The battle on the screen was little more than a fiery blur as zh’Firro guided the ship through wild corkscrew maneuvers at full impulse. The daring young zhen raised her voice to compete with the screaming din of the phasers. “Impulse power’s down to eighty percent!”
Nassir opened a channel to engineering. “Master Chief, report!”
“Main plasma relay’s been hit,” Ilucci replied, his voice barely audible over the clamor of shouting voices and straining machines in the engine room. “We’re running a bypass.”
Another near-miss rumbled through the hull. “Make it fast. Bridge out.” Nassir closed the channel and twisted around toward the tactical station. “Sorak, how’s the Panama holding up?”
“Not well,” the Vulcan centenarian said. “Her starboard shields are collapsing. She’s coming hard about to turn her port side to the armada.”
“Give her covering fire until she completes the turn,” Nassir ordered. To zh’Firro he added, “Sayna, swing us past the Panama, try to draw the enemy’s fire.” A punishing concussion stuttered the overhead lights and flickered the bridge consoles.
“I don’t think we’ll have to try very hard,” zh’Firro said as she changed course.
Theriault looked up from the sensors. “Bandits, twelve o’clock high!”
“Targeting,” Sorak replied. “Firing.” Another angry chorus from the phasers, and he added, “Attack group breaking off, heading for zone three.”
“Leave them to Buenos Aires,” Nassir said. “Find a new target and keep firing.”
Alerts and system failures cascaded across the Endeavour’s master engineering console faster than Bersh glov Mog could deploy damage-control teams. He switched from one internal comm circuit to another as he rattled off orders. “Team Four, hull breach on Deck Nine, Section Two! Team Seven, phaser coupling overload, Deck Sixteen, Section Four! Fire Team Alpha, plasma fire on the hangar deck!” He was looking at the status indicator for the secondary hull’s port defense screen generator as it toggled from green to red, indicating a failure, and he reached to open a comm channel to the nearest repair team.
A godhammer of concussive force hit the ship and sent him and the other engineers tumbling. Despite his muddied hearing, Mog heard someone call out, “We’ve lost shields!” Another replied, “Hull breach! Outer sections!”
Mog pulled himself to his feet and stumbled like a drunkard across the heaving deck. “Air masks! Now!” He grabbed the respirator kit next to his station and strapped it on, then lurched across the compartment toward the lockers where the hazmat gear was stored, fighting every step of the way against the random pitching and rolling of the ship. Damn these weak inertial dampers, he cursed to himself. Down the length of main engineering, he saw other officers and enlisted men fumbling with their breathing masks.
He reached for the emergency equipment locker.
The loudest explosion he’d ever heard struck him as a wall of sonic energy and threw him against a bulkhead several meters away. As he ricocheted off the wall and collapsed, his black eyes opened wide in shock at the sight of a brilliant crimson beam of disruptor energy tearing through the hull from outside and wreaking fiery havoc as it lanced through bulkheads and filled the air with a terrifying buzz-roar so loud it drowned out the screams of the dying. The heat from the beam singed Mog’s mane and beard, filling his snout with the horrid stench of burnt fur. He lifted his arm to shield his face from the jabbing-needle pain of ultraviolet radiation—then the beam stopped, and its harsh buzzing was replaced by the groaning howl of escaping atmosphere. The hurricane-force gale threatened to hurl Mog away into the cold vacuum, but he caught the protruding pipe of a coolant valve and hung on as heavy emergency barriers lowered swiftly into place to contain the damage.
Half a dozen people in the breached sections weren’t so fortunate, and Mog watched the horror of their fates register on their faces as they were sucked out into space. A lucky few were close enough to the adjacent sections to escape before the airtight barriers fell. Mog reached out to a Vulcan man who was crawling too slowly, clutched his hand, and with a fierce yank pulled him clear before the barrier met the deck and locked into place.
Air pressure normalized within seconds, and Mog knew there was no time to waste on asking every survivor his or her status. His only concern now was to restore main power, which the disruptor blast had just crippled. He tried to run back to his master console, only to find himself feeling simultaneously lightheaded and dead on his feet. Then he was overcome by nausea and doubled over as he succumbed to a sudden urge to vomit. Spewing sour stomach acid tinged with blood, he heard others around him collapse into bouts of violent emesis.
Coughing and gasping, Mog crawled back to his console and pulled himself upright, even as sickness churned in his abdomen. He reached out to initiate a set of diagnostic checks and saw that his hand was shaking. A cold shiver ran down his spine, and was followed by a fatiguing flush of heat in his forehead that left him panting and dry-mouthed. A single glance at the environmental status gauges confirmed what he already knew: He and the other survivors were just as doomed as those who had been pulled into space moments earlier. They all had been exposed to an acute dose of hyperionizing radiation, far exceeding four thousand rads, as the beam had ruptured the matter-antimatter mix system. Radiation levels inside the engineering compartment were already dropping as automated safety systems kicked in, but it was too late for all of them; the damage was done, and not even Starfleet’s best medicine could undo it.
Mog turned around and met his crew’s mix of frightened stares and empty gazes. “I won’t lie to you. You all know what’s happened. But we need to use whatever time we have left to bring back main power, before we lose the whole ship. So snap to!” Fighting back against the hot sensation winding through his intestines, he focused on his master console, started rerouting circuits, and resumed dispatching damage and fire teams.
A minute later, the slightly nasal, New York–accented voice of the ship’s chief medical officer, Doctor Anthony Leone, blared from Mog’s console speaker. “Sickbay to Mog!”
“Go ahead, Doctor.”
The doctor was furious. “What the hell, Mog? Radiation levels in main engineering are off the chart! Get your people out of there!”
“I can’t do that, Doctor. We have to restore main power.”
“Don’t make me pull rank, goddammit!”
Mog appreciated Leone’s aggressive, argumentative style. He’d often thought the wiry little human physician with bulging eyes would have made a fine Tellarite, so he tempered his refusal with admiration. “It won’t make any difference, Doctor. There’s nothing you can do for us now. We all have an hour left to us, and we plan to spend it working. I suggest you do the same. Mog out.” He closed the channel and cut off the comm circuit to prevent Leone from pestering him again. Then he looked back at his weary, dying crew and put on his bravest face. “Move with a purpose, people! The antimatter injector won’t fix itself!”
He knew that an ugly, painful death awaited them all in an hour’s time.
Until then, he planned to live usefully, or die trying.
Lieutenant Isaiah Farber could barely see through the columns of oily gray smoke drifting through Vanguard’s reactor control level, and he struggled to hear over the incessant percussion of energy attacks pounding the station’s overtaxed shields.
“Ops, please repeat your last,” he said into the comm, “all after ‘support.’”
The reply was inaudible amid the tumult of battle, so Farber pressed one ear to the speaker and covered the other with his hand. “Cut off life support to all unoccupied sections and seal them,” said Commander Cooper. “Reroute that power to shields.”
He wondered if anyone up there had any idea what they were asking for. “Ops, we’re already pushing too much juice through the shield grid! Any more and we’ll burn it out!”