Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven (40 page)

A minute later, the slightly nasal, New York–accented voice of the ship’s chief medical officer, Doctor Anthony Leone, blared from Mog’s console speaker.
“Sickbay to Mog!”

“Go ahead, Doctor.”

The doctor was furious.
“What the hell, Mog? Radiation levels in main engineering are off the chart! Get your people out of there!”

“I can’t do that, Doctor. We have to restore main power.”

“Don’t make me pull rank, goddammit!”

Mog appreciated Leone’s aggressive, argumentative style. He’d often thought the wiry little human physician with bulging eyes would have made a fine Tellarite, so he tempered his refusal with admiration. “It won’t make any difference, Doctor. There’s nothing you can do for us now. We all have an hour left to us, and we plan to spend it working. I suggest you do the same. Mog out.” He closed the channel and cut off the comm circuit to prevent Leone from pestering him again. Then he looked back at his weary, dying crew and put on his bravest face. “Move with a purpose, people! The antimatter injector won’t fix itself!”

He knew that an ugly, painful death awaited them all in an hour’s time.

Until then, he planned to live usefully, or die trying.

Lieutenant Isaiah Farber could barely see through the columns of oily gray smoke drifting through Vanguard’s reactor control level, and he struggled to hear over the incessant percussion of energy attacks pounding the station’s overtaxed shields.

“Ops, please repeat your last,” he said into the comm, “all after ‘support.’”

The reply was inaudible amid the tumult of battle, so Farber pressed one ear to the speaker and covered the other with his hand.
“Cut off life support to all unoccupied sections and seal them,”
said Commander Cooper.
“Reroute that power to shields.”

He wondered if anyone up there had any idea what they were asking for. “Ops, we’re already pushing too much juice through the shield grid! Any more and we’ll burn it out!”

“Admiral’s orders,”
Cooper replied.

“I don’t give a damn if they come from God himself,” Farber said. “Cook those emitters and you’ll have no shields at all.” Deep sirens wailed and flashing lights pulsed, which meant another fire had broken out somewhere near the reactor’s heat exchangers.

Cooper hollered back with the flustered manner of a man caught in the middle of someone else’s argument,
“Then reconfigure the shields to sacrifice the low-value areas.”

“We don’t
have
any
low-value
areas!” Farber wished he could punch someone over an intercom channel. “What do you want to leave undefended? The reactor? The fuel tanks? The operations center? The tactical levels? This game’s all or nothing, Commander!” High overhead, something resounded with an apocalyptic boom, and the gauges on Farber’s master panel started flipping en masse from green to red. “What the hell just happened?”

“Cargo bays are breached,”
Cooper said.
“Levels Forty-four through Fifty-one.”

Scanning the multitudes of error reports flooding his board, Farber saw something far more serious than damage to the cargo bays. “Ops, we’ve lost two out of four turbolift shafts in the lower core. I recommend we start evacuating the lower sections—starting with the Vault.”

“Acknowledged. Now, get us more shield power, or—”
Another brutal impact rocked the station. When the roar abated to a
constant but low rumbling, Farber strained to hear the rest of Cooper’s response. Only then did he realize the comm circuits linking the reactor level to the rest of the station had been severed. They were cut off. He grabbed his communicator from his belt and flipped it open. “Farber to ops! We’ve lost comms! Do you copy?”

Static scratched and hissed from the speaker.

Another explosion, even closer than the last. Half the gauges on Farber’s panel red-lined; the rest flat-lined. The broad-shouldered, impressively muscled engineer put away his communicator and looked around, trying to remember where the concealed emergency exits were—because he suspected he and his team were about to need them.

There was no time for triage. Fisher and the rest of the skeleton staff of surgeons, nurses, and technicians in Vanguard Hospital were besieged by a nonstop parade of wounded from all over the station. Every biobed was occupied by the broken, the maimed, the charred, or the bloodied. Plangent wails of suffering filled the air, making Fisher grateful for those moments when the caco-phony of the Tholians’ bombardment overpowered the plaints of the dying.

