WildFire Book Two Read online

  She kissed him softly on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Kieran.” She gently pushed past him and walked resolutely down the gangway toward the Oberth.

  Toward her future. Out of my life.

  “Sir, are you going aboard?” The voice came from behind Duffy. He turned to see a stoutly built, middle-aged human, a Starfleet chief petty officer, looking at him. “I have to seal the gangway, sir.” Duffy nodded and moved away down the main corridor. He kept walking until he reached one of the observation lounges.

  Duffy positioned himself in front of the twenty-meter-tall transparent aluminum windows and watched silently as the Oberth cleared its moorings and powered up its navigational thrusters. The compact starship pulled away from the spacedock and allowed Starbase Control to guide it through the massive space doors.

  She’s gone, he thought. She’s really gone.

  The Enterprise was scheduled to remain here at Starbase 67 for nearly a month to undergo major systems repairs following a rather brutal encounter with a quantum filament. Without Sonya, however, Duffy was certain it would seem much longer than that.

  * * *

  I’m never going to see you again.

  The auxiliary shuttle-bay door slid closed, separating Duffy from Gomez. His departure from the da Vinci was only seconds away. Once he passed through the force field, there would be no coming back. He knew that the chances of the da Vinci and her crew escaping the atmosphere were dismal. He also knew that beating long odds was what this crew did best.

  He turned and faced the force field. To step through it, to leap alone into the darkness, would mean releasing his hold on everything and everyone he cared about. His knowledge of what he was about to lose held him back. This would be no accidental death, no calamity met in the spur of the moment.

  This was a calculated sacrifice.

  Duffy closed his eyes and thought of Sonya.

  If I don’t go, we’ll both die for certain. If I succeed, at least she’ll have a chance.

  He opened his eyes and faced the dark tabula rasa beyond the force field. He imagined all the people and things he treasured as a tenuous clump of cold dirt clutched in his fist, stretched out over a dark chasm. He pictured his fist opening, his handful of dirt falling away in a slow earthen cascade, vanishing into the abyss of time.

  Empty-handed, Duffy stepped forward through the force field and surrendered himself to the darkness.

  Good-bye, Sonnie.

  * * *

  Falling…

  Duffy felt weightless, disembodied. He listened to his own shallow breathing, which grew weaker with each labored ebb and flow from his desperate lungs. I’m not dead…yet.

  He opened his eyes.

  He drifted slowly into the center of a hollow space within the sphere of energy. He guessed that this empty space was also spherical, but without a reference point he couldn’t be certain. He knew only that he was surrounded by a vacuum, beyond which pulsed an unbroken surface of radiant energy. Logically, Duffy knew he should be alarmed; his air supply was reading empty. His suit was out of power. Suffocation was only moments away. Yet he felt peaceful…serene…unafraid.

  They were reading my memories. Duffy sorted through the episodes of his life that he had vividly relived moments ago, as well as countless others that had flickered by so quickly as to be nearly subliminal in their effect. Memories of flight…memories of loss, of separation…of Sonya…

  …memories of them. Duffy searched his mind for several newly made memories, hidden in the fractured puzzle of his own past: Life formed on an unfamiliar world beneath a reddish star; a saurian species rose through stages of evolution; they mastered symbolic thought, built civilizations, waged wars; they soared away to the stars; they evolved, as many other corporeal species before them had done, into non-physical beings.

  They were giving me their memories as they read mine.

  The Ovanim. They call themselves the Ovanim. Duffy marveled at how much the Ovanim had been able to impart to him in images and mathematical concepts, without ever resorting to spoken words. The Ovanim had long since abandoned physical bodies, and, disdaining contact with physical beings, chose to make their home here, deep within a gas giant, an environment so hostile to corporeal species that they had expected to enjoy their solitude for at least several more millennia. The subatomic legerdemain they’d had to concoct to make this domain a reality was more complex and subtle than anything Duffy had imagined possible.

