Текст книги "Storming Heaven"

A deep groan became a falling hum as the array cycled down to its standby power levels. As the last creepers of violet electricity vanished from the consoles ringing the isolation chamber, Xiong heaved a grateful sigh. That could have gone a lot worse, he reminded himself. All the major indicators on his panel had receded from their red-bar warnings to the hairline separating cautionary yellow from “all’s well” green.

He asked Klisiewicz, “How was that for operations?”

The Endeavour’s black-haired science department chief regarded his own panel with a tired and wary frown. “No errors, no feedback loops, no interference,” he said. “As for whether it actually did what it was supposed to do, I have no idea.”

“Containment’s holding,” Theriault reported without being prompted, “but only just by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin. If we run this same experiment again tomorrow, I can’t guarantee the whole thing won’t go up like a bomb and take us with it.”

“Noted,” Xiong said. “Let’s run a full diagnostic and make sure we didn’t break anything.” While Theriault and Klisiewicz subjected the array, the isolation chamber, and all its related systems to a thorough review as a precaution before conducting more experiments, Xiong left the shielded area of the master control panel and made a quick review of the outer stations’ data, so that he could add those findings to his report. He would file a detailed account of the test’s success, qualified with all the appropriate caveats and warnings, but he was fairly certain no one at Starfleet Command or Research and Development would pay any attention to anything except whether they had achieved the desired result.

He stopped at an unmanned auxiliary station beside the isolation chamber and compared the readings from several different sensor palettes to see if they had detected any interesting new correlations. As he waited for the computer to finish its analysis, he couldn’t help but stare at the array. His eyes were drawn to the web of interlinked crystals, all of which now burned with the wild, kaleidoscopic hues of captive Shedai essences. Though he and the now-departed civilian scientists had mastered the challenge of negating the artifacts’ fear-inducing aura, he imagined he could still sense the terrifying energy trapped inside those fragile containers.

Stop, he told himself. Shake it off. You’re freaking yourself out. It’s just nerves, is all.

From the overhead PA came the voice of the station’s senior communications officer, Lieutenant Judy Dunbar. “Ops to Lieutenant Xiong.”

Xiong opened a response channel from the work console. “This is Xiong.”

“You have a priority transmission from the starship Repulse on a coded frequency.”

This was it: the verdict on their insane undertaking. “Patch it down here, please.”

“Routing the signal to your office,” Dunbar said.

Xiong hurried across the lab, dashing and dodging around the other Starfleet scientists, until he reached his office. He scrambled behind his desk and saw that the signal from the Repulse was waiting to be answered on his secure terminal. As he sat down, Theriault and Klisiewicz appeared in his office doorway, and he waved them inside as he opened the channel. The face of the Repulse’s youthful commanding officer, Captain Eugene Myers, appeared on his screen. “Captain Myers,” Xiong said, coiled with anticipation.

“Lieutenant Xiong,” Myers said, his manner guarded. “My crew and I don’t know quite what to make of the readings we’ve taken for you.”

“Just give me the high points, Captain.”

“The high points? All right. For no reason we can determine, space-time folded in on itself, pulverized Ursanis II—a Class D planetoid—and then the whole mess winked out of existence. Would you care to explain that? Can you explain that?”

“I’m sorry, Captain, I’m afraid all other details of this operation are classified. I presume you and your crew have already been briefed by Starfleet Intelligence?”

Myers cocked one eyebrow with suspicion. “Yes, we’re all painfully aware that we were never here, this never happened, and we didn’t see any of what didn’t happen. Or else we’ll all be living out the rest of our natural lives in a penal colony on Izar’s frozen moon.”

Xiong nodded. “Sounds about right. Thanks for your help, Captain. Xiong out.” He switched off the terminal, closing the subspace channel, and looked up, wide-eyed, at Theriault and Klisiewicz. “Did you hear that? We just obliterated a planet at a range of ninety-six light-years with the press of a button! Even the debris disappeared.” He reclined his chair and took a deep breath to slow the furious tempo of his pulse. “Wow.”

Klisiewicz looked stunned. “I can’t deny it’s kind of a rush to think we’re controlling that kind of power. But all I can think about is what’ll happen if it winds up in the wrong hands.”

