Fire On High Page 14

  "See that you do! Burgoyne out."

  * * *

  Burgoyne shook hir head in annoyance as s/he monitored the readouts. Soleta was next to hir and asked, "Problem?"

  "Crewman's in the wrong place. At least," s/he said, frowning, "I think he is. Frustrating thing is, I hope it wasn't my screwup. I might have accidentally assigned him to the wrong place. Just had a lot on my mind lately, I guess."

  "Do you wish to discuss it?" asked Soleta.

  "No. No, I don't think so."

  "Good," Soleta said firmly. "Because I do not believe I wish to hear—"

  Then her eyes widened. "Burgoyne!" she said as the readings began to spike.

  "I see it!" replied Burgoyne. Hir heart was pounding against hir rib cage as hir mind fought to understand what s/he was seeing. "Look at that! Something's driving the energy readings back up again! But that's impossible! Nothing can override the flow from the power transfer conduits! It's got twenty seven fail-safes!"

  "Apparently that's one less than it needed," Soleta told hir sharply. "The engines are powering up, the matter-antimatter feed is coming back on line."

  "Blast and damn!" shouted Burgoyne even as s/he hit hir commbadge. S/he looked up at the ten stories of the M-ARA as s/he called, "Burgoyne to Beth! Burgoyne to Christiano! Get the hell out of there! We're removing the containment patch and replacing the pressure ports! Get clear in case something else goes wrong!"

  That was when Burgoyne heard the screams. Alarmed shouts coming from throughout the engine room, reacting to something that did not seem as if it could possibly exist.

  And then s/he saw it.

  In the heart of the matter-antimatter core, it began to take form. The ionized gas within moved about it, and whether it was feeding off it or whether the gas was actually constituting its body, s/he couldn't even begin to guess.

  It didn't have eyes or any discernible feature. It seemed almost embryonic, as if it were trying to decide what shape it was going to take. Burgoyne could almost imagine that s/he heard some sort of distant roaring, although that was flat-out impossible. But then again, so was this.

  "Soleta to bridge!" Soleta was shouting over her commbadge. "There is some sort of being in the M-ARA! Repeat, some sort of creature, possibly sentient, definitely hungry!"

  "On my way!" came Calhoun's voice.

  And then the alarms began to go off, systems shutting down and starting up again all over the ship. Burgoyne wasn't sure where to look first, and then s/he looked up and s/he saw something truly horrifying. Something that made the situation seem like the death throes of Thallon all over again, except this time it was the helpless Excalibur that found herself squarely in the middle of the situation.

  Something was punching its way up through the top of the matter reactant injector. Although the magnetic patch was still in place, something—a talon, a claw, a tentacle, a roiling combination of all that and more—stretched through it and upward, toward the terrified forms of Ensigns Beth and Christiano.

  * * *

  Lieutenant j.g. Michael Houle never knew what hit him.

  Houle, a tall, handsome, and freshly promoted flight deck officer at shuttlebay two, at that moment was trying to figure out why all the systems were going insane in front of him. One indicator said that the bay doors were open, another said they were closed, a third said that the annular force field that prevented depressurization of the bay had come on, another said no. It was as if the entire array had gone nuts, as if something was blowing out energy all over the ship and creating havoc with the systems.

  He heard a footfall behind him and turned to see if it was someone who was going to explain to him what was going on. He didn't even have time to fully register that a fist was coming his way before it struck him cleanly on the chin. Houle's head snapped around and he sagged to the floor without having managed to say a single word.

  Morgan stepped past him, shaking out her hand to remove the tingling from her fist. "Never hit bone on bone," she scolded herself. "I simply must remember that."

  From the Ops booth, she looked down over the shuttlecraft available to her. There was not quite the assortment available as there was in the main shuttlebay; on the other hand, she knew it was considerably less guarded and more open to attack. Besides, she didn't need much. Then she spotted the ideal vehicle for her needs.

  "A type six," she said briskly. "Will give me warp two for thirty-six hours, warp one-point-two for two days if I'm moving at full bore. Excellent."

