Текст книги "Serpents Among the Ruins "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Vaughn tried to fall backward, but the woman would not let him go. Instead, she reached down with her other hand and took hold of his arm, then hauled him upward easily, as though the artificial gravity of Tomedhad been suspended for her. She let go of him with one hand and raised her fist again, cocking her arm back. Concerned that if she hit him again, he might pass out—dooming Commander Gravenor and Captain Harriman, as well as the mission—Vaughn swung his arm up and frantically reached for the side of the Romulan’s head. His fingers found her wounded ear, seized it, and pulled. The flesh and cartilage came away with a sickening, carnal sound, and blood spurted from the coarse wound.

The woman cried out, her voice seeming to carry less pain than anger. She released her grip on him as her hands reached for the side of her head. Vaughn started to sidle away, but the woman stepped forward and dropped her hands, took hold of his upper arms, and heaved him into the air. He soared several meters before crashing onto the deck.

Searching his mind for anything that he could do to overcome his opponent, Vaughn struggled back to his feet. He anticipated another attack by the Romulan, but he saw that she had not yet moved toward him again. Instead, she bent down, slipped her fingers inside one boot, and pulled out a shape perhaps twenty centimeters long. Vaughn recognized it immediately as a knife.

The woman held the weapon before her, as though displaying it for Vaughn. Then she reached up and removed its sheath. The blade, half the length of the entire knife, glistened a deep, reflective black. In that moment, Vaughn knew with certainty that, before this battle ended, the Romulan’s dagger would slice into his body.

Forming a desperate plan and wanting to regain the initiative, Vaughn ran toward the woman. As he came at her, he saw her brace herself, bending her knees and pulling the dagger back, clearly readying to thrust it forward. But Vaughn dived downward, pitching himself at her shins. He knew that she would not have enough time to reverse the haft of the knife in her hand in order to bring it down into his back, but she lowered it enough that he felt it pierce the top of his shoulder as he struck her legs.

The Romulan flew forward, her legs taken out from under her, and she toppled to the deck as Vaughn passed beneath her. He’d hoped that she would let go of the knife, but her hand stayed wrapped tightly around it, and the blade carved through Vaughn’s shoulder and emerged from his back. Pain shot through him, but he ignored it; he could do nothing else.

He rolled onto his back, intending to hurry to his feet and continue his attack. But already the Romulan had risen, and as Vaughn began to stand, she pounced on him. He landed on his back again, and she came down on top of him, her legs straddling his midsection, her knees pinning his forearms. She reached down past his face and pulled off the artificial tip of his ear, then repeated the process on the other side. An expression of repulsion decorated her features as she examined the bits of mock flesh. After a few seconds, she cast them aside.

The movement caused a globule of the Romulan’s blood to drip from her face onto Vaughn’s uniform. She looked down to where it had fallen, and then glared at him with raw hatred. She dropped her empty hand onto his wounded shoulder and pressed down. Pain seared that side of his body, and for the second time, he feared that he would pass out. Whorls of white light spun across his vision, and he opened his mouth and screamed. Above him, the woman’s eyes gleamed with the enjoyment of her cruelty.

“Do it!”Vaughn yelled at her. “Kill me!”

With sudden speed, the Romulan raised the knife above her head. Vaughn moved with equal swiftness, recognizing his opportunity. He yanked one arm free from beneath her knee, then flung his hand upward. As she brought the knife down, it punctured his palm, the blade passing out the other side. He could not ignore the agony, but he refused to give in to it; the stakes were too high. Instead, he wrenched his arm sideways and down, knowing the damage the ebon blade would do to his hand, and not caring.

The knife came free of the Romulan’s grasp, and Vaughn tugged his other arm from beneath her knee. As she scrambled to reclaim her weapon, he grabbed its handle with his uninjured hand. The woman reacted, but not quickly enough: Vaughn pulled the blade out of his palm and then drove it forward, into her rib cage. She threw her head back and howled in obvious distress, reaching automatically to where her own weapon had injured her. But Vaughn wasn’t done; he slid the knife back out, and then sent it slicing back into her body, up on the right side, where her black heart still beat within her. She tried to take hold of Vaughn’s hand, but her strength had gone now. He pushed at her upper body, and she fell backward and to the side with a dull thud, one of her legs coming to rest draped across his knees.

