by David Mack
She winced. “You’re not gonna like it.”
“On speakers,” Nogura growled.
The universal translator parsed a screech that made Nogura think of a saw biting through metal bones. “There will be no parley. No terms. No prisoners. No mercy.”
The noise ended, and Dunbar said, “That’s all there is, sir.”
Nogura looked back at his bloated fleet ops manager. “Cannella?”
“The last three ships just cleared moorings.”
On the towering screens, the Tholian armada split up into attack groups. Each wing of thirty or forty ships peeled off from the main force, shifting course while the rest of the fleet wheeled at high speed around Vanguard, like scavengers circling a dying beast they know will soon become carrion. Nogura steeled himself for the carnage to come. “Cooper, order all gunners to start locking in targets. Take out the point ships first—those will be the leaders.”
Cannella bellowed, “All ships away!”
“Raise shields!” Nogura ordered. “Damage control and fire suppression teams to action stations.” He opened an internal comm to the engineering levels. “Ops to reactor control. Increase power output to one hundred ten percent of rated maximum.”
“Roger that,” replied the station’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Isaiah Farber.
Cooper tensed. “The Tholians are locking weapons!”
Switching to a coded subspace frequency, Nogura opened a channel to his four defending starships. “Vanguard to all Starfleet vessels: prepare to engage the enemy.”
Then came the bedlam of a thousand blows landing at once on Vanguard’s shields, and the station’s worst-case scenario became a reality: It was under siege.
Nogura knew the battle’s outcome was a foregone conclusion.
The only mysteries now were how long it would last—and how many would die.
33
An endless red storm of disruptor pulses converged upon Vanguard. “Evasive!” Nassir ordered, and zh’Firro counterintuitively steered the Sagittarius toward the incoming barrage to minimize the ship’s profile—and then she accelerated.
Jarring blasts hammered the ship. As the deck pitched and yawed, Nassir clung white-knuckled to his chair and shouted over the clamor of detonations. “Return fire, phasers only!”
The whoop-and-shriek of the ship’s phasers was deafening. Unlike larger ships, which had the luxury of isolating their weapons systems from the crew compartments, the Sagittarius’s two phaser nodes were just a few meters overhead, on the dorsal hull. Each salvo tortured Nassir’s eardrums with piercing, high-pitched noise.
A sudden flare on the main viewer made him wince and shield his eyes. Blue and white fusillades lit up the screen as Vanguard unleashed the full might of its fearsome—and until that moment, never tested—arsenal. Within seconds, the space within twenty kilometers of Vanguard became a hellish chaos of metal and fire. Several dozen high-power phaser batteries lashed the Tholian armada circling the station. Scores of brilliant white photon torpedoes—some in tight clusters, some in wide spreads—tore through the attacking Tholian battle groups. Ephemeral flares revealed the station’s shields as salvos of Tholian disruptor fire slammed home. Then tractor beams leapt from the starbase like golden spears, snared half a dozen Tholian cruisers, and dragged them into the station’s brutal kill zones of overlapping phaser and torpedo fire.
For a moment, Nassir swelled with irrational hope that the battle might not be futile, after all. Then a crushing blow pummeled the Sagittarius, and darkness swallowed the bridge as flames and acrid smoke erupted from the port bulkhead above the auxiliary engineering station.
Tactical officer Dastin attacked the blaze at point-blank range with a handheld fire extinguisher as Terrell hollered, “Damage report!”
Dastin waved a path through the smoke. “Secondary systems are fried!”
The battle on the screen was little more than a fiery blur as zh’Firro guided the ship through wild corkscrew maneuvers at full impulse. The daring young zhen raised her voice to compete with the screaming din of the phasers. “Impulse power’s down to eighty percent!”
Nassir opened a channel to engineering. “Master Chief, report!”
“Main plasma relay’s been hit,” Ilucci replied, his voice barely audible over the clamor of shouting voices and straining machines in the engine room. “We’re running a bypass.”
Another near-miss rumbled through the hull. “Make it fast. Bridge out.” Nassir closed the channel and twisted around toward the tactical station. “Sorak, how’s the Panama holding up?”
