by David Mack
Checking the sensor data on the main viewscreen, Khatami realized the battle had already claimed nearly sixty-five percent of the ships in the Tholian armada. For a moment, she was torn between despair for the lives lost in the frigate’s suicide run and gloating for the havoc it had seemed to wreak upon the Tholian fleet. Then she remembered that with the loss of the frigate, the Endeavour was now the only ship left defending Vanguard. Their situation until that moment had been bad. It was about to become much worse.
“Look sharp, everyone,” Khatami said. “We’re about to get to the fun part.”
Fisher cut through one side of the jammed door to Phaser Control Delta with a phaser while his Andorian compatriot, Shor, pulled on the other side with all his considerable strength. As the phaser beam sliced past the midpoint of the door, the entire thing buckled and folded outward, and Shor pulled it off its slide track and hurled it aside. He rushed inside the smoky compartment without a moment’s hesitation and called to Fisher, “This way, Doctor!”
Fisher followed the Andorian thaan through the suffocating haze until they reached a trio of motionless personnel: two humans in their twenties, a man and a woman; and a male Tellarite. Fighting to breathe and blink away the tears drawn out by the acrid smoke, Fisher activated his medical tricorder and scanned the three junior officers. He pointed at the human man. “He’s dead.” Gesturing at the other two, he added, “I’ll grab her, you get him.”
Shor hefted the portly Tellarite over his shoulder with ease, while Fisher labored to lift the diminutive woman from her chair and carry her away from her sparking console. He was several paces behind Shor and envying the younger officer’s vigor as the bright, fuzzy shape of the open doorway became visible through the veil of bitter haze.
Just a few steps more to clean air, he promised himself to keep his feet moving.
He was knocked to the floor by a blast so loud he felt it in his core, and so hot that it hurt for only a moment until it killed all the nerves on the back half of his body. Then came the tug of weightlessness and the sickening sensation of being transformed into a leaf on the wind.
The vacuum of space robbed him of the air in his lungs as he was hurled from the station into the darkness, tumbling beside Fellaren th’Shoras and three people whose names he’d never had the chance to learn. His slow tumble brought the station into view for a few seconds before his vision failed. The mushroom-shaped starbase was crumbling and ablaze, saucer and core alike rent and scarred. One of the massive deuterium tanks on the far side of the station exploded, blasting away a wedge of the saucer and scattering debris to the ends of creation.
Floating like a mote in the eye of eternity, Ezekiel Fisher felt the icy touch of the universe and discovered that death was utterly silent—and every bit as lonely as he’d feared it would be.
Sprawled half-conscious across the Hub, Nogura fought to marshal his ebbing strength so he could pick himself up and carry on. Get up, damn you, he cursed at himself. There’s no time for this. Get up or die! Pain coursed down his spine as he pushed himself upright. Mustering a Herculean effort, he stood straight—then coughed. It was a deep, wet sound from deep inside his chest, and when he wiped his hand across the itch on his upper lip and chin, his palm came away slicked with his own blood. Only then did he notice the throbbing ache of his broken nose.
A hoarse female voice broke the eerie silence in the operations center.
“Admiral, are you all right?”
Nogura turned to see his yeoman, Lieutenant Toby Greenfield, herself ragged and bloody, swaying on unsteady feet a few meters away. “I’m fine,” Nogura lied. Looking around, he saw fallen sections of the overhead, blasted-in bulkheads, and smoldering consoles heaped with dead officers. At a glance he confirmed that Cannella, Dunbar, and Cooper all were dead, victims of the direct hit that had just crippled the operations center.
Greenfield hobbled over to Nogura, her awkward gait suggesting she had suffered a fractured bone in her leg. “Sir, it’s over. We need to abandon the station before it’s too late.”
The few wall screens that still functioned confirmed that Vanguard and its handful of ships had made the Tholians pay a heavy price for this win—perhaps even a steep enough cost to classify their victory as Pyrrhic. But there was no longer any denying that they had prevailed, and that they now possessed the upper hand in the engagement.
