by Greg Cox
“What’s that again?” She cupped a hand over her ear in a transparent attempt to feign that she couldn’t quite hear him. “Would you mind speaking louder?”
“What happened?” he hollered. “Is Shaun still with you?”
“Jeez, Doc! There’s no need to shout.”
For God’s sake! He didn’t have time to play games like this. Fuming, he activated the comm instead. “I know you opened the airlock to the outside!” he ranted. “What were you thinking?”
“Would you believe it was getting a bit stuffy in here?” She tugged at the collar of the cooling suit. “Not to mention chilly. You wouldn’t believe how damp and clammy this place gets after a while. Not exactly the luxury suite, you know.”
Her flippancy infuriated him. “Stop it! Can’t you be serious for once in your life?” He tried to peer past her, but her inverted face filled the porthole, obstructing his view. “Where is Shaun? Let me talk to him!”
“Oh, it’s ‘Shaun’ again, is it?” Her fingers formed air quotes. “I thought you and Fontana had decided that he was possessed by space ghosts or something. You forget about that part?”
“Shaun, the probe, amnesia… whatever!” He threw up his hands, unable to believe that she was actually wasting their last few hours like this. “Is he in there? Did he survive?”
“What do you care?” she shot back. “We’re all supposed to die anyway, right, when we take our one-way plunge into Hurricane Saturn? What does it matter if ‘Shaun’ and I decided to air out this crummy cell first?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Between you and me, it was starting to smell like a gym locker.”
“Cut the comedy routine!” he demanded, as though dressing down a class clown back at the university. “How did you even get the hatch open? That should have been impossible!”
“You ever get tired of saying that, Doc?” she replied. “You’d think you would have figured out by now that anything is possible in this crazy universe. Just ask that weirdo hexagon down there.”
“Just answer the question!”
“Say, how is my BFF Fontana doing? She still sleeping it off? Granted, there’s a woman who really needed to unwind a bit, but slipping her a roofie seems a bit extreme.”
She’s stalling, he realized. But why? What is she hiding?
A worrisome possibility came together in his mind. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. There had been two spacesuits stored in the airlock, after all.
“Where is Shaun? Let me see him… if he’s still there.”
She shook her head upside-down. “The astronaut formerly known as Colonel Shaun Christopher is not available right now, but if you like, I can take a message.”
I was right, he realized. She’s ducking my questions.
His dire suspicions crystallized into certainty. Shaun wasn’t in the brig with her. He had exited the airlock in the other suit. He was spacewalking, and there was only one place he could be going.
The command module.
“Blast you, Shaun,” he murmured. “Why couldn’t you just let me finish this?”
There was no time to lose. Like a swimmer reversing direction at the end of a lane, he somersaulted in the air and set off back the way he’d come.
“Wait! Where are you going?” Zoe hollered. “Come back!”
He ignored her. She didn’t matter now. He needed to get back to command — before Shaun ruined everything!
Kirk was anxious to get out of his spacesuit. Stuck in the docking ring, he waited impatiently for the airlock to finish repressurizing so he could enter the command module. He remained on the lookout for O’Herlihy, whose whereabouts remained unknown. Kirk suspected that the desperate scientist would not surrender without a fight.
What I wouldn’t give for a phaser right now.
To his dismay, he spotted O’Herlihy in the vestibule on the other side of the module. Their eyes met across the charred remains of the mid-deck. O’Herlihy lunged from the vestibule, racing to seal the airlock before Kirk could emerge. Kirk’s ears popped as he felt the air pressure rise within the compartment. A gauge reported that the pressure was almost normal.
Just another second…
The indicator turned green, and the hatch slid open. Kirk burst from the airlock to confront the other man. He unscrewed his helmet and tossed it aside.
“That’s enough, Doctor. It’s over.”
“Don’t try to stop me, Shaun… or whoever you are.” O’Herlihy brandished a large metal wrench. “I won’t let you!”
They circled each other warily, propelling themselves by handrails and gentle shoves. Kirk assessed his chances. He could handle himself in a fight, as everyone from Khan to Klingons had found out in his own time, but zero gravity complicated matters. It was going to be tricky to throw punches and kicks in this environment, and his zero-g combat training was years in the past and in a much younger body. He needed to think this one out instead of just wading in with his fists.