“Not well,” the Vulcan centenarian said. “Her starboard shields are collapsing. She’s coming hard about to turn her port side to the armada.”
“Give her covering fire until she completes the turn,” Nassir ordered. To zh’Firro he added, “Sayna, swing us past the Panama, try to draw the enemy’s fire.” A punishing concussion stuttered the overhead lights and flickered the bridge consoles.
“I don’t think we’ll have to try very hard,” zh’Firro said as she changed course.
Theriault looked up from the sensors. “Bandits, twelve o’clock high!”
“Targeting,” Sorak replied. “Firing.” Another angry chorus from the phasers, and he added, “Attack group breaking off, heading for zone three.”
“Leave them to Buenos Aires,” Nassir said. “Find a new target and keep firing.”
Alerts and system failures cascaded across the Endeavour’s master engineering console faster than Bersh glov Mog could deploy damage-control teams. He switched from one internal comm circuit to another as he rattled off orders. “Team Four, hull breach on Deck Nine, Section Two! Team Seven, phaser coupling overload, Deck Sixteen, Section Four! Fire Team Alpha, plasma fire on the hangar deck!” He was looking at the status indicator for the secondary hull’s port defense screen generator as it toggled from green to red, indicating a failure, and he reached to open a comm channel to the nearest repair team.
A godhammer of concussive force hit the ship and sent him and the other engineers tumbling. Despite his muddied hearing, Mog heard someone call out, “We’ve lost shields!” Another replied, “Hull breach! Outer sections!”
Mog pulled himself to his feet and stumbled like a drunkard across the heaving deck. “Air masks! Now!” He grabbed the respirator kit next to his station and strapped it on, then lurched across the compartment toward the lockers where the hazmat gear was stored, fighting every step of the way against the random pitching and rolling of the ship. Damn these weak inertial dampers, he cursed to himself. Down the length of main engineering, he saw other officers and enlisted men fumbling with their breathing masks.
He reached for the emergency equipment locker.
The loudest explosion he’d ever heard struck him as a wall of sonic energy and threw him against a bulkhead several meters away. As he ricocheted off the wall and collapsed, his black eyes opened wide in shock at the sight of a brilliant crimson beam of disruptor energy tearing through the hull from outside and wreaking fiery havoc as it lanced through bulkheads and filled the air with a terrifying buzz-roar so loud it drowned out the screams of the dying. The heat from the beam singed Mog’s mane and beard, filling his snout with the horrid stench of burnt fur. He lifted his arm to shield his face from the jabbing-needle pain of ultraviolet radiation—then the beam stopped, and its harsh buzzing was replaced by the groaning howl of escaping atmosphere. The hurricane-force gale threatened to hurl Mog away into the cold vacuum, but he caught the protruding pipe of a coolant valve and hung on as heavy emergency barriers lowered swiftly into place to contain the damage.
Half a dozen people in the breached sections weren’t so fortunate, and Mog watched the horror of their fates register on their faces as they were sucked out into space. A lucky few were close enough to the adjacent sections to escape before the airtight barriers fell. Mog reached out to a Vulcan man who was crawling too slowly, clutched his hand, and with a fierce yank pulled him clear before the ba
rrier met the deck and locked into place.
Air pressure normalized within seconds, and Mog knew there was no time to waste on asking every survivor his or her status. His only concern now was to restore main power, which the disruptor blast had just crippled. He tried to run back to his master console, only to find himself feeling simultaneously lightheaded and dead on his feet. Then he was overcome by nausea and doubled over as he succumbed to a sudden urge to vomit. Spewing sour stomach acid tinged with blood, he heard others around him collapse into bouts of violent emesis.
