STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER

by Diane Carey

  The suction from above wheezed and fell away. The gravity compensators gasped with relief, and turned loose of those who were left alive. When the sealant tank exhausted itself, Tim McAddis was encrusted into the silent dome overhead, the victim of a ritual smothering.

  Palsied and shuddering, Keller dropped the tank and staggered to the middle of the deck, turning in pathetic circles and staring upward.

  “Tim!” he rasped. “Tim!”

  Bits of chemical bond flecked his hands and face. He gasped upward, soulless, shuddering. His hands pressed to the sides of his head as if it might explode. “Tim! Tim!”

  Roger Lake’s form appeared in front of him, also turning and staring upward. “Mother of Christ,” the captain uttered, his mouth moving like a gulping koi’s. “Isn’t that something . . .”

  Lake had his back to Keller as he stared up at his entombed science officer. McAddis returned the stare, but his eyeballs were coated with curing stone.

  Right in front of Keller was Lake’s head, the poisoned organ that had caused all this. Emergency light flickered on the bald spot.

  When Keller saw that flicker he stopped turning or calling out. As if sinking underwater, he held his breath and stared into the mirror of his mistakes, all the decisions he should’ve made a long time ago, and right up to today. Right up to now.

  Where were his hands? He had no phaser, no blades, just empty hands.

  He raised those hands. Something moved in his periphery. A movement. A solid object. A duranium cyclospanner. Zane Bonifay was holding the other end, inviting him to take it, to do something, anything.

  Choose between a wrong and a wrong . . . Even a bad decision is better than no decision.

  Reason left his mind, leaving only passion to rule him. He felt the balance of the wrenchlike tool is his grip. His arm drew back over his head. Power, thrust, rage all came together in the single force of his arm and shoulder. He put everything into the one strike, for he knew he could never make himself do this twice.

  The spanner whistled faintly, but with purpose. The tool came down on Lake’s head. Was it enough? Too much? Would the captain be killed or just angry?

  Keller had no idea. He’d never hit another man before.

  Before him, Lake didn’t even flinch, didn’t stiffen or react. His chin went up a little. That was all.

  He collapsed and lay in a heap at Keller’s feet.

  Around them, the shocked crew stared at him, at his unconscionable act. The security guards turned their phasers on him in some kind of panic, but faltered in actually firing them. He expected to be shot. He should be.

  But Zoa snatched up a piece of Hurley’s smashed chair, tested the weight, didn’t like it, flipped the piece over and let it fly. It pinwheeled perfectly over Keller’s shoulder and struck one of the guards in the throat, slamming between his chest shield and helmet. The blunt force drove him backward and he fell.

  His partner gaped at Zoa, then at Keller, and backed off. He was only eighteen.

  In that instant, Keller realized the greatest error in his career, probably in his life—the reason James Kirk had come to haunt him in the corridors of Peleliu, and the thing Tim McAddis had tried to tell him. Keller had tried to manage a bad situation instead of leading it. Nothing could work that way on a ship.

  Either be in command, or don’t.

  Around him, the eyes of his shipmates were sallow, injured. Yes, shocked at his behavior. The regard of Shucorion nearly crushed him. Another captain, from another culture. Zoa, representing a civilization the Federation needed to help defend itself. What was she thinking as she stood there judging these unforgivable actions? What were they all thinking?

  He felt their repugnance, the intense discord he represented to them now. Estranged from people who had liked him before, he found the aloneness suddenly alluring. He couldn’t do any worse in their eyes. No point caring now.

  He picked up his legs, screwed them back on, and stepped over Lake, crossed the deck and grabbed Shucorion. He wheeled the alien all the way down the port steps to the helm, and pushed him into Makarios’s chair.

  “Drive the ship,” he said. “Hard about, starboard, mark two-four.”

  Shucorion faltered only briefly. “About?”

  “Turn us around to the right, down five degrees.”

  “The shots are coming from that direction.”

  “Never run from an animal once it’s charging you. Bonifay, take damage control. Savannah, get on the science boards. Zoa, can you operate the firing systems?”

