I scramble to my feet. The bridge is a chaos of flames and screaming alarms - and screaming people.
A foul smell catches my nostrils, and I turn my head. F'hon Tlaxx is lying by the comms console, his torso torn open by a jagged piece of metal, astonishment in his dead face. F'hon - he's been with me since the start, since the very earliest days -
No time to think of that now.
"Biochem alert!" I scream at the top of my voice. "Bolian blood in the atmosphere! Clear the bridge! Move!"
I don't know who's still alive. The bridge is a wreck, the artificial gravity is fluctuating, the lights are down to red emergency, and even they are dying. I grab someone, hustle them out into the corridor.... The corridor is just as bad.
I look at the person whose shoulder I'm holding. It's Anthi. I'm briefly heartened to see her still alive.
"Sir -" she says, and stops.
I have to take charge. Somehow. "Get to aux control and take stock," I tell her.
"That was the Siohonin warp cannon -"
"I know. Get to aux con! I'm heading for main engineering - try to stabilize the situation - let's go!"
She stumbles off into the smoky corridor, hesitant at first, then moving with swift confidence as her military background kicks in. I wish I had some of that myself.
I turn the other way, begin to run towards Engineering. The corridor looks skewed, somehow, twisted out of true - what I can see of it, in the smoke and the dim lighting. I run. My feet leave the floor as the gravity plating wavers, sending me gliding along the deck, a dozen metres with every stride. Alarms are screaming. There are explosions, distant and close, and the terrible moaning wail of a massive atmosphere leak.
In my mind's eye, a merciless picture emerges, a picture I've seen so many times before; a starship, rolling helpless in space, wreathed in flame where escaping air mixes with escaping warp plasma, armour shattered, hull breached, until the brilliant flash of an exploding warp core puts an end to it all -
No. Not me. Not my ship.
The turbolifts are down, but I know the King Estmere so well by now, I find a route, down side passages and auxiliary Jeffries tubes... all filled with smoke and red light. I still don't know who's alive and who's dead. No point trying my combadge.
I slide down a Jeffries tube and into the hell that is Main Engineering. No shortage of light, here; the glare from the madly pulsating warp core brings all the wreckage into sharp relief.
Dyssa D'jheph, my chief engineer, is on the deck, face down and moaning. Nearby, the two Jolciots, Thirethequ and Jeroequene, are struggling with consoles. Jeroequene is hammering at the fire suppression system, and finally it comes online, and cold mist blasts into the air around us, quenching a dozen small blazes around the big room.
Jeroequene turns to me. "Noble Admiral!" she cries, her purple face suddenly alight with relief. "It is indeed felicitous to have your inspiring presence in this perilous situation!"
Nothing, apparently, can stop the Jolciots from using flowery language. "Situation report," I snap at her.
"It is most grave, esteemed leader. The warp core is heavily damaged and destabilizing. Ejection is not possible, since the structural integrity field has failed under the reprehensible suddenness of the Siohonin assault. System failures are endemic throughout our mighty vessel."
Thirethequ is slamming commands into the emergency warp core management console. The Jolciots are good, but maintaining a damaged warp core is beyond anyone's ability. If structural integrity has failed, the ship will come apart in short order -
I'm thinking faster than I've ever thought before, and a solution comes to my mind. "Jeroequene. I'll need you."
"At your orders, most excellent commander!"
I leap for one side of the engineering room, aided again by the failing gravity. I grab a cover hatch and wrench it free. "Primary SI links." Tholian design is weird, a whole bunch of essential systems run closer to each other than I'd like - normally. "Jeroequene. That one there." I point to another cover. "We're going to be violating a couple of hundred safety regs -"
"In a good cause, I doubt not," says Jeroequene. "And besides, a desperate stratagem is clearly called for in this situation." She frees the hatch cover with one jerk of her long anthropoid arms. The stocky, long-armed Jolciots have immense physical strength. That's one thing I'm counting on.
"Main SI field inductors." I yank a handful of sparking leads loose from the hatch. "Need to link them in to -"
"Ah! I perceive. Bold, but innovative!" Jeroequene grabs the leads from me. "The safety interlock will engage mechanically, though -"
"That's why I need you. Stop it."