Coughing and gasping, Mog crawled back to his console and pulled himself upright, even as sickness churned in his abdomen. He reached out to initiate a set of diagnostic checks and saw that his hand was shaking. A cold shiver ran down his spine, and was followed by a fatiguing flush of heat in his forehead that left him panting and dry-mouthed. A single glance at the environmental status gauges confirmed what he already knew: He and the other survivors were just as doomed as those who had been pulled into space moments earlier. They all had been exposed to an acute dose of hyperionizing radiation, far exceeding four thousand rads, as the beam had ruptured the matter-antimatter mix system. Radiation levels inside the engineering compartment were already dropping as automated safety systems kicked in, but it was too late for all of them; the damage was done, and not even Starfleet’s best medicine could undo it.
Mog turned around and met his crew’s mix of frightened stares and empty gazes. “I won’t lie to you. You all know what’s happened. But we need to use whatever time we have left to bring back main power, before we lose the whole ship. So snap to!” Fighting back against the hot sensation winding through his intestines, he focused on his master console, started rerouting circuits, and resumed dispatching damage and fire teams.
A minute later, the slightly nasal, New York–accented voice of the ship’s chief medical officer, Doctor Anthony Leone, blared from Mog’s console speaker. “Sickbay to Mog!”
“Go ahead, Doctor.”
The doctor was furious. “What the hell, Mog? Radiation levels in main engineering are off the chart! Get your people out of there!”
“I can’t do that, Doctor. We have to restore main power.”
“Don’t make me pull rank, goddammit!”
Mog appreciated Leone’s aggressive, argumentative style. He’d often thought the wiry little human physician with bulging eyes would have made a fine Tellarite, so he tempered his refusal with admiration. “It won’t make any difference, Doctor. There’s nothing you can do for us now. We all have an hour left to us, and we plan to spend it working. I suggest you do the same. Mog out.” He closed the channel and cut off the comm circuit to prevent Leone from pestering him again. Then he looked back at his weary, dying crew and put on his bravest face. “Move with a purpose, people! The antimatter injector won’t fix itself!”
He knew that an ugly, painful death awaited them all in an hour’s time.
Until then, he planned to live usefully, or die trying.
Lieutenant Isaiah Farber could barely see through the columns of oily gray smoke drifting through Vanguard’s reactor control level, and he struggled to hear over the incessant percussion of energy attacks pounding the station’s overtaxed shields.
“Ops, please repeat your last,” he said into the comm, “all after ‘support.’”
The reply was inaudible amid the tumult of battle, so Farber pressed one ear to the speaker and covered the other with his hand. “Cut off life support to all unoccupied sections and seal them,” said Commander Cooper. “Reroute that power to shields.”
He wondered if anyone up there had any idea what they were asking for. “Ops, we’re already pushing too much juice through the shield grid! Any more and we’ll burn it out!”
“Admiral’s orders,” Cooper replied.
“I don’t give a damn if they come from God himself,” Farber said. “Cook those emitters and you’ll have no shields at all.” Deep sirens wailed and flashing lights pulsed, which meant another fire had broken out somewhere near the reactor’s heat exchangers.
Cooper hollered back with the flustered manner of a man caught in the middle of someone else’s argument, “Then reconfigure the shields to sacrifice the low-value areas.”
“We don’t have any low-value areas!” Farber wished he could punch someone over an intercom channel. “What do you want to leave undefended? The reactor? The fuel tanks? The operations center? The tactical levels? This game’s all or nothing, Commander!” High overhead, something resounded with an apocalyptic boom, and the gauges on Farber’s master panel started flipping en masse from green to red. “What the hell just happened?”
“Cargo bays are breached,” Cooper said. “Levels Forty-four through Fifty-one.”
Scanning the multitudes of error reports flooding his board, Farber saw something far more serious than damage to the cargo bays. “Ops, we’ve lost two out of four turbolift shafts in the lower core. I recommend we start evacuating the lower sections—starting with the Vault.”
“Acknowledged. Now, get us more shield power, or—” Another brutal impact rocked the station. When the roar abated to a constant but low rumbling, Farber strained to hear the rest of Cooper’s response. Only then did he realize the comm circuits linking the reactor level to the rest of the station had been severed. They were cut off. He grabbed his communicator from his belt and flipped it open. “Farber to ops! We’ve lost comms! Do you copy?”
