STAR TREK®: VULCAN'S HEART

by Josepha Sherman

Castillo turned from the tac station to grin at his captain in admiration, white teeth flashing in a mask of ash and sweat.

  “Now we make our stand,” Garrett ordered. The survivors on the bridge managed a ragged cheer. This time, she did not stop them.

  “Photon torpedoes,” she ordered Castillo hoarsely. “Fire at will. Come on, Lieutenant, this is your chance to test out all the wild tactics you’ve been talking about all these years.”

  The ship rocked slightly as the torpedoes sped away.

  One of the warbirds went up in gouts of flame.

  “Good shot! Try for two!”

  The ship took another tremendous hit from one of the three surviving warbirds. Debris buffeted Garrett, and she grunted at the impact, feeling something snap deep within her. A rib, hopefully only a rib. People had survived worse.

  Smoke and gas erupted from one of the maintenance tubes. It was going to get really hard to breathe in just a few seconds. “Emergency O2 masks on!”

  Assuming the oxygen masks hadn’t been pinholed by all the debris.

  Another hit. A console came crashing down across her legs, and she nearly screamed at the sudden white-hot blaze of pain. Drugs . . . there were painkillers stored in a compartment beneath the arm of her command chair. She had never used them, never needed them. Now, she fumbled the compartment open, groped for the spray hypo, and injected herself, fighting the black mists threatening to engulf her.

  “Shields down to fifteen percent, Captain. The next disruptor . . .” Castillo shrugged finality, then slammed a hand down, firing photon torpedoes.

  Varani had moved over to Science. “Captain, I’m getting a reading from that anomaly, the rift. It’s moving in on us.”

  “Evasive,” she whispered, but her gaze was on the warbirds preparing to fire what she knew would be a fatal salvo.—A flash of memory: herself as a tall, gawky young girl who had looked up at the stars from the fields of home and staked her claim to them.

  And had I the choice, I’d do it all over again, Garrett assured that younger self.

  “Into Thy hands,” she whispered as she had not since she was a child, then straightened as best she could. “Evasive action, Mr. Castillo. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

  “Warp engines are off-line, Captain.” The young voice from Engineering sounded exhausted and infinitely regretful.

  Aren’t we all? “Get working, mister!” Garrett snapped.

  “Captain,” came another voice from Engineering, sounding just as young as the first. Damn, were children all that was left down there? “Captain, there’s a power drain. Our dilithium crystals are degrading. I think it’s that anomaly—if we don’t retreat, it’ll pull us in.” The voice cracked.

  The warbirds had stayed with their prey, following Enterprise’s every move. With a blaze of green, disruptor fire engulfed the ship.

  “Shields down, Captain.”

  Debris raked the bridge. Garrett heard Varani scream, raising his voice for what surely was the first time in his life. And, a quick glance told her, the last.

  They were trapped. With warp drive down, they could not run. With shields down, they could not stand. Could they fight?

  The ship’s gravity quivered again, released, then secured itself. Someone, whoever was left in Engineering, must have gotten that fix to work. But to Garrett’s horror, she saw an amber light flicker to red on her board. There went life-support on the bridge. What about the rest of the ship?

  “Damage control!” she tried to shout, but all that came out was a gasp. She coughed up blood. Nasty way to die, drowning in your own blood.

  A warbird veered, banked, and circled back. Fight, she told herself. You’re not dead yet.

  “Fire!” she gasped.

  Castillo must have blacked out. Garrett overrode Tactical and fired. Got him! Phaser fire raked across the warbird’s hull—

  But then the Romulan returned fire. And this time, her own weapons systems did not respond.

  Castillo raised his head, his face a bloody mask. “Sorry, Captain.”

  “I’m picking up an image from the planet, Captain,” said Ensign Fredericks.

  “Screen . . .” Garrett coughed again. “On.”

  A few buildings, charred and smoking, still stood amid the ruins, a few lights still flickered within. Some survivors, then . . .

  “My God, Captain, will you look at the readings from that warbird?” Castillo gasped, then collapsed across his console.

