Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

26

“Eight hundred thousand qelIqams and closing,” Tonar reported. “Disruptors ready.”

Captain Kutal eyed the tiny Starfleet ship on the main viewscreen. Hardly a prize worthy of us, he lamented. But that doesn’t mean I plan on letting her get away. “Arm a volley of torpedoes,” he commanded. “Wide dispersal. I want that ship captured, not destroyed—understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Tonar replied.

Recalling the beating his ship had taken during its last two sorties into the Jinoteur system, Kutal eyed the fourth planet’s trio of satellites with suspicion. “BelHoQ,” he said, summoning the first officer with a jerk of his head. “Any activity on those moons?”

“None, Captain,” BelHoQ said.

From an auxiliary tactical station, second officer Krom reported, “The Starfleet ship has begun evasive maneuvers.”

“And the hunt begins!” Kutal bellowed with a sharp grin. “Helm, stay with them. Full ahead.”

“Full ahead,” Qlar responded as he pushed the ship’s sublight drive to its limits. The hull of the Zin’za vibrated with the rising pitch of the strained engines.

Kutal surveyed his bridge crew and was pleased. Despite the overpowering and surprisingly persistent stench that infused the ship as a result of its septic sabotage on Borzha II, his men had pushed the foul reek from their thoughts and focused on the mission. It’s all about good men, Kutal reminded himself. You have to have good men. Good warriors.

“Four hundred thousand qelIqams,” Tonar announced.

“Hold for optimum firing range,” Kutal said.

On the main screen, the diminutive ship twisted, rolled, and vanished off the bottom edge of the viewer. “Agile at sublight,” BelHoQ observed.

“Very,” Kutal agreed. He barked at the helmsman, “Qlar, if they get away, you’re dead.”

The Zin’za’s engines shrieked with the effort of a high-impulse turn coupled with a corkscrew roll. Motivated by the threat of imminent execution, Qlar was discovering a new level of mastery over the battle cruiser’s flight controls. Less than six seconds later the Starfleet ship bobbed and rolled back into view, almost close enough for Kutal to read its markings.

Tonar called out, “Two hundred thousand qelIqams.”

“Fire torpedoes,” Kutal ordered. The ship echoed with the percussive ring of missiles leaving the forward torpedo tube. Six self-propelled munitions split up and tracked the Starfleet ship in wide, spiraling trails that skimmed the fourth planet’s upper atmosphere, leaving wispy contrails in their wakes. When all six torpedoes flanked the enemy ship, they detonated, enveloping the outrider in an antimatter-charged blaze.

“Now disruptors,” Kutal said, smiling broadly. “Let’s see what it takes to make them surrender.”

“Port shields buckling,” Sorak reported, sounding to McLellan as if he thought it was just any other item of business.

Smoke and warning lights blanketed the bridge of the Sagittarius in crimson fog. McLellan could barely see her hands on the console in front of her, but the warning lights on her display burned bright through the haze. “Port nacelle’s venting plasma!” she shouted above the wail of engine noise. Disruptor fire from the massive Klingon battle cruiser strafed the Sagittarius, which heaved and lurched as its inertial dampeners stuttered from the overload. “Update,” she added. “Port nacelle is on fire.”

“Sayna,” Nassir said over the din, “get us out of the atmosphere. Head for the closest moon, and hug the surface.”

“Aye, sir,” zh’Firro replied, banking the overtaxed scout ship hard away from the planet.

A warning beeped on Sorak’s console. “They’re locking disruptors—”

“I don’t think so,” zh’Firro said, her competitive streak in full effect. The starfield spun into a blur as she executed a maneuver so swift and complex that McLellan lost track of their position—until she saw the Klingon cruiser dead ahead of them, on a collision course. Its twin disruptor beams slashed past them, barely missing the Sagittarius. Then the scout ship zipped beneath the Zin’za and raced away from it as the larger vessel fought to make a clumsy rolling turn and continue its pursuit.

