Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  Leaning the leg against the wall under the dumbwaiter, he ignored his own huffing and puffing and once again put all the power he had into raising the dense door as high as it would go. More dust and cobwebs wheezed out and clouded around him. He coughed, tried to find clear air, then held his breath. Using his shoulder to keep the door up, he struggled to grab the leg—not knock it over and have to do this again—then he crammed the leg under the door. It had to go in at an angle because it was a little too long, but it did keep the door up.

  Not for long, though—under so much solid weight, the hollow rod was already bowing under the strain.

  That meant he had only seconds more before his own time ran out, as well as his father’s.

  Confiscating two insulation pads from a tool locker, he dragged them back to the dumbwaiter and put them to one side, where he could reach them. Working so fast his fingers tangled, he positioned the fire extinguisher with the valve facing into the dumbwaiter shaft and the bottom of the canister facing the gravity generator housing. Then he tied one end of the Tellarite’s belt around the light stand’s leg, and backed off to the other end.

  If only he could feel the ship turning . . . but there was only the taunting hum from the stator spinning in its casing. A starboard turn. He had to brace against—that wall over there.

  Using one hand, he put the insulation pads up against the wall to his right, the starboard wall, toward the back. He could barely reach the back part of the cell. He’d probably be crushed a few paces in that direction, but it was best he could do.

  The stator was still humming. Now it was working for him instead of against him. They were still turning for the kill.

  He closed his eyes briefly, then gasped, “One . . . two . . . three!”

  With both arms he yanked the belt.

  The leg shrieked and popped out. The dense door panel came down—yes, just like a guillotine blade—and smashed the valve.

  The extinguisher canister jiggled crazily for an instant, then shot across the cell like a missile, spraying a yeasty mist all over the cell and Jimmy.

  Flattened against the insulation pads, holding his breath, Jimmy saw the canister hit the gravity casing.

  A giant fist hit the ship.

  A seizure of raw natural power smacked the vessel bodily in the gut with cyclone force. Its whirlwind outbreak made a mockery of technology and turned the universe into a senseless lather.

  Nausea flushed Jimmy a fraction before he was pulled off the wall by a sucking force and propelled across the cell and right out the open door, angled upward toward the corridor ceiling, helpless even to pull his arms and legs forward. Pieces of the ship went with him—anything that wasn’t tied down flew for freedom, heedless of its path, or whether or not there even was a path. Bolted-down equipment ripped right off housings and hurtled in the most direct line, smashing through the walls as though everything had been changed into a bullet.

  Whatever couldn’t smash through was destroyed by the walls. The weaker force was destroyed, whatever it was, alive or not. Sounds of smashing and crashing, breakage, explosion, and screams erupted all around him, but he was caught like a leaf in the cyclone.

  The door frame whipped past. All the lighting changed. The corridor wall rushed at his face, struts spreading like the arms of a great black bear.

  The last thought Jimmy had was about the physics of a starboard turn, that the wall rushing at him was the one he should be braced against, and how this was a really pointless way to die.

  “They’re on to us! They’re moving off!”

  Dripping sweat, Carlos Florida raked a wet hand across his forehead.

  “Now, Carlos!” George shouted. “Blow the engines!”

  Carlos gritted his teeth and winced as he hit the switch.

  Nothing happened.

  George shoved past him and slammed the switch with his fist. And again. “What the hell’s wrong! What’s wrong with it!”

  On the small screen before them, the enemy ship was already hundreds of kilometers away and coming around in a wide semicircle.

  Carlos frowned and said, “They’re coming about.”

  “I don’t believe this,” George groaned.

  Despondent, Carlos shook his head gravely. “There must be a leak in our system. The buildup’s being purged somewhere. It won’t blow up.”

  George plastered a palm over his eyes and battled the sudden draining weakness that made him lean forward on Carlos and groan. Unfulfilled anticipation sucked the strength from his back and down into his legs and right out the bottom of the cutter. His head sagged and breath came in shallow gusts.