“Please, Shaun!” the doctor begged. “I don’t want to fight you. Just let me save my daughter!”
“I’m sorry, Marcus. You know I can’t let you do that.”
O’Herlihy was fighting for his child’s life, as he saw it, which made him a dangerous opponent, plus he had the advantage of a weapon. Weightless or not, that wrench could still do serious damage if it connected. Kirk started to regret taking off his space helmet.
He glanced around for something to even the odds. Zoe’s slender tablet was still strapped to his wrist, but it wouldn’t be much use in a fight. His gaze fell on a fire extinguisher taped to a melted lab counter. Outside of a phaser, the sturdy metal cylinder was just what he needed. Pushing off from a warped steel cabinet, he flew for the canister.
“Leave that alone!” O’Herlihy saw what Kirk was up to and frantically tried to stop him. He hurled the wrench at Kirk’s head. The sturdy tool spun through the air between them. Kirk ducked and heard it clang against a bulkhead. Executing a barrel roll above the counter, he yanked the fire extinguisher free and rotated to face O’Herlihy, who was diving at him with a murderous expression on his face. Kirk fumbled with the trigger.
Foam sprayed from the nozzle. The blast struck O’Herlihy, driving him back, while simultaneously propelling Kirk in the opposite direction. Kirk grunted in pain as his back, already bruised from being tossed about the brig earlier, smacked into a wall. The padded spacesuit cushioned the blow to a degree, but it still smarted. He eased up on the fire extinguisher to keep from caroming around the deck.
“Stop it, Marcus! You don’t want to do this!”
“It doesn’t matter what I want!” O’Herlihy sputtered through a mouthful of foam. The frothy mixture coated his face and front, making him look like a survivor of a coolant explosion. He wiped it from his eyes. “I’ll do whatever it takes to save my daughter!”
He grabbed the hatchway ladder to halt his flight. Choosing the better part of valor, he scrambled up through the open hatch, disappearing from sight.
Not so fast, Kirk thought. He couldn’t give O’Herlihy the chance to lock him out of the flight deck above. Using the fire extinguisher as a makeshift thruster, he rocketed through the hatchway after his quarry. Drifting foam splattered against his face as he blasted up into the flight deck, past Fontana, who was still floating unconscious by the top of the ladder. Duct tape bound her wrists to an upper rung, while her legs floated free. She stirred restlessly.
But where was O’Herlihy? Kirk had lost sight of his foe. Killing the fire extinguisher, he looked about for the other man. “Marcus?”
A metal meal tray smashed Kirk in the face, knocking him across the deck. The fire extinguisher slipped from his fingers. He tasted blood. Glistening crimson beads sprayed into the air, dispersing weightlessly through the atmosphere. He tumbled backward, dazed by the blow. The fire extinguisher banged into a bulkhead several meters away. Kirk felt as if he had just been slapped across the face by a Gorn. He spit out a tooth.
The ruckus roused Fontana, whos
e eyes fluttered open. A floating bead splattered against her cheek. She gazed about groggily. “Shaun?”
O’Herlihy tossed away the tray. Before Kirk could recover from the blow, he bounded over to the helm and hastily worked the controls. Not bothering to strap himself into the pilot’s seat, he keyed new commands into the ship’s computer.
“Wait!” Fontana said, coming to. “What are you doing? Get away from there!”
“You can’t stop me!” His fingers jabbed at the instrument panel. “I have to save Tera!”
Even if it meant sending the Lewis & Clark on a suicide mission into the heart of a gas giant.
The thrusters ignited. A burst of acceleration tossed Kirk back against a bulkhead. Fontana was tossed about the ladder like a flag flapping in the wind. Saturn’s turbulent atmosphere filled the windows of the cockpit, growing larger and clearer by the moment. Kirk could make out the planet’s sulfurous yellow bands in alarming detail. Lightning flashed across storms the size of continents. The ship plowed through the inner rings.