Xiong stood over the science station—or, at least, what was left of it now that he had extinguished the fire in its duotronic relays. He kicked the access panel shut and set down the emergency fire extinguisher. “Primary sensors are gone,” he said, crossing the bridge. “I’ll fire up the secondary.”

Sorak spoke over his shoulder, “The Klingon cruiser has come about and is back in pursuit. Range two hundred thousand kilometers and closing.”

McLellan got up from the engineering console and favored her left leg as she moved to stand beside Captain Nassir. “Ming,” she said, “look for structures on the moons we can use for cover, and relay the data to Sayna.”

“You got it,” Xiong said, patching in all of the ship’s still-functioning sensor systems.

Nassir swiveled his chair toward Sorak. “Any sign they’ve detected the Rocinante?”

“Negative, Captain,” Sorak replied. “We appear to be their sole object of interest.”

The captain smirked ruefully at McLellan and confided, “I guess that’s the bad news and the good news.”

McLellan replied, “Vulcans are very efficient, sir.”

“And we have excellent hearing,” Sorak added with a reproving lift of one age-whitened eyebrow. “Range one hundred thousand kilometers and closing. They are locking disruptors.”

Another pinwheeling turn turned stars to streaks. Then McLellan was looking at the pockmarked gray landscape of an airless moon. Reddish-orange beams of disruptor energy coursed past the Sagittarius and cut long, charred streaks across the moon’s surface. As they leveled out of their vertical dive, the hard angles and tailored curves of artificial structures came into view ahead of them. Though there were gaps in the dense array of towers and artillery emplacements, McLellan couldn’t imagine that any of them were large enough to grant passage to a starship, even one as compact as the Sagittarius.

“Please tell me we’re not—”

“Yes, we are,” zh’Firro said, cutting her off. “You might want to close your eyes, though.” At that, the young zhen guided the ship into a slow roll and started navigating through a narrow maze of rock-hard surfaces in which one error would spell instantaneous destruction.

McLellan wanted to shut her eyes, but morbid fascination made that completely impossible.

Even at one-eighth impulse, the obstacles and surfaces were nothing more to the second officer’s eyes than a pale gray blur, then a sun-bleached white blur. Every few seconds a close disruptor shot peppered the Sagittarius with rocky debris. Undaunted, zh’Firro rolled and banked the ship, slipping it through walls of fire and evading barriers of broken stone.

Then she noted with trepidation, “Captain, we’re about to run out of cover.”

Nassir asked, “Can we double back?”

“We had disruptors on our tail the whole time,” Xiong said.

“That was a one-way trip.”

The ship streaked back into open space above the surface of the moon and was immediately rocked by a powerful disruptor shot. McLellan was launched forward and down, and her right leg, already stiff, buckled under her.

“Dorsal shields collapsing, Captain,” Sorak said.

“Continuing evasive maneuvers,” zh’Firro said.

The captain jabbed at the intraship comm. “Bridge to top deck. We need warp speed, Master Chief!”

“And I need to fix the valve on that crappy fuel pod!” Ilucci snapped back in reply.

Nassir thumbed off the comm switch and looked at McLellan, who had just pulled herself back to her feet by his side. Three more disruptor strikes pounded the ship in quick succession. This time McLellan held on to the captain’s chair for support as the ship pitched and rolled.

“Clark usually has a bright idea right about now,” Nassir confided to McLellan.

A nearby torpedo detonation hammered the Sagittarius, and Sorak barely leaped clear of the weapons console as it exploded, showering the bridge with brilliant sparks.

Xiong looked up from the auxiliary science station. “The Klingons are in transporter range.”

“They won’t begin transport until they have us in a tractor beam,” Sorak interjected.

McLellan wasn’t encouraged by that news. She looked at Xiong. “How long until they’re in tractor-beam range?”

“Sixty seconds,” he said. “Maybe less.”