There was little to be done for the most seriously wounded. In order to return gunners or engineers to duty, the ones with the simplest wounds were treated and released as quickly as possible, while those who lay in agony, clutching at mangled limbs or trying in vain to stanch mortal bleeding with filthy hands, were treated as invisible. Under ideal circumstances, most of them could probably be saved, but in the midst of combat, they were a liability no one could afford. Their gruesome ranks and imploring voices haunted the periphery of Fisher’s perceptions. When he dared to look directly at any of them, he filled with despair and felt certain he had blundered into some unknown circle of hell.

As Fisher bandaged a mechanic’s scorched hand, a young Andorian
thaan
in a command-gold jersey bearing a junior lieutenant’s
stripes sprinted through the hospital’s main entrance. “We need medics at Phaser Control Delta!”

Doctor Robles, who had succeeded Fisher as Vanguard’s CMO, shouted back, “We only treat the ones who make it here, Lieutenant.”

The Andorian was on the verge of hysteria. “There aren’t enough people left to man that battery! Give me a medkit and send me back, but give me something!”

Fisher put away his bandage roll in his satchel and replied, “I’ll go with you.”

Robles shot a poisonous glare at Fisher. “You’re needed here, Doctor.”

“Sounds like I’m needed there, too,” Fisher said as he moved to join the Andorian.

“Get back on the line, Doctor!” Robles looked ready for an aneurysm. “That’s an order!”

On his way out the door, Fisher permitted himself a rakish smirk at Robles. “I don’t work here anymore, remember? Hold the fort till I get back.” The next cannonade that shook the station drowned out Robles’s reply full of colorful metaphors, and by the time it faded Fisher and his Andorian guide were in the nearest turbolift and hurtling away to one of the outer sections of the upper half of the saucer, where the phaser and torpedo nodes were located.

He offered the Andorian his hand. “Ezekiel Fisher. My friends call me Zeke.”

The Andorian shook his hand. “Fellaren th’Shoras. . . . ‘Shor.’”

“Nice to meet you, Shor,” Fisher said with a disarming smile. Under his breath he added, “I always make a point of knowing the people I might end up dying with.”

The Andorian nodded, as if the sentiment were not utterly morbid. “Most sensible,” he said. “If we perish together, I shall vouch for you before Uzaveh the Infinite.”

Fisher had no idea what else to say except, “Um . . . thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

After that, he figured it would be best to just stop talking for a while.

“One more adjustment,” Xiong begged his two remaining colleagues. “If we can equalize the quantum subharmonic frequency across all the nodes, that should do it!”

Sheltered inside the Vault, the most heavily shielded part of Vanguard, Xiong had at first barely been able to tell the station was under attack. Then a devastating blow to the station’s lower core had interrupted the supply of primary power to the lab. The secret research center had its own backup power generators, life-support systems, and computer core, but without main power, Xiong had no idea how long the array could continue to contain its Shedai prisoners. All his estimates for the lab’s minimum power requirements had been predicated on the simpler setup involving only two inhabited crystals. Now they had more than five thousand of the alien artifacts, all of them except the first packed with multiple Shedai life-forces.

He knew he didn’t want to be here when the array’s containment matrix failed, but he also knew that the consequences of that would be far worse than anyone outside of Operation Vanguard could possibly imagine. For their sakes, he had to finish this while he still could.

His workstation display flashed with alerts as he struggled to refine his control over the array by making a few final tweaks to Klisiewicz’s command interface.

“We need to evacuate,” pleaded Ensign Heffron. “Now, before the turbolifts are gone!”

“Just a few more seconds,” Xiong said, keying in new lines of code as quickly as he could. “Humberg, do you have that frequency yet?”

Lieutenant Christian Humberg, a thirty-something applied quantum physicist with a compact build and a full head of prematurely gray hair, grimaced as he wrestled with his own set of high-complexity calculations. “I’ve almost got it,” he said. “There! A modulated subharmonic that should enable us to control entropic effects on the quantum level.”

“Send it to Heffron.” Looking across at the blond ensign, he
added, “Kirsten, reset the main emitter to resonate on that frequency. I’m loading the updated command interface into the system now.” As he waited for the new software to complete its installation, he looked up at the ominously radiant crystals of the array inside the isolation chamber. He had grown so used to seeing it all from several meters away, through the wall of transparent steel sprayed with a clear compound that acted as a polarizing filter, that he had forgotten how unnerving it could be to stand in the shadow of such awesome, barely yoked power.

