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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2003 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

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  Chapter

  1

  Captain’s Log, Stardate 53781.1.

  First Officer Sonya Gomez recording: The da Vinci ’s salvage of the Federation Starship Orion —which was crippled by an unknown phenomenon in the atmosphere of Galvan VI—has taken a tragic turn.

  Our first attempt to recover the ship’s top-secret cargo—a protomatter-fueled warhead called Wildfire that can ignite gas giant planets into dwarf stars—was aborted after Security Chief Corsi was critically injured during an encounter with a peculiar, luminescent energy field of unknown origin.

  A second attempt to recover the device by Second Officer Duffy was also aborted. When Duffy and P8 Blue’s transport became trapped in an atmospheric anomaly during their return to da Vinci, Captain Gold ordered us to move closer and intercept them. During the recovery attempt, a thermal event catapulted the Orion into a collision with the da Vinci.

  The da Vinci has sustained massive damage, and the crew has suffered several casualties. We’re still assessing the damage and counting the dead. Without main power, we can’t escape the atmosphere, which will crush us in less than an hour when our structural integrity field collapses. But even if we avert that imminent threat, another looms close behind it: the Wildfire device, now armed and loose in the atmosphere, is counting down to detonation in approximately three hours.

  * * *

  Gomez saved her log entry and turned off the tricorder. From behind her, she heard the snap of Ina Mar cracking another chemical flare to life, adding its pale violet glimmer to the dim glow of other flares the red-haired Bajoran woman had scattered around the smoke-filled bridge. Gomez brushed a lock of her long, dark curly hair from her forehead, then gingerly touched the gash on her forehead with her fingertips. The wound was still sticky with half-dried blood.

  The emergency lights had not come back on, which meant even auxiliary power was gone. The only thing keeping the ship’s structural integrity field from collapsing under the pressure of the gas giant’s atmosphere was a very small number of industrial-grade sarium krellide batteries with what were now certain to be very abbreviated life spans.

  The bridge was eerily quiet. There was no throb of engines, no hum of life-support systems, none of the muted vibrations through the deck that became routine elements of the environment when one lived aboard a starship. Now that the ship had sunk below the meteorologically active levels of the planet’s atmosphere, the cacophony of thunder and thermal swells that had buffeted the ship for hours before the accident were conspicuously absent.

  The groaning of the hull had also diminished significantly; Gomez grimly concluded that most of the outer compartments and lower decks had imploded after the collision with the Orion, and the habitable areas of the ship were now likely limited to the central areas and uppermost decks. Fortunately, that included the bridge which, though damaged, was still mostly intact. Gomez surveyed her surroundings; it stank of charred wiring, chemical flame retardant, and blood. Vance Hawkins from security was extinguishing the last of the small fires inside the shattered aft console displays; Ina was lighting another chemical glow-stick; Songmin Wong, the conn officer, exited through the bridge’s aft door to the corridor outside, where the crew had set up a makeshift triage area.

  Dr. Lense knelt in the center of the bridge, next to the unconscious Captain Gold. The white-haired captain’s left hand and wrist were pinned under a heavy mass of fallen ceiling support beams; the small mountain of metal would have killed him had the ship’s tactical officer, Lieutenant David McAllan, not leapt forward and sacrificed his own life to push the captain most of the way clear. Lense glanced at the display of her medical tricorder and shook her head as she reached into her shoulder bag for a laser scalpel. With quiet precision she activated the beam, and a faint odor of searing flesh crept into Gomez’s nostrils as Lense began amputating the captain’s left hand just above the wrist. She cut quickly through muscle and bone, the beam cauterizing the flesh as it went. She clicked off the scalpel and put it back into her shoulder bag.

  “Commander?” Lense said to Gomez, nodding toward Gold. Gomez helped her lift the captain from the deck; he seemed surprisingly light. They carried him out to the corridor, where Nurse Wetzel and medical technician John Copper tended to five patients, who sat on the floor. The light from Wetzel’s and Copper’s palm beacons slashed back and forth in the darkness as the pair moved from one patient to another.

  The two women gently placed the captain between the gamma-shift helm officer, Robin Rusconi, who was awake and grimacing as she bore her pain in silence, and gamma-shift tactical officer Joanne Piotrowski, who was unconscious. Lense took a dermal regenerator from her shoulder bag and slowly repaired the jagged wound on Gomez’s forehead. Gomez stood still and let Lense work. Gomez watched Wetzel and Copper position a handful of violet glow-sticks Ina had just brought them, trying to maximize their area of illumination. She looked back at Lense as the doctor finished and put away the regenerator
.

  “Do we have a head count, Doctor?”