His sentiment seemed to strike a chord with Theriault. “Ming, can you think of a single good reason why Starfleet would need to be able to crush planets from a hundred light-years away? Or even a slightly not-crazy reason?” She raised her hands in a pantomime of surrender. “Because I’m drawing a blank, here.”

As much as Xiong wanted to bask in the satisfaction of a major accomplishment, monstrous though it might be, he had to admit his friends were right. Nothing about this experiment boded well for the future, and imagining all the ways this technology could be abused filled him with a pervasive dread. “Then I guess the next question—”

The beeping of an internal comm cut him off. He thumbed open the channel. “Xiong.”

“This is Jackson” said the station’s chief of security. “I need you up here at Ezthene’s habitat, on the double.”

The urgency of the request drew troubled looks from Xiong and his two colleagues. Worried that he already knew the answer, he asked, “Why? What’s going on?”

“It looks like our resident Tholian’s having a psychotic episode.”

Xiong was out of his chair and running for the door. “On my way.”

Five minutes later, Xiong dashed out of a turbolift and sprinted the last several meters to the outer hatch of Ezthene’s customized habitat. Inside the enclosure, the pressure and temperature were extreme enough to disintegrate most organic matter, and the majority of substances that could survive those elements would succumb to the corrosive effects of the various compounds that served as an atmosphere for their Tholian refugee.

Lieutenant Haniff Jackson waited beside the hatch with Lieutenant Felicia Knight, the station’s preeminent expert on Tholian biology. The two of them peered through a ten-inch-thick viewport of specially treated transparent steel. Neither seemed to note Xiong’s approach, so he called out, “What’s happening in there?”

Jackson stepped aside and motioned for Xiong to take his place. “See for yourself.”

Xiong pressed up against the window and peered into the ruby mists of Ezthene’s habitat. “Where is he? I don’t see him.”

“Look down,” Knight said.

As indicated, the expatriate Tholian was lying on the deck in front of the inner hatch, below a unique interface panel that had been designed to enable Ezthene to initiate contact with those outside his segregated compartment. His orthorhombic limbs were all curled inward, as if to shield his abdomen and thorax. Xiong asked, “Has he moved?”

“A couple of times,” Jackson said. “He alternates between—”

Ezthene sprang from the deck and flailed about in wild, jerking movements. His piercing screech shrilled over the open intercom channel like a diamond drill cutting through duranium. He slammed his body against the walls and the inner hatch, and his ponderous thuds of impact were audible through the reinforced bulkheads. Xiong recoiled by instinct as Ezthene threw himself violently against the transparent barrier.

Hoping to end the tantrum, Xiong reached over and spoke into the intercom. “Ezthene! Calm down, please. It’s me, Ming Xiong.” Ezthene continued his display, his ferocity undiminished. “Ezthene, can you hear me? It’s Xiong. Please respond!”

“The voice!” shrieked Ezthene, his words sounding as harsh from the universal translator as they did in his native language. “The voice!”

He kept repeating those same two words, over and over, until Xiong turned off the intercom. “That’s not good,” he muttered.

Knight turned her baffled stare in his direction. “You know what that means?”

“I have some idea,” Xiong said. “But please don’t ask. I guarantee you really don’t want to know.” He turned toward Jackson. “Have you been maintaining surveillance on Ezthene?”

“Twenty-four seven,” Jackson said, “just like the admiral ordered.”

Xiong said to Knight, “I need your tricorder. Now.” She lifted her tricorder from her hip, ducked out from under its strap, which had crossed the front of her blue minidress, and handed the device to Xiong. He handed it to Jackson. “Patch into your security logs and confirm the exact moment Ezthene started going berserk. Hurry, please. It’s important.”

Jackson worked quickly, and several seconds later he said, “His seizure, or whatever we’re calling it, began at precisely nineteen seconds past 1622 hours.”

“That is definitely not good,” Xiong said, feeling as if the floor had dropped out from under him. Inside the habitat, Ezthene ceased his wilding and slumped back to the deck, his narrow limbs once again retracted like a clutching talon around his segmented torso. Xiong reopened the comm channel. “Ezthene? Are you still conscious? Can you hear me?” He thought he heard the scratching sound of a reply from within, but the translator remained silent, so he increased its audio sensitivity. “Ezthene? Can you repeat what you said?”