Nassir nodded. “Just enough time.”

Not sure she wanted to know, McLellan asked, “For what?”

“To brush up on our tlhIngan,” Nassir said with a smirk. “I don’t suppose you know the Klingon word for ‘mother,’ by any chance? I want to make a strong first impression.”

Pennington was halfway around the corner when Theriault snagged his rain-sodden shirt and yanked him backward. A shuttle-sized wedge of black marble crashed down in his path, burying itself in the stone floor, which shattered like an eggshell.

Theriault pointed. “This way!”

He followed her down an adjacent passage that led back outside. Groundquakes were disintegrating the city’s foundation and pulverizing its lofty arches. In every direction they turned, tunnels imploded. Gone were the warring goliaths; all that remained was a city collapsing into itself. A constant, deafening roar assaulted Pennington and Theriault as they ran; he was unable to tell whether it was thunder from the storm raging outside or the death throes of the city.

The passageway rolled to the left, hurling them both against the wall. Ahead of them, the end of the passage broke away from the promenade that ringed the building’s exterior. A jagged edge of broken rock began to rise, blocking the end of the tunnel. It’s not rising, Pennington realized. This building is sinking. He scrambled to his feet and pulled Theriault with him as he sprinted toward the tunnel’s swiftly closing exit.

He reached the edge first and kneeled, offering his cupped hands as a step for Theriault. She leaped onto his hands and pushed off of his shoulders as he launched her through the narrow opening above him. The nimble ensign tumbled and rolled to her feet. He leaped up, counting on her to return the favor as he scrambled to pull himself through the gap before it scissored him in twain. She didn’t disappoint him: her hands locked onto his arms with fierce determination, and she tugged him clear.

Rain slashed over them, driven by a moaning wind. Behind them, the interior of the great building sank into a churning vortex of crushed obsidian that swirled and flowed like a liquid. Only the broad curves and steep slopes of its exterior were left standing. A flash of lightning revealed the shattered, crumbling cityscape all around them. Ahead of them stretched a long causeway, which led to a tower whose odd organic shape reminded Pennington of a bone.

They were three steps onto the bridge when another staccato burst of lightning betrayed the fact that the tower they were running toward was toppling sideways—and taking their bridge with it. Slipping to a precarious stop on the rain-slicked surface, Pennington caught Theriault. “Go back!”

She scrambled through a flailing turn, with him directly behind her. They tumbled off the bridge as it sheared away from the promenade and broke into hundreds of pieces swallowed by the storm. There was no cover, no room to retreat. Pennington flipped open the communicator Terrell had loaned him. “Quinn! Can you hear me? We’re trapped! Where are you?”

Through the spattering of static and the oscillating wail and whine of random signals, Pennington thought he might have heard Quinn’s voice. Dismayed to find his luck running true to form, he slapped the communicator shut and tucked it back in his pocket. Then Theriault’s arms were around him, squeezing tight.

In an electric slash of light across the blackened sky, he saw the reason for her sudden embrace. Another tower was pitching over and falling to its doom—directly toward them.

Time felt to Pennington as if it had slowed down. His mind was racing against the moment, and where he had expected to find nothing but panic and paralysis he found clarity.

The tower fractured as it fell and cut a path through the storm that deluged the city. The rain whipped at their bodies and faces; it kicked off of the buildings’ façades in a gray mist and ran down them in sheets, hugging the organic curvatures of the biomechanoid metropolis. Far below, frothing eddies of runoff merged and flowed toward low ground.

There was no time to think it through, only time enough for a simple assurance—“Trust me,” he said to Theriault—and a leap of faith. He wrapped her in a bear hug, lifted her off the ground, and made a running jump into a softly angled groove in the building’s exterior, on a slope partially shielded from the falling tower. He wasn’t surprised that Theriault screamed as they dropped off the promenade into free fall; he was surprised that he didn’t.