  “Firing?”

  “Can you shoot?”

  Her masklike face lit up. Her heavy braids fell forward as she bent over the nav console and the weapons systems as she picked out words and symbols she recognized on the high resolution display membranes.

  Suddenly calm, as if he were the one plastered and frozen, Keller scanned the master situation monitors and optical subprocessors on the engineering side. The ship was in deep trouble. Fuel constriction. Thermal overload. Thrust imbalance. Exhaust vane misalignment. It was an orchestration of disasters showing the harmonic collapse of ship’s systems. What else could possibly go wrong? Amazing that they could still breathe, that they still had gravity.

  “Initiators are firing out of phase,” Bonifay called. “If you don’t shut down, they’ll rupture in less than fifty seconds.”

  “Valve off the deuterium flow. Prepare to shut down. Decouple the accelerators.”

  “Already done. We’re on total emergency power supplies. Total.”

  Back at his ravaged station, Lewiston called, “Mr. Keller, if these readings are right, the excelinide sphere’s cracked in the IRC chamber!”

  “How many layers?”

  “All eight.”

  “We’re dead,” Savannah wheezed.

  Around them, the supercomplex integrated organism that was a Starfleet ship finally and irrevocably began to collapse. She was nearly dead. Speared, cracked, bleeding to death. Her arteries were cut. Her brains were smashed, her heart missing beats, and still the Peleliu forced air into the ducts, coughed coolant through her veins, to keep the gasping crew alive inside her. How was it possible? Keller could still breathe, still think, still move around. She was giving them air and gravity, the two things they needed most at the moment.

  She was giving them a second chance. She didn’t know what they could do with it, but she would hold on another few minutes. Time enough to think. Maybe act.

  Act how? They couldn’t see the enemy as anything more than hazy phantoms blowing about on the screens, and couldn’t accurately tell where those phantoms were in relation to Peleliu. On the hull, random shots still thumped and shook, but they might as well have been hitting the carcass of a downed rhinoceros. What was left of the cruiser’s shields took the brunt of impact. If those had been phasers or disruptors hitting them, the ship would’ve been a ball of dust by now. Only the Kauld’s lack of modern technology provided a clouded window.

  He began to focus his attention. Smaller and smaller thoughts, smaller targets, animal thinking. He looked into the face of the charging bull.

  We’re dead. We’re dead. We’re dead.

  “No, we’re not,” Keller declared.

  Something of a hollow assurance if he couldn’t think of anything in the next couple of seconds.

  James Kirk’s words jerked him back to that corridor. Use the tools you have.

  What do I have?

  You have Shucorion.

  Survived in the sensor darkness for years. Fought these same enemies for years—

  Keller crossed the deck in a step and a half, startling Shucorion at the helm. Digging his fingers into the Blood man’s shoulder, Keller demanded, “What am I forgetting?”

  Though taken by surprise and pressed hard under Keller’s unremitting grip, Shucorion recovered within a second or two.

  “They are also blind,” he said.

  At first, the concept seemed too simple to be of any help.

 
; Then it snapped into place.

  “That’s it!” Keller swung around. “Rick, let the field collapse. Give me overthrust, right now. Zane, go help him!”

  Bonifay clumped down from the starboard side, leaped over Lake, and joined Lewiston on the port side. Around them lay the moaning, unconscious or dead bodies of their captain and shipmates. Drained of his humanity, Keller felt as if his arms and legs were separated from him. His mind went off on its own. His voice followed.

  “Shut down everything but environmental, shields, and weapons. Give me photon torpedoes. Lay a pattern in a funnel shape. Zane, show Zoa how to lay a dispersal. I want automatic detonation at fifty kilometers.”

  Bonifay thunked to the lower deck, came around the helm, and poked the coordinates into the tactical board. Zoa nodded silently as she picked up exactly what he was doing and apparently understood. In less than five seconds she took over completely and Bonifay went back to the engineering boards to continue damage control.