All at once, Vaughn felt numb. The pains in his hand and shoulder had not abated, but had somehow transformed; they had mutated into dull and pulsing sensations, horribly unpleasant, but survivable. He identified it not as anything that he had managed to do, but as simple instinct, the natural reaction of his body and mind to protect themselves.

He lifted his mangled hand up to look at it. Blood flowed freely from the wound, actually hiding the worst of it, but he could move only his thumb and none of his fingers. He knew that he would have to tend to his injury—injuri es,he amended, thinking of his shoulder—or he would die from blood loss. Unable to help himself in any other way at the moment, he forced himself up into a sitting position, then placed his damaged hand beneath his opposite arm. He squeezed as gently as he could, but forcefully enough to stem the flow of blood. It hurt him no more than what he had already been through.

Extracting himself from beneath the Romulan woman’s leg, Vaughn leaned over and reached awkwardly to her wrist with his healthy hand. He felt for a pulse and found none. Good,Vaughn thought, and then felt immediately uncomfortable for his satisfaction at the death of another. He had always believed in the sanctity of life– alllife. If he could have incapacitated the woman somehow, he would have, but…

I killed her,he thought, the foreign notion terribly troubling to him. Worse, though, was his certainty that, given another opportunity, he would have taken the same actions. He did not regret what he had done, but he regretted having had to do it. Until now, his duties with special operations had avoided matters of life and death, at least in such a direct and personal manner. He also realized that, in other times and other places, circumstances such as these would recur, and he would again do what needed to be done. Unquestionably, he had crossed the Rubicon.

Vaughn removed his fingertips from the wrist of the dead woman. As he withdrew his uninjured hand, he saw it stained in blood, both the green of the Romulan and the red of his own. No,he thought. There will be no going back.

He fought to get to his feet, then staggered back to Liss Riehn.When he had earlier searched for weapons aboard the shuttle, he’d come across a medical kit. He would use it now to tend to his wounds and mask his pain. However he would need to deal with what had just happened, with what he had done—with what he had lost—it would have to wait.

Right now, he still had a job to do.

Harriman ascended the ladder, climbing into the limited, dimly lighted space between a turbolift and the wall of the vertical shaft. At the top of the ladder, he dismounted onto anarrow walkway, careful to make sure of his footing. He circled around the lift—which sat parked at the starboard entrance to Tomed’s bridge—and entered the horizontal shaft that ran in an arc to the port-side doors.

Taking the beacon from his belt and switching it on, he walked to the other side of the ship and began searching along the bulkhead. It did not take long for him to locate a knockout panel that allowed emergency access to and from the bridge. And this,he joked to himself, qualifies as an emergency.

Lowering himself from the walkway to the floor of the horizontal shaft, Harriman moved back to the starboard turbolift. He found the knockout panel in its shell, once more using the beacon. Then, with great care, he set his shoulder against the bottom of the panel and applied gradual pressure; he did not want the square of metal falling into the lift and either making noise or activating the automatic opening of the doors.

When he had pushed the panel inward a few centimeters, Harriman pried its top edge downward with his fingers, eventually allowing him to pull it completely free. He set it on the walkway, then reached to his belt and traded the beacon for his phaser. Selecting its stealth mode and an appropriate power level, he set the weapon to overload, with a trigger of sixty seconds. He began counting down in his head as he gently deposited the phaser inside the lift.

As Harriman made his way back over to port, he drew the disruptor he had picked up from beside the dead body of the Romulan engineer. He verified its setting, then climbed back up onto the walkway and readied himself in front of the emergency access panel. As he waited to take action, though, his thoughts returned again to Amina, just as they had down in the transporter room. And as he had done then, he pushed those thoughts away, knowing that they would not serve him right now.

He counted down to twenty, and then to ten, and then to five. He tensed his muscles as he awaited the explosion, not wanting to move before his diversion manifested itself. He counted to three, two, one, and as though he had willed the detonation himself, the phaser overloaded.

