And the finale...
Chapter Seven
“I got the last one, sir!”
Captain Sharp felt like smiling. He didn’t. Too many other things were still going wrong. But at least they could accomplish what they’d come over here to do.
“Excellent work, Commander. Come on back.”
He shined his flashlight into the chasm before him as a guide for his science officer. As he stood there, listening to her occasional grunt and imagining he could hear her jostle the powered down workings of this old starship, he let himself drift away in thought.
Even if his team was unable to extricate themselves from the Trafalgar and return to Endeavour, the ship and the rest of her crew would soon be able to blast the hell back out of this dampening field. If everything went to plan.
Sometimes, fate seemed to work against a person’s best-laid plans.
Like the shuttle’s power system. What else had they gotten wrong?
The captain went over everything they thought they knew about the energy-sucking anomaly around them. He could not help but think that the Trafalgar crew lying just outside the door behind him might have come up with everything his people had. And they’d still died. Slowly. Had they come up with the same answers Endeavour personnel had? Had they devised a way to make an escape? Or had they needed that one key component that Sharp had because of their deaths?
A disposable starship.
A sudden, frightened grunt came over the open comm line.
“Captain!”
“What’s happened, Commander?”
“I’m stuck!”
“How?”
“I don’t know, Captain! I…I can’t see behind me!”
Sharp could hear the increasing adrenaline in his science officer’s voice. He leaned in to try and see her from his vantage. He could make out the bare, dim little light from her spanner’s nose. How had she ever navigated with that little thing?
“I see you, Commander. Keep calm. Can you back track and get loose?”
“I’m trying…I’m stuck!”
“What does it feel like?”
The fright level in her responses was increasing.
“It gives when I move, but pulls tight when I go very far.”
A conduit or cable then. Probably wrapped around her pack or caught in her gear. Sharp turned on his helmet light and pushed into the tight space before him.
The bulk of his helmet and his own shoulders were an instant impediment. He didn’t go far before having to push through a tangle of wires and cables just to see. However, once he cleared the first mass, he could see his trapped officer.
She was pressed in between two wide, thick truss-beams. A snaking cable was wrapped about her midsection and snagged into her suit’s life support pack. When she pushed to back track out of it, it just pulled tight and arrested her movement all the more.
“I see it, Commander. Hold tight.”
Sharp drew his phaser and switched off the safety.
“If you miss and hit the tank…” She tried to warn him.
The captain was already twisting the silver adjustment casing around the barrels of his weapon.
“I won’t miss.” He said sternly, almost reproachfully.
“Aye, sir.”
Aiming a phaser, looking up, inside an EVA helmet was hard. Doing so in the dark, with inconsistent light, a tiny target and heavy gloves was no test for the unskilled. Luckily, phasers fired beams. Heedless of the deuterium tank behind her, Sharp pulled the trigger.
The thin, low-power beam lanced out into the dark, lighting everything painfully and blinding Andreavich. The beam did in fact strike the tank behind her, but it was heavily armored. The beam touched the conduit entangling his officer and she dropped away from it.
Sharp hoped she wouldn’t look back to see the glowing line of metal where he’d hit the fuel tank. As it happened, she didn’t spare it even a glance.
The captain extricated his bulk from the crawlway and reached in to pull his following officer clear. Once he handed Andreavich her helmet, Sharp took the demolition remote from Bornet’s case and activated it.
“We have another problem,” he said.
“What now?”
“This remote is down to a tenth of its battery. This field is draining everything…and its accelerating.”
“Oh sh*t.”
“Mister Bornet, are you monitoring?”
“I am, Captain. And you’re right. Even these phasers are on their last legs down here.”
“I’m going to set the timers now, or the detonators might not be able to set off the charges.”
“Sounds good. How much time you giving us?”
Sharp contemplated. It would take him and Andreavich five minutes to reach the shuttle with all the hatches between this compartment and there left open. He didn’t think the detonators would be dead before ten minutes were up, but he didn’t know if they’d last much longer than that.
“Eight minutes.”
“I’m not going to be finished down here in that amount of time.”
“How long do you need, engineer?”
“Twenty, no less.”
“I’m setting it for eight. They won’t last twenty.”
“Alright. I’ll be down here waiting for you.”
“On our way, Engines.”
Captain Sharp set the remote’s controls for an eight-minute countdown. He noticed that the signal reception from the three explosives was weak when they transmitted their acceptance of the command. He tucked the remote into a pocket and motioned Andreavich to run after him.
The flying run through the null-gravity ship might have been fun without the threat of death following them. The passage felt agonizingly slow, no matter how fast they pushed off every flat object they came to. The captain pondered whether he’d given them enough time. He wondered if it would even matter. Jave said he needed twenty minutes to enable his plan. Where they just going to be vaporized with the Trafalgar after all?
They came to the turbolift Bornet had passed down and shoved their way into it. One of the Trafalgar crew had drifted into it and they had to dodge her broken form on the way down.
“Are we still going to mine the antimatter pods on the way?”
“No. They should go up by themselves when the main tank breaches.”
The two of them rocketed by the antimatter storage section and aimed down into the shuttle’s soft dock. Sharp emerged into the shuttle interior last, spinning to right himself with the deck. He shoved Andreavich into a passenger seat.
“What’ve we got, engineer?”
“I have forty megajoules that’s being absorbed almost as fast as I input it.”
“That’s it?”
“Yup.” Jave sounded irritated. “So you just decide what system you want me to power up, cause we’ll get about a minute on any one of them.”
“Give me the inertial dampener.”