  The Romulans did, indeed, have those plasma weapons. A burst of immense power erupted from the Romulan ship, blooming, expanding as it exploded out toward Narendra III, engulfing it in blue-white fire that sent tears sheeting down Garrett’s face. The screen filled with flame—then went dark. All those lives, all the installations downworld . . .

  . . . Nothing left.

  Nothing at all.

  And soon, not even us.

  “Suit up!” Garrett ordered. “Man the stasis units.” That might save a few. “Release the log buoy.” That order hurt; she had given it last during the Kobayashi Maru examination. So strange that Starfleet still had its cadets fight Klingons, not Romulans.

  Of her bridge crew, it seemed that no one was left to obey her. Varani lay facedown on the deck. Fredericks slumped in his chair, overcome by smoke. Garrett released the buoy herself. With her exec and Engineering officers dead, she could not destroy the ship. The Romulans’ plasma bursts would take care of that. At least, she hoped they would blow up the ship, rather than try to take it in tow.

  One last duty to perform. She opened a hailing frequency to the broadest possible band.

  “This is Captain Garrett—” She broke off with a gasp. Oh God, she hurt. Even through the painkillers, she could feel the pain constricting her chest, the bones of her broken leg grinding together. She gagged, nearly choked, panting through clenched teeth, struggling for enough breath to finish her distress call.

  A racking cough told her that Castillo had fought his way back to consciousness. He stiffened with horror as he stared at the screens. “The anomaly.” It was the barest rasp. “God, it’s moving!”

  Garrett ignored him. She might have only seconds left to send out her warning.

  “Captain Garrett . . . of the Starship Enterprise. We . . . have been attacked by Romulan warships. Require . . . immediate assistance. We have lost warp drive . . . life-support is failing . . .”

  “Captain, we’re being sucked into the anomaly!”

  It was the last thing she heard. The anomaly loomed on the flickering viewscreen, a vast jagged tear in space. Her head spun in the foul, thinning air. The rift twisted as it opened, taking on the aspects of a wormhole. The colors within it formed patterns like snakeskin, luring her, drawing her in . . .

  White light erupted, shading up to purple. Even the raving of the Romulans’ disruptor fire paled by comparison.

  Everything went black.

  TWENTY-THREE

  SPACE, NARENDRA III

  Charvanek impatiently hit a communications button on the arm of her chair. “Well?”

  Takvi’s gruff voice, the gruffness just barely hiding bone-weariness, said from the engine room, “Done, Commander. At least as good as it’s going to get, given what we have to hand.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that we’ve finally got Honor Blade’s engines functioning well enough to get the battered lady back into the security of her cloak.”

  “And warp drive? What about that?”

  “Yes, Commander. Not much of one, but we do once more have a working warp drive.”

  “Excellent. Dismissed. Go and rest.” Charvanek glanced about the wreckage of the bridge, seeing at least some order where there’d been nothing but chaos. The crew might be sagging with exhaustion, but they’d done an amazing job. “At ease.”

  She courteously failed to notice how they reeled when they no longer had to brace to attention.

  “Open shipwide communications. I assume we still have shipwide communica
tions? Good. Hear me, all of you. Now that the Honor Blade is in no immediate danger of blowing up, I am ordering the following division of labor. A third of you will stand down immediately, a third will keep stations as . . .” As they limped along? No. “As we proceed toward Narendra III. A third will continue repair, maintenance, and . . .” She stopped short, because her voice had been about to quiver. “And preparation of our dead comrades,” Charvanek continued, “for the Last Review in the halls of Erebus.”

  She got slowly to her feet, holding herself erect by sheer force of will. “One last point: I am briefly leaving the bridge. While I am gone, you will poll the crew. Make Honor Blade’s shuttles and emergency supplies ready for those who choose not to . . . continue the fight. There is to be no shame attached to any who do so.”

  Managing not to stagger, Charvanek made it to her small, neat, so-familiar cabin, and sat for a precious few moments with head in hands. “It is no dishonor to admit exhaustion of the heart.” Her old teacher Amarcan’s Axioms could break your heart. If it were not already broken.