Harriman surged forward at the sound of the blast, driving his shoulder against the knockout panel and pushing forward onto the bridge. The explosion seemed to occur in two places at once, both behind him, in the turboshaft, and to his right, in the lift. He hit the deck and rolled, coming up onto one knee with the disruptor held out before him. Ignoring the effects of the phaser blowing up, he assessed the situation as quickly as he could. He saw a figure pulling itself up from beneath a console at the center of the bridge. Harriman immediately put the officer in his sights, but he’d expected to find two Romulans here and—

Something shifted position on the far side of the bridge. Harriman dropped at once to the deck and crawled behind the nearest console, not waiting to find out what had moved. Above him, the air suddenly sizzled as disruptor fire roared past and hammered into a station behind him. He brought his own weapon up and fired it around the corner of the console, aiming not in the direction from which the disruptor shots had come, but toward the Romulan he had seen in the center of the bridge. He heard the body fall to the deck just before more disruptor shots screamed out, this time striking the front of the console providing him cover.

Something flickered off to Harriman’s right, and he glanced that way to see a series of small flames dancing in the starboard turbolift. One of the two doors had been blown completely off and now lay on the deck, he saw, while the other still stood, but had been badly bent and scarred. When the disruptor fire stopped a moment later, it left the crackle of the fire as the only sound on the bridge.

Harriman peered around at his immediate environs, looking for anything he could use to his advantage. Cautiously, he rose onto his knees and peeked over the edge of the console. Keeping his head low enough that it would not become visible from the other side, he read the Romulan markings on the panel to see which ship’s system it operated: environmental control. He considered several options, then reached up and worked some touchpads.

The lighting went out. The fire in the turbolift sent an eerie, orange glow flickering across the bridge. The numerous consoles threw long, wavering shadows along the deck and against the bulkheads.

Harriman waited, listening fixedly for the slightest sound of movement. He let a full minute pass before he pulled the beacon from his belt. Covering the beam, he activated it, then tossed it spinning away from him with a flick of the wrist. The disruptor fire began almost at once, blasting in the direction of the beacon. Staying low, Harriman emerged from behind the console on the other side. In the semidarkness, the point from which the disruptor was being fired made itself plain. Harriman raised his own weapon and pressed the trigger. Blue light streamed across the bridge, briefly illuminating the face of the Romulan as it struck him.

Both disruptors quieted. Not taking any unnecessary risks, Harriman jumped back behind the console and consulted his tricorder. In seconds, he had confirmed that neither of the two Romulans on the bridge any longer posed a threat.

Harriman stood up and reached to the environmental controls, bringing the light back up. He walked the perimeter of the bridge, over to the Romulan he had just fired upon. The man lay on his side, one arm stretching out above his head, the gray sash of his uniform distinguishing him as a technical specialist. His disruptor sat on the deck a few centimeters from his open hand. Harriman reached down and picked it up.

Walking to the center of the bridge, he regarded the first Romulan he had shot. The man lay prone on the deck, but Harriman did not need to see his face to recognize him. Small in stature, and with the royal purple of his uniform indicating his high position within the Imperial Fleet, Admiral Aventeer Vokar seemed to exude an aura of authority even now.

Starfleet Command deemed Vokar one of the most dangerous people in the Romulan Star Empire, a prime architect of the present lust for war with the Federation. Harriman did not entirely agree with that assessment: he considered the admiral to be themost dangerous Romulan. In addition to Vokar’s staunch conviction in the preeminence of his people, he constantly sought the defeat of all those he considered inferior—the Federation, the Klingons, and others—and he had allies in the Senate, the ear of the praetor, and command of all Romulan space forces.

Harriman peered down at Vokar, stunned into unconsciousness. The admiral had a spanner in his hand, and had obviously been working to restore helm control to the bridge. Harriman peered at the flight-control readouts and verified that Tomedremained at speed and on course. He saw a disruptor sitting atop the helm panel.

He contemplated his own disruptor, and visualized pressing its energy emitter against Vokar’s temple. He recalled his first encounter with the admiral, when Vokar had launched unprovoked attacks on Dakotaand Hunley.He had killed Captain Linneus and dozens of others, and would have captured and tortured the rest of the crews had he not been stopped. Surely those actions alone justified Vokar’s death, even all these years later—perhaps especiallyafter all these years; the admiral had lived free for three decades after committing multiple murders. There hadn’t even been any ongoing hostilities between the Federation and the Empire to qualify him as a war criminal; Vokar was simply a criminal.

