She wanted to believe there was still a way out, but her training told her that was all but impossible. She and Quinn were outnumbered more than a hundred to one, and he was too far away to do much more than bear witness to the inevitable.
“Listen up,”Quinn said over the communicator. “Use your phaser to collapse the tunnel to the big cave. That’ll slow the Klingons down and buy us some time. I can advance to sniper distance in about ninety minutes.”
“And then what? You’ll start a firefight with two hundred Klingons? In the open? With no cover? Are you out of your mind?”
Her retort was met by several seconds of silence. She admired Quinn’s fighting spirit but couldn’t stand the thought of him sharing her fate.
Suddenly, she regretted all the times she’d taken him for granted, all the moments when she’d cut him with sarcasm or pulled rank simply because she knew he would let her get away with it. Only then, when she knew she would never see him again, could she admit to herself just how much that deeply flawed, strangely idealistic, ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, crazy-brave, barely reformed drunkard of a man truly meant to her.
With the flick of a toggle and the press of a button, Bridy armed the ordnance package’s detonator. Her only remaining decision was whether to set a countdown or to trigger the device manually.
From the caverns beyond the tunnel, she heard Klingon voices shouting.
“Okay, new plan,”Quinn said. “Collapse the tunnel and give me time to get theDulcinea ’s transporter working. Once it’s back up, you phaser that crazy machine into slag and use your recall transponder to beam out.”
Her fingers trembled above the detonator switch. “We don’t have that much time. You need to go back to the ship now,Quinn.”
“Why? It ain’t like they’ve spotted me.”
She wiped a rolling tear from her cheek. “Please—you need to hurry.”
“Tell me you didn’t bring that goddamned bomb with you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not good enough.”
“There’s no other way.”
“Yes, there is! We just haven’t—”
“No, there isn’t! If even one of those bastards gets in here with a scanner, they’ll relay this intel back to their ships, and that’ll be game over. We’ll never stop them all in time. I can’t let them have this.”
“If you blow it up, we won’t have it, either.”
“I know. But those are my orders.”
“Goddammit, screw your orders! Just give me a little more time!”
Footfalls echoed in the tunnel. She had only seconds left. Her voice cracked with grief. “You know I love you, right?”
Quinn’s stoic façade crumbled along with Bridy’s. “I love you, too.”
She shut her eyes. “Then for the love of God, run.”
Quinn looked up from behind his rifle’s scope, his eyes fogged with tears. Dread rooted him in place as he picked up the communicator. He didn’t know whether he was begging mercy from Bridy or from God. “Please, just wait. . . .”
Over the open channel, he heard a translated Klingon shout: “Halt, human!”
Bridy’s last words were calm and softly spoken. “Close your eyes.”
The last sound from the communicator was the screech of a disruptor, angry and close. Quinn winced, his grief a reflex. His breath caught in his chest, trapped behind a choked-back roar of fury and sorrow.
The night flared red. An apocalyptic booming split the frigid air and buried his angry screams. Quinn ducked behind his rocky cover a fraction of a second before the detonation’s shock wave hammered the mountainside with heat and brute force, kicking up clouds of snow and ice and churning them into spindrifts. Thunder rolled and echoed without end.
He peeked over the rocks, in the direction of the blast. A mushroom cloud of black smoke and ruddy fire climbed into the sky, and the formerly frozen lake had shattered and boiled, swallowing the five Klingon vessels instantaneously.
Then a more present rumbling snared his attention.
It was behind him. He turned. The snow between him and the Dulcineawas churning like a muddy river, but it wasn’t the origin of the sound. He looked up.
The mountain’s snowcap was plunging toward him.
He abandoned his rifle and ran toward the Dulcinea. It had been hard enough slogging through the knee-deep snow before; now it shifted and slid like an ocean’s riptide and threatened to sweep his feet out from under him.
Stumbling and staggering, he fought his way back to the ramp and clambered awkwardly inside the ship. He slapped the button to close the ramp on his way forward. The ship heaved to starboard, throwing him hard against the bulkhead. Fighting for balance and momentum, he pushed off the wall and lunged toward the cockpit.
He was three steps shy of the pilot’s seat when the avalanche hit the ship.
The vertigo of free fall was arrested by his first brutal collision with a bulkhead. Then the nose of the ship pitched upward, and Quinn fell nearly the whole length of the ship into the main cabin. One jarring impact after another threw him in random directions, and the only sounds were the omnipresent roar of the collapsing mountainside, the monstrous groans of wrenching hull plates, and the high-pitched shriek of metal being torn asunder. Every loose object inside the ship was tossed into a maelstrom with debris smashed free from the Dulcinea’s broken frame.
Entire sections of the ship were torn away as it rolled down the mountain. Something unseen sheared through the main passageway. The bow of the ship disappeared, and for a moment Quinn glimpsed the sky.
Then a final, bone-jarring impact brought the main fuselage of the ship to a halt—and a wall of snow and ice rushed in like a river. Broken and stunned, all Quinn could do was shut his eyes as he was entombed in bone-numbing cold and suffocating darkness. He thought of Bridy as his world went black, and hoped the universe would spare him the pain of awakening without her.
18
“Over here!”
Katherine Stano turned to see who had called out over the baleful cries of the wind. Several meters away, Lieutenant Paul McGibbon, the Endeavour’s deputy chief of security, waved over the rescue team, which consisted of engineers, medical staff, and a pair of security officers, all of them bundled in awkward combinations of cold-weather gear and dusky red radiation suits. Stano, attired in the same clumsy double outfit, jogged with the others to join McGibbon.
Doctor Anthony Leone, the ship’s chief medical officer, was the first to reach the security officer. “Report.”
“One human life sign, weak.” McGibbon held out his tricorder so Leone could see its display. “Buried about four meters down, inside part of the ship.”
The team circled Leone and McGibbon. Stano pushed through the line to join the surgeon and security officer. “Can we get a transporter lock?”
“Negative,” McGibbon said. His tricorder’s screen was hashed with static. “Still too much radiation from the blast. It wouldn’t be safe.”
Stano waved everyone away from the entombed fuselage. “Move back!” She flipped open her communicator. “Stano to Endeavour.”
Captain Khatami answered, “Go ahead, Commander.”
“Lieutenant McGibbon is sending you some coordinates.” She nodded at McGibbon, who started the data upload from his tricorder. “We need you to beam out a layer ten meters square by three-point-five meters deep. It’s sitting on top of a buried survivor. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you time is a factor.”