  You waste precious time. Charvanek forced herself up again, snatching a few seconds to wash and tend her scrapes and burns: The ship’s physician would be occupied with serious injuries. Wearily, she pulled on her dress uniform, then hacked off a handful of her long hair with her Honor Blade, a token sacrifice to her dead whose blood, even more than hers, justified her injured ship’s name. Properly, she should fast until she had performed the Rites for the Dead; yet the living needed her alert.

  Forgive me, she wished her dead crew, and ate the hastily prepared food her orderly had left for her. Soon, I will see that you have your proper honor.

  Soon, her mind added unbidden, she would see them again.

  Leaving the suddenly tasteless meal unfinished, Charvanek returned to the bridge, pausing just outside to straighten her back and force her face into an impassive mask.

  Her officers stiffened to attention as she entered.

  “Commander,” her First greeted her.

  “Have you polled the crew?”

  Here at the end of things, she found herself particular about the company in which she died. No cowards, certainly, and none whose spirits quailed at the last.

  “I have, Commander. They stay at their posts of their own free will.”

  “My eaglets,” Charvanek said, her voice going husky despite her best intentions. “You will snatch honor from the Halls of Erebus itself.”

  She seated herself, drew her Honor Blade, blooded it against a thumb in ritual sacrifice, and sat, keeping station. Honor Blade crept toward Narendra III.

  The first thing that greeted Honor Blade in the Narendra system was a scream in the barbarous noise that Klingons called a language.

  “It is a good day to die!”

  That had been an old man’s voice. But he’d shouted not an appeal for help, but a challenge. A brave one, that grandfather, whoever he was. She could value courage, even in Klingons.

  Echoing that challenge, tiny ships rose like sparks from Narendra III, only to be shot down by General Volskiar’s four remaining warbirds, swiftly as sacrificial spices consumed by flame. Charvanek could hear the mourning howls of the remaining pilots, and thought, in a warrior’s brief sympathy, Honor to them.

  Once again, shouting over the disruptor static that bombarded the station circling Narendra III, came the old Klingon’s voice. “

  We have been attacked in overwhelming numbers by a dishonorable enemy . . .”

  Dishonorable, indeed. And she—

  “Commander, systems report power drain from the cloaking device.”

  “Boost power,” she ordered automatically, then held up a hand. “Wait.” Opening in-ship communications, Charvanek asked with deceptive softness, “Engineering, need I order you to run diagnostics?”

  “I mean no disrespect, Commander.” Takvi’s voice was its usual gruff self. “But there’s only so much my crew can do. The cloaking device takes a cursed amount of power. If we are to have energy for ship’s engines and weapons systems . . .”

  “Understood. Concentrate on those.”

  Volskiar was picking off the Klingon scouts in quick bursts of fire. The personnel carrier that had disengaged from the station died in gouts of flame. But then, shouting over the static, came a new voice. A human voice. “This is Captain Rachel Garrett of U.S.S. Enterprise . . .”

  Enterprise.

  A little shiver of memory shot through Charvanek, and she thought, I should have known. Of course this was not that Enterprise, the first of its line, the ship she had not quite sworn feud against—the fates only knew why—but it was still Enterprise in a newer, mightier guise. She watched, breath caught in her throat, as it sped to the attack, engaging Volskiar’s fleet in gallant, outnumbered combat. Charvanek’s crew stood at their duty stations, awaiting orders to fight.

  “Engineering,” she snapped. “Report.”

  “Commander, power consumption up 58.32 percent. Estimate critical in 9.75 unless economies are instituted.”

  “Decloak,” Charvanek ordered. Space shimmered about them. “Weapons, Takvi, do we have weapons?”

  “Powering up, Commander. But it’s going to take time—”

  “We don’t have time! Selta! Open communications with the flagship.” Maybe we can at least distract them!

  “Transmission jammed.”

  “Break through.”

  The communications officer winced at the terrible squeals of static, but tried again. A savage burst of sound erupted from his headset, and he ripped it off in agony, bleeding from the ears, glancing at her in wild appeal.

  “Cease,” Charvanek ordered.