Anger grew within Harriman as he remembered that terrible time aboard Hunley.Vokar’s death right now would not only avenge all of those he had killed and maimed, both back then and in other incidents, but it would also limit the risk of notkilling him. If Harriman permitted Vokar to live, there would always be the threat that he would reveal the mission. Starfleet special ops would take measures against that, of course, but the threat would exist as long as Vokar remained alive.

He adjusted the setting on his disruptor, then squatted beside the admiral and pushed the weapon against the back of his head. Beads of sweat formed on Harriman’s skin. The weight of the disruptor felt right in his hand.

He did not press the trigger.

For all of the evil Vokar had perpetrated, Harriman could not kill him in cold blood. He had not done so all those years ago aboard Daami,and he would not do so now. But he would do everything he could to see the admiral imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Harriman stood up and found the tactical console, intending to scan the interior of the ship. On the readout, though, he saw that an attempt had been made to engage Tomed’s self-destruct. Vokar had evidently made some progress with it, as some of the power couplings Harriman had himself rerouted to the containment field had now been isolated and cut off. As a result, containment would now fail sooner, but fortunately not before the mission had been completed.

He operated the ship’s internal sensors, and read four life signs, all Romulan: two here on the bridge, and the two Commander Gravenor had stunned down near the maintenance junction. Including the engineer Harriman had killed, that left one unaccounted for. He pulled out his communicator and flipped it open. “Harriman to Gravenor,” he said, choosing not to use the Romulan names they’d assigned themselves.

“Gravenor,”the commander responded.

“I’ve taken the bridge and captured two Romulans,” Harriman said. “That means there’s one more aboard, but I haven’t been able to locate them with the ship’s sensors.”

“Understood,”Gravenor said.

“What’s your status?” Harriman asked.

“I’m preparing for our departure,”Gravenor said.

“Very good,” Harriman said, understanding that the commander meant that she was working on the cloaking device. She also had not utilized the prearranged word that would have functioned as a distress signal, something she would have done if, for example, the sixth Romulan had been holding her prisoner. “Harriman out.” He reached up and reset the channel on his communicator, then said, “Harriman to Vaughn.”

Several seconds passed, and he grew concerned. He envisioned a scenario where the sixth Romulan had incapacitated—or killed—Vaughn and now utilized the lieutenant’s sensor veil to mask their own position. But then Vaughn’s voice came across the comm channel. “Vaughn here,”he said.

“Are you all right?” Harriman asked, hearing something—weariness? pain?—in the lieutenant’s tone.

“I’ve been injured,”Vaughn explained. “One of the Romulans came to the shuttlebay.”He seemed about to say more, but then paused. As the silence drew out, Harriman worried that Vaughn might have passed out, but then the lieutenant continued. “She’s dead.”

Like Gravenor, Vaughn did not employ the word that would have indicated that he spoke under duress, which meant that all six Romulans had now been neutralized, two dead and four captured. He explained that to Vaughn.

“Understood,”the lieutenant said.

“What’s your status?”

“I’m preparing a shuttle,”Vaughn said, “but I’m having some difficulty. I’ve lost the use of one hand.”

“All right, Lieutenant,” Harriman said. “I’m on my way to help. I’ve got to deal with the four remaining Romulans, and then I’ll be down to the shuttlebay.”

“Yes, sir,”Vaughn said. “Thank you, sir.”

“Harriman out.” He closed the communicator and returned it to the back of his waist. He exhaled loudly, as though he’d been holding his breath. Haven’t I been?he thought. For months, for years even, figuratively holding his breath as he waited for the start of the interstellar war everybody considered inevitable.

But now, at last, that wait would end. Whether he, Gravenor, and Vaughn would survive the end of the mission was problematic, but it had become clear now that the mission would succeed. After all this time, after all the planning and effort, they were almost home.

Vokar awoke by degrees, becoming aware of himself first, lying on his side, and then of the hard surface beneath him, and finally of the muted sounds of voices, speaking as though from a distance. He remembered the explosion on the bridge, and the events that had led up to it. Assuming now that he had been captured, he kept his eyes closed, giving no indication to anybody who might be watching that he had regained consciousness.

With little movement, Vokar tested his muscles, flexing them lightly and feeling for any limitations. He found himself encumbered only at the wrists, held together before his thighs. Finally, needing more information to act, he slit one eye, the one closest to the deck.

Ahead of him, he saw the back of another Romulan, stretched out parallel to him. The gray sash of the uniform told Vokar that it was Akeev. Beyond the science officer sat a couple of shuttles and several maintenance pods.

