Stano pointed at the main viewscreen. “Look!”
The Buenos Aires made an abrupt course change and charged directly at the densest cluster of Tholian ships circling Vanguard. Moments later the frigate unleashed a steady torrent of photon torpedoes—and accelerated behind them.
“My God,” Stano blurted out, “they’re on a ramming trajectory!”
Khatami sprang from her chair. “Helm! Get us to the other side of Vanguard—now!”
The thrumming of the impulse engines escalated to a high-pitched droning as Neelakanta accelerated the ship to flank speed while guiding it through a dizzying bank-and-roll maneuver.
A brilliant cone of destruction blazed through the Tholian armada, which scattered along dozens of vectors. Phaser and torpedo fire from Vanguard tracked the ships as they were forced out of their holding pattern, and blasted them with ferocious zeal and intimidating accuracy.
Checking the sensor data on the main viewscreen, Khatami realized the battle had already claimed nearly sixty-five percent of the ships in the Tholian armada. For a moment, she was torn between despair for the lives lost in the frigate’s suicide run and gloating for the havoc it had seemed to wreak upon the Tholian fleet. Then she remembered that with the loss of the frigate, the Endeavour was now the only ship left defending Vanguard. Their situation until that moment had been bad. It was about to become much worse.
“Look sharp, everyone,” Khatami said. “We’re about to get to the fun part.”
Fisher cut through one side of the jammed door to Phaser Control Delta with a phaser while his Andorian compatriot, Shor, pulled on the other side with all his considerable strength. As the phaser beam sliced past the midpoint of the door, the entire thing buckled and folded outward, and Shor pulled it off its slide track and hurled it aside. He rushed inside the smoky compartment without a moment’s hesitation and called to Fisher, “This way, Doctor!”
Fisher followed the Andorian thaan through the suffocating haze until they reached a trio of motionless personneclass="underline" two humans in their twenties, a man and a woman; and a male Tellarite. Fighting to breathe and blink away the tears drawn out by the acrid smoke, Fisher activated his medical tricorder and scanned the three junior officers. He pointed at the human man. “He’s dead.” Gesturing at the other two, he added, “I’ll grab her, you get him.”
Shor hefted the portly Tellarite over his shoulder with ease, while Fisher labored to lift the diminutive woman from her chair and carry her away from her sparking console. He was several paces behind Shor and envying the younger officer’s vigor as the bright, fuzzy shape of the open doorway became visible through the veil of bitter haze.
Just a few steps more to clean air, he promised himself to keep his feet moving.
He was knocked to the floor by a blast so loud he felt it in his core, and so hot that it hurt for only a moment until it killed all the nerves on the back half of his body. Then came the tug of weightlessness and the sickening sensation of being transformed into a leaf on the wind.
The vacuum of space robbed him of the air in his lungs as he was hurled from the station into the darkness, tumbling beside Fellaren th’Shoras and three people whose names he’d never had the chance to learn. His slow tumble brought the station into view for a few seconds before his vision failed. The mushroom-shaped starbase was crumbling and ablaze, saucer and core alike rent and scarred. One of the massive deuterium tanks on the far side of the station exploded, blasting away a wedge of the saucer and scattering debris to the ends of creation.
Floating like a mote in the eye of eternity, Ezekiel Fisher felt the icy touch of the universe and discovered that death was utterly silent—and every bit as lonely as he’d feared it would be.
Sprawled half-conscious across the Hub, Nogura fought to marshal his ebbing strength so he could pick himself up and carry on. Get up, damn you, he cursed at himself. There’s no time for this. Get up or die! Pain coursed down his spine as he pushed himself upright. Mustering a Herculean effort, he stood straight—then coughed. It was a deep, wet sound from deep inside his chest, and when he wiped his hand across the itch on his upper lip and chin, his palm came away slicked with his own blood. Only then did he notice the throbbing ache of his broken nose.
A hoarse female voice broke the eerie silence in the operations center.
“Admiral, are you all right?”
Nogura turned to see his yeoman, Lieutenant Toby Greenfield, herself ragged and bloody, swaying on unsteady feet a few meters away. “I’m fine,” Nogura lied. Looking around, he saw fallen sections of the overhead, blasted-in bulkheads, and smoldering consoles heaped with dead officers. At a glance he confirmed that Cannella, Dunbar, and Cooper all were dead, victims of the direct hit that had just crippled the operations center.
Greenfield hobbled over to Nogura, her awkward gait suggesting she had suffered a fractured bone in her leg. “Sir, it’s over. We need to abandon the station before it’s too late.”
The few wall screens that still functioned confirmed that Vanguard and its handful of ships had made the Tholians pay a heavy price for this win—perhaps even a steep enough cost to classify their victory as Pyrrhic. But there was no longer any denying that they had prevailed, and that they now possessed the upper hand in the engagement.
Distant explosions trembled the broken husk of the station, and Nogura felt the grim intimations of Vanguard’s inevitable fall with every tremor.
“You’re right,” he said. “Round up as many people as you can and get to the nearest transporter room. I’ll coordinate the evacuations from here.”
The feisty young yeoman held up a hand like a traffic warden halting a vehicle. “Hang on. What about you, Admiral?”
“I have a communicator,” he said, lifting the device from his belt to prove he was telling the truth. “I’ll activate my beacon when the evacs are finished. Now get out of here, Lieutenant. That’s an order.” He punctuated the command with a stony glare that sent Greenfield limping to the turbolifts. Then he triggered the evacuation alarm and keyed the hailing frequency. “Vanguard to Endeavour. Acknowledge.”
Captain Khatami answered, “Endeavour . Go ahead, Vanguard.”
“Start the evacuation. Get the other ships to cover you, drop your shields, and beam out everyone you can.”
After a troubling pause, Khatami replied, “That’ll be a problem, Vanguard. There are no other ships—just us. And if we drop our shields now, we’re as good as dead.”
34
The Endeavour shook as if afflicted with a palsy. Wave after wave of Tholian strikes were swiftly buckling the shields, filling the ship with staccato reports and grave echoes. Half the panels on the bridge had gone dark, and Khatami had lost count of how many hull breaches had been reported in the mere minutes since the battle began. But despite the fact that her ship felt as if it was disintegrating around her, her mind was focused on the dilemma of the few hundred souls still clinging to life inside the core of the fractured and rapidly imploding Starbase 47.
Over the comm, Admiral Nogura’s gravelly voice had become even more rough-edged. “Captain, we’re cut off from the lifeboats, and the Tholians would destroy them, anyway. We need immediate beam-out!”
Another resounding boom rocked the ship and dimmed the lights. As the bridge crew stumbled back to their stations, Klisiewicz left the sensor console to join Khatami and Stano in the command well. “Sirs, we have to go now. We can’t take another direct hit.”
“Unacceptable, Lieutenant,” Khatami said. “I won’t leave those people behind.”
Klisiewicz grew insistent. “When our shields fall, we won’t be able to help anybody—and all the refugees we already have on board will die with us.”