  Her intention had been to reroute the bay door commands so that she could activate them from the interior of the shuttle, but she quickly found herself falling victim to the systems blackouts that were devastating the rest of the ship. Clearly the unexpected distraction of the systems problems was a double-edged sword. It had caused enough confusion to allow her to slip by the security guards, but it was now impeding her intended means of egress.

  "All right," she said to no one. "Not a problem. I have a backup plan."

  Quickly she exited the Ops deck and headed down to the shuttlecraft that she had selected. She emerged from the stairway to the Ops level, ran several feet—and stopped.

  Si Cwan was blocking her way, standing between her and the shuttlecraft.

  "You left right in the middle of our drinks, Morgan," he chided her. "You struck me as a woman of better breeding than that.

  "One side, Ambassador, or I'll strike you in a worse way than that," she said. Slowly she walked toward him, her arms swinging in leisurely fashion. "This is none of your concern."

  "Yes, so you believe. Unfortunately for you, I do not." He did not appear the least bit concerned about her advance. There seemed little reason for him to be. He was a head taller than she, with broad shoulders and muscular build. And he was someone who had proven himself any number of times in battle; indeed, he had even managed to fight the formidable Zak Kebron himself to a standstill. "Do not try it, Morgan. The outcome will not be pleasant for you."

  "Yes, so you believe," she tossed back at him. "Trust me, Si Cwan, you do not want to get between me and the shuttle."

  "I already am, and trusting you seems to be the root of our problem, doesn't it?"

  "It would seem so."

  And then, with no further preamble, Morgan launched herself at Si Cwan.

  He admired her form. She moved quickly, confidently, and although she didn't have nearly the reach that Si Cwan did, she more than made up for it with speed and aggressiveness. But Si Cwan's confidence never wavered. He sidestepped as she came at him with that graceful economy of movement he always displayed, and he swung his leg in a roundhouse kick that was designed to catch her squarely in the back and knock her to the ground.

  But then Morgan made a sudden movement with her hand, something so subtle that he almost didn't spot it. When he did, it was too late. His leg was already in motion, and then Morgan had out the spray hypo that she had grabbed off the medtech and secreted up her sleeve. She jammed it squarely into his inner thigh and it hissed its contents into him.

  "You… !" Si Cwan managed to get out, and then the world twisted around him. He sank to his knees, desperately trying to fight off whatever it was that she had pumped into his system. There appeared to be three of her in front of him and he made a desperate lunge toward the one in the middle. One would have thought it was the logical choice, but his hand went right through her and then the one on the right slammed a fierce kick into the side of his head.

  And still Si Cwan would not go down. Instead he crawled on his hands and knees, trying to go after her even as she opened the door of the shuttle. "Oh, for God's sake," she said in irritation. Displaying amazing strength considering her size, she grabbed Si Cwan by the back of his tunic and yanked him toward a freight container that was anchored to the floor. It was exactly what she needed as she yanked it open and saw that it was empty. She hauled him up and shoved him into the container, snapping the lock shut on top. "You won't suffocate," she said. "I'll let them know you're
in here after I'm safely gone. Trust me, this is for your own good, although you probably can't hear me or else don't believe. But as you said, trust has always been part of our problem, hasn't it?"

  Si Cwan couldn't manage any sort of articulate response, which wasn't all that much of a problem since she wasn't listening to him. With the ambassador safely stowed, she headed back for the shuttle and climbed in.

  Quickly she fired it up, bringing the engines on line with practiced ease. She had to hurry the systems check, but she was confident in Starfleet compulsion to keep everything in top working order.

  For the briefest of moments she regretted taking off on Robin yet again. But she would just have to understand. "You're a big girl now, Robin," Morgan said, "and you can certainly live without your mommy. Heaven knows you've done it for long enough."

  The bay doors remained sealed, but Morgan did not see that as being a problem for much longer. As the engines roared to life, Morgan brought the phaser array on line. Standard equipment for the shuttle did not include any weaponry, but Morgan had quickly spotted this one rigged with a type IV phaser array. Clearly this was a shuttle reserved for special operations. Well, she had just such an operation in mind.