It felt as if they were dropping without resistance. He spread his feet against the slippery wet sides of the groove in the wall and applied all the pressure he could. They continued to fall faster by the second, but he felt his back settle squarely into the groove, which was several inches deep with water and getting deeper the longer they fell. It got steadily colder and stung him with icy needles of pain.

Fear and adrenaline made it impossible for Pennington to know how long they actually fell before they found themselves completely submerged in a rushing vertical torrent of water. Then he felt his momentum working against the familiar pull of gravity. Their heads broke the surface. They’d passed the trough of the slope and had begun speeding up its opposite side. At its top it twisted and threw them through a hard turn, then another in the opposite direction. Then it pitched downward again, on a steep but at least not vertical gradient. It’s like riding a luge underwater, Pennington thought.

He might have been tempted to laugh and enjoy the ride, but then he saw that the end of this slope spewed its water out into open air toward another building.

Theriault’s arms closed so tightly around his chest that he could barely breathe. “Tim…” she said, her voice trailing off.

“This may have been a bad idea,” he confessed a moment before they were launched out of the trench and through billowing curtains of rain at the side of another building a dozen meters away. With all the strength he had, he twisted and turned in mid-air, placing himself as much as possible between Theriault and the point of impact.

He closed his eyes and hoped that the water might have been cold enough to numb him even a little bit to the pain.

It hadn’t been, and it didn’t.

His back hit the wall. A few ribs on his right side cracked. Every ounce of air immediately exploded out of his lungs, which refused to reinflate. Stabbing pain flared across his lower right side as gravity once again took hold of him and Theriault. This wall had no groove to slip into, just a thin, steady cascade of rainwater across its slope, which Pennington was grateful to see shallowed quickly beneath them.

As they were funneled into another curve-bottomed trench, every twisting turn wrenched his back and pummeled his fractured ribs. Pained howls left his mouth filled with dirty water, which he spluttered out between curses. Then a final whip-turn sent them hurtling toward an intersection of several drainage channels, all of which flooded into a tunnel that plunged swiftly into underground darkness. “Bloody hell,” Pennington grumbled.

“It’s okay.” Theriault gasped. “Take a deep breath, and keep your head down!” She filled her lungs and pressed her face against his chest. He gulped as much of a breath as his protesting lungs would allow, closed his eyes, and rode the turgid current into the darkness.

It was surprisingly peaceful. Completely submerged, he was barely aware of being in motion. Alone with the beating of his heart, he focused on slowing its tempo. On letting go of fear and expectation. On the warmth of the body entangled with his. On the ambience of moving fluid…

Light and air, rushing and roaring as they dropped into free fall. He opened his eyes. Sixty-five meters below, in a stag-geringly huge cavern, a broad pool of azure water awaited them. Dozens of plumes of water cascaded from the roof and walls of the cavern into the pool.

Theriault pushed away from Pennington so that they could each control their own splashdown. They straightened and pointed their feet at the water. He watched her pinch her nose shut, and he did likewise. Then they plunged together into the water, and their frantic forward motion at last came to a halt.

Pennington savored the inertia for a few moments. Then he used his left arm and left leg to propel himself back to the surface. As he wiped the water from his eyes, he saw the familiar shape of the Rocinante making a slow vertical descent from a broad opening in the cavern’s ceiling. Rain poured in alongside it.

Within moments the tramp freighter was hovering above him and Theriault. The cargo doors on its underbelly opened, and a rescue harness at the end of a winch cable dropped in a rapid spiral. From inside the hold, Quinn smiled down at the pair in the water. “Hell of a time for a swim, newsboy.”

Pennington laughed with relief. “I’m so happy to see you, I can’t think of a comeback.”

“First time for everything,” Quinn said. He offered a small salute to Theriault. “Cervantes Quinn, miss. At your service.”

