Текст книги "Storming Heaven"
Автор книги: David Mack
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Научная фантастика
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
“No, I’ll shoot you dead where you stand.” Nogura drew his phaser and held it casually at his side, aimed at the deck. “Make your choice, Captain.”
Telvane backed away, a disgusted scowl on his swarthy face. “Looks like I’m dead either way. I hope you can live with yourself, Admiral.” He turned and headed for the turbolift.
Nogura holstered his phaser. He didn’t worry whether he would be able to live with his decision. He was too busy worrying whether he would live through the next hour.
Pennington sprinted the last several meters to the Denevan dogwood on Fontana Meadow just as a trio of Starfleet botanists, two men and a woman, inserted small, high-tech devices into the soil all around it. “Wait!” he cried. “Not yet!” The three blue-shirted young officers looked askance at him as he stumbled to a halt in their midst and reached for one of the tree’s lower branches.
The taller of the men seized Pennington’s wrist. “What the hell are you doing?”
“It’s all right, mate,” Pennington said, raising a small pocket knife in his other hand.
The other male botanist grabbed Pennington’s knife hand and told his female colleague, “Call security!” She reached for her communicator and flipped it open.
Struggling to break free, Pennington shouted, “Let go, you wankers! I just want one of the flowers!”
The woman lowered her communicator and looked into his eyes. “Why?”
There was no time for lies. “I lost someone I loved on the Bombay. I want the flower as a memento. I don’t have anything else.”
She put away her communicator and said to the men, “Let him go.”
The big man blustered, “Are you crazy? He—”
“That’s an order, Ensign.” Pennington noticed the two men’s shirts had no braid on their cuffs, but those of the woman’s minidress did—a solid stripe. The men let him go. Not wanting to press his luck or test the lieutenant’s patience, he snipped a yellow-centered white blossom from the dogwood’s lowest branch, pressed the flower carefully inside his bifold wallet, and tucked it into his jacket’s inside pocket. He offered the lieutenant a sad smile. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Now stand back.” Pennington did as she said, and the other two men did the same. The lieutenant opened her communicator. “Bernstein to Endeavour. Ready for transport.” She backed up three steps. Seconds later, the tree vanished in a sparkle of transporter energy, leaving behind a perfectly smooth divot in the ground.
From the communicator, a man’s voice said, “Transport complete. The tree’s safe inside our arboretum. But you three had better hurry up and head back, because—”
The station’s Red Alert resounded ominously inside the vast terrestrial enclosure. The botanists, and every other person Pennington could see, sprinted for the turbolifts. He ran like hell to keep up and prayed his transport didn’t leave without him.
32
“All hands to battle stations,” Captain Khatami announced over the Endeavour’s PA system, her manner cool and efficient despite the flashing red panels on the bulkheads and the fearful mood that pervaded the ship. “This is not a drill. Damage control teams to alert stations.” She closed the channel with a quick jab at the button on her command chair’s armrest, then watched Airlock 2 and the surrounding infrastructure of Vanguard’s main hangar recede on the bridge’s main viewer as her starship navigated in reverse on thrusters.
Lieutenant Neelakanta made some fine adjustments at the helm and keyed the switch for the station’s comm channel. “Vanguard Control, Endeavour. We have cleared all moorings.”
A woman’s voice responded from the helm’s speaker. “Endeavour, this is Vanguard Control. Outer doors are open, and you’re clear to proceed.”
“Acknowledged,” the Arcturian helmsman said. “Clearing bay doors in ten seconds.”
Departure from spacedock normally took twenty-five seconds, but Khatami had seen fast exits such as this many times over the years. Within seconds, the gray curve of the lower half of Vanguard’s massive saucer hull dominated the viewscreen from the edges in.
“Endeavour, you have cleared bay doors. The lane is clear, and you’re free to navigate.”
“Helm,” Khatami said, “bring us about, bearing nine one, mark one five. Lieutenant McCormack, raise shields and arm all weapons.”
“Shields up,” McCormack confirmed. “Phasers and torpedoes armed.”
“Charge up the tractor beam, too, Lieutenant,” Stano added as she moved to stand beside Khatami’s command chair. “It might come in handy.”
Khatami looked up at her first officer. “Brushing up on starship combat tactics?”
Stano smiled nervously. “Always worked when I crammed for tests at the Academy.” Her forced joviality vanished as the image on the main viewer panned in a swift blur to reveal the Sagittarius emerging from the Bay 3 doors directly ahead of Endeavour—and, in the distance, a vast swarm of tiny gray specks moving amid the cold brightness of the stars.
Hector Estrada held one hand over the transceiver protruding from his left ear and swiveled his chair to face Khatami. “Captain, the Panama and the Buenos Aires confirm they’re in position and awaiting your orders.”
Neelakanta chimed in, “Sagittarius is clear of spacedock and moving into a defensive posture on our aft port quarter.”
“All ships, proceed to first coordinates as planned,” Khatami said. “McCormack, make sure the rest of our battle group has the latest update on Vanguard’s firing solution. We need to stay out of their crossfire and force the Tholians into it. Neelakanta, ahead full impulse.”
“Full impulse, aye,” Neelakanta said over the rising hum of the ship’s engines.
Khatami turned toward the sensor console. “Klisiewicz, how’s the evacuation going?”
“Ten minutes ago, it was a crisis. Now, it’s officially a disaster.” To McCormack, he added, “Aft viewer, please.” McCormack switched the viewscreen to an image of the steady stream of civilian vessels pouring like a flood from Vanguard’s open docking bays and leaping into warp—but there were several vessels still docked at the lower pylons. “Sensors show way too many people inside the station. I think a lot of people just missed their rides.”
Stano looked at Khatami. “I’ll have all transporters stand by to beam out survivors on your order.” She got the captain’s nod of approval and stepped away to make it happen.
“Forward angle,” Khatami said, and McCormack returned the screen to its default view. The elegant Miranda-class frigate Buenos Aires and the stout Equus-class cargo transport Panama were directly ahead, holding position between Vanguard and the incoming Tholian armada. “McCormack, have Sagittarius cover zones one and two with the Panama. Buenos Aires can cover three and four. We’ll defend five through eight.” She turned and looked back at the communications officer. “Estrada—send the message packet.”
Estrada nodded and transmitted a vital signal back to Earth in a coded subspace radio burst: a packet of prerecorded messages by the Endeavour’s crew and officers, final missives to be delivered to their loved ones by Starfleet Command in the event that they or the ship did not survive the battle to come. It wasn’t the first time Khatami had recorded a possible farewell to her husband, Kenji, and daughter, Parveen, nor was it the first time she had served aboard a ship whose crew had all prepared parting sentiments on the eve of battle. But until now, she had never actually taken the extra precaution of sending the messages home for safekeeping.
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.
33
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.
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?”