“Must . . . silence the voice . . . .”

A final twitch and then he was still. Jackson scanned him with the tricorder. “He’s alive.” He squinted at the tricorder’s display, then turned it upside down. “At least I think he is. I can’t make heads or tails of his biology.”

Knight plucked the tricorder from his hands. “Let me.” She checked the readouts, “Ezthene appears to be in a catatonic state. It might be part of his healing process.”

Xiong didn’t like the sound of that. “Might be?”

“It also might be a sign that he’s suffering a nervous collapse.”

Jackson chided her, “I thought you were an expert on Tholians.”

“I am,” she said. Then her bravado faltered. “Just not ones that are still alive.” She recoiled, hyperactive and defensive. “Well, I never had a chance to study a live one before!”

“Oh, that’s just great,” Xiong said. He turned off the intercom. “Rest assured, if he dies, you’ll be the first person I call.” He stepped away to a nearby companel on a wall, entered his security code, and then punched in the code for the Vault.

A soft beep over the comm and then, “Theriault.”

“Vanessa, it’s Ming. Shut down all experiments involving the array, take the interface off line, and route all available power to the containment system.”

“Roger that. But what if we get orders to continue?”

“Ignore them. I’ll explain why when I get back. Right now, I have to head up to command and tell the admiral why I pulled the plug. Xiong out.” He switched off the companel and walked back to Jackson and Knight. “If there’s any change in Ezthene’s status, raise me on my communicator immediately. And not a word of this to anybody else, understood?”

Jackson’s relaxed body language telegraphed his answer: “Whatever you say.”

Xiong nodded his thanks and ran for the turbolift.

As the doors closed and he grabbed the control handle to guide the lift to ops, he wondered who was about to have a worse day: him, Ezthene, or Admiral Nogura.

Pondering the worst-case scenario, he realized it would likely be a three-way tie.

They were all going to lose.

The dire implications of Xiong’s news dominated Nogura’s thoughts. His headache began a few seconds later, inflicting viselike pressure on his temples. “Are you sure about the timing of the two events? Is there any chance it was a coincidence?”

“It’s possible,” Xiong said, “but damned unlikely.” He pointed at the side-by-side time comparisons he’d routed to Nogura’s computer monitor. “At the exact second we triggered the pulse that vanished that planet, Ezthene suffered a violent seizure and collapsed, and he’s been getting worse ever since. Considering when we last saw this kind of correlation between Shedai-related activity and Tholian meltdowns, I don’t think we should be taking any chances.”

“Agreed.” Nogura didn’t need Xiong to elaborate. He’d read the full reports of Operation Vanguard when he’d assumed command, so he was aware of the widespread incidents three years earlier of Tholians suffering simultaneous violent seizures during a brief moment of unshielded emissions from the first Conduit that Starfleet had tinkered with. He also remembered well the subsequent consequences of that early misstep. “The last time the Tholians got worked up like this, they sterilized Ravanar IV and destroyed the Bombay,” he said. “So what I need to know, Ming, is whether the effects of our experiment were limited to our friend Ezthene—or if we’ve just taken a torch to a hornet’s nest.”

“Our best bet would be to check in with someone on Earth,” Xiong said. “Maybe the Starfleet liaison to the president, or someone at the Department of the Exterior. If the Tholian delegation to Paris just had a seizure, we’ll know we’re in trouble.”

It was worth a try, Nogura figured. He activated the intercom to his yeoman. “Lieutenant Greenfield, I need a real-time priority subspace channel to the secretary of the exterior.”

“Aye, sir. I’ll have Lieutenant Dunbar route it to you as soon as we make contact.”

“Thank you.” He switched off the intercom. “The one flaw in this plan is that the Tholians tend to sequester themselves inside their embassy except when they visit the Federation Council or the Palais on official business. Even if they have felt the effects of our array, unless they were out and about when it happened, there might be no way of confirming our hypothesis.”

Xiong’s brow creased as he considered their dilemma. “Well, it would take longer to get any answers, but if we had to, we could contact Ambassador Jetanien and ask him to look into it. He might have access to sources of information that we don’t.”

“Let’s hope better options present themselves,” Nogura said.