She swam over to Pennington, helped him into the harness, and took hold of it beside him. With a double tug on the safety line, she signaled Quinn to hoist them up. As the winch lifted them from the water, she favored Pennington with a quirky, irresistibly cute smile. “I guess sending a reporter to save me wasn’t such a bad idea after all,” she said.

He smiled back. “Can I quote you on that?” “Absolutely,” she said with a single, exaggerated nod and a crooked grin. “Consider my thank-you officially on the record.”

The Wanderer committed herself again and again, sharpening her fury into a cutting edge, a singularity of hatred, but it was not enough to halt the Apostate’s slow dismantling of the glory of the Shedai.

One by one he had freed the Kollotaan from the First Conduit, diminishing its power, sapping the Shedai of strength. Only one of the Kollotaan remained in thrall, twitching and flailing weakly in the machine’s dark fires.

The Wanderer hurled herself into another attack. All her strength, all her anger, she made into a thrust of pure will, hoping to inflict enough damage to merit the Apostate’s notice.

He deflected her with a thought. His will was unstoppable, diabolical in its mastery, and freighted with the weight of ancient grudges beyond her ken.

Be still, whelp, he taunted. The great work will not be disrupted by one such as you.

Though her essence lay crushed and broken before him, she could not relent. You have betrayed us. Betrayed our Second Age.

She jabbed at him with the very core of her being.

He rebuffed her casually. A noncorporeal avatar of his deepest, most primitive aggressive energies thrashed her into meek submission. Unlike her own dwindling reserves of power, his seemed limitless.

Why? she pleaded, unable to comprehend his actions. The Telinaruul cannot wield our power wisely. Why do you thwart our efforts to defend what is ours?

As his attention turned fully upon her, she felt the truly awesome nature of his power, which for the first time in aeons was unsuppressed by the Maker. Paralyzed before him, all she could do was listen.

I counseled a clean end to our reign. Destroy the Conduits, I implored you all—unmake the First World, extinguish all our fires and go quietly into the final night. None of you listened. So obsessed with retaining power, none of you asked if you still had the right to wield it. You couldn’t see that power is just like matter—an illusion.

Hues of regret and mourning colored his thought-line. Even we cannot lay claim to eternity…. Everything dies. Even time.

Sickly greenish contempt radiated between her words. Perhaps you are ready to die, ancient one. I am not. Will you condemn me to oblivion at your side?

He drew her attention to the First Conduit by making it glow with a gentle throb of power. One path remains open, he explained. In a moment I will release this creature back to his own kind, and the road will be closed. You must choose: Stay and continue your futile attempts at retribution…or flee and live.

She did not trust him. The Maker had warned all the Shedai for aeons that the Apostate was a deceiver. If he closed the Conduit channel while her essence was in transit, she would be lost, cast into an outer darkness from which there would be no salvation. Why should I believe your pledge of safe conduct?

Now it was his turn to reply with utter contempt and disdain. I was ancient before you had essence. I was Serrataal before you had form. You are unworthy of my wrath.

The First Conduit hummed with the muted Song of the Shedai. Trapped within, its lone Voice cried out for death or freedom.

Choose, he adjured her.

She shed the last vestiges of her corporeal avatar and prepared her essence for the transit. At the threshold of departure, she dared to ask him one final time, Why?

He answered in placid hues and without malice. In the beginning we governed wisely. In the end we became tyrants. Our legacy and the galaxy will both be served best by our downfall. Above them, the great dome that shielded the First Conduit fissured and began to break apart. When this place is gone, those Shedai who remain will still be powerful…but they will never again be almighty. Massive slabs of the ceiling collapsed inward. Fly, youngling. The end approaches.

With bitter resignation, the Wanderer projected herself through the First Conduit and tripped across a wrinkle in space-time to safety—and exile.

The Rocinante climbed back into orbit under the guidance of its guest copilot, Clark Terrell of the Sagittarius. Quinn stepped back into the cockpit and was glad to see that Terrell had an intuitive feel for the ship’s sometimes temperamental controls.