  She targeted the bay doors and opened fire. The phasers blasted outward, pounding into the doors and easily smashing through them, sending large pieces of the triple-layered duranium doors tumbling into space.

  She prepared to lift off, but something ricocheted off the front of the shuttle, tumbling away. It caught her attention and she realized that it was the top of a freight container. Then she heard something else, something much fainter, bump against the lower section of the ship. She might not have heard it at all, for the vacuum of space and the roar of the engines was almost deafening, but the moment she saw the piece from the container spiraling away into space, she had known with hideous certainty what was going to be next. A quick exterior scan confirmed it for her.

  "I don't believe it," she said.

  Si Cwan was clutching the right warp nacelle of the shuttle, and he had mere seconds to live before the howling vacuum of space dragged him to his death.

  X

  THE TENTACLE (for that was the shape that it had assumed at that moment) stretched up out of the matter-antimatter core. The magnetic seal reconfigured around the tentacle, preventing any of the intense radiation and heat—hot enough to blast a gaping hole straight through the side of the Excalibur—from escaping.

  "You go this way, I'll go that way!" screamed Christiano as it snaked upward. But Beth was paralyzed, staring down at the tentacle in undiluted horror. No textbook had ever prepared her for this, no tall tale or fable of an expedition had ever mentioned something akin to a Lovecraftian monster taking refuge inside of the warp core. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen, a horrific thing composed of energy plasma, glowing and shifting, undulating hideously, and she could swear that it was letting loose with some sort of ungodly howling that was ripped from the primordial origins of humanity.

  "Go!" Christiano shouted again, and he shoved her, and this time she started to move. Christiano bolted in the other direction and then the tentacle snaked out and wrapped around Christiano's leg. Christiano barely had time to let out a cry of terror and then he was yanked clear off the catwalk. The tentacle started to retract, hauling Christiano down toward the magnetic seal and, inevitably, toward the warp core itself. Through the clear containment of the core, Beth could see the being within writhing about, upset, confused, furious, trying to come to terms with its very existence in an environment that defied the ability of anything to live within it.

  Christiano howled Beth's name, and Beth had no time at all to make a snap decision. She lunged off the catwalk, snagging the lower half of the rail with one hand and stretching her other hand to the utmost just as the tentacle descended past her with a frantic Christiano writhing in its grasp. The containment patch yawned wide beneath them, not letting the radiation out, but not stopping anyone from going in. The ionized gas roiled below and then Beth snagged Christiano by the wrist.

  "Don't let go!" he screamed. "Don't let go! Don't let me go!"

  The tentacle yanked downward and Beth's grasp slipped as she was jolted before she was able to get a firm grip on the catwalk railing. She snagged Christiano's hand, holding on with every bit of willpower she had, as she was hauled halfway forward and her ankles wrapped desperately around the lower strut of the railing. Now she had no support at all, forming a human bridge between the catwalk and Christiano. There was no way on Earth she could possibly get the leverage to haul Christiano back up.

  Not that it mattered.

  For with that abrupt yank downward, Christiano's lower body was yanked down into the warp core. Ironically, Beth's endeavors to help him transformed what would have been a quick death into an agonizing one. Had he simply fallen in, he would have been vaporized instantly. As it was, the lower half of his body was immediately incinerated, but the upper half—including a piercing and terrifying death scream—had time to register what was happening while it was happening.

  There is no more horrifying sensation than knowing that one is already dead and there is nothing one can do about it.

  Without Christiano to anchor her, Beth simply hung there, held only by the locked position of her ankles. She was stunned, her mind unable to accept what she had just witnessed, and then her entire body simply shut down and her legs went limp. Beth began a headfirst dive toward instant death.

  And a taloned hand reached down from above and snagged her ankle.

  On the catwalk overhead, Burgoyne 172 held on for all s/he was worth. S/he was only slightly out of breath despite the fact that s/he had scaled the emergency ladder along the reactor core shaft, up ten decks, in just under sixty seconds flat. S/he paused a moment to gather hirself and then pulled Beth up and out of harm's way.

