Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven (39 page)

That was because, until now, she had never been asked to face down an enemy armada with two warships, a scout vessel, and a freighter.

On the viewscreen, the gray specks grew larger and more distinct with terrifying speed, until the Tholian ships’ triple-wedge hulls hove into view like an arrowstorm descending with deadly intent from the darkness. Khatami drew a sharp breath. She felt as if she were standing alone on a beach at night, waiting for a tidal wave to crash down and sweep away all in its path, knowing in her heart that it would be as unstoppable as it was inevitable.

She forced herself to exhale and clear her mind. Making a silent survey of her bridge, she was pleased to see that everyone remained focused and alert. Tensions were high, but her crew appeared resolute. Wiping the sweat of her palms over her black trousers, Khatami was almost hypnotized by the terrifying spectacle of the Tholian armada bearing down on Vanguard.

She couldn’t stand to sit still. She stood and paced around her chair as she addressed her bridge crew. “Listen up, everyone. In the next few minutes, any one of you might need to take over at any one of these stations. If the worst comes to pass, one of you might find yourself in command. No matter what happens, know that I have faith in you. Most important, I want you to remember this advice: Whoever’s on weapons control, fire for effect. Use the phasers to dimple enemy shields, then use torpedoes to break them. Don’t ignore an enemy ship because it’s damaged—it can still be used to ram us or the station. If its shields are down, destroy it. Last but just as important, stay alert for the retreat signal from Vanguard. When that sounds, we’ll have to beam out as many survivors as we can. The people on that station are counting on us to pull them out before it’s too late. I’m counting on all of you to make sure we don’t let them down.

“That’s all. Man your posts.”

As her crew returned to their duties, Khatami returned to her chair and beheld the hundreds of incoming vessels that now filled the forward viewscreen.

She gripped her chair’s armrests and grimaced.

Allah help us all
.

Most of Vanguard was being maintained by a skeleton crew, but in the operations center, every console was manned. The wraparound screens covering the high walls teemed with images of Tholian warships cruising at full impulse on a direct interception trajectory. Red Alert panels flashed beneath every screen and beside every turbolift, though the wailing klaxon had long since been muted on Nogura’s order. The admiral stalked across the supervisors’ deck toward the Hub. “Dunbar! Hail the armada commander, tell him we want a parley!”

The communications officer punched commands into her console and shook her head. “They don’t acknowledge our hails, sir.”

Nogura cursed under his breath. Commander Cooper looked
across the Hub at him. “Do you really think you can talk our way out of this?”

“I’d like to try,” Nogura said. He looked back at Dunbar. “Send the following to the lead ship: ‘Tholian commander, this is Admiral Heihachiro Nogura. I formally request terms of surrender.’” A hundred wide-eyed stares suddenly were aimed at Nogura from every direction. He looked at Dunbar and ignored the others. “Send it, Lieutenant. See if it buys us any time.”

Dunbar transmitted the message as she replied, “Aye, sir.”

“Commander Cannella,” Nogura shouted across the deck.

Raymond Cannella, the station’s heavyset fleet operations manager, looked up from his space-traffic-control station, his fleshy face a portrait in stress, and retorted in his thick, northern New Jersey accent, “What?”

“How many ships are still docked?”

Cannella checked his auxiliary data screen, tracing a line across the monitor with his index finger, then called out, “Twenty-six.”

“Tell them all to launch now,” Nogura said. “As in,
right this second
. I don’t care who or what they’re waiting for, they need to go. Anybody left behind will have to beam out with us.” The admiral shot an imploring look at Dunbar, who seemed to be listening to a reply. “Well?”

She winced. “You’re not gonna like it.”

“On speakers,” Nogura growled.

The universal translator parsed a screech that made Nogura think of a saw biting through metal bones.
“There will be no parley. No terms. No prisoners. No mercy.”

The noise ended, and Dunbar said, “That’s all there is, sir.”

Nogura looked back at his bloated fleet ops manager. “Cannella?”

“The last three ships just cleared moorings.”