  The others didn’t understand yet, but they would in a minute. If the Kauld were blind too, then they had to be close. Not space-distant close, but really close. Physically on top of each other—spittin’ distance.

  “Ready,” Zoa announced.

  “Fire,” Keller ordered.

  They heard the phew-phew-phew of photon torpedo launch, but saw almost nothing except a faint color change on the main screen and the two dynoscanners still working. He didn’t have any way to know how many torpedoes had successfully launched. There were supposed to be seven in a funnel assault. He didn’t think he heard that many.

  Would the torpedoes detonate in space, or were the casings or controls damaged?

  Ffffmmmmm—there it was. The Peleliu went up on her bow, then downward, and washed back in the photon wake. One thing worked.

  “Mr. Keller,” Shucorion called. “Kauld are breaking off!”

  Keller rushed to his side to confirm what he saw on the helm’s only working sensor outlet. “Why would they?”

  “No idea.”

  “We couldn’t have hit them all—” He divorced himself from what couldn’t have happened and concentrated on the next action. “Turn us away. Move opposite to them. We’ll hide in the night.”

  A single valiant scanner showed fuzzy streaks, constantly changing, as it tried to show the enemy ships spinning away into the cloak of Gamma Night, leaving the dying ship and her half-dead crew to float through the darkness. Leaving. For no good reason.

  Why?

  Overthrusting the impulse engines with minute amounts of antimatter in the IM reaction chamber had given them increased power when they needed it.

  Keller counted off about two minutes of thrust, of moving into the sensor darkness.

  “All stop,” he ordered. “Shut down all systems but life-support. Lay silent.”

  They lay in near darkness, listening only to the ship’s death rattle. A fritz, spark, snap of electrical arcing deep within the superstructure. Keller felt the color of emergency lights, faintly reflecting upon his bloodless cheeks, reflecting in his eyes.

  The force of life drained out of him. He began the hurt of waiting.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Pandora’s Box

  “DO YOU THINK they’re alive?”

  “There’s no way to tell.”

  Uhura didn’t like her answer to Dr. McCoy’s question. Something about the way the words fitted together, and the images they called up.

  Many times in their lives, they had been on the inside of an attack, to feel the ship shudder and quake around them, the deck grow unstable and the power-loaded consoles explode.

  “If we hadn’t been here, no one would’ve known,” she continued. What was that—a ray of hope? “You did a good job, getting all the way down to the array without any of the other criminals seeing you.”

  “They did see me. I just gave them all inoculations on the way down. They thought Billy ordered it as part of the Billy-takes-care-of-us milieu. Your timing was perfect. Not to mention your aim. Your guesses seem to be as fine-tuned as anybody else’s hard data.”

  She smiled and stole a moment to put some of her hair back in place. “Let’s hope they made good use of it.”

  McCoy’s animated brows bobbed, not with particular confidence. “What in blazes is Peleliu doing on the other side of the sun in the middle of Gamma Night? Jim set up a defensive perimeter that would’ve warned them of Vellyngaith’s approach! They couldn’t pass gas in the Occult solar system without the planet smelling it, and for some reason Peleliu let itself be tempted out of the protective wedge!”

  “Maidenshore broadcast a distress signal from this ship at Vellyngaith’s position. Captain Lake fell for it.”

  “He must be a piece of work.”

  “Oh, now, that’s not really fair, is it?”

  “I don’t even know him and I don’t like him already.”

  The small screens on Uhura’s heavily controlled console could only show them meager spectroscopy of the battle going on out there. Uhura had managed to tag the faint blurry readings of the Peleliu and also identify the blips of Kauld vessels from their peculiar exhaust, but only at certain distances. She could pick them up as they veered in past the mine ship to strike at the Peleliu, only to lose them as they veered out again. In the sensor darkness she had managed only to pick up certain elements of heat interruptions in the sun’s radiation, a sun they also could barely see.