  “God,” he wheezed. “I can’t even commit suicide right. . . . ”

  This sorrow-sick noise was the voice of the brokenhearted. Worse than the concept of sacrifice and dying for this cause was the prospect of somehow surviving a situation that had taken the life of his youngest son.

  Burdened and guilty, driven spiritless by the failure of their final act, he knew none of them would get back the strength to do this a second time. Such resolve was hard to stoke and almost impossible to rekindle. Could he ask of Robert and Carlos to try again?

  The enemy ship was racing nearer with every second, and was again practically on top of them. There was no more time, no chance to do anything else.

  “They’ve got us,” he murmured. “We’ve lost.”

  He felt Robert’s hand on his elbow and a squeeze that was meant to be some kind of support or sympathy, but there was nothing to say that would wipe away the fact that they’d failed. From now on, when these criminals attacked any other ship in the future, it would somehow be Commander George Kirk’s fault. He and his son and his crew, and his friend Captain April, the founder of the Federation Starship Program, would simply disappear and become a mysterious statistic in the history of space exploration. This area of space would become known as some kind of quicksand, but nobody would know why.

  Under his wet palm, Carlos suddenly stiffened. “Look!”

  Before their eyes the attack ship buckled against itself in the middle of its swing around, spitting flotsam like an animal vomiting bones. Crystallized air sprayed out of scissures all over, and in other places the hull material caved in even as they were watching. Slits opened up along seams, and some chambers blew open and spewed everything inside.

  “Good God!” Robert uttered as they all leaned closer to the little staticky picture. “What on earth—?”

  “Right in the middle of a turn!” Carlos choked out. “Their gravity compensation went!”

  And a hideous sight it was. The enemy ship spun sickeningly on a point, pocked with holes torn by entire consoles that had come off their mountings and smashed through deck after deck to shoot right out the hull. Whole sections were blown open. Atmosphere sprayed in frozen funnels from a dozen places. Squinting in empathy, they watched the backups shutting off portions of the ship where atmosphere spat. Some funnels puttered and closed off quickly, but others sprayed until the atmosphere in that area simply petered out. The two circumstances looked different somehow to trained eyes . . . one had a little more control than the other in a situation where control was a shabby wish.

  Chunks of ship and machinery, tools and parts, food and lamps and boots and bottles, flew outward from the enemy vessel, small, large, and even the grotesque remains of crewmen slaughtered by the impact, some blown out holes while still alive and then torn apart by the vacuum of space, others crushed by flying machinery, then driven through the shattered hulls crammed into open space. Headless bodies, bodiless heads, limbless torsos—all had a sort of expression of horror endemic to living creatures, bodies in a state of surprise, the last second’s emotion recognizable by anyone who lived and breathed and saw.

  A wild, demonic ship’s nightmare. A tempest of physics. A ship with its gravity shut down in the middle of a turn.

  “What happened?” George rasped. “What happened to them?”

  Robert April closed the few inche
s between them. “I’ll tell you what happened, old boy—”

  He coiled an arm around George’s shoulders and howled enthusiastically.

  “Your son happened!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Klaxons honked obscenely, shrieking what the crew already knew. Alarms demanded attention that wouldn’t come soon. Nerve-ripping screams and frantic shouts from below shot up through the crawlways.

  “What happened! Caskie! What stopped us!”

  “How d’I know?”

  Lou Caskie spat broken teeth out of his mouth and fingered his nose and a cheekbone, both broken. Smoke poured from somewhere and nearly blinded him. The bridge stank and the heat was almost unbearable. Through it all he heard Rex badgering him again.

  “Ask Okenga, then!”

  “I ain’t asking him!”

  “Why’n hell not?”

  “’Cuz he’s . . . ask him yourself.”

  “Aw, Jesus Christ, why can’t that blood-sucking yorker stay on those engines, where he belongs! Okenga! Get up off your back, son of a bitch!”

  Big Rex Moss stumbled forward, off balance because the deck was hoisted up to nearly a twenty-degree angle, which made him virtually lift his own bulk and pull himself along the destroyed control panels. He skidded on something slick and looked down to curse the flow of lubricant.