Static scratched and hissed from the speaker.
Another explosion, even closer than the last. Half the gauges on Farber’s panel red-lined; the rest flat-lined. The broad-shouldered, impressively muscled engineer put away his communicator and looked around, trying to remember where the concealed emergency exits were—because he suspected he and his team were about to need them.
There was no time for triage. Fisher and the rest of the skeleton staff of surgeons, nurses, and technicians in Vanguard Hospital were besieged by a nonstop parade of wounded from all over the station. Every biobed was occupied by the broken, the maimed, the charred, or the bloodied. Plangent wails of suffering filled the air, making Fisher grateful for those moments when the caco-phony of the Tholians’ bombardment overpowered the plaints of the dying.
There was little to be done for the most seriously wounded. In order to return gunners or engineers to duty, the ones with the simplest wounds were treated and released as quickly as possible, while those who lay in agony, clutching at mangled limbs or trying in vain to stanch mortal bleeding with filthy hands, were treated as invisible. Under ideal circumstances, most of them could probably be saved, but in the midst of combat, they were a liability no one could afford. Their gruesome ranks and imploring voices haunted the periphery of Fisher’s perceptions. When he dared to look directly at any of them, he filled with despair and felt certain he had blundered into some unknown circle of hell.
As Fisher bandaged a mechanic’s scorched hand, a young Andorian thaan in a command-gold jersey bearing a junior lieutenant’s stripes sprinted through the hospital’s main entrance. “We need medics at Phaser Control Delta!”
Doctor Robles, who had succeeded Fisher as Vanguard’s CMO, shouted back, “We only treat the ones who make it here, Lieutenant.”
The Andorian was on the verge of hysteria. “There aren’t enough people left to man that battery! Give me a medkit and send me back, but give me something!”
Fisher put away his bandage roll in his satchel and replied, “I’ll go with you.”
Robles shot a poisonous glare at Fisher. “You’re needed here, Doctor.”
“Sounds like I’m needed there, too,” Fisher said as he moved to join the Andorian.
“Get back on the line, Doctor!” Robles looked ready for an aneurysm. “That’s an order!”
On his way out the door, Fisher permitted himself a rakish smirk at Robles. “I don’t work here anymore, remember? Hold the fort till I get back.” The next cannonade that shook the station drowned out Robles’s r
eply full of colorful metaphors, and by the time it faded Fisher and his Andorian guide were in the nearest turbolift and hurtling away to one of the outer sections of the upper half of the saucer, where the phaser and torpedo nodes were located.
He offered the Andorian his hand. “Ezekiel Fisher. My friends call me Zeke.”
The Andorian shook his hand. “Fellaren th’Shoras. . . . ‘Shor.’”
“Nice to meet you, Shor,” Fisher said with a disarming smile. Under his breath he added, “I always make a point of knowing the people I might end up dying with.”
The Andorian nodded, as if the sentiment were not utterly morbid. “Most sensible,” he said. “If we perish together, I shall vouch for you before Uzaveh the Infinite.”
Fisher had no idea what else to say except, “Um . . . thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
After that, he figured it would be best to just stop talking for a while.
“One more adjustment,” Xiong begged his two remaining colleagues. “If we can equalize the quantum subharmonic frequency across all the nodes, that should do it!”
Sheltered inside the Vault, the most heavily shielded part of Vanguard, Xiong had at first barely been able to tell the station was under attack. Then a devastating blow to the station’s lower core had interrupted the supply of primary power to the lab. The secret research center had its own backup power generators, life-support systems, and computer core, but without main power, Xiong had no idea how long the array could continue to contain its Shedai prisoners. All his estimates for the lab’s minimum power requirements had been predicated on the simpler setup involving only two inhabited crystals. Now they had more than five thousand of the alien artifacts, all of them except the first packed with multiple Shedai life-forces.
He knew he didn’t want to be here when the array’s containment matrix failed, but he also knew that the consequences of that would be far worse than anyone outside of Operation Vanguard could possibly imagine. For their sakes, he had to finish this while he still could.
