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Kirk nodded at someone off-screen, then replied, “You’ll have it. And I hope your pilot’s as good as mine, because we’ll have to be almost on top of you to pull this off.”
“We can avoid hitting the station as long as you don’t hit us.”
Kirk smiled. “Deal. We’ll follow your lead. Enterprise out.” The viewscreen blinked back to the distressing sight of Vanguard aflame.
“All right, Neelakanta, time to earn your pay,” Khatami said. “Take us under what’s left of Vanguard’s saucer for cover, roll our belly toward the station, and give me as tight an orbit of the core section as you can. And don’t make any sudden moves, because Enterprise will be mimicking our every move right above us.”
The Arcturian’s wide eyes belied his calm reply of “Aye, Captain.”
Khatami opened a comm cha
T’Pry
“Directing the evacuation,” Nogura said without taking his eyes from his work. “Why aren’t you at your evac point?”
She clambered over the heaped debris, skipping from one to the next with preternatural agility. “Sir, this center is no longer secure. Another direct hit and you will be killed.”
“Then you shouldn’t be here, either,” he growled.
Two ru
“I can’t,” Nogura said, relaying transport coordinates to the Endeavour like a man possessed. “Aux ops lost its comm link. This has to be done from here. And now that our core’s breached, Endeavour needs our help to lock in the signals through the interference.”
To her chagrin, the admiral’s argument was eminently logical.
An uncomfortably close blast rained sparks and debris from the ceiling at the room’s edge. T’Pry
“This is my command. I don’t leave till my people are safe. If that means I go down with the station, so be it. Now get to your evac point, Lieutenant. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” T’Pry
The station’s survivors had gathered at a dozen dedicated emergency transport sites, each capable of beaming up to five people at a time. Two transport cycles had been completed already. She could only hope the station would hold together long enough to complete the last three cycles necessary to finish the evacuation, now that the station’s weapons had been knocked out and its shields were contracting and intermittently stuttering out.
Then she noticed one personal transponder that was nowhere near an emergency site, and when she verified that it was in the Vault, she knew it had to be Ming Xiong.
Fear and hatred coursed from the array like a river in flood. Cracks propagated through its matrix, filling the Vault with its delicate symphony of fracturing crystal. The containment system burned out one subsystem at a time while Xiong stood mere meters away, finishing the preparation of the laboratory’s self-destruct system. Overriding its security protocols had taken longer than he’d expected; it had been designed to require at least two senior perso
The terror quotient inside the lab escalated on a logarithmic scale as the array’s myriad safeguards broke down. Xiong couldn’t say what was more to blame—the Tholian attack or the obvious struggle of the Shedai to break free of their crystalline prison. He decided the cause didn’t matter. No matter how hard he tried to focus on entering the final command sequence for the self-destruct, every instinct he possessed screamed, Run! Get away from there!
His hands shook above the console, and his mind was empty of everything except fear. No, he told himself. It’s not real. It’s just beta waves from the Shedai. It’s an illusion. He closed his eyes and fought to ignore the unearthly dirge that groaned from the mysterious alien machine, but it was no use. He felt the Shedai’s hateful emanations in his gut; they invaded his thoughts with whispers of interminable pain and suffering to come, cruel fates aborning for one and all.
Just a few more seconds, he berated himself. That’s all it takes. He thought of the billions of i
Somewhere inside the array, he heard one of the crystals shatter.
His communicator beeped twice on his belt. Keeping watch over the crumbling array, he pulled out his communicator and flipped it open. “Xiong here.”
“Mister Xiong, this is Lieutenant T’Pry
The first narrow tendrils of dark energy snaked out of the machine’s core. Primal fear rooted Xiong in place and left him paralyzed. Watching the black liquid creep upward, he knew it would be only a matter of moments until it shattered another crystal, and another—then all the Shedai would break free, and there would be no hope of ever containing them again.
T’Pry
Startled back to his senses, Xiong replied, “Negative. I . . . I have to finish something.”
“The rest of the crew is being beamed out as we speak. Endeavour is holding position until all perso
An entire row of crystals shattered and rained to the floor in shards. A vast cloud of u
Xiong fought the temptation to trigger the self-destruct sequence right then. Instead, he forced himself to patch in a feed from Vanguard’s passive sensors, revealing the positions of the Endeavour and the Enterprise, the circling mass of the Tholian armada, and the escaping convoy of civilian vessels escorted by the Sagittarius.
“Tell them I won’t be coming,” Xiong said.
It was the only choice he could live with. If he set a long-enough delay on the self-destruct timer to permit the two Constitution-class starships to reach minimum safe distance, he couldn’t be certain the escaping Shedai wouldn’t disable the system after he left. If he triggered it now, he would doom the two starships and everyone aboard them to a fiery end. His only way of making sure he’d contained the threat he’d helped awaken three years earlier was to stand over it and personally drag it down into oblivion.