“Emitter reset,” Heffron said.

Xiong knew he likely would get only one chance to make this experiment work. He hoped for the sake of millions of unsuspecting innocents that his calculations had been correct. “Interface is loaded and stable. I’m bringing the array to full power.”

Prismatic ribbons of energy danced over the screaming machine, and a tingle that was part static electricity and part fear crept up Xiong’s back. A deep, almost subsonic throbbing pulsed through the deck like a leviathan’s heartbeat. Xiong imagined this might have been how it would have felt to be the first mortal to receive the gift of fire from Prometheus.

He engaged the command interface as Heffron and Humberg looked over his shoulder.

Heffron asked, “What are you doing?”

“Pinging all the Conduits in the Shedai network,” Xiong said as he worked.

As if fearful of the answer, Humberg asked, “What for?”

Xiong activated the new subharmonic function. “For this.”

On his workstation monitor, the constellation of several thousand blue dots began to dwindle, a few at a time at first, then by dozens, and then by scores. Heffron and Humberg both looked perplexed. She pointed at the display. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Xiong said with ruthless satisfaction, “that my program works.” He turned and met the bewildered stares of his peers. “Right now, all across the Taurus Reach, all the Conduits the Shedai ever made are self-destructing, shattering into dust. In
a few minutes, there won’t be a single node of their former network left in the galaxy.”

Heffron looked horrified. “But what about all those planets?”

“It’s all right—with the array I was able to target just the Conduits. The planets are fine.” He ushered them toward the exit with broad movements of his arms. “Now go, both of you. Get to the beam-out point on Level Twenty, before the turbolifts fail.”

Humberg held Xiong at arm’s length. “Wait, what about you?”

“I need to shut down the array,” Xiong said. “I’ll be right behind you, I promise. Go.” Reassured by his lies, Heffron and Humberg scrambled out through the main hatchway and started running. Xiong locked the hatch behind them.

Alone at last with the array, Xiong regarded it with awe and contempt. He had spent years plumbing the secrets of the Shedai, plundering their legacy for the benefit of Starfleet and the Federation, and the end result had been this machine, a device of unimaginable power that he could wield to destroy distant worlds, but whose principal function stubbornly eluded him.

He had not yet figured out how to make it destroy its Shedai prisoners.

Realizing he wouldn’t have time to unravel that mystery in the scant minutes remaining to him, he returned to his workstation and armed the Vault’s self-destruct system.

Inside the terrestrial enclosure, the sky was burning.

Smoldering cracks marred the twilight, belying the illusion of placid heavens. Then the dusk flickered and faltered, revealing the gray metal interior of Vanguard’s upper saucer hull and its latticework of holographic emitters. A white-hot blister of half-molten duranium drooped inward, but there was no one left on Fontana Meadow to see it, no one left to hear the stentorian groan of hundreds of tons of overstressed metal, the incessant thunder of high-power detonations tearing their way through the 800-meter-wide dome.

A fearsome bolt of blinding energy burst through the hull,
raining twisted slabs of scorched metal and charred bodies around its point of impact, just shy of Stars Landing. A shock front of superheated, ultracondensed air vaporized the cluster of buildings in a flash and scoured the deck of its manmade lawn. Driving a ring of debris ahead of it, the shock wave slammed against the station’s inner core and blasted in hundreds of transparent aluminum barriers.

Half a second later, the hunger of the vacuum asserted itself and tore the firestorm and every bit of loose matter out through the enormous, glowing-edged gash in the hull. Silence reigned within the sterilized interior of the saucer’s upper half, even as another half dozen shining blades of fire ripped through the hull and began carving it into scrap.

“Last torpedo’s away!” Terrell called out as he turned from the auxiliary tactical console to face the main viewer. The last photon torpedo aboard the
Sagittarius
streaked away and detonated in the midst of a tight formation of Tholian cruisers, whose course Terrell had deduced while watching them flee from Vanguard’s thinning barrage of phaser fire moments earlier. When the conflagration faded, nothing remained of the four ships except debris and ionized gas.