  And the tentacle writhed up toward them.

  "Pressure port seals!" shouted Burgoyne at the top of hir lungs. "Bring engine up to seventy-five percent capacity and keep it there!" And the emergency systems kicked in, slamming the pressure ports into place, sealing off access to the injectors.

  The tentacle immediately dissipated, but not without giving off a massive blast of heat that Burgoyne feared, for just a moment, was capable of incinerating them where they stood. But after a few moments had passed, Burgoyne was happy to realize that they were still there and still in one piece.

  S/he held a trembling Beth tight against hirself, displaying considerable agility as s/he made hir way down the ladders toward the main engineering room. Every one of hir people was gathered down there, looking shaken and confused. They were staring at the warp core with undisguised fear, for although the danger seemed momentarily to have passed, it was still all too present and all too real.

  * * *

  Trapped within the confines of a cargo container, Si Cwan fought desperately to shove away the lethargy that was seizing his mind. The drug injected into his system was a powerful one, but whatever it was, it had apparently been set to effect human physiology. Thallonian physiology, on the other hand, was made of sterner stuff.

  It was not easy for him by any means. It was everything he could do to fight it off. His overpowering temptation was to sleep, to just give in to the darkness that threatened to envelop him. But he kept muttering, "No," over and over to himself, forcing himself to focus, to ignore the temptation to give up.

  He began to pound on the lid of the container. It seemed solid, and the ringing of the noise he generated as he struck it seemed so loud that he thought it was going to split his head wide open. But he did not cease, did not give in, would not give up. "Won't… get away," he murmured. "Won't get away, won't get away." It became his mantra as he repeatedly pounded on the lid, over and over, determined not to lose. He felt the lid begin to loosen, bit by bit. Once more he started to tire but he knew that if he surrendered the momentum now, he would never attain it again. With both his fists he smashed upward, sending the l
id flying up and off, and he started to clamber out of the container…

  Just as the shuttlecraft blasted open the bay doors.

  The vacuum of space howled around him while he was still hauling his numbed lower body out of the container. Instantly he let out much of the breath from his chest, because he knew that if he inhaled deeply, as was his reflex, the air would explode out of his lungs in a rather forceful fashion. The powerful suction hauled him out of the container and he skidded across the floor. Only seconds lay between him and ejection into the depths of space.

  He pushed up with his powerful arms, angling himself in a desperate move, and slammed into the warp nacelle of the shuttlecraft. Urgently he wrapped his arms around the nacelle, braced his slow-to-function legs against the support strut, and hung on with all the strength he could muster.

  The shuttlecraft lifted clear of the floor, and it was then that he realized that seeking salvation from death in space by clutching on to a vessel about to head into that very same void was probably not the best strategy he had ever developed. Unfortunately, by the look of things, he wasn't going to be around long enough to formulate any more.

  * * *

  "Damn the man!" snarled Morgan. "Goddamn the man!"

  All she had to do was hit the forward thruster, and the shuttlecraft would be out and away. She would be clear of the Excalibur, gone to the safety of space and away from her imprisonment, and by the time they realized what had happened she would be long gone. Granted, they'd probably be able to follow her, but she had places she could get to, resources she could tap. Coolly she ranked her odds at about 70/30 in favor of making a clean getaway, and those were odds that she would happily take.

  But it was going to be at the cost of a man's life; a man who had wanted nothing more but to try and patch things up between her and her daughter and obey the captain's dictates that she was not to leave the ship. Was her freedom worth killing Si Cwan for?

  Hell yes! Morgan's mind screamed at her. You don't owe him anything! Punch it and let's go! But even as her mind celebrated her freedom, she powered up the reverse thrust. The shuttle backed up under her careful guidance, slowly and carefully bringing Si Cwan toward the door that led to the Operations control booth. She knew that if she could get him to that point, and if he could just hold on until she did, he could worm his way through the door and to safety.