  But it wasn’t lubricant under his shoes. It was Okenga’s innards.

  The Andorian wasn’t on his back on the deck. In fact, he was still standing, fitted grotesquely into an indentation in the side-mounted starboard control center, a dent that was form-fitted because his form had crushed it in. Across his lower body lay a three-foot shard of torn computer casing, half of the navigational console torn right out of its base and thrown across the bridge into the consoles on the other side. Only Okenga had been standing there in the way.

  He looked sag-eyed at Rex with a perfect opera-house stare, waiting for the music to start. His blue complexion was pasty, stumpy antennae shifting slowly, lips hanging open and oozing fluid, but moving—open, shut, open, shut—as though trying to form a sentence.

  The alien reached out toward Rex. Beryl fingers gnawed the air. A plea, an accusation—all this was on his mottled face as it rapidly changed from blue to bleached white. On his hand, tangled in fingers that should have been mending machinery, hung a vine of intestine.

  Open, shut, open, shut.

  “Christ!” Rex gagged. He staggered backward, away, wagging his hands. “Don’t touch me! God!”

  The whine of the ship trying to keep itself from falling apart, blowing up, or blowing out smothered his shouts.

  He dragged himself past Caskie to the crawlway, straddled it, and shouted down into the billowing smoke and fumes in the engine room.

  “Dazzo! Munkwhite! Smith! Gowan! Get up here! Clear out this junk and get this corpse off the bridge!”

  There were no answers. Only howls for help, groaning, panicked accusations, the crashing of broken machinery and whole sections collapsing fifty feet below him.

  From the deck, a voice cut through him, quiet and stable.

  “At least give him a chance to die first.”

  Purple with rage, Big Rex thrust around to snarl at his son. “If we had those shields, none of this would be happening! We’d be in the Blue by now!”

  Lowering his voice, though he was in no position to challenge, Roy had to ask, “What’ve my shields got to do with this? The gravity went haywire!”

  “Find out what happened,” Big Rex snarled. “You, boy, you find out. They did something to us! I don’t know what and I don’t know how, but they did something! They made the gravity turn itself off.”

  Panting as if he’d run through the ship, Roy pulled up from where he lay with legs curled under him and his knuckles crushed against a spurting vein in his left calf and gave his father a you’re-stupid look.

  “Gravity doesn’t turn itself off,” he said. “There’s compensation as long as the stator is spinning. Either plasma power has to be cut or the housing has to be ruptured. The power wasn’t turned off. The backup compensators are still working, since we have some gravity left, but the main system—”

  “What’s all that mean?” his father bellowed. “Quit sucking your tail and give me an answer! What does it mean?”

  Shuddering under his father’s vast shadow and the form that cast it, Roy licked at the salty taste of blood in his mouth before he could answer.

  Then he said, “It means we’ve got a worm.”

  George Kirk stared at the small screen. His legs were thready, eyes red and moist, his voice heart-pricking.

  “He’s . . . alive?”

  The pathetic whisper wanted desperately to be an answer and not a question, but there simply wasn’t enough assurance in it to carry beyond the small sound of a parent’s hope. His hands trembled and had nothing to do. He opened and closed them in nervous spasms.

  “At least,” Carlos said, “he was a minute ago.”

  The fact struck them all as they pushed for a view of the tiny screen and the sickening picture of the ship.

  Robert uttered, “Somewhat of a determinist, isn’t he? My Lord, look at it. They must’ve had a shattering blow . . . perhaps they’re ready for a stand-down.”

  With a taste of irony in his mouth, George complained, “What’re you gonna do? Swim over there and say, ‘Checkmate’?”

  Indulging a passive grin, Robert said, “Wouldn’t that be a jolly moment. Well, we can’t destroy ourselves in such a way that we would take them with us, and we can’t cross the little mile between us and board them, so what can we do? We’ll have to reassess the situation, gentlemen, but I warn you, we’re still dancing on a hot griddle.”