Distant explosions trembled the broken husk of the station, and Nogura felt the grim intimations of Vanguard’s inevitable fall with every tremor.
“You’re right,” he said. “Round up as many people as you can and get to the nearest transporter room. I’ll coordinate the evacuations from here.”
The feisty young yeoman held up a hand like a traffic warden halting a vehicle. “Hang on. What about you, Admiral?”
“I have a communicator,” he said, lifting the device from his belt to prove he was telling the truth. “I’ll activate my beacon when the evacs are finished. Now get out of here, Lieutenant. That’s an order.” He punctuated the command with a stony glare that sent Greenfield limping to the turbolifts. Then he triggered the evacuation alarm and keyed the hailing frequency. “Vanguard to Endeavour. Acknowledge.”
Captain Khatami answered, “Endeavour . Go ahead, Vanguard.”
“Start the evacuation. Get the other ships to cover you, drop your shields, and beam out everyone you can.”
After a troubling pause, Khatami replied, “That’ll be a problem, Vanguard. There are no other ships—just us. And if we drop our shields now, we’re as good as dead.”
34
The Endeavour shook as if afflicted with a palsy. Wave after wave of Tholian strikes were swiftly buckling the shields, filling the ship with staccato reports and grave echoes. Half the panels on the bridge had gone dark, and Khatami had lost count of how many hull breaches had been reported in the mere minutes since the battle began. But despite the fact that her ship felt as if it was disintegrating around her, her mind was focused on the dilemma of the few hundred souls still clinging to life inside the core of the fractured and rapidly imploding Starbase 47.
Over the comm, Admiral Nogura’s gravelly voice had become even more rough-edged. “Captain, we’re cut off from the lifeboats, and the Tholians would destroy them, anyway. We need immediate beam-out!”
Another resounding boom rocked the ship and dimmed the lights. As the bridge crew stumbled back to their stations, Klisiewicz left the sensor console to join Khatami and Stano in the command well. “Sirs, we have to go now. We can’t take another direct hit.”
“Unacceptable, Lieutenant,” Khatami said. “I won’t leave those people behind.”
Klisiewicz grew insistent. “When our shields fall, we won’t be able to help anybody—and all the refugees we already have on board will die with us.”
“Hang on,” Stano said, waving Klisiewicz back from the command chair. “We’ve already lost ventral shields, and the transport array is on the ventral hull. Roll that side toward the station and reroute all power—”
“We’re already doing that,” Klisiewicz protested. “Captain, we only have a few seconds until we get hit again. We need to withdraw before—”
His prediction came true before he finished his warning. A brilliant flash on the main viewer was followed by a violent lurch of deceleration, as if the Endeavour had slammed bow-first into a planet. Funereal groans of distressed metal and distant roars of explosive decompression resounded through the bridge, and Khatami knew instinctively that Endeavour’s shields were gone and that the underside of the saucer section had just suffered a massive breach.
The idea of saving her ship by deserting Admiral Nogura and the others on Vanguard sickened her, but as a starship captain her first duty was to her vessel and crew, and circumstances had left her no other choice. “Neelakanta, set a new course. Rendezvous with—”
“New sensor contact!” McCormack interrupted. “Starfleet transponder!” She spun around to face Khatami and Stano, brimming with excitem
ent and hope. “It’s the Enterprise!”
The navigator switched over the main viewer angle to reveal the Endeavour’s sister ship cruising into the fray at full impulse, its shields fresh, phasers blazing, and torpedoes flying in a steady stream. Within seconds, the Enterprise had broken through the circling formation of Tholian warships and interposed itself between them and the war-torn Endeavour. Almost instantly, the percussion of Tholian attacks battering Endeavour’s hull faded away.
Thank Allah for mercies great and small, Khatami prayed. “Hector! Hail them!”
“Already got ’em,” Estrada said. He patched the signal to the main screen.
Captain Kirk appeared on the main viewscreen, his often boyish mien now one of keen intelligence and efficient professionalism. “What’s your status, Captain?”