“Shaun!” Fontana tugged at her bonds, fully awake now. “Stop him! He’s changing our orbit, sending us into the planet!”
So much for the scenic route, Kirk thought. O’Herlihy had evidently given up on his plan to drag out the ship’s final orbits long enough to make more observations of Saturn and its rings. Cutting to the chase, the crazed scientist and father was taking them on a downward trajectory straight into Saturn. The thrusters continued to fire, accelerating the ship. Kirk guessed that they had only minutes before the ship entered the atmosphere.
No, Kirk thought. This has gone far enough.
A crimson haze literally floated before his eyes. Shaking the cobwebs from his brain, he swept the drifting globules aside and tackled O’Herlihy at the helm. The doctor’s face slammed into the instrument panel, and Kirk yanked the other man’s hands away from the controls. Kicking against the console, he sent them both tumbling away from the helm.
“Let go of me!” O’Herlihy raged. “You’re going to get Tera killed!”
Kirk disagreed. “Nobody’s dying today, Marcus. Least of all us.”
The two men grappled in midair, much as Kirk and Zoe had earlier, but much less enjoyably. O’Herlihy elbowed Kirk in the gut, but the captain’s spacesuit shielded him from the blow; it was like wearing a heavily padded suit of body armor. Twisting around, O’Herlihy grabbed Kirk’s throat and squeezed. His nails dug into Kirk’s neck. Crimson bubbles percolated from his nose.
“Have you forgotten your oath, Doctor?” Kirk wheezed. He’d been choked once today already, and he’d had enough. “First, do no harm…”
He butted his head into O’Herlihy’s bloody face. The scientist shrieked as his busted nose took another hit. More weightless red bubbles contaminated the air, joining drifting flecks of foam. Pushing down on O’Herlihy’s shoulders, Kirk swung his legs up and kicked the other man squarely in the chest with his sturdy space boots. The force of the kick sent the scientist flying backward — toward Fontana.
She snagged him with her legs, wrapping them around his neck. “Hurry!” she shouted at Kirk. “Finish this!”
“Let go of me!” O’Herlihy struggled to extricate himself. “You don’t understand what you’re doing!”
Kirk bounced off a wall, launching himself at the trapped scientist like a missile. His right fist collided with the man’s jaw. The thick white glove felt like a boxing glove, protecting his knuckles. O’Herlihy’s head snapped backward, then swayed atop his neck. Frantic eyes rolled upward until only the blood-streaked whites were visible. He went limp.
Kirk had scored a knockout.
“Sorry about that, Doctor, but I left my phaser at home.”
Fontana gave him a quizzical look. “Okay, consider me impressed, whoever you are.” She let go of the unconscious scientist and nodded at her bound wrists. “I’d give you a round of applause, but I’m a little tied up.”
“Let me do something about that.”
The captain briefly wondered if it was a good idea to release her, since she was the one who had tossed him into the brig in the first place, after nearly choking the life out of him earlier, but he judged that circum-stances had changed. After O’Herlihy’s rampage, there was no longer any question who the real saboteur was, and Kirk guessed that he was going to need Fontana’s help to undo what the doctor had done and save the ship.
He hastily tore away the tape. “Don’t make me regret this.”
“Not yet,” she promised, massaging her wrists. “I think we’ve got bigger problems.”
The thrusters flared at full power, recklessly burning through their fuel. No wonder the ship had been orbiting Saturn quickly enough to keep hitting the rings; never intending to make a return trip to Earth, O’Herlihy had felt free to expend all of their fuel on one final death spiral.
Fontana raced Kirk to the cockpit. She fired the braking thrusters.
“It’s too late!” she shouted. “We worked up too much speed. We’re caught in the gravity well.” She strapped herself in. “Brace yourself! We’re going in!”
Twenty-seven
2020
They entered Saturn.