The shuttle compartment,Vokar thought. Butwhy the shuttle compartment?

Vokar heard a hiss behind him, like that produced by a hypospray, and a few seconds later, he heard another. “Captain,” a man called from nearby, “they’re awake.”

Realizing the futility of continuing his subterfuge, since he’d apparently been brought back to consciousness by the intruders, Vokar raised his head from the deck. He looked first at his wrists, which he saw had been placed in electromagnetic restraints, evidently appropriated from Tomed’s own armory. Then he peered past his feet, toward the source of the voice. He saw a quartet of antigrav stretchers, and a man walking past them toward the bow of a shuttle. The man had both a disruptor and a hypospray clasped in one hand, and a bandage wrapped around the other, with that arm in a silver mesh sling. He wore a Romulan engineering uniform, though he was clearly not Romulan: his round ears and feathery brown hair provided ample evidence to that effect. “Akeev,” Vokar whispered, looking forward again.

“Sir,” the science officer said. “Are you all right?”

“How long have we been unconscious?” Vokar asked, ignoring the question.

“A long time, I think,” Akeev said. “Ten hours, fifteen…maybe more.”

“Then we must be close to the Neutral Zone,” Vokar concluded.

“Yes,” Akeev agreed, “if we haven’t already crossed it into the Federation.”

But Vokar knew that they hadn’t. If they had, then why would they still be aboard the ship, and in any case, why would the intruders be in the shuttle compartment? He saw now that he had erred in assuming that they’d wanted to commandeer Tomedfor their own uses—he had erred not in that deduction, but in stoppingat that deduction. He thought that he now saw their purpose in appropriating his vessel.

Footsteps approached from the direction of the shuttle. Vokar looked up to see a Starfleet officer, a disruptor in his hand. He stopped a couple of meters short of Vokar’s feet.

“Admiral Vokar,” Harriman said.

“My serpent,” Vokar intoned, “returned to me.” He chose not to hide his hostility.

“You can think that,” Harriman told him, “but I’d suggest that the serpent lives in your own house, sits in your own chair.”

“Perhaps,” Vokar said, “but I’m not about to kill hundreds—or is it thousands—of my own people.” Harriman’s eyebrows went up, and Vokar knew that he had unmasked the human’s plan. “All to coerce the Klingons to ally with the Federation against the Empire. And what do you imagine the Klingons would do if they learned of your cowardly act?”

Harriman lifted a hand to his face and wiped it across his mouth. “Two of your officers have been killed,” Harriman said then, apparently unwilling to respond to Vokar’s accusation. “There are four of you left—”

“Also to be killed shortly,” Vokar interrupted, a comment intended only to bait Harriman. If the Starfleet captain had truly wanted to take the lives of Vokar and his other three officers, he would have done so already.

“Actually, you have a choice, Admiral,” Harriman said. “I’m aware of the prerogative of Romulan commanders to destroy their own vessels, and to kill themselves and their crews, when faced with capture, and I remember your own personal desire to go down with your ship.” Vokar used his hands to push himself up to a sitting position, and he saw T’Sil and Valin also beside him, their faces turned up to listen to the conversation. Linavil and Elvia, then, had been killed. “But in this instance, you can stay here,” Harriman finished, “or you can come with us.”

“And where would ‘we’ be going?” Vokar asked, already having a good idea of the answer, and knowing that he would neverconsent to being a prisoner of the Federation.

“You and your crew will be taken to a planet far from Romulan space,” Harriman said.

“Where we’ll be kept as prisoners,” Vokar said.

“Yes,” Harriman said. “But you won’t know it. We’ve developed an experimental technique to erase memory.”

“You’re going to experimenton us?” Akeev asked, obviously fearful of such a prospect.

“Your memories will be erased,” Harriman said, “but otherwise, you’ll be unaffected. You’ll be permitted to live out your lives in a comfortable setting.”

Even if Vokar believed Harriman—which he didn’t—the notion of Federation doctors performing experimental techniques on his brain repulsed him, as did the idea of living the rest of his life in captivity. As he had been trained to do, Vokar would die with his vessel. But he also knew Starfleet, and he understood that Harriman offered this choice to Vokar not for all four of them, but only for himself; Harriman would allow the others to make their own choices.