The intercom buzzed. “Admiral, they need you out here,” Greenfield said. “It’s urgent.” Nogura and Xiong traded stares of alarm, then they hurried out of his office.

The normally busy atmosphere of ops had become outright frantic. Yellow Alert panels flashed on the walls, and junior officers were scurrying from one duty station to the next, collecting reports and handing them off, each in turn, to Commander Cooper. Nogura cleaved a path through the Brownian chaos of moving bodies, bounded up the stairs to the supervisors’ deck, and caught up with the soft-spoken executive officer at the Hub. “Report.”

“Long-range sensor buoys have picked up major movement along the Tholian border,” Cooper said as he keyed commands into his panel on the octagonal command table. Star maps graphically annotated with fleet deployment information and the positions and headings of known threat vessels appeared on one of the level’s enormous, curved situation monitors. “It looks like the armada the Endeavour detected is on the move. They’ve left their space and are crossing the Taurus Reach at high warp—heading straight toward us.”

Nogura didn’t need to ask what time the armada had started moving; that much he could now guess. There was a more pressing question on his mind. “What’s their ETA?”

“Four days,” Cooper said. He lowered his voice, no doubt in the interest of preserving morale for as long as possible. “Admiral . . . Starfleet Command estimates the armada represents more than twenty percent of the Tholians’ active combat fleet. They’re coming in with more than five times’ enough firepower to wipe us off the map. . . . Orders, sir?”

“Show me every Starfleet vessel within four days’ travel at high warp,” Nogura said, doing his best to project confidence and calm authority. “We need every ship we can get.”

Cooper adjusted the deployment information on the large wall screen. It painted a grim picture: there were no reinforcements close enough to reach Vanguard before the Tholian armada arrived. Only two ships, both of which were already assigned to the station, were in range to join the station’s defense: the frigate Buenos Aires was three days away, and the cargo transport Panama was one day out. The Enterprise was just outside of response range, and it was also engaged on a high-priority assignment. That left only the Endeavour and the Sagittarius, both of which were still several days shy of finishing their repairs due to the late arrival of needed parts and equipment. It was an impossible situation, so Nogura had no choice but to start giving impossible orders and have faith in his crew to carry them out.

“Commander Cooper,” he said, “I want every engineer and mechanic who can push a tool working double shifts on the Endeavour and the Sagittarius, starting now. Those ships need to be combat-ready in four days. Recall the Buenos Aires and the Panama, and start running battle drills. Pull every warhead out of storage and have them in our torpedo bays by 0800 tomorrow. I want all phaser banks checked, rechecked, and ready to give the Tholians a warm welcome.”

“Aye, sir,” Cooper said.

Nogura held up a hand. “One more thing: I want every civilian ship within three days of Vanguard rerouted here on the double. We’ll need them to assist in the evacuation of all civilians and noncombatant personnel.” With a nod, he dismissed Cooper to begin preparing the station for battle. Then the admiral left the Hub and stepped over to the communications officer, who sat at her station, nervously twisting a curl of her brown hair around her index finger. “Lieutenant Dunbar.” He waited until she looked up at him, her eyes bright with the fear he knew would soon infect everyone on the station, and then he continued. “Work with Lieutenant Xiong to back up all data from the Vault to the main computer on the Endeavour. Make sure it stays encrypted every step of the way. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Dunbar replied. She shot a look at Xiong, who stepped forward to lean over her shoulder and walk her through the process of accessing the Vault’s top-secret databanks.

Everyone around Nogura was swinging into action, moving with a purpose, and focusing on their jobs in a desperate bid not to think about the incoming Tholian armada. Nogura wished he had that luxury, but it was far too late for regrets. He hurried down the stairs to the main level and bladed through the frenzy of activity, back toward his office.

As he passed Lieutenant Greenfield, he caught her eye and issued an order on the move. “Tell Captains Khatami and Nassir I need to see them in my office right now.”

“Aye, sir,” Greenfield replied as the office door closed behind Nogura.

He went back to his desk, sank wearily into his chair, and checked the chrono. It was 1743 hours. By his best estimate, it would take Khatami and Nassir approximately five minutes to travel from their ships to his office. Which meant he had just less than five minutes to think up a dignified and confidence-inspiring way to convey the message, We are completely screwed.

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