  Lense nodded and watched Wetzel and Copper as she answered. “Four confirmed dead: McAllan, Eddy, Lipinski, and Drew. Another eighteen missing and presumed dead—most of them in the engineering section and damage-control teams.” She gestured to the five patients in the corridor. “We have five seriously injured: Gold, Corsi, Piotrowski, Rusconi, and Shabalala. The rest of us I’d call ‘walking wounded.’”

  “How soon can you have them back on their feet?” Gomez said, gesturing toward the wounded. Lense shook her head.

  “Without a sickbay? No time soon.” Lense held out her medical tricorder and flipped through several screens of data while interpreting it for Gomez.

  “Shabalala has third-degree burns over almost half his body,” she said, referring to the beta-shift tactical officer. “Rusconi has a shattered femur and fibula, a broken knee, and a fractured pelvis. Piotrowski has a serious skull fracture and concussion, a broken clavicle, and multiple internal injuries. She’s lost a lot of blood, and she’s still hemorrhaging. Lucky for her she has the same blood type as Wetzel. We’ll start transfusing her in a few minutes, then I’ll begin surgery.”

  Gomez frowned. “Gold and Corsi?”

  “Gold’s in shock. Corsi’s still comatose, but stable.”

  Gomez nodded. “Keep me posted, Doctor.” On the edge of her vision, she caught the flicker of a new beam of light emanating from around the corner at the end of the corridor. The shaft of light bobbed with the walking motion of whoever was carrying it, revealing by degrees the curling ribbons of acrid smoke that snaked lazily through the corridors. A long shadow was cast ahead of the beam, its shape amorphous but growing more distinct as its owner neared the corner.

  A moment later, Gomez was relieved to see the familiar, diminutive eight-limbed shape of P8 Blue, the da Vinci’s Nasat engineer. P8 was walking upright and appeared unharmed. The palm beacon silhouetting P8’s body was still behind the corner. Then P8 stepped forward, and Lt. Commander Kieran Duffy entered the corridor behind her. He swung his beam across the row of seated patients, then onto Gomez.

  “Everybody hurt?” Duffy asked. “Anyone all right?” Gomez usually appreciated Duffy’s sarcastic humor, but this time his instinct to deflect tragedy with a flip remark annoyed her. She said nothing as he and P8 walked over to her.

  “Sorry we’re late,” the tall, fair-haired engineer said quietly as he settled in next to Gomez. “Traffic was a—”

  “Round up everyone who can walk and join me on the bridge immediately,” Gomez interrupted. She turned and strode purposefully back to the bridge.

  From behind her, she heard Duffy’s quiet reply: “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Duffy and Stevens, both free of their bulky environment suits and back in regular uniform, stood together at the aft end of the bridge, leaning against the railing and looking over the pile of broken metal that was now hard not to think of as McAllan’s burial mound. Gomez paced over a short open patch of deck in front of the mound, reversing direction after every third or fourth step, being careful always to turn in the direction that kept her from making eye contact with Duffy. Her every motion was watched by eleven of the fourteen remaining, assembled active members of the da Vinci crew, besides herself. Only Lense, Wetzel, and Copper were absent, busy preparing for surgery on Piotrowski.

  “Where, exactly, are we?” Gomez said to Wong. The once-boyish-looking Asian man cradled his crudely bandaged left hand as he sat in front of his scorched, shattered helm console. Gomez noted that Wong seemed to have aged in the past few hours. The look in his eyes had changed, had become hard and distant.

  “We’re about fifty-nine thousand kilometers deep in the atmosphere,” Wong said, “drifting around the planet’s equator, suspended in a layer of superheated liquid-metal hydrogen. The structural integrity field is the only thing keeping our hull from melting. Once the SIF runs out of power, it’s anyone’s guess whether we’ll burn up or be crushed first.”

  Gomez turned toward Ina, who was seated at what was left of her regular post at ops. “Engineering damage report?”

  Ina checked her tricorder. “The warp core’s been ejected, leaving us without main power or warp propulsion. The impulse system’s ruptured, and all fusion cores went into auto-shutdown as a fail-safe. Auxiliary power failed when the strain of maintaining the structural integrity field overloaded the EPS taps. Right now, we’re running on half emergency battery power, and most of that’s going to the integrity field, which’ll collapse in less than an hour.”

  “What about escape options?” Gomez said, turning toward Stevens. “Can we abandon ship? Or send a distress signal and hang on until a rescue team arrives?”

  “Afraid not, Commander,” Stevens said. “Subspace transmitters are gone, and both our shuttles were destroyed by a hull implosion—not that they’d survive long this deep in the atmosphere. Life support’s offline, and we’re down to four hours of breathable air. Most of the escape pods and a lot of the spare environment suits were lost when the outer compartments imploded. And, even if we could get a signal out, the nearest rescue’s at least eighteen hours away. We’ll either be out of power or out of air long before then.”