On the towering screens, the Tholian armada split up into attack groups. Each wing of thirty or forty ships peeled off from the main force, shifting course while the rest of the fleet wheeled at high speed around Vanguard, like scavengers circling a dying
beast they know will soon become carrion. Nogura steeled himself for the carnage to come. “Cooper, order all gunners to start locking in targets. Take out the point ships first—those will be the leaders.”

Cannella bellowed, “All ships away!”

“Raise shields!” Nogura ordered. “Damage control and fire suppression teams to action stations.” He opened an internal comm to the engineering levels. “Ops to reactor control. Increase power output to one hundred ten percent of rated maximum.”

“Roger that,”
replied the station’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Isaiah Farber.

Cooper tensed. “The Tholians are locking weapons!”

Switching to a coded subspace frequency, Nogura opened a channel to his four defending starships. “Vanguard to all Starfleet vessels: prepare to engage the enemy.”

Then came the bedlam of a thousand blows landing at once on Vanguard’s shields, and the station’s worst-case scenario became a reality: It was under siege.

Nogura knew the battle’s outcome was a foregone conclusion.

The only mysteries now were how long it would last—and how many would die.

An endless red storm of disruptor pulses converged upon Vanguard. “Evasive!” Nassir ordered, and zh’Firro counterintuitively steered the
Sagittarius
toward the incoming barrage to minimize the ship’s profile—and then she accelerated.

Jarring blasts hammered the ship. As the deck pitched and yawed, Nassir clung white-knuckled to his chair and shouted over the clamor of detonations. “Return fire, phasers only!”

The whoop-and-shriek of the ship’s phasers was deafening. Unlike larger ships, which had the luxury of isolating their weapons systems from the crew compartments, the
Sagittarius
’s two phaser nodes were just a few meters overhead, on the dorsal hull. Each salvo tortured Nassir’s eardrums with piercing, high-pitched noise.

A sudden flare on the main viewer made him wince and shield his eyes. Blue and white fusillades lit up the screen as Vanguard unleashed the full might of its fearsome—and until that moment, never tested—arsenal. Within seconds, the space within twenty kilometers of Vanguard became a hellish chaos of metal and fire. Several dozen high-power phaser batteries lashed the Tholian armada circling the station. Scores of brilliant white photon torpedoes—some in tight clusters, some in wide spreads—tore through the attacking Tholian battle groups. Ephemeral flares revealed the station’s shields as salvos of Tholian disruptor fire slammed home. Then tractor beams leapt from the starbase like golden spears, snared half a dozen Tholian cruisers, and dragged them into the station’s brutal kill zones of overlapping phaser and torpedo fire.

For a moment, Nassir swelled with irrational hope that the battle might not be futile, after all. Then a crushing blow pummeled
the
Sagittarius,
and darkness swallowed the bridge as flames and acrid smoke erupted from the port bulkhead above the auxiliary engineering station.

Tactical officer Dastin attacked the blaze at point-blank range with a handheld fire extinguisher as Terrell hollered, “Damage report!”

Dastin waved a path through the smoke. “Secondary systems are fried!”

The battle on the screen was little more than a fiery blur as zh’Firro guided the ship through wild corkscrew maneuvers at full impulse. The daring young
zhen
raised her voice to compete with the screaming din of the phasers. “Impulse power’s down to eighty percent!”

Nassir opened a channel to engineering. “Master Chief, report!”

“Main plasma relay’s been hit,”
Ilucci replied, his voice barely audible over the clamor of shouting voices and straining machines in the engine room.
“We’re running a bypass.”

Another near-miss rumbled through the hull. “Make it fast. Bridge out.” Nassir closed the channel and twisted around toward the tactical station. “Sorak, how’s the
Panama
holding up?”

“Not well,” the Vulcan centenarian said. “Her starboard shields are collapsing. She’s coming hard about to turn her port side to the armada.”

“Give her covering fire until she completes the turn,” Nassir ordered. To zh’Firro he added, “Sayna, swing us past the
Panama,
try to draw the enemy’s fire.” A punishing concussion stuttered the overhead lights and flickered the bridge consoles.

“I don’t think we’ll have to try very hard,” zh’Firro said as she changed course.

Theriault looked up from the sensors. “Bandits, twelve o’clock high!”