Descending toward the planet, the Lewis & Clark skimmed the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. Icy wisps of crystallized sulfur and ammonia blew past the cockpit windows as the ship bounced violently off the dense cloud banks below. Freezing winds buffeted the ship, fighting a losing battle against the heat of friction and causing the flight deck to spin on its axis like a carnival ride. Kirk strapped himself into the pilot’s seat to keep from being tossed about the compartment. The hull began to creak alarmingly as the heat and pressure mounted outside. The temperature inside the cockpit climbed toward the hellish. Warning lights flashed all over the instrument panels. Alarms blared. The ship’s outer plating had been built to withstand the unpredictable hazards of a six-month voyage far from home, but Kirk knew that the ship couldn’t go much deeper into the atmosphere without burning up. It was a race to see what killed them first — the pressure, the storms, or the heat.
Kirk wanted to call down to Engineering, to tell Scotty to divert all available power to the shields. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.
“What about Querez?” Fontana shouted over the chaos. The bumpy ride rattled her voice, giving it more than a touch of vibrato. Sweat poured down her face. “Where is she?”
“The airlock. Safe, last time I saw her.”
But for how much longer?
He let Fontana pilot the ship. She had more experience with this generation of vessel. He unhooked his clumsy gloves and tossed them aside. “Can you get us out of here?”
“I’m trying! But it’s no use. I’m hitting the brakes for all they’re worth, but the thrusters are running out of fuel. We can’t achieve escape velocity!”
“There has to be some way to break free!” Kirk said. Saturn’s tempestuous atmosphere descended for nearly a hundred thousand kilometers, but at this rate, the Lewis & Clark would burn up like a shooting star long before they reached the boiling seas of liquid hydrogen and helium far beneath the raging storms, let alone the planet’s molten core. “We just need more power.”
An idea hit him.
“The impulse engines! They’re our only hope.”
Fontana stared at him in shock. “From a cold start? There’s no time!”
The impulse engines had been shut down since they had arrived at Saturn; the crew had been relying on controlled thruster burns to navigate around the planet. But it was possible that even the Lewis & Clark’s primitive impulse engines might have enough oomph to get them clear of the atmosphere again — if they could get them fired up in time.
“Trust me! It can be done.” Kirk had seen Scotty work wonders with his engines in the past, usually in the nick of time. “You just need to kick-start the fusion reaction by superheating the deuterium, then keep a close eye on the plasma conduits.”
“Or?” she asked.
“The
ship blows up,” he admitted. “But you have to believe me. I know this technology better than you do, and I know what it’s capable of… with the right handling.”
She hesitated, uncertain whether to trust him. “I don’t even know who you are.”
He didn’t blame her for doubting him. He was asking a lot. “I know. But believe it or not, I’ve done this kind of thing before.”
Lightning flashed far below them. Deafening thunderclaps shook the flight deck. Banshee winds wailed over the agonized groaning of the hull. The ship was tossed about like a dinghy on an angry sea. The overhead lights flickered ominously. Sparks erupted from one of the auxiliary computer terminals. Sweat soaked through Kirk’s clothes; it was already hotter than Vulcan’s Forge and getting worse by the second. He feared for Zoe, who was still trapped down in the airlock, with no clue of what was happening. He feared for them all.
“Oh, what the hell,” Fontana blurted. “It’s not like I’ve got any better ideas. Get to it, stranger.”
“Thanks!”
Kirk rapidly called up the impulse controls and started streamlining the start-up procedure. The computer flashed a stream of alerts, warning him that he was exceeding established safety parameters. He ignored the cautions and overrode the computer’s increasingly strident attempts to block him. He remembered reviewing the engine specs back in Shaun’s quarters; what he was attempting was risky, to be sure, but it was doable if you didn’t push these crude engines too hard. There was no way he could achieve the sort of thrust that more advanced impulse engines were capable of, but he wasn’t trying to approach light speed, just to get them out of this oversized pressure cooker before they went too deep. Good thing Saturn’s gravity isn’t proportionate to its size, he thought, or we wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Almost set.” He let Fontana keep control of the helm, while he monitored the fusion reactor, the accelerator/generator, the drive coils, and the vectored plasma exhaust vents. All indicators were in the red zone, and the computer thought he was a maniac, but that couldn’t be helped. He was asking the Lewis & Clark to do something no Earth-based ship had done before. He could only hope that she was up to it. “On my count, three… two… one…”