"I shall attempt it to the uttermost limits of endeavour!" And she braces herself, while I make the cross-connections.
Blue sparks a metre long flash about us, amid an acrid reek of ozone. The circuit breakers trip, and meet Jeroequene's long arms. The little engineer groans and strains, and the servos whine against her tremendous Jolciot strength, and finally fail. I ram the last connection home.
The deck shifts under my feet - and steadies. Jeroequene and I exchanged stunned looks. "Success!" she cries.
I hurry over to the console where Thirethequ is working. He glances up at me, his bearded purple face gleaming with sweat. "Magisterially ingenious, revered commander!" he says. "But ejection is still blocked by the lamentable disarray of our vessel. Section thirty-one has shifted and is obstructing the ejector tube -"
Section 31. Oh, that would be the one that kills us. "Keep trying," I tell him, and hurry over to Dyssa.
She is trying to stand, getting to her hands and knees and then falling again, and when I look, I can see why. Some random piece of flying metal has crushed her left antenna. Losing one is painful enough, but a crushing injury... it floods the brain with pain and disorientation.
I steel myself. There are plenty of cutting tools available in engineering. I find a laser cutter and I use it.
Dyssa screams. I wrap my arms around her and hold her tight, ignoring the pain as she hits me, fists thumping my back over and over. "I'm sorry," I whisper to her, "I'm sorry...."
After a minute or two, she calms down. I let her go, and she turns her homely face towards me, now twisted with pain and streaked with tears. "What the hell did you do?" she asks in a hoarse voice.
"Cross-patched the SI fields to the EPS network." Essentially, running the structural integrity fields through the electro-plasma conduits - tying the ship back together with its own power system.
"But -" Dyssa's face screws up further. "That won't work, the EPS net can't take the load, the conduits will fuse -"
"Yes, eventually. All I've done is buy time for real repairs. Come on, Thirethequ is trying to stabilize the core."
Dyssa clambers uneasily to her feet. With one antenna gone, her depth perception and balance will be off, until it grows back. Not to mention the pain. I support her as we go back to Thirethequ.
"It does not look hopeful, sirs," the Jolciot says. When even Thirethequ can't get as far as three syllables to a word, things have got to be bad.
"Dilithium focus assembly is shot to hell," Dyssa mutters. "Crystals fractured, way out of alignment...." She looks up, towards the top of the shuddering warp core. "We have spares. But there's no time to fit them. Not before -"
With no way to channel energy out of the warp core, our power system is down to the auxiliary batteries. And those batteries are being drained, steadily drained, by the core itself. The biggest single need for power, now, is the antimatter containment system. The antimatter in the core has to be kept contained, or it will come into contact with normal matter... and we will have energy in plenty. Like a sun going nova in our faces.
So, we need an alternative source of power, before the battery is completely depleted. I check the energy levels; that will be soon. "What about the auxiliary fusion reactor?"
"Offline," says Dyssa. "I'll... I'll try to get it on."
"Do that. What about running a line to one of the Mesh Weavers?" If we can connect a frigate's power supply to our own, we can sustain containment with its reactor while we repair the core.
"Hangar bays are breached to vacuum," Thirethequ reports. "I have no details on the status of the frigates themselves." He is obviously stressed. Jeroequene reaches out to him and takes his hand.
My combadge chirps at me. I hit it. "Shohl."
"Sir." It's Anthi's voice. "I'm at auxiliary control. Sir, we've been punched clean out of the Rift, we have massive hull breaches and systems failures. I don't know what you did to stabilize us, but it's helped a bit. We're still non-operational, though. I have lines to some decks, some facilities -"
"Can you give me ship-wide address?"
"I can put you through to most decks, sir."
"Try it."
"Yes, sir." A pause. "You're on, sir."
"This is Vice Admiral Shohl to all crew." My voice booms back at me through the speakers in Engineering. "King Estmere has sustained critical damage. Engineering is working to rectify the situation, but we must prepare for the worst." There's a lump in my throat; I talk around it with difficulty, trying to stay calm, trying to project control and confidence. "All personnel, report to your assigned disaster stations. Make pickup on injured crewmates wherever you can do so without jeopardizing your own safety. If you cannot reach your designated escape pod, report to the nearest one with available seating space. Abandon ship. I repeat. Abandon ship."