“Targeting,” Sorak replied. “Firing.” Another angry chorus from the phasers, and he added, “Attack group breaking off, heading for zone three.”

“Leave them to
Buenos Aires,
” Nassir said. “Find a new target and keep firing.”

Alerts and system failures cascaded across the
Endeavour
’s master engineering console faster than Bersh glov Mog could deploy damage-control teams. He switched from one internal comm circuit to another as he rattled off orders. “Team Four, hull breach on Deck Nine, Section Two! Team Seven, phaser coupling overload, Deck Sixteen, Section Four! Fire Team Alpha, plasma fire on the hangar deck!” He was looking at the status indicator for the secondary hull’s port defense screen generator as it toggled from green to red, indicating a failure, and he reached to open a comm channel to the nearest repair team.

A godhammer of concussive force hit the ship and sent him and the other engineers tumbling. Despite his muddied hearing, Mog heard someone call out, “We’ve lost shields!” Another replied, “Hull breach! Outer sections!”

Mog pulled himself to his feet and stumbled like a drunkard across the heaving deck. “Air masks! Now!” He grabbed the respirator kit next to his station and strapped it on, then lurched across the compartment toward the lockers where the hazmat gear was stored, fighting every step of the way against the random pitching and rolling of the ship.
Damn these weak inertial dampers,
he cursed to himself. Down the length of main engineering, he saw other officers and enlisted men fumbling with their breathing masks.

He reached for the emergency equipment locker.

The loudest explosion he’d ever heard struck him as a wall of sonic energy and threw him against a bulkhead several meters away. As he ricocheted off the wall and collapsed, his black eyes opened wide in shock at the sight of a brilliant crimson beam of disruptor energy tearing through the hull from outside and wreaking fiery havoc as it lanced through bulkheads and filled the air with a terrifying buzz-roar so loud it drowned out the screams of the dying. The heat from the beam singed Mog’s mane and beard, filling his snout with the horrid stench of burnt fur. He lifted his arm to shield his face from the jabbing-needle pain of ultraviolet radiation—then the beam stopped, and its
harsh buzzing was replaced by the groaning howl of escaping atmosphere. The hurricane-force gale threatened to hurl Mog away into the cold vacuum, but he caught the protruding pipe of a coolant valve and hung on as heavy emergency barriers lowered swiftly into place to contain the damage.

Half a dozen people in the breached sections weren’t so fortunate, and Mog watched the horror of their fates register on their faces as they were sucked out into space. A lucky few were close enough to the adjacent sections to escape before the airtight barriers fell. Mog reached out to a Vulcan man who was crawling too slowly, clutched his hand, and with a fierce yank pulled him clear before the barrier met the deck and locked into place.

Air pressure normalized within seconds, and Mog knew there was no time to waste on asking every survivor his or her status. His only concern now was to restore main power, which the disruptor blast had just crippled. He tried to run back to his master console, only to find himself feeling simultaneously lightheaded and dead on his feet. Then he was overcome by nausea and doubled over as he succumbed to a sudden urge to vomit. Spewing sour stomach acid tinged with blood, he heard others around him collapse into bouts of violent emesis.

Coughing and gasping, Mog crawled back to his console and pulled himself upright, even as sickness churned in his abdomen. He reached out to initiate a set of diagnostic checks and saw that his hand was shaking. A cold shiver ran down his spine, and was followed by a fatiguing flush of heat in his forehead that left him panting and dry-mouthed. A single glance at the environmental status gauges confirmed what he already knew: He and the other survivors were just as doomed as those who had been pulled into space moments earlier. They all had been exposed to an acute dose of hyperionizing radiation, far exceeding four thousand rads, as the beam had ruptured the matter-antimatter mix system. Radiation levels inside the engineering compartment were already dropping as automated safety systems kicked in, but it was too late for all of them; the damage was done, and not even Starfleet’s best medicine could undo it.

Mog turned around and met his crew’s mix of frightened stares and empty gazes. “I won’t lie to you. You all know what’s happened. But we need to use whatever time we have left to bring back main power, before we lose the whole ship. So snap to!” Fighting back against the hot sensation winding through his intestines, he focused on his master console, started rerouting circuits, and resumed dispatching damage and fire teams.