WildFire Book One Read online

  He keyed the safety override and initiated the emergency core-ejection. He knew it was the right decision; his only regret was that he had no time to tell his engineers what was about to happen.

  He wondered if his wife would be waiting for him in the afterlife. When he was a young man, his wife, Sindea, had passed away of a sudden illness a few months after they were married. That was more than forty years ago. He had never remarried, choosing instead a solitary life in the service of Starfleet.

  A quickly rising hum was all that preceded the electromagnetically propelled ejection of the da Vinci’s warp core, which shot down and out of the main engineering compartment in a blur, exiting the ship in a hundredth of a second. The vacuum created by its departure tore the breathable air from main engineering, and pulled Jil Barnak and seven of his engineers out into the atmosphere of Galvan VI, less than four seconds before the warp core exploded.

  * * *

  “Get that force field up!” Stevens said, pointing the beam from his pressure suit’s wrist beacon past Faulwell, toward the door to the forward sensor control room. Faulwell, also suited up for the worst, was straining to pull the manual-release lever for the emergency bulkhead in the middle of the corridor.

  “I can’t,” Faulwell said through teeth gritted with effort. “Internal force fields are offline.” Stevens cursed under his breath. Without the force fields, they would have to manually close the emergency bulkheads to seal off compromised areas of the ship. He sprinted across the trembling deck to Faulwell’s side, grabbed hold of the release lever and pulled. The lever came free, and both men gingerly stepped clear of the quickly closing, twenty-centimeter-thick door.

  “C’mon,” Stevens said. “We have to get down to deck four.” Faulwell followed Stevens, who, although an enlisted man, was in charge of the ship’s damage control teams during this kind of crisis. They rounded the corner and practically ran over Abramowitz, who was assisting security guards Eddy and Lipinski. Stevens was glad to see all three women were wearing lightly armored full EVA gear—which he had months ago made a standard for all da Vinci damage-control personnel—even though he knew the garments would offer only limited protection without the null-field generators that had been added to the away team’s pressure suits. Still, he reasoned, better a small amount of protection than none.

  “Did you secure the science lab?” Stevens asked Eddy. She shook her head.

  “It’s already gone. We had to seal corridor two.”

  “Damn. Let’s get down to deck four.”

  Stevens led the way to the turbolift. As he stepped in front of the doors, he realized they were quaking. A thin spray of blistering, liquefied hydrogen jetted out of the crack between the sliding doors and struck his pressure suit like a red-hot scalpel. He dived to his left, tackling Abramowitz as the turbolift doors bulged outward and a jet of superheated semifluid hydrogen began flooding into the corridor. A moment later the wall beyond the turbolift buckled inward as well.

  “Run!” Stevens said. “Get to the ladder in section six!”

  The five of them began running as quickly as their bulky EVA gear would allow, the churning flood of inferno-hot gases lapping at their heels as they retreated. With the rushing, knee-deep flood rebounding off the bulkheads only seconds behind them, they rounded two corners and logjammed at the emergency access ladder. It was claustrophobically narrow for one person even in a regular uniform, and barely navigable for one wearing a pressure suit. Stevens pushed Abramowitz forward and up the ladder. “Climb, fast.”

  Abramowitz scrambled up the ladder as quickly as she was able. As soon as she had climbed high enough for another person to get on the ladder, Stevens pulled Faulwell forward. “Go.” Faulwell grabbed the rungs of the ladder. Stevens looked up to see Abramowitz opening the hatch to deck two and climbing through. Faulwell followed as quickly as he could.

  Stevens turned toward Eddy and Lipinski. “Don’t even think about it,” Eddy said. “Move it, Stevens.” Stevens grinned and climbed, his hands hitting the rungs the moment Faulwell’s foot was clear. Stevens glanced down as he neared the top, and saw Eddy on the ladder just below him. As he pulled himself over the lip of the opening onto deck two, he heard an explosion from the deck below and looked down.

  Lipinski was at the bottom of the ladder, looking back into the corridor. Stevens thought she was about to say something when a wall of searing liquefied hydrogen slammed into her with terrifying speed and force. She went limp without making a sound, and the flood raced up the ladder shaft.