"Admiral." Thirethequ has recovered some of his composure. "It is of the highest degree of unlikelihood that I should be able to traverse the route to my assigned departure station, Main Engineering being so deeply ensconced within the ship's architecture as it is. With no wilful disobedience to your wise and compassionate orders, therefore, I deem it my duty to remain and assist. With your permission, estimable leader."
"I - Glad to have you. Thank you, Mr Thirethequ."
"Where my beloved remains," says Jeroequene simply, "I remain."
"Glad to have you both," I say. "Let's see if we can help Dyssa get the fusion reactor back online."
But Dyssa's face has fresh tears gleaming on it. "No good," she says. "It's no good." She sobs.
"What's the problem?"
"The fusion initiator. It's gone." She sobs again. "I can see it on the video link. It's come free, dropped out of a hole in the aux power room. It's gone."
I think, for half a second. Then I turn and run for the equipment locker. It's been half crushed, a girder is sticking into it. I grab the warped door with both hands and wrench it loose, then dive in. Smashed gear confronts me, and I sort through it frantically.
One suit. We still have one intact EV suit. It will have to be enough. I start to struggle into it.
"What are you going to do?" Dyssa asks.
"The initiator's outside the ship, right?"
"It fell through the hull. What are you going to do?"
I fasten the suit, pull the helmet into place. "Go out there and get it."
---
The ship's corridors are still in chaos as I lumber grimly down them. My trick with the EPS network has steadied things a little - the grav plating is no longer flickering on and off, the emergency lights are steady - but the ship is still leaking air at a frantic rate, and the situation is still desperate.
Dyssa's right, the EPS net can't take the load, it will melt in a few hours. It's academic. The auxiliary battery will give out a lot sooner, and when it does, containment goes in the core, and the ship blows. We could drain remaining auxiliary power from other sources - and gain an extra thirty seconds or so, at the expense of what's left of life support, command and control, communications....
I just hope enough people are reaching the escape pods.
My way is blocked by a collapsed bulkhead. I swear, and turn down a side passage. I need to get outside the ship... I might not need an airlock for that. Ahead of me, I can see stars; a hull breach, this one covered by an emergency forcefield. At least some of them are still working.
I turn to a control panel in the corridor wall, gloved fingers clumsy, punching in the commands. I can't worry about losing another corridor's worth of air. I press the last button, and the forcefield blinks out, while another one powers on behind me. The tug of air pulls me off my feet, hurls me out through the gap in the hull -
I am outside the ship.
I spin slowly in space, getting my bearings, trying to assess the situation. King Estmere is turning listlessly, trailing streamers of fire and smoke, still, from more hull breaches than I can count. Her gleaming hull is scored and warped and shattered, she is surrounded by a cloud of debris. As I watch, there is a stab of flame as an escape pod launches from somewhere above me. Maybe they can clear the blast radius before the warp core goes. Maybe. I hope so.
I have my own problems. A mechanical voice chirrups in my ear: "Auxiliary battery now at thirty per cent capacity. Warning. Depletion rate above normal permitted parameters." The voice sounds almost cheerful about it. I hate it.
I engage my suit's thrusters, and start to turn. I know what I'm looking for. The suit's sensors are good enough to pick it up. The thrusters should have enough reaction mass to move it. I hope.
I angle down, swooping through space, dodging the fragments that have spilled from my ship's wounds -
Something comes towards me.
My eyes widen, my breathing stops. It's a body. It's one of my people -
The corpse drifts past me, limbs splayed out against the backdrop of stars, sightless eyes covered with a film of frost. I recognize her. Zazaru. My chief science officer since I don't remember when - I think of the sights those soft brown eyes of hers saw, and my own eyes fill with tears at the thought that she will never see anything again.
With an effort, I put it from my mind. I have work to do.
"Auxiliary battery now at twenty-five per cent capacity. Warning. Depletion rate above normal permitted parameters. Warning. Reduce power drain before critical level is reached."