“Captain,” the man with the bandaged hand called. “Thirty minutes.”

“That’s it,” Harriman said, looking at each of the four Romulans. “You need to make your decisions now, all of you. Are you coming with us, or are you staying here?”

Vokar waited. Valin spoke up first. “I…I’ll go with you,” he said quietly.

“I will too,” T’Sil said. Vokar felt nothing but disgust for the young officers.

“I’m staying,” Akeev declared, defiance apparently overcoming his fear. Vokar nodded his head in approval.

“Admiral?” Harriman asked.

“We’ll all go,” Vokar said. “Including Akeev.”

“Sir?” Akeev asked, his voice rising in obvious surprise.

“We’ll all go,” Vokar repeated.

“All right,” Harriman said, then called back over his shoulder, “Lieutenant.” The man in the ersatz Romulan uniform appeared again from around the bow of the shuttle and approached the group. Vokar saw that he now held only a disruptor in his unbandaged band. “We’re going to have four more passengers,” Harriman told him.

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said. He circled the group at a wide remove until he’d gotten behind them.

“Everybody up,” Harriman said, gesturing with his own disruptor. “Slowly.” Vokar and the others all rose to their feet. “Now, one at a time, I want you to walk toward the shuttle.”

Vokar peered over at Valin, ordering him without a word to go first. The sublieutenant stepped forward and started toward Harriman. Vokar waited for only a moment, and then he moved. He brought his hands up in their restraints as he rushed over to T’Sil, bringing them down around her head. “Akeev,” he yelled, hoping the science officer would understand his duty. Vokar twisted with all of his might, and heard with satisfaction the fracturing of T’Sil’s neck. He turned then, toward Valin, and saw the sublieutenant falling to the deck from Akeev’s grasp. A flash of intense blue light streaked across the shuttle compartment, and Akeev crumpled where he stood. Beyond him, Harriman stood with his disruptor aimed. Vokar took a step toward him, and Harriman fired.

His last thought consisted of a single word directed at the Starfleet captain: Die!

In the aft portion of the shuttle cabin, Gravenor executed the test sequence for the third time. Before her, the cloaking device she had removed from Tomedsat on the deck between the two equipment columns. Fiber-optic lines ran in jumbles from numerous junction nodes on the device over to the exposed circuitry of the shuttle. She confirmed the operation of the cloak, its connections to the deflector interface, and the rate of the power drain.

Finished with her testing, Gravenor turned toward the front of the cabin, to where Lieutenant Vaughn sat at one of the forward stations. She saw the sling he wore and wondered again just what he had been through here. He had reported killing a Romulan officer whom he’d believed had come to the shuttlebay to transmit a message about the commandeering of Tomed.But the spatters and smears of red and green blood on the deck, the lifeless body of a subcommander, and Vaughn’s own injuries had all testified to the ferocity of the battle that had taken place, something the lieutenant had not mentioned. That omission, as well as his reluctance to provide details of the encounter, troubled Gravenor. Of more concern to her, though, was Vaughn’s manner in the hours since the incident. He continued to behave and act professionally, but where he had always been open and communicative, he now seemed reserved, almost closed off. Gravenor had initially suspected the lieutenant to be suffering a post-traumatic reaction to his experience, but she now suspected that there might be larger matters at issue.

With a few minutes before they needed to launch, Gravenor stood up and walked to the front of the shuttle. “How are you doing, Elias?” she asked as she took a seat beside him. She rarely used his first name, and she did so now as an indication of her concern for him.

“I’m fine, Commander,” Vaughn said, looking up from the console for just a moment. “Thank you.” Although polite, the response promised no elucidation.

“Are you in much pain?” she persisted. Vaughn had initially treated himself with a Romulan medkit he’d found in the shuttle, but Harriman had later tended more carefully to his injuries. The captain had also provided him with medication for his pain, but the analgesic hadn’t been able to mask it completely.

“There’s some pain,” Vaughn admitted, now keeping his focus on the panel, “but I’m getting through it.”

“Good,” Gravenor replied. She wanted to say more, wanted to help her colleague deal with the issues affecting him right now, but she also knew that there would be a better time than this to do so. Instead, she glanced down at the chronometer on the console. In just thirteen minutes, she saw, the shuttle would have to launch. “What’s Captain Harriman’s location?” she asked Vaughn.