“We need cover so we can beam survivors off the station,” Khatami said. “Can you buy us five minutes?”
Kirk nodded at someone off-screen, then replied, “You’ll have it. And I hope your pilot’s as good as mine, because we’ll have to be almost on top of you to pull this off.”
“We can avoid hitting the station as long as you don’t hit us.”
Kirk smiled. “Deal. We’ll follow your lead. Enterprise out.” The viewscreen blinked back to the distressing sight of Vanguard aflame.
“All right, Neelakanta, time to earn your pay,” Khatami said. “Take us under what’s left of Vanguard’s saucer for cover, roll our belly toward the station, and give me as tight an orbit of the core section as you can. And don’t make any sudden moves, because Enterprise will be mimicking our every move right above us.”
The Arcturian’s wide eyes belied his calm reply of “Aye, Captain.”
Khatami opened a comm channel from her armrest. “All decks, this is the captain. Transporter rooms, start beaming survivors off the station.”
T’Prynn emerged from the emergency access stairwell to find the operations center a smoking heap of rubble littered with corpses. In the middle of it all, elevated above the destruction, was the supervisors’ deck, where Admiral Nogura worked while hunched awkwardly over the Hub. “Admiral,” T’Prynn called out over the sepulchral drumbeat of explosions ripping through the station. “What are you still doing here?”
“Directing the evacuation,” Nogura said without taking his eyes from his work. “Why aren’t you at your evac point?”
She clambered over the heaped debris, skipping from one to the next with preternatural agility. “Sir, this center is no longer secure. Another direct hit and you will be killed.”
“Then you shouldn’t be here, either,” he growled.
Two running steps and a leap propelled her to the railing of the supervisors’ deck, which she vaulted over, and she landed behind Nogura. “Sir, I must insist you leave this task to the auxiliary operations center and beam out immediately.”
“I can’t,” Nogura said, relaying transport coordinates to the Endeavour like a man possessed. “Aux ops lost its comm link. This has to be done from here. And now that our core’s breached, Endeavour needs our help to lock in the signals through the interference.”
To her chagrin, the admiral’s argument was eminently logical.
An uncomfortably close blast rained sparks and debris from the ceiling at the room’s edge. T’Prynn realized that Nogura had paid the explosion no mind. “Sir, as a flag officer—”
“This is my command. I don’t leave till my people are safe. If that means I go down with the station, so be it. Now get to your evac point, Lieutenant. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” T’Prynn said. She turned to leave—then pivoted back with a dancer’s grace, clutched the vulnerable nerve cluster between the admiral’s neck and shoulder, and held him as his body went limp and sank to the floor. “Forgive me, sir.” She took his communicator from his belt, activated its emergency beacon, and tucked it back into its pocket. Then she stepped back several paces and watched as Nogura dematerialized in a golden shimmer of light and a mellifluous hum of sound. As soon as the transporter effect faded, she stepped forward, took his place at the Hub, and continued relaying transport coordinates to the Endeavour.
The station’s survivors had gathered at a dozen dedicated emergency transport sites, each capable of beaming up to five people at a time. Two transport cycles had been completed already. She could only hope the station would hold together long enough to complete the last three cycles necessary to finish the evacuation, now that the station’s weapons had been knocked out and its shields were contracting and intermittently stuttering out.
Then she noticed one personal transponder that was nowhere near an emergency site, and when she verified that it was in the Vault, she knew it had to be Ming Xiong.
Fear and hatred coursed from the array like a river in flood. Cracks propagated through its matrix, filling the Vault with its delicate symphony of fracturing crystal. The containment system burned out one subsystem at a time while Xiong stood mere meters away, finishing the preparation of the laboratory’s self-destruct system. Overriding its security protocols had taken longer than he’d expected; it had been designed to require at least two senior personnel’s command codes to authorize the self-destruct, but he was the only one left, so he’d hotwired it.