Bornet looked quizzical, but Sharp didn’t stop long enough to answer any questions. He had already turned and was cranking the seal shut on the hatch in the deck. After pulling the emergency release on the soft-dock below to release them from Trafalgar, he headed aft and entered the auxiliary space in the back. There he opened up every emergency air tank the shuttle carried, and let their high-pressure contents blast into the compartment.
When he returned to the main cabin to take the dead helm, Jave was looking back at him.
“You got a plan?”
“Strap in!”
Sharp rammed himself into the pilot seat and set the main belt of its five-point harness. Bornet at the copilot station and Ursula behind him did the same.
Bornet exclaimed loudly when Sharp drew his phaser, set it for maximum and aimed it for the fore viewport.
“What the—“
Jonathan fired the phaser.
The little window blew outward in a vaporous blast. The now highly pressurized cabin blew out in a long gust. The occupants within the ship were yanked forward, and not only by the blow of escaping atmosphere.
“Number One!” Mister Sehr jabbed a blue finger at the viewscreen. “The shuttle!”
Commander Jeremy’s jaw sagged down. The shuttle was moving. The little boxy ship was boosting her way toward home, backward, without an outward sign of power. He could barely make out some kind of fluttering gas near the shuttle’s nose.
“He vented her to space…” He thought aloud, voice a murmur. “All stations, stand by!”
“Engines ready!” Said the Asian kid.
Jeremy could already see that the shuttle’s momentum wasn’t going to build up to anything fast enough to bring them into tractor range. Endeavour needed to get closer.
“Helm, get us in there. Meet them halfway.”
“I’ll try…”
The ensign began tapping in commands and the impulse drive strove to meet his demands. The ship lurched ahead, then slued to the side, much like before. The helmsman tried to compensate, but they were just going further off the mark.
Jeremy bolted forth from the conn, grabbing the kid by the shoulder.
“Move, kid!”
The XO all but shoved the younger officer out of his seat and took over. Jeremy had already battled this anomaly once and lost. He would be damned if he were going to lose a second time and watch the captain’s team die. He tapped in an impulse power course correction and turned on every starboard RCS thruster the ship had.
Slowly, the ship’s course rightened. They turned toward the Trafalgar.
“Tractor beams!”
Jeremy wasn’t sure if they were close enough to the little craft yet to get a lock on it. He had no idea if Lieutenant Imura had even activated them until the shuttle suddenly lurched sideways. The invisible beam had them!
It was just then that the Trafalgar erupted into flaming debris. The explosion was so sudden that the exec stopped and gaped in stupefaction. The shockwave from the detonation hammered Endeavour, setting off collision alarms. This served to center Jeremy’s thoughts. His hands flew over the helm almost without direction from him. The main engines howled to life.
The ship’s bow came about, pointing away from the explosion at a thirty-degree angle. He kept keying the throttle further and further open, urging the huge ship ahead. The hull began to groan and pop, making sounds as though her alloy skin was flexing about them. The impulse drive called out shrilly, hurting the ears. The Alert klaxon went on and on.
“Dampening field separating!” Sehr called out. “The gravity field is coming apart! Let’s go!”
“Warp speed!” Daniel shouted, jabbing a finger down on the flashing control.
Endeavour blasted her way free.
Epilogue
Starship’s Log, supplemental. First Officer Jeremy recording.
It’s been three hours since we escaped the dampening field of the anomaly in the Urusae system. I’ve ordered warning buoys places in orbit around the planet, warning of the anomaly. We’re currently sending probes into the system to search for more of them, but hope that it was a localized thing.
The captain, engineer and science officer are recovering from their rough ride in sickbay under the care of Doctor Ken. Engineer Bornet was able to reestablish the Eagle’s inertial dampeners before detonation of the Trafalgar, but it proved incapable of sustaining the forces of the explosion and our tractor beam. All three officers should return to duty tomorrow, and the shuttle is under repair.
“How’s the ship, Number One?”
Commander Jeremy gave the captain a confident smile from where he stood at the foot of his biobed. The three shuttle crew lay side by side along one side of the sickbay, covered in bruises and cuts.
“Ship and crew are fine, though I’m pretty sure I pissed off one of my relief helm officers.”
Sharp blinked swollen eyes. When they’d beamed the crew off the shuttle, the captain’s faceplate had been busted. He had some decompression signs and cuts from the helmet glass.
“How’d you manage that?”
“I just about threw him to the deck to come get you…and I think he got tossed into the rail when the Trafalgar blew.”
Sharp heckled.
“Which kid was it?”
“The Oriental-looking one…Suru…”
“Sulu?”
“That’s the one.”
“I thought he was the mathematician.”
“He transferred to my department last month before we left starbase. I told him I’d give him a shot. But I think he needs to stick to math and swinging that sword of his.”
“Never know, Number One. He may turn out to be one hell of a pilot. Keep on him.”
“Aye, sir.”
“What’s our current heading?”
“We’re circling the system at a safe distance. Probes are scouring the interior. If it’s safe, we can go back in, avoiding the gas giant, and we can complete our survey.”
“Very good, Number One. Carry on.”
Doctor Ken stepped around Bornet’s bed, tucking a large clipboard under his arm. “Did you find Miss Andreavich’s brother?”
“How’d you know about that?” Ursula answered dimly from her own bed.
“I was just going over your file. It’s listed.”
The science officer nodded.
“Yeah, we found him. We…put him to rest.”
Jeremy noticed his captain smiled somberly and nodded. The XO nodded also and believed he understood. He gave Sharp’s foot a pat and headed for the doorway.
“Number One.”
Jeremy turned and looked back.
“Good job.” Sharp told him.
“You too, sir. All of you.”
END
Topic: Endeavour #1 (Read 13071 times)