  And all the while, the brave, doomed Enterprise fought on. Salute, sister, Charvanek wished its commander, this Captain Garrett. May your gods grant you honor in whatever Afterworld is yours.

  A cold, clear thought twisted its unwelcome way into her mind: The Enterprise is wounded, dying. When you have weapons back on-line, you could destroy it, atone for attacking your own—

  And destroy her honor and that of her crew?

  It probably wouldn’t work, anyhow.

  Charvanek reopened a channel to Engineering. “We need weapons, dammit! Shut down all nonessential systems. Lights at minimum, and lower gravity by 0.10 percent.”

  That should save some power but not interfere with anyone’s efficiency.

  “This is Captain Garrett.” Enterprise sounded mortally worn, mortally wounded. “To all Federation ships. We . . . have been attacked by Romulan warships and require . . . immediate assistance. We have lost warp drive . . . life-support is failing . . .”

  All space suddenly seemed to blaze with a blinding blue-white light, a blaze into which the Enterprise vanished. Charvanek blinked her eyes, dazzled. “What in the name of all the Powers is that?” Her mind cried wildly, A Federation weapon, something more terrible than any plasma burst—and we never, never knew . . .

  “An anomaly, Commander, a rift in space!”

  Here? Now? The Powers truly had a perverse sense of humor! The anomaly was breathtaking, shimmering with more colors than Charvanek had ever seen, but if they were drawn into it—

  “Evasive action!” she shouted.

  The overworked engines groaned into life, then suddenly stopped. Honor Blade shuddered violently as if it were taking heavy fire.

  “Damage control, report!” Charvanek snapped.

  “Commander!” That was Engineer Takvi, sounding almost indignant. “Engines just shut themselves down.”

  “Commander,” her bridge crew reported, voices overlapping in their astonishment, “ship’s instruments just reversed themselves.” “Instrument readings went wild!” “All of space just wavered!”

  Now what? How do I fight space itself?

  But in the next instant: “Commander, instruments are returning to normal!”

  The ferocious rainbow patterns of the rift shimmered, subsided, then, abruptly, quickened again. Lightning seemed to lash
out of a rip in the fabric of space itself, and—

  Enterprise was visible again, and fighting more fiercely than before, almost as though the ship itself knew this was its final battle.

  It was not enough. The Federation ship took hit after hit.Disruptor fire raved out, followed by a salvo of photon torpedoes. The wildfire of laser fire attempted to circle Enterprise’s hull, then ceased. Its shields wavered and fell.

  The Empire’s once-mighty enemy hung dead in space.

  Charvanek drew in a shaken breath, only then realizing that she’d been hoping against all logic that the Enterprise could have somehow summoned its customary wizardry—and spared her the decision she knew she had to make.

  And only now, with dreadful irony, came Takvi’s report, “Weapons powered up.”

  She’d always known that the Fates were perverse. So be it. “Prepare to attack,” Charvanek said quietly. “Open in-ship communications.”

  No time for anything more than brief words. They were all going to die, and they must all already know that. “My eaglets, my children,” my heir whom I shall never now have—no. Do not think of that. “We are here today to conquer or die. But if we die, it is with honor. In death or in victory, we shall win immortality!”

  They cheered her. Even though she was leading them to their deaths, they cheered her. Charvanek rose to salute them, then sat again and strapped herself in.

  “Attack.”

  Honor Blade leapt forward, disruptors firing even as its engines faltered. The sheer vicious impetus of its attack took out the most badly damaged of Volskiar’s surviving warbirds, which exploded in a blaze of white-hot light, debris tumbling in all directions.

  Bank, dive, overloading engines groaning . . . not a word of complaint from Takvi; he knew it didn’t matter now what happened to them. Full power, nothing in reserve, no worries about coming home, spend it all on—

  Someone got in a glancing shot. Honor Blade jolted wildly, lights dimming, acrid smoke swirling onto the bridge, but her ship kept flying. No time to ask for damage reports, just keep going in the name of Romulan honor and—

  Charvanek leaned forward in her chair, staring through the smoke with savage joy. Victorious lay dead ahead, a huge green demon aimed at them. Now we die together, Volskiar! “Ramming speed!” she shouted.