  Eddy, still on the ladder, looked up at Stevens, her expression calm as she pulled the manual release for the access ladder’s emergency bulkhead. The thick barrier snapped shut between her and Stevens, and the upswell of liquid metal struck it with a gruesome, muffled thud.

  Faulwell reached down, and offered his hand to Stevens. “Come on,” Faulwell said. “We have to move.”

  Stevens, numb, took his friend’s hand. Faulwell helped him to his feet, and gently prodded him forward as they moved to seal the next bulkhead.

  * * *

  Duffy stumbled to a halt as he found the corridor ahead blocked by imploded walls and burning plasma conduits. He turned back and saw P8 Blue was still right behind him; her annoyed clicking noises, rendered hollow-sounding by their suits’ short-range transceivers, echoed inside his helmet. “If the starboard side is blocked, we’re trapped,” P8 said as she followed Duffy toward their only other route off this deck.

  “Lucky for us I’m a gambling man,” Duffy said. The pair turned the corner, and at the far end of the starboard corridor saw Security Guard Loten closing an emergency bulkhead. Duffy waved frantically at Loten and quickened his pace toward the Bajoran man, who noticed Duffy as the bulkhead began to close. Loten reversed the lever, opening the door, and gestured to Duffy and P8 to hurry. Loten pulled the release lever for the bulkhead as the pair scrambled across the threshhold, and P8 squeezed through the narrowing gap barely in time.

  Duffy and P8 were just getting their bearings on the other side of the bulkhead as Loten started hurrying off port-side. Duffy keyed his suit’s comm. “Loten. What’s the fastest route to the bridge?”

  Loten stopped, turned back toward Duffy, and forced open a pair of sliding doors leading to an empty, horizontal turbolift shaft. “Only way forward, sir,” he said, pointing into the shaft. “Breaches all over this deck. Ladder’s still clear in section one.” Loten turned away and resumed his rush toward the port-side corridor. “Gotta seal the mid-hatch before we lose this deck. Good luck, sir.”

  Loten sprinted clumsily away in his EVA gear and vanished around the corner. Duffy and P8 stepped into the horizontal turbolift shaft, closed the sliding doors behind them, and activated their wrist beacons. Until now, Duffy had thought of the da Vinci as a small ship. Suddenly, it looked much longer than he had remembered.

  As he and P8 moved toward the front of the ship, the sounds of the crumpling outer hull seemed to grow louder and more distinct. Then he realized it was because the thunder and roaring currents he had been tuning out for the past several hours had suddenly ceased. For a moment, he wondered if they had escaped the storms and made it out of the atmosphere.

  Then the shrieks of collapsing metal from the ship’s outer hull grew worse than ever, and Duffy realized that the da Vinci hadn’t climbed above the storms. The ship wasn’t on its way back to space. It had been pulled below the storms, into the thermal vortex.

  It was sinking.

  * * *

  Concentrate, Chief Diego Feliciano reminded himself as he worked. Focus. His thoughts kept drifting homeward, to his wife, Arlene, and only son, Carlos, and he had to keep tearing himself back to the present. He and Damage Control Team Four were racing to boost the power to the ship’s structural integrity field, which was failing under the steadily rising pressure of the atmosphere.

  To Feliciano’s left, security guards Friesner and Frnats were at the end of the dead-end corridor, following a series of extremel
y simplified directions being given to them by Lieutenant Keith Kowal, the ship’s gamma-shift operations officer, who was standing at the other end of the corridor, working on his own tangle of wires and pile of burned-out circuits. Friesner had no trouble identifying this or that piece of hardware, but Frnats didn’t know an ODN cable from an isolinear chip, and Kowal was quickly growing impatient with the Bolian woman.

  “Just take the small, red rectangular thing out of the top left slot, and throw it on the floor,” Kowal said. Frnats did as he instructed, and for the moment things seemed to be on track.

  “Chief,” Kowal said, “how’re we doing with the holo-generator bypass?”

  “Almost done, sir,” Feliciano said. If Kowal’s numbers were right, they had less than two minutes to increase the SIF’s power before the entire ship imploded. As soon as Kowal finished his EPS tap, Feliciano would shunt it and the ship’s other auxiliary power sources to the new bypass. As long as they didn’t have to explain to Frnats what any of that meant, they might just make it.

  Or they might not.

