More alarms sounded to his left, and he saw several of his deputies were responding to reports of looting in Stars Landing. He shook his head in disgust. There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to fence the goods, and no way off the station with anything more than the clothes on their backs. So what the hell are those idiots thinking?
The dim ambience of computer screens in the darkness was momentarily washed out by a spill of harsh white light from the corridor as the door opened behind Jackson. He turned to see Ming Xiong enter, and he waved the scientist over to his station in the middle of the U-shaped ring of duty stations. Xiong rushed to his side and sounded winded, as if he had run all the way up from the Vault. “What’s up? You said it was urgent.”
“I had an idea,” Jackson said, calling up tactical plans on his master control screen. “Scuttlebutt on the command deck is that you guys wasted a planet with that gizmo of yours.”
Xiong backed up half a step. “I can’t discuss that.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s classified, I get it. Forget that for a second.” He showed Xiong a simulation of the Tholians’ likely attack plan. “If we could direct just a fraction of the power from your setup to a handful of key points, we could break their momentum before they—”
“It won’t work,” Xiong said. “Bringing the array to full power is a risk under the best of circumstances. And the truth is, we just don’t have the kind of precision control we’d need to use the array as a close-range tactical system. If we tried to do something like this, we’d probably blow ourselves up in the process.”
Jackson held up one hand while he loaded another simulation. “Okay, I thought you might say that. So, look at this. What if you target their fleet right now, while they’re still on approach in tight formation? Just hit an area of effect and—”
“The timing on the effect isn’t precise to within more than twenty seconds. We could barely target a planet in a slow orbit. No way we can hit a fleet moving at warp speed.” He added with a measure of sympathy, “Got a Plan C?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. “Run like hell.”
Outside the walls of Manуn’s cabaret, the residents of Stars Landing were falling victim to the station’s spreading contagion of hysteria. Inside the cabaret, Manуn packed a few prized possessions into a compact carryalclass="underline" a rare bottle of Brunello di Montalcino from Earth, an even rarer bottle of Silgov vasha, and a smattering of tiny knickknacks she had carried with her years earlier, on the fateful night when she’d fled her homeworld on the eve of its invasion.
Her wanderlust had fired her imagination long before her exodus, but the threat of the Vekhal’s arrival in force on Silgos Prime had spurred her into flight. She had forsaken home and noble title for freedom; heritage and the companionship of her own kind for survival. At the time it had seemed an easy bargain. Only after years as an exile did she understand the true cost of her salvation: all her fleeting moments of joy had since been tempered by the bitter loneliness of never again seeing one of her own kind.
She had done her best to fill her days and nights with companions. Ironically, in her opinion, she felt most at home when surrounded by as diverse a population as possible, and nowhere had she encountered a polyglot society on a par with the Federation. Among all the civilizations she had encountered across a span of nearly three thousand light-years, the United Federation of Planets was unique.
Perhaps I would have been happier had I stayed safely within its borders, she speculated. In hindsight, she realized, it was only her emotional need to keep moving, to remain figuratively one step ahead of her memories of the Vekhal, that had driven her to leave her safe haven on Bolarus to open a business aboard a starbase in the perilous no-man’s-land of unclaimed space.
In a very short time she had come to think of this place as home, and of its denizens as her friends. Pausing in the doorway before running for her ship, the Niwlolau Leuad (which the Federation’s ever-obliging universal translator had rendered accurately as “Moonlit Mist”), she lamented that she would never again hear T’Prynn play her baby grand piano, or be regaled by one of Quartermaster Sozlok’s ribald tales of misspent youth, or enjoy the succulent delights that her kitchen staff improvised each night, based on whatever fresh ingredients had come in aboard the latest cargo ships. There were few things Manуn had ever been part of that had meant so much to her as this place, and it filled her with sorrow to bid it farewell.
Everything ends, she reminded herself. But for now, I must go on.
With a light step and a heavy heart, she ran for her ship.
“Get your drink and get out!” Tom Walker stepped briskly down the length of his bar, filling one outstretched shot glass after another in a single, unceasing pour. “One and done! Keep it moving!” He reached the end of the bar and turned back to fill another line of empty glasses being pushed forward. “You’ve all heard of last call! This is the very last call! It’s closing time, people! One free shot per customer! Belly up and drink up!”
Twenty-five-year-old Macallan single malt Scotch whisky flowed in an unbroken stream, splashing over hands as much as into glasses, and as the patrons were served, they stepped back from the bar, downed their measures of liquid courage, and bolted for the door. There were civilians and Starfleet personnel all bunched together, everyone looking to take the edge off one last time before everything went to hell. At the other end of the bar, Tom’s night bartender, Maggie, was doing the same thing he was: bolstering morale one ounce of booze at a time. Whereas he was pouring top-shelf scotch, she had opened up the Gran Patrуn Platinum tequila. Tom knew he couldn’t take any of this with him, and it seemed like a sin to leave it behind when so many people on this station were so desperately in need of stiff drinks.
“Drink faster, folks!” Tom shouted. “We gotta go! I didn’t survive cancer just so I could die in space!” The bottle of Macallan 25 ran dry, so he reached for the Macallan 30—the last bottle on the shelf. He pulled off the pour spout, and resumed his free-for-all last call. Less than a minute later, its last drops fell into a waiting glass, and he hurled away the empty bottle. “Party’s over, folks! You don’t have to go home, but you’d better not stay here!” He nodded at Maggie, and she grabbed her shoulder bag from under the bar. Tom picked up his half-filled duffel, and together they slipped out the back door and high-tailed it across Stars Landing on their way to his private ship, the Friday’s Child. He didn’t know where the two of them would end up, but he didn’t really care—as long as they got the hell away from Vanguard and lived to tell about it.
Tim Pennington had searched every watering hole in Stars Landing, looked behind the bar at Manуn’s cabaret, and even checked the seemingly never-used officers’ club on Level Six, but Cervantes Quinn was nowhere to be found. He couldn’t believe that Quinn could have soused himself so utterly that he would have slept through the last three days of evacuation madness aboard Vanguard, but he had run out of ideas for where to look for his friend, so he returned to the first place he’d checked, vowing to start the search over, if that’s what it took.
He forced open the door of Quinn’s residence in Stars Landing. It was easy, since the portal had remained ajar since the first time he’d broken into Quinn’s flat. The barely furnished little bedsit was still empty. The door to the lavatory was open, as was the shower curtain.
“Quinn!” he shouted, thinking he might conjure the old pilot from thin air. “Bloody hell, mate! Where are you? It’s time to go, man!” On a hunch he checked the closet, thinking Quinn might have sought refuge there in a moment of drunken logic, but he found nothing except one of Quinn’s shirts crumpled on the floor. He turned in a circle, one way and then the other, his eyes scanning the room for clues, but all he gained was a bout of vertigo.