The fusion initiator is in front of me, now. I can see it. The module hasn't travelled too far from the ship - it is moving slowly, slowly enough that I can stop it with my suit's thrusters, can push it back into place, can reconnect it, fire up the fusion reactor, get power back online, save the ship.
I can do this. I have to do it, so I can do it.
The initiator is a bulky truncated cone, basically, about four metres high, about five metres base diameter. I circle it, trying to size up the situation without burning too much reaction mass. The initiator is massively heavy, but it is moving slowly. I can generate enough delta-v to push it back into the ship.
I program the line I need into the suit helmet's head-up display, find a likely couple of handholds, and fire the thrusters.
Simple. Straightforward application of Ytsay's Third Law of Motion; every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Except... there is give in this system, the flexion of my body as the thrusters fire. The initiator slows its motion, comes gradually to a halt, starts to drift, at a few millimetres a second, back towards the ship.
But the line on my HUD is off, way off. I grit my teeth, shift position, fire the thrusters again and try to hold my body absolutely rigid. The initiator swings around... the line on the HUD flashes green, then amber, then red again. Off, in another direction. I grind my teeth in frustration. I can get this right - given time. But the auxiliary battery is steadily draining, and the reaction mass in my suit's thrusters is limited, too. I have to start getting this right, first time.
"Auxiliary battery now at twenty per cent capacity. Warning. Depletion rate above normal permitted parameters. Warning. Reduce power drain before critical level is reached. Warning. Reserve power now below regulation permitted level."
Suit thrusters have fifty-seven per cent remaining capacity. It's got to be enough. Unless I rupture the suit and use the escaping air to push me - but if I lose consciousness, there's no one to reconnect the initiator -
Someone taps me on the shoulder, hard enough that I can feel it through the suit.
I look round in astonishment, and my heart nearly stops. For a second, the dark-haired figure in science division uniform, floating beside me, looks like Zazaru's ghost. Then the electronic panels in the cheeks register, and the eyes - the eyes are metal, not frozen. Amiga. The android motions to her combadge. I click on the suit's short range comms.
"I'm glad to find you, sir," says Amiga's voice. Her lips don't move while she's speaking. It seems strange.
"Can you help with this?" I ask.
"I believe so, sir. I made my way to Engineering shortly after your departure. Since I don't need to breathe, I don't need an EV suit either."
"Do you have thrusters? We need to move this -"
"I found some hyperfilament cable in the equipment locker, sir. I've rigged lines from the hull breach over the fusion reactor. If we can link them up, we can just reel this thing in."
Damn it, that's the sort of solution I should have thought of. "OK," I say. "Can you tie lines on to the grip bars? We've got limited time."
"No problem, sir." The initiator is, at least, well provided with handholds and attachment points. Amiga scoots off, moving from one handhold to the next, quick and mechanically efficient. "My hands aren't gloved, sir, so I'd better handle the knots."
"How did you get here, anyway? I didn't know we had any portable thrusters -"
"We don't, sir. But, well, every time you visit New Romulus, you seem to pick up another can of insect repellent, and there are plenty of those still in the equipment locker. Or were."
"You're flying around on cans of virhanen repellent?"
"Don't knock it, sir, it works. Those cans need plenty of pressure to knock out those bugs. If you can give this thing a nudge, sir, on vector, umm, nine five two from your position -"
I line it up, fire the thrusters. "If it's any help, sir," says Amiga, "I doubt I could do that on the insect repellent." Well, it makes me feel marginally less useless, at least.
"Engaging winch motors," says Amiga. She rigged up powered winches, as well? I should retire, I'm just taking up space.
The initiator starts to glide, slowly, towards the ravaged bulk of King Estmere. "We'll need to give it some more nudges along the way, sir," says Amiga. "The ship is rotating slightly."
"OK," I say.
"By the way, sir," says Amiga, "I was with your uncle in weapons bay two when we were hit. He's all right - I just thought you'd like to know."
"Thank you." Uncle Kophil is all right. At least someone is. "Did he get to an escape pod?"
"He didn't try, sir. Last I saw, he was trying to reinitialize the power couplings for the plasma arrays."
"Stubborn old fool," I mutter.
"With respect, sir," says Amiga, "I don't see you rushing for an escape pod, either."
"Of course not," I snap. "This is my ship."