  The corridor’s outer wall began to warp, and the deck under their feet heaved and contracted. This corridor was seconds away from disintegrating. Feliciano saw his own look of recognition reflected in the faces of Kowal, Frnats, and Friesner.

  Kowal turned his attention back to the EPS bypass in front of him. “Feliciano, I need you to stay,” he said, then nodded his head sideways toward the open doorway beside him. “Frnats, Friesner, move forward and seal this bulkhead behind you.”

  Friesner continued rerouting various independent power sources to Kowal and Feliciano’s new relay. “Seal it yourself, sir,” she said, her hands moving quickly inside the mangled machinery. “I’m still working here.”

  Frnats turned to face the bank of glowing isolinear chips in front of her. “Ready for your next order, sir.”

  Kowal nodded. “Connect circuits one and two.”

  Feliciano saw the pieces of his own engineering puzzle quickly coming together. “Ready for bypass in ten seconds, sir,” he said confidently. Just a few more seconds. We can do this.

  There was a deafening roar as the wall behind the damage control team splintered. Feliciano felt the searing heat on his back even through his radiation-shielded pressure suit. It reminded him of the worst sunburn he ever got, when he was a boy visiting his grandfather’s house in Havana, where his wife and son now lived and were home waiting for him. Carlos’s seventh birthday was nine days away. Diego had missed his son’s last birthday, and he had promised Carlos he would make it home this time. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he had said, drawing an X with his finger across his chest, while his son mimicked him and flashed a smile wider than the Crab Nebula.

  Kowal shouted something to Feliciano, then turned and reached for the manual bulkhead release. Feliciano couldn’t hear the lieutenant over the wrenching of metal and the howling of liquid-metal hydrogen geysering up through cracks in the deck. He felt his footing slipping.

  He made an educated guess that Kowal’s EPS tap was ready; with one hand he opened the switch to his own makeshift circuit, and with the other he made the sign of the Cross. Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia… The jury-rigged power relay pulsed to life.

  Feliciano saved his last thought for Arlene and Carlos as the deck disintegrated and the outer wall exploded.

  * * *

  Lense’s eyes adjusted from the glare of her medical tricorder to the dimly lit sickbay. She was standing over Nancy Conlon, who’d been carried in by security officer Stephen Drew (who was unhurt, as usual) a few moments ago with a sizable chunk of broken duranium protruding from her shoulder blade.

  Lense looked from one end of sickbay to the other and counted only six people besides herself: Drew, Conlon, Corsi, medical technician John Copper, Nurse Sandy Wetzel, and Emmett, the Emergency Medical Hologram, who probably didn’t even really count as a person. Of the six, only Corsi and Conlon were patients. Lense knew that was a bad sign—in a crisis of this magnitude, few wounded meant many more dead.

  She removed the jagged shrapnel from Conlon’s shoulder. The petite engineer bit down on her lip and stifled a cry of pain—not that anyone but Lense would have been able to hear her over the melancholy wails of the da Vinci’s crumpling outer hull. Wetzel shone a light on Conlon’s wound, and Lense was glad to see it was clean of any metal fragments. “Emmett, hand me the sterilizer, please,” Lense said.

  The holographic physician passed the tool to Lense. “Sterilizer.”

  Lense used the device to clean the wound, then handed it to Copper and looked back to Emmett. “Dermal regenerator,” she said. Emmett reached for the device on the rolling cart next to him. His hand passed through the cart, then a static flicker disrupted his holographic body.

  “Emmett?” Lense said. “Are you losing power?”

  “A moment, Doctor, I’m running a diagnostic.” Emmett’s eyes darted from side to side, as if he were reading an invisible book at tremendous speed. He looked up, past Lense, to his program’s manual interface on the far wall of sickbay. “Doctor,” he said sharply. “Evacuate your staff and patients immediately.”

  “What’s—”

  Emmett’s voice became distorted and plagued with bursts of harsh static. “The computer that runs—snnrkkzzzt—my program is experiencing cascade—grzzzrrttt—hardware failures. That wall has been breached from the other side.”

  Lense grabbed her field surgery kit from the rolling cart. “Wetzel, Copper, grab everything you can!” She slung her surgical kit diagonally from her left shoulder and reached for a first-aid kit. “Surgical supplies, hyposprays, anything!” Wetzel and Copper scrambled to collect every portable piece of sickbay they could find. Lense slung the first-aid kit from her right shoulder and turned toward Conlon. “Can you walk?”