The terror quotient inside the lab escalated on a logarithmic scale as the array’s myriad safeguards broke down. Xiong couldn’t say what was more to blame—the Tholian attack or the obvious struggle of the Shedai to break free of their crystalline prison. He decided the cause didn’t matter. No matter how hard he tried to focus on entering the final command sequence for the self-destruct, every instinct he possessed screamed, Run! Get away from there!
His hands shook above the console, and his mind was empty of everything except fear. No, he told himself. It’s not real. It’s just beta waves from the Shedai. It’s an illusion. He closed his eyes and fought to ignore the unearthly dirge that groaned from the mysterious alien machine, but it was no use. He felt the Shedai’s hateful emanations in his gut; they invaded his thoughts with whispers of interminable pain and suffering to come, cruel fates aborning for one and all.
Just a few more seconds, he berated himself. That’s all it takes. He thought of the billions of innocent civilians on worlds throughout local space, not just in the Federation but across all the currently explored sectors of the galaxy’s Orion arm, and he imagined the brutal horrors that would befall them if even a single Shedai escaped alive from the array. His sense of duty granted him a brief instant of clarity, and he pushed through his fear long enough to enter the final arming sequence. The computer screen flashed COMMAND AUTHORIZATION VERIFIED—SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE ARMED. Then the system prompted him to set a countdown.
Somewhere inside the array, he heard one of the crystals shatter.
His communicator beeped twice on his belt. Keeping watch over the crumbling array, he pulled out his communicator and flipped it open. “Xiong here.”
“Mister Xiong, this is Lieutenant T’Prynn. Are you ready for transport?”
The first narrow tendrils of dark energy snaked out of the machine’s core. Primal fear rooted Xiong in place and left him paralyzed. Watching the black liquid creep upward, he knew it would be only a matter of moments until it shattered another crystal, and another—then all the Shedai would break free, and there would be no hope of ever containing them again.
T’Prynn’s voice cut through the dire wailing of the Shedai. “Mister Xiong! Do you copy? Are you ready for transport?”
Startled back to his senses, Xiong replied, “Negative. I . . . I have to finish something.”
“The rest of the crew is being beamed out as we speak. Endeavour is holding position until all personnel are accounted for. How long until you’re ready?”
An entire row of crystals shattered and rained to the floor in shards. A vast cloud of unnatural black smoke roiled inside the isolation chamber, its inky swirls swimming with violet motes of energy, its entire mass seething with violenc
e and malice.
Xiong fought the temptation to trigger the self-destruct sequence right then. Instead, he forced himself to patch in a feed from Vanguard’s passive sensors, revealing the positions of the Endeavour and the Enterprise, the circling mass of the Tholian armada, and the escaping convoy of civilian vessels escorted by the Sagittarius.
“Tell them I won’t be coming,” Xiong said.
It was the only choice he could live with. If he set a long-enough delay on the self-destruct timer to permit the two Constitution-class starships to reach minimum safe distance, he couldn’t be certain the escaping Shedai wouldn’t disable the system after he left. If he triggered it now, he would doom the two starships and everyone aboard them to a fiery end. His only way of making sure he’d contained the threat he’d helped awaken three years earlier was to stand over it and personally drag it down into oblivion.
“Captain Khatami refuses to leave you behind,” T’Prynn said several seconds later. “Stand by while we establish a transporter lock on your communicator.”
Cracks began to form in the transparent enclosure of the isolation chamber, the wall of triple-reinforced transparent steel that the engineers had assured him was impenetrable.
Xiong realized the Endeavour’s crew would never abandon him as long as there remained a chance that they could pluck him from danger, and he had no time to explain the true nature of the threat before them. He couldn’t take the chance that they would steal him away and leave the Shedai free to terrorize the galaxy for another aeon.
He dropped his communicator to the floor and crushed it under his heel. Putting his weight into it, he ground the fragile device beneath his boot until nothing remained but broken bits and coarse dust.
Inside the isolation chamber, the array collapsed like a house of cards in a gale.
A symphony of shattering crystal filled the air.
Then came the darkness.
T’Prynn watched Xiong’s communicator signal go dark, and then its transponder went off line.