“How are Tim and Vanessa?” asked Terrell.

Quinn shrugged. “Fine, I s’pose. We patched up his ribs, and now they’re in the back, dryin’ off and makin’ googly eyes at each other.” Terrell chuckled quietly. Quinn collapsed into his seat and glanced at the main sensor display. Its readout was blank. “Piece o’ crap,” he muttered, and gave it a broad slap on its side. The display flickered and rolled but didn’t change. “All the interference down there must’ve fried it.”

“Either that or the Klingons are jamming us,” Terrell said.

Shaking his head to dismiss the notion, Quinn started punching in numbers to manually calculate the jump to warp speed. “No way. If they were, I’d know.”

His ship lurched to a sudden halt. Inertia pinned him against the main console. Pushing back, he glanced out the cockpit and saw nothing at first. Then he half stood from his seat, turned, and craned his neck to peer out the top of the cockpit’s all-encircling canopy. Above and behind the Rocinante, barely visible as a speck against the stars, was the outline of a Klingon warship emitting two golden beams—one locked on to his ship and the other holding the Sagittarius.

The ship-to-ship channel beeped for Quinn’s attention. He opened it. A gruff voice crackled over the comm. “Attention, unidentified vessel. This is the Klingon battle cruiser Zin’za. Power down your engines and prepare to be boarded.”

Quinn frowned and shifted the main impulse drive to standby. He looked at Terrell and frowned. “To paraphrase the immortal words of General George Custer: Crap.”

“The Klingons have locked a tractor beam onto the Rocinante,” Sorak reported from his jury-rigged console.

Captain Nassir hung his head with disappointment. He had hoped that the capture of his own vessel might distract the Klingons long enough to permit the small tramp freighter to escape. Apparently, the Klingons had made important strides in sensor-jamming, enough to catch Mr. Quinn unaware.

The bridge portal slid open with a soft hiss. Razka entered with an open satchel slung across his torso and resting at his left hip. As soon as he was inside the door, he handed a phaser and a spare power cell to Sorak, who accepted them and checked the weapon’s settings. “The top-deck crew is armed and ready to repel boarders, Captain,” Razka said.

“Very good, Chief,” Nassir said, nodding his thanks as Razka handed him a phaser. As the Saurian scout continued around the bridge handing out weapons, Nassir asked McLellan, “Status of the Klingon ship?”

McLellan checked her console. “Still reeling us in, sir,” she said, pocketing the phaser that Razka handed to her. “Their shields are still up.”

“Not that it matters,” Nassir said. “We overloaded our phasers fending off the Shedai.” A hopeful thought occurred to him. “Any chance the Rocinante’s armed?”

The slender brunette shook her head. “No, sir.”

Xiong received his phaser as zh’Firro set hers on her lap. Having finished dispersing sidearms to the crew, Razka closed his satchel and drew a fearsome-looking knife from a sheath on his belt. He tested its gleaming edge with one delicate, bulbous green fingertip. “Ready to give the Klingons a warm welcome, Captain.”

Nassir checked his own phaser and verified that it was set for heavy stun. The use of a higher, potentially lethal setting was unnecessary and, in the close confines of such a small vessel, most likely foolish. One missed shot at full power might fatally compromise the hull. He hoped that the Klingons would realize that when they came aboard and adjust their disruptors accordingly. Then he hoped that Klingon disruptors had a setting other than “fry everything.”

He swallowed hard. The dryness in his throat was painful, and nervousness stirred up the acid in his gut. Never too old to be scared, the middle-aged Deltan mused. He tightened his grip on his phaser and prepared to face the inevitable.

Everyone else on the bridge except Xiong seemed calm about the imminent arrival of the boarding party. The young A&A officer trembled, and his hands shook so badly that he could barely be trusted to aim his phaser. “Are we really taking on a Klingon boarding party?”