  “I think so,” Conlon said.

  “Go. Drew, you carry Corsi. Everybody move!”

  Drew lifted Corsi and moved straight for the door, with Conlon right behind him. Lense sprinted across the room to her office, scooping every loose item within reach into her first-aid kit. She leaned into her office and grabbed from her desk the thank-you plaque she’d been given by the president of Sherman’s Planet, and dropped it in with the hyposprays and neural stimulators.

  She stepped quickly to the door, and paused in front of Emmett, whose program was rapidly disintegrating. She had told herself hundreds of times he was just a program, a simulation and nothing more. But watching him come apart was like watching a person die, and she couldn’t hide her tears, which were undeniably real. “Good-bye, Emmett,” she said.

  “Good-bye, Doc—skrrzzk—tor,” he said. As his program collapsed, his garbled, disembodied last words echoed in the empty sickbay. “It’s been an honor serving with you.”

  Lense had forgotten she was still standing in sickbay until Drew shouted her name. “Dr. Lense! Come on!”

  Lense sprinted out of sickbay as the back wall began to collapse. Drew closed the door behind her, then grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly down the pitch-dark corridor. “Sickbay won’t hold,” he said. “And without pressure suits you folks are sitting ducks. We have to get you up to deck two.”

  Lense ran behind Drew, trying to follow the thin, quaking beam of light from his pressure suit’s wrist-mounted palm beacon. They turned the corner and found Wetzel, Copper, and Conlon waiting for them. Copper and Wetzel were carrying Corsi; each of them had one of the comatose security chief’s arms draped across their own shoulders. Conlon had activated her own palm beacon and was widening its beam to better illuminate the corridor ahead. Drew pointed forward.

  “Move out,” he said. “Double quick-time.”

  The group hurried down the narrow corridor toward an access ladder. They all had just congregated beneath it when the corridor behind them reverberated with a thunderous explosion, followed by a shock wave that knocked them to the deck. They heard the rapidly growing roar of something coming toward them.

/>   Drew sprinted away from the group, back the way they had come. Lense had never seen anyone run so quickly, in or out of a pressure suit. “Go!” he yelled back over his shoulder. “Get up the ladder!” Conlon scrambled to get a handhold on the rungs. Wetzel and Copper, holding Corsi between them, froze.

  Lense glanced back and saw the flood of superheated liquid-metal hydrogen raging around the corner less than ten meters away. Drew leapt toward one of the emergency bulkhead levers, located just a few meters ahead of the oncoming wall of destruction. He grasped the lever with both hands and let the weight of his falling body pull it down. The emergency bulkhead emerged from the wall and closed quickly as the flood raced toward it.

  Drew was on the flood side of the bulkhead. His momentum had carried him past the safe side of the door, and he was unable to get back on his feet in time.

  The barrier closed. The corridor vibrated with the low-frequency rumble of the flood striking the bulkhead with enough force to annihilate anything in its path. Lense forced herself to turn away from what she had seen and focused on what she had to do next.

  Save the living first, she thought, reminding herself to think like a doctor. She concentrated on remaining calm; detached; professional. Save lives now. Grieve later. She’d done it before, when her entire medical staff and half the crew of the Lexington were killed at Setlik; she’d do it now.

  “Are you all right to climb?” she asked Conlon.

  “I’ll make it,” Conlon said. Lense helped her onto the ladder, and Conlon started her ascent. Lense stood beside Wetzel and Copper and stared back down the corridor at the sealed bulkhead. Grieve later.

  As soon as Conlon was far enough ahead, Lense stepped onto the ladder and began climbing.

  * * *

  “Hawkins, get those fires out!” Gomez said to the muscular, dark-skinned security guard who’d been assigned to the bridge. She tripped over a chunk of the debris that had killed McAllan and dodged out of Vance Hawkins’s way as he hurried past her to extinguish the flames erupting from the science station and licking madly at the ceiling. The bridge was thick with smoke, the stench of burned circuitry, and the smell of blood. The few display screens that hadn’t been destroyed now showed only infrequent static.