  Gomez rubbed the stinging sensation from her eyes with the palms of her hands. “What about the main computer?”

  Soloman cocked his head slightly. “Tricorder scans indicate the computer core is still intact, but without power we will not be able to bring it back online.”

  “Could you power it up with one of those portable kits?” Duffy said. “Like the one you brought aboard the Orion?”

  “Yes,” Soloman said. “But I do not think I can reach the access hatch to the core.”

  “Most of the corridors on that deck are either flooded or have imploded,” P8 said.

  Gomez nodded, and turned to Conlon. “Conlon, we need to buy ourselves some time,” Gomez said to the young woman. “Three more hours, to be precise. Is there any way for you to bring auxiliary power back online for just three more hours?”

  Conlon looked petrified by the question. “By myself? Commander, the whole engineering staff is gone, except for me. How am I supposed to—”

  Gomez cut her off. “Nancy. We need power to keep the structural integrity field operating for the next three hours while we look for a way out of the atmosphere. I don’t care how you do it, but find a way, and do it before the reserve batteries run out in—” Gomez checked her tricorder’s chronometer “—about forty-five minutes. Just buy me two more hours after that.”

  “Why only two hours?” Carol Abramowitz asked.

  Hawkins turned to the short, slender cultural specialist and answered plainly. “Because that’s when we estimate the Wildfire device will detonate, igniting this gas giant into a small star. If we’re not gone by then, we’re dead no matter what.”

  Bart Faulwell, the ship’s middle-aged cryptographer, sighed heavily and shook his head. “I’m so glad you asked that, Carol. Really, I am.”

  “I know we’re down to a skeleton crew,” Gomez said, trying to sound reassuring as she looked around the bridge at the desperate faces surrounding her. “But we need to restore power to the SIF in the next forty minutes. Once that’s done, we’ll focus on escaping the atmosphere.” She turned quickly from one person to the next as she fired off orders in a tone that brooked no questions.

  “Duffy, Stevens, you’re with me. We’ll reroute any independent power sources we can find to the emergency batteries.

  “Robins, Hawkins, find a safe route to the main computer core for Soloman. Check all emergency bulkheads along the way, make certain they’re holding.

  “Conlon, Pattie, look for a way to purge main engineering, the impulse core, or any other compartment from which you can reroute primary and auxiliary power.

  “Faulwell, Abramowitz, search all secure areas of the ship for extra environment suits, drinkable water, rations, first-aid kits, light sources, tools, tricorders,
anything that might be even remotely useful.

  “Soloman, Ina, Wong, stay here and try to restore bridge operations.

  “Everyone report back here in exactly twenty minutes. And do your best to come bearing good news.”

  Chapter

  2

  Faulwell and Abramowitz struggled for breath as they forced the sliding door half-open and peeked into Lense and Corsi’s quarters. The air in the ship was quickly growing hot and stale without the life-support system to counter the heat radiating through the hull from Galvan VI’s searing atmosphere.

  Faulwell slipped inside the room first, leaving behind in the corridor a makeshift sack he had fashioned by knotting together bedsheets taken from Lipinski and Eddy’s shared quarters. The sack was now almost filled with salvaged first-aid kits and small pieces of standard-issue equipment collected from throughout the ship.

  Abramowitz followed Faulwell into Lense and Corsi’s dark, tiny room, the beam from her palm beacon set wide and casting an enormous, sharp shadow of Faulwell on the far wall.

  Faulwell quickly riffled through Lense’s side of the room, in a routine at which he was quickly becoming too proficient for his own comfort. He looked over his shoulder and noticed that Abramowitz seemed to be procrastinating, dwelling too long on the small knickknacks that had fallen from a shelf and landed in a random arrangement on Lt. Commander Corsi’s bunk.

  “Carol?” Faulwell said. “You okay?” Abramowitz nodded. “Then we need to hurry,” he said. “Check under her bunk—maybe she keeps a spare phaser rifle.”

  Abramowitz crouched, pulled open the drawers below Corsi’s bunk, and started to toss aside articles of civilian clothing. Faulwell finished his own search, which had yielded a spare medical tricorder and a first-aid kit—both of which Lense kept conveniently under her pillow—and turned to see Abramowitz lifting from Corsi’s drawer a rectangular wooden case with a clear top. Inside the case was an antique axe. It had a broad, squarish, spike-backed steel head, its red paint heavily scuffed. The head was affixed to a meter-long, gently curved wooden handle whose rough grain and faded flecks of yellow paint betrayed its antiquity. The base of the handle was sheathed in thick, black rubber. The head of the axe rested on a triangle of folded, dark-blue fabric decorated with white stars.