  “He’ll probably kill us now, you know.” McCoy sat down on the little needlepointed antique bench, a new addition, a gift to Uhura from Billy. “I wish he’d get to it. Jim’s gone, and there’s nobody left on Belle Terre who could possibly break Billy’s back. Sooner or later, it’s—”

  He stopped speaking abruptly as the door clacked its magnetic lock and opened. Billy Maidenshore bumped in, his face flushed with anger.

  The instant he got in the door and pinned Uhura with his electric glare, the fury in his face dropped as if he’d taken off a hat.

  Amazing. Everything about him was fake.

  “You lit our phaser, didn’t you, hon?” he asked, swaggering the rest of the way in. “Laid into the back of one of Velly-Belly’s ships. Tipped off the Peleliu.”

  Would he keep looking at her? Or would he notice McCoy sitting over there, and add up what had really happened? That McCoy was the one who could move about the ship, make it down to the defensive array, maybe arrange for a single shot before the inhibitors kicked in.

  “Life’s a game, Billy,” Uhura said, determined to keep the attention on herself. “We’re both just players.”

  Maidenshore approached her, then sat down on the edge of the bunk. Eerily he said nothing to the doctor, and did not even acknowledge his presence here. Instead he leaned forward with his hands on his knees and studied Uhura’s face, her cocoa eyes, as if she were a piece of art in his collection.

  “Pretty good,” he lauded. “How’d you get out of here? You figure out my locking system?”

  “Who are you kidding, Billy?” she said. “You know everything I can do is right here in this room.”

  “What about Hippocrates over there?”

  “He’s a doctor, not a gunner.”

  He straightened a little. “You’d be surprised what kind of people end up on a mine ship. I’ve got theoretical physicists, I’ve got ex-privateers, I’ve got all kinds of people here at my disposal. They all work for me now, and they had this system all sewn up. If you don’t tell me where the hole is in our system here, then I won’t know how to plug it. So tell me, or I’ll take it out on Lenny.”

  She smiled. Almost. She lowered her chin a bit, and gave him her favorite melted-chocolate gaze. “Are you going to kill me if I do?”

  The answer was immediate. “No, I kinda like what you did. Smart. I like smart women. In fact, you out-smarted me. That’s not easy. Brains are way more attractive than anything else. Course, you got plenty of ‘anything else’ too, don’t get me wrong. It was a good try, really good try. Doesn’t
matter, though. I can be back in two weeks with more Kauld ships. How long do you think it’ll take them to fix that wreck?”

  She reached out with one hand, flecking her fingers through his chinchilla hair, just over his ear. “My job is to stop you. You know that.”

  “Oh, sure.” He caught her hand, held it, drew it down and looked with fascination at her fingers, and her longer nails, which had been perfect before these weeks of capture. Mesmerized, he picked the old polish off one of them. “And my job, my challenge in life, is to convince you to come with me when all this is over.”

  Raising a tavern eyebrow, Uhura smiled with half her mouth. “I’ve got a thousand tricks up my sleeve. You’ve still got nine hundred and ninety-nine yet to see.”

  There was still no sign of the anger he’d come in with, yet a lingering sense that he hadn’t let it go, but only camouflaged it. Still, he smiled rather jauntily and patted her hand between his.

  “This is gonna be fun,” he promised.

  As he stood and beamed at her, Uhura received a subliminal understanding of him. He was charming, yes, and infectious in his manners, his promises, and his lies. He did enjoy the game, the tricks and deception, and he liked pushing every envelope to see just how much he could extort or bleed out of every situation. She knew that was the only reason she was still alive, and his attraction to her was the only reason McCoy was alive. Maidenshore had taken to enjoying these bizarre sessions, when he had a private conversation with her despite the presence of an endangered voyeur in the form of McCoy. There was something about being watched by the doctor that Maidenshore preferred, or he would’ve arranged something else.

  And he always left them here alone for a while after he left. He got some kind of thrill out of knowing they were talking about him.

  She also knew those filaments could snap at any moment. He could instantly lose interest. McCoy would be the first to suffer and die. Billy would make sure of that, and make sure Uhura was there to watch.

  He waved merrily at her before stepping out of the small quarters. He never stayed very long, but always accomplished so much.