot better once Duffy was back aboard to help her fine-tune it. He was a propulsion expert, and this was his specialty.

  She wiped the sweat from her palm down the side of her jacket and tapped her combadge. “Gomez to Duffy. What’s your return ETA? We could really use a hand up here.”

  Gomez looked up and noticed Conlon was climbing down from the deuterium injector. Good. She’s ahead of schedule. A few seconds later she was still waiting for a reply from Duffy. She was about to tap her combadge again when she heard his voice crackle weakly over the comm.

  “I’m sorry, Sonnie.”

  Gomez felt the panic rise in her like a wave.

  “Kieran? What’re you—”

  “I love you, Sonnie…. I’m sorry.” Duffy’s final iteration of I’m sorry was drowned out by a rasp of static.

  “Kieran?” Gomez’s voice rose in pitch and volume with her fear. “Kieran!”

  Gomez was numb. Her breath caught in her throat. She thought of Duffy, alone, swallowed by searing darkness, crushed, vaporized…. She slumped against the side of the warp core. Her jaw trembled and her knees felt ready to fold and deliver her to gravity’s mercy.

  No…. Oh, God, no…. A sick shudder racked her body. Her throat tightened to hold in a cry of rage and grief. Through the blurred lenses of her tear-filled eyes she noticed that all other activity in main engineering had ground to a halt.

  Can’t fall apart, she told herself. If you’re weak these people die. Get up. Get up!

  She banished her grief with an angry growl and blinked hard to clear her vision. She sealed the dilithium crystal chamber and glared at Conlon, who seemed to recoil from Gomez, as if grief were contagious. “If you’re done up top, go help Stevens,” Gomez said.

  Conlon rushed to the hatch that led to the engineering sublevels.

  “Let’s go, people,” Gomez said loud enough to be heard a deck away. “We have twelve minutes to restore main power, and I don’t plan to be late.”

  Gomez moved toward the impulse power relay, grabbing up tools along the way. She thought of Duffy, dying alone, and wished she was with him. She paused to look at the other members of the crew, all scrambling to finish repairs they weren’t remotely qualified to make, fighting for their lives.

  If it were just my life, Kieran…. She let that thought drift away uncompleted. She stepped to the relay, opened it, and began making the fastest, simplest, good-for-now repairs she could think of. But it’s not just my life. These people need me.

  She had her orders. She had her duty.

  And there would be time to mourn later.

  Chapter

  8

  Falling…

  The sky had opened up beneath Duffy. He tumbled downward, spiraling in tight circles beside the nowinert Wildfire device. He felt his weight increase with each passing moment, and his vision had long since blurred.

  He was no longer in darkness; all he saw were washes of color racing past him—or perhaps he was racing past them. He sensed he was moving with tremendous speed, even though his pressure suit’s plasma thrusters were out of fuel.

  Then the sensations changed. The pressure abated. He no longer felt the heat. Lense warned me about this, he remembered. Pressure psychosis. I’m losing it. He wondered which would come first—crushing implosion or asphyxia. He hoped for asphyxia.

  He pulled a breath of thinning air into his lungs and struggled to focus his eyes. He was hurtling headlong through a vertical tunnel of multicolored light. He plunged past its spiraling walls toward a bright surface of shifting colors and swirling semiliquid gases.

  The multichromatic wall rushed up to meet him. He braced for the impact. Instead, he broke through the luminescent barrier, penetrating it like a bullet.

  Duffy emerged into a vast expanse of vacuum, a region of negative space at the heart of the gas giant. The pocket
of vacuum was encased in a shimmering, hollow sphere of liquid metallic hydrogen.

  At its center was a sphere of light.

  The sphere wasn’t like a star, or some monochromatic orb; its surface was made up of what Duffy surmised must have been many trillions of individual beams of light with definitive beginnings and endings, collections of coherently ordered light that seemed to be their own source.

  Hundreds of colossal tentacles of energy, which reached from the surface of the sphere to the shimmering wall above the vacuum, undulated and twisted around one another; they resembled tornadoes of light and moved in complex patterns that Duffy couldn’t help but think of as a dance.

  The beams in the sphere and tentacles spanned more hues than Duffy could discern, in shadings and gradations too subtle for him to comprehend. He continued to descend, slipping through a narrow gap in two tentacles as they closed their double-helix into a single strand. He found it difficult to judge sizes and distances without the benefit of his suit’s sensors, but he guessed the sphere he was falling toward was at least eight times the size of the Earth.

  The surface of the sphere dominated his field of vision; its horizon grew wider and flatter. Duffy felt like he was falling in slow motion as he neared the moment of impact.

  He fell into the sphere and sank through its shifting layers of light and energy. The systems of his enhanced pressure suit flickered, then failed.

  Duffy was oblivious to the shutdown of his equipment; he was far away, drowning in the deep, swift currents of memory.

  * * *

  The blades of grass prickled young Kieran’s neck as he lay on his back, arms folded behind his head. He stared up at the night sky from his parents’ backyard. His father sat beside him, listening proudly and only rarely pointing out minor corrections as Kieran named the constellations.

  Only seven years old, Kieran already had memorized most of the stellar configurations visible from Earth with the naked eye, and he was well on his way to learning the stars’ names as they were known to those who lived on planets that circled them.