"Yes, sir."
---
By the time we ease the initiator through the gap in the hull, the warning voice has taken us down to ten per cent. I think the drain rate is fluctuating. Perhaps Dyssa is working on some way to stabilize the core by itself - I don't know, I can't find out, the patchy communications don't work this far from Engineering.
Gravity is out in the fusion power room, so shifting the initiator module back into position over the fusion reactor is... well, not as complicated as it might have been. With the main force of my thrusters, and Amiga's patient work on the motorized winch, we swing it into place, using more hyperfilament cable to replace the sheared docking latches, tying it in place.
There remains the job of reconnecting the wiring and restarting the fusion reactor, and I am painfully aware that time is ticking down. Very nearly the last gasp of my suit thrusters takes me to the wall of the chamber, and I fumble with a console, manage to reactivate an emergency forcefield over the hole in the hull, and engage repressurization. I can't do this in gloves.
Air puffs out of my suit as I release the catches and draw off the gauntlets. The pressure in the chamber is very low, and my hands are bitterly cold. I kick off from the wall and float over to the initiator.
"Skip the safety checks," I order Amiga. Either it works first time, or we're dead. The unit is robust, it's meant to take a pounding... it's had a pounding, though. I open the main inspection cover, start toggling in the start-up sequence.
"Positioning checks out," says Amiga. "I am skipping the auxiliary circuitry, and reconnecting the EPS main directly."
"OK - wait!" I yell.
Too late. There is a brilliant flash, and Amiga is hurled away from the unit, to slam into the wall of the chamber. For a moment, I think she's out - damaged or dead. Then she twitches, pulls herself off the wall, and jumps carefully back to the unit. "That was unexpected," she says.
"The SI field is running through the EPS conduits," I explain. "There was an energy surge when you re-linked -"
"Ah. I see. Ingenious, sir." The android looks faintly rueful. "I will endeavour not to be caught like that again."
"It's worked... so far. Running initialization now."
The unit shudders. Amber lights flash on the panel... no red ones. Good enough. Fine adjustments can wait, we just need to get the fusion reactor up and running -
"Alert. Alert. Auxiliary battery drain now at critical level. Disengage all power drain or reinitialize external power supply. Alert. Alert." The mechanical voice no longer sounds smug about it.
"We're out of time. Skip all remaining checks and hit it."
"Yes, sir." Amiga's hands move over the controls faster than I can follow them.
The fusion reactor groans and shudders. Red lights flash on the panel now. "Hold it!" I yell. "Something's out of alignment...."
"Checking." Amiga's metal eyes are faster than mine, too. "Coolant unit. Piping is out of true. I'm on it, sir." She scrambles across the unit's housing, opens an inspection cover. "I think I can -"
She grips the pipes and squeezes, her hands moving with micrometer precision. "- bend it back into shape," she finishes. I can hear the squealing and grinding of the metal as she works her way along the duct. "Try it now, sir," she says, inspecting her shredded fingertips with distaste.
I punch in the initialization sequence. The lights on the panel flash - green and amber -
Then the lights in the chamber come on, and gravity suddenly snatches at me. I'd forgotten, or maybe I never knew, which way down was in this room.
Amiga snatches for me, and I feel her fingertips brush mine, but not close enough. I fall -
I slam into the floor of the chamber. The suit takes some of the impact, and the gravity plating isn't back to full power yet, but the blow is quite bad enough. I feel something snap in my chest, and a roaring tide of black pain surges up to engulf me.
But the lights are on, the gravity is on, the power must be coming from somewhere - the reactor is online.
Amiga is scrambling down the wall to reach me. I fight back the blackness, call up the details on my suit HUD.
"Plenty of time," I mumble. "Seventy-three seconds left... before the battery failed... couldn't even make a good holovid drama with a margin like that... plenty of time...."
"Lie still, sir." I wasn't going to do anything else. "I'm calling medical - there may be someone who can answer." She bends over my chest, reading my medical status on the displays there. "And actually, sir, you are a couple of decimal places out. The battery was 0.73 of a second away from total depletion." She pauses. "Still an ample safety margin by my standards, of course."
If she says anything else, I don't hear it, as the blackness rises up to take me away.
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