“Of course we are, Ming,” Nassir said. “This situation calls for a stupid and utterly futile gesture to be done on somebody’s part, and I think we’re just the crew to do it.”

The captain held a straight face and enjoyed Xiong’s stunned, slackened expression for a few seconds. Then the younger man surrendered to the moment and laughed low and ruefully at their predicament.

Good, Nassir thought. Better to go out in high spirits.

Sorak turned from his console and stood up, phaser in hand. “The Klingons have lowered their shields and begun scanning us and the Rocinante for transport.”

“Here we go,” Nassir said, standing up to steel his nerves for the coming fray. He watched the image of the Zin’za on the main viewer—and flinched with surprise as a volley of charged plasma shots struck it amidships, battering its secondary hull and peppering its warp nacelles and impulse drive. Instantly dealt a savage blow, the ship’s bow pitched downward as the vessel rolled to port.

“Stations!” Nassir snapped, pushing himself back into his chair. “Sorak! Report!”

“Weapons fire from the Tholian ship,” the Vulcan said. “Heavy damage to the Klingons’ impulse drive, shields, life support, and weapons.”

McLellan cut in, “Tractor beams disengaged, sir! We’re free to navigate!”

“Sayna,” Nassir said, and before he could finish the sentence zh’Firro had already accelerated the Sagittarius to full impulse away from the Klingons. The captain looked back at McLellan. “The Rocinante?”

“Free and breaking away,” she said. “The Tholians are pursuing the Zin’za.”

Nassir eyed the swiftly changing situation on the main viewer. “Will the Klingons fight it out?”

“Negative, sir,” McLellan said. “They’re breaking orbit.”

“Confirmed,” Sorak added. “The Zin’za is powering up its warp nacelles for—” On the main viewer the Zin’za vanished to warp speed in a colorful blur. From behind it, the Tholian warship was cruising toward the Sagittarius.

Now to find out if we’re next on the Tholians’ hit list, Nassir worried. “McLellan, hail the Tholians, request a parley. Sorak, contact the Rocinante, tell them to make a run for it.” He thumbed open a comm channel to the top deck. “Master Chief? ETA to a working warp drive?”

“Almost fixed, Skipper,” Ilucci said. “Two more minutes.”

McLellan removed a Feinberger transceiver from her ear and reported, “The Tholians don’t answer our hails, Captain.”

The hulking, triple-wedge-shaped hull of the Tholian battleship filled the entire frame of the main viewer. It was all but on top of the Sagittarius. Nassir threw a perplexed look over his shoulder at Sorak, who reviewed his console’s readouts.

“No sign of weapons lock by the Tholians,” Sorak said. “No indication that they are scanning us in any manner.” The ship vanished into the top frame of the viewscreen, leaving only stars and the curve of Jinoteur IV. A moment later, Sorak added, “The Tholian ship has jumped to warp, sir.”

McLellan silenced a beeping signal on her console. “It’s the Rocinante, sir. They’re asking if we’re all right.”

“Tell them we’re fine,” Nassir said, heaving a sigh of relief. Around the bridge, hunched shoulders relaxed, held breaths were exhaled, and exhaustion long denied took hold.

Then Xiong went and ruined the moment. “Captain,” he said, the worry in his tone instantly setting the rest of the crew back on edge. “We’re picking up some really wild readings throughout the Jinoteur system.” Flipping some toggle switches next to the sensor hood, he continued, “Major gravimetric fluctuations, disruptions of subspace and regular space-time. It looks like a subspatial compression with a diameter of—”

“Sum it up, Ming.”

Xiong stood and looked Nassir in the eye. “A wrinkle in space-time is crushing this star system. We need to go to warp in the next sixty seconds, or we’re all dead.”

“Bridy Mac,” Nassir said, “if the Rocinante has warp speed, tell them to go. I mean it this time. Sayna, lay in a course, maximum warp.” Thumbing open the top-deck channel, he finished, “Master Chief, it’s now or never.”