  “Sir?” Carlos grunted as he stood up and faced them. “If there’s a purge in the power system, that means there’s enough coolant left in the system somewhere to keep the failsafes on line so we couldn’t overload.”

  He looked from one to the other of his commanding officers, and knew his analysis hit its mark when Robert strode off a pace or two and muttered, “Oh, dear.”

  “So,” George said, looking at Robert then back at Carlos. “What’s that mean?”

  Carlos shifted nervously. “Well, it means I might be able to find some electroplasma in the system and funnel it into the cutting torches. I might be able to get you a couple of low-power laser shots. At this distance,” he said, pointing at the very close enemy ship on the monitor, “even industrial lasers’ll slice that ship in half.” Knowing what he was suggesting, he paused then and spoke more quietly, only to George. “If you . . . want to, I mean.”

  The moment’s irreducible weight sat again on George Kirk. He breathed heavily through cracked lips, and stared at the cluttered deck. Wrapped in the thorns of his problem, he felt his two shipmates’ sympathetic eyes, but couldn’t force himself to look up and meet them.

  Cutting lasers at less than two kilometers. It’d kill everybody over there, no question. One last-ditch hair-brained idea. One last chance—again. How many last chances would they get before their deadlock was broken and they started backsliding? How long before somebody else would pay the price?

  “Get on it,” he said. “Get me a shot before they get their shields back up.”

  His voice cracked. His expression was heart-melting, crusting over quickly as he summoned his saw-file temper to protect himself. Putting space between himself and the others, he warned them with his posture to leave him alone.

  “Aye, sir,” Carlos said sadly.

  Robert saw the dark wall descending, and stepped across the deck. “George—”

  But the other man didn’t look at him. Words snapped between them like the crack of a leather whip.

  “Don’t talk to me, Robert.”

  The galaxy moaned in the rapture of unconsciousness. Pain misted its stars. Plenty of stars, everywhere.

  Vibrations tortured the vessel. A relentless force, wave after wave.

  Jimmy swam back to awarenes
s through a contaminated sea. He groped through darkness, stroked for the surface, lungs crying for relief. Salty bubbles clogged his mouth and nose. He moaned aloud and nearly choked, but the sound gave him something to swim toward.

  A relentless force held his arms and legs down. His muscles were helpless to do their jobs, and they whined with frustration and effort. Paralyzed?

  In a daze, he moved his head from side to side. His tongue worked inside swollen lips. Moisture squished between his teeth.

  The bubbling, and the warm, salty taste, was blood. Internal damage. Maybe his lungs. Maybe his face or his head. Why couldn’t he feel the pain? He had a moment ago . . . he felt his eyes blinking now, but though vaguely aware of straining lights above him, he couldn’t see through a pinkish blur.

  Was he blind?

  If Veronica could take being ripped in half, then he could take being blind. He made that decision before he even attempted to sit up and account for his injuries. Whatever it was, he would get through it.

  As thoughts about Veronica and his father and the others came back, so did the pain.

  Nothing to worry about. Dad would take care of it.

  The thought bulldozed him. He hadn’t had a thought like it for years . . . this idea that he was being taken care of . . . that he was better off than somebody else might be . . . that he owed anyone anything . . .

  His chest pounded. He groaned aloud again. The sound pulled him up fast, like being pushed upward out of a grave into the light of consciousness. Lying on hard rubber . . . faint bands of light, in no particular direction. The smoke. The smell—

  The corridor. The enemy ship. The gravity compensator!

  What a mess he must have made. The whole ship was whining, groaning, hissing spray and smoke from ruptures up and down the adjoining corridors. His chest pounded from inhaling whatever gases and fumes were spitting out.

  “God . . . damn . . . was . . . that . . . stupid . . . ”

  He had pinpointed the gravity thing, tried to imagine ahead of time what would happen to the ship, tried to recall everything Veronica had explained to him so that he would get it right, and kept the presence of mind to brace himself against the wall.