Tears began to form in Vaughn’s eyes. My family,he thought, unsure who he was addressing. This is my family. Isn’t this why I’m here?
Vaughn lowered his phaser. “Prynn,” he said.
His daughter paused from her reading and looked up. She saw the phaser in his hand and frowned. “Dad? What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure,” Vaughn said. “But I need you to step away from your mother right now. We have to make sure everything’s all right. Please, Prynn. Move now.”
To her credit, Prynn didn’t argue. She put the book down and started to rise.
The tenderness abruptly fell from Ruriko’s eyes. She reached out to Prynn with her remaining hand.
Vaughn brought up his phaser and fired.
19
Lieutenant Commander Bhatnagar had returned to duty only two hours before. After a good night’s rest following her release from sickbay, she was anxious to figure out the cause of the overloaded EPS conduit. While by definition, starship engine rooms should have been predictable, uneventful places that operated according to the reliable mathematics of warp physics, she’d come to believe that, more often than not, they were in fact the nexi of entropy. Order battled chaos in these places with an almost dependable regularity. And engineers, she secretly suspected, functioned as avatars of both these forces, keeping them carefully balanced so that neither overwhelmed the other. Thus, warp drive worked, but the best engineers could still find a new wrinkle in the laws of physics when circumstances required it.
Bhatnagar stood over the master systems display table in the center of room and knew that something wasn’t right. Nothing in the diagnostics explained the buildup that led to the plasma overload. According to every instrument and situation monitor in engineering, everything had been fine. Yet something had caused the conduit to rupture, and in the absence of any evidence of a malfunction, or defects in the conduit itself, Bhatnagar knew only one other conclusion was reasonable: sabotage. Someone aboard the Gryphonhad caused the explosion deliberately.
She was considering how precisely to tell the captain when a chime from the computer suddenly rang out. “Warning: Antimatter containment failing. Ejection system off-line. Warp core will breach in two minutes.”
What—?
Bhatnagar checked her monitors as all around her techs scrambled to do the same at stations throughout engineering. But nothing was amiss: Forcefields and injection systems in the warp core were at optimum, the core temparature was well inside the safe zone, and there was no indication of any anomalous energy fluctuations. Yet the computer had just announced imminent failure of the antimatter-containment fields.
“Montenegro to crew,”the first officer’s voice said over the comm system. “Report to the escape pods. All hands abandon ship. I repeat, abandon ship.”
Bhatnagar was beginning to believe chaos had finally gotten the upper hand. Nothing was making sense. A breach in progress where all was well, and now an order to evacuate the ship.
“Commander! What the hell are you doing? Let’s go!”
Bhatnagar ignored her assistant, Lieutenant Benitez, as she sought the cause of the computer’s warning.
“Warning. Antimatter containment now at 50 percent and dropping. Warp core breach in sixty seconds.”
“Savitri, we have to get out of here, now!”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Bhatnagar muttered, moving toward the towering column of the warp core itself. It pulsed normally, tranquilly. The ejection system really was off line, but…
Suddenly Benitez’s hand was around her wrist, yanking her away from the core. “Commander, we’ve been given the order to evacuate. We have to go!”
Bhatnagar allowed herself to be pulled away from the core, still unable to believe what was happening as she started to run to the escape pod.
Mello’s thumb tensed above the trigger. Her eyes never leaving Kira’s, she tapped her combadge. “Mello to bridge.” No response. “Bridge, this is the captain. Respond.”
“Captain,” Kira said, “you have to listen to me—”
“Shut up,” Mello said, backing toward her desk. Without changing her aim, she activated the companel. “Mello to bridge.”
“They can’t hear you, Captain,” Kira said. “Montenegro’s put your quarters under security quarantine. That means a forcefield over the door, signal jamming, and, I suspect, neutralized phasers.”
Mello tested her phaser on the door. Nothing happened. “Dammit,” she said, tossing the useless weapon aside. Xiang still lay unconscious on the floor. “All right, Colonel. Start explaining to me what the hell is going on.”
“Admiral Akaar sent me a message,” Kira began, and with exacting detail, proceeded to explain the truth about Shakaar and his assassination. “Montenegro must have anticipated that he was in danger of being exposed, because almost from the moment I came aboard, he tried to convince me that something wasn’t quite right with you.How you’d begun to distance yourself, how your personality had changed—all things that I’d seen in Shakaar the last few months. He even had evidence ready for us to discover that you were the one who’d faked the cloaking-device reading. He set me up, Captain, to get us both out of the way so he could take over the ship and carry out an attack against Trill.”
Mello had begun pacing the room. “I attended a classified Starfleet briefing on this parasitic species just after I was promoted to captain, eleven years ago. There was compelling evidence to suggest they might someday return, but I never imagined—” She stopped, cut off by a Klaxon and the computer’s announcement of a core breach in progress.
Kira tested the doorway. The force field was still there. Mello failed again to contact other parts of the ship. “Quarantine field should have come down automatically once the evacuation order was issued.”
“Maybe it would have,” Kira said, “if this were a real crisis.”
“You think Montenegro engineered this?”
“I’m beginning to,” Kira said. “That unexplained crisis in engineering gave him the perfect opportunity to set something up. Think about it. He can’t just take command of the ship without an explanation the crew will accept. Confining you here, even killing you, doesn’t help him. He needs control. But if he gets rid of the crew—”
“He’s leveling the playing field,” Mello realized.
Kira nodded. “The ship can proceed to Trill on autopilot, then all he needs to do is implement an attack program, or voice-authorize manual firing of the weapons systems. It’s what he convinced us you’d be able to do.”
“Warning,”the computer said. “Antimatter containment now at 13 percent. Warp-core breach in fifteen seconds.”
“If you’re wrong, we’re dead,” Mello said. The decks vibrated beneath them. Outside the windows, escaping pods could be seen fleeing the ship.
Kira said nothing as the final seconds dwindled…and then passed. The Gryphoncontinued toward Trill at Warp 9.5 silent as a tomb.
Xiang awoke and took the news of what had happened better than Kira expected. Maybe it was because now at least there was no question about who the immediate threat was. Mello studied the chip with Akaar’s message and the parasite file, which Xiang still carried, while Kira and the doctor searched for a way to break out of the captain’s quarters.
Less than four hours from Trill, the forcefield in front of the door fritzed out. The women took positions in different parts of the room, ready to hit Montenegro from three directions. But the doors didn’t open at once. The panels barely budged before several sets of fingers forced their way into the crack, pulling the doors apart.