  Too bad I won’t live long enough to study it.

  The light around Duffy began to dim. He looked around, confused. An image nearly a hundred kilometers tall took shape on the curved inner surface of the hollow sphere in which he floated. The image that formed was that of Galvan VI, as seen from space. Then a new shape appeared—the U.S.S. Orion, silhouetted against the glowing, bluish gray gas giant. The ship disappeared into the planet’s atmosphere.

  Moments later, the flash of the planet igniting into a nova blinded Duffy. He squeezed his eyes shut, and held them closed until the glare subsided.

  He peeked cautiously at the newly forming image. It was a short series of quick images, rendered in what, to Duffy’s failing vision, looked like the impressionistic stipple of a Monet painting: The da Vinci navigating through the hazardous atmosphere; the Work Bugs inspecting the wreck of the Orion; Corsi and the warhead; the collision of the Orion and the da Vinci…

  Duffy’s vision blurred. He struggled to shake off quickly growing feelings of panic and disorientation.

  Have to focus…have to fo—

  —cus… Duffy snapped back with a start. Passed out. Not much time left.

  The image that now towered over Duffy, larger-than-life, was himself, disarming the Wildfire device. The image melted into the likeness of Sonya, shining in violet light as Duffy had last seen her…then it became his air gauge, flashing EMPTY on his visor moments before his suit lost power.

  The thoughts that whispered in his mind were not his own.

  …disruption…light…death…defend…

  I understand, he thought. You defended yourself.

  Duffy focused on making himself heard and hoped his efforts now were not futile. This was going to be his last first-contact mission. He was determined to make the best of it.

  We didn’t know you were here. It was an accident.

  …understand…accident…forgiveness…peace…

  Yes. We, too, wish to live in peace. We’re sorry.

  …duffy…rescue…death…sacrifice…

  It was my duty. My life for yours.

  …understand…grateful.

  The images on the inner sphere shifted again. Duffy found himself surrounded by images of Sonya: as he had first seen her that day when he walked past her on the Enterprise; smiling at him as she pulled him into their first kiss; running toward him on Sarindar, sun-browned and scarred but also defiant and fearless and beautiful; laughing hysterically at one of his stories of drunken misadventure; graceful in repose under starlight on the night that he knew he wanted to marry her.

  Sonnie…

  Duffy drew a pained, shallow breath, then exhaled and felt his life slip away, like a fist opening into a hand.

  Chapter

  9

  Ina was grateful not to be on the bridge right now. I never know what’s happening when I’m up there, she thought. All I can do up there is sit and wait. At least down here I’m doing something.

  Gomez moved from one person to the next, giving so many orders so quickly that Ina couldn’t keep track of them all. Minutes ago Ina’s task had sounded simple, but the heat and exhaustion had taken their toll. Can’t breathe, Ina thought, battling back an irrational urge to scream. Can’t get my hands to follow simple commands. It didn’t help that main engineering was growing darker by the minute as the chemical flares expired.

  “Mar!” Gomez shouted up at her. “How’s that phase adjustment coil coming?”

  Ina nodded in reply. “Almost finished,” she said over the deaf
ening groans of the ship’s buckling spaceframe.

  “Step it up, we still have to initialize the power transfer conduit,” Gomez said before turning her focus toward Stevens.

  Ina finished calibrating the coil and forced herself to climb the ladder to the PTC. Still so much to do, she realized. But at the rate the hull is collapsing… She banished that thought from her mind and moved on to the next task.

  * * *

  Faulwell sat quietly at the helm. A parade of sweat rivulets meandered through his beard.

  He looked to his right, toward Abramowitz, who sat hunched over the ops display, her features dimly lit by the feeble blue-green glow of the console in front of her. To his left, Captain Gold was little more than a dark phantom in the shadows, leaning against the railing, his head drooped and his body sagging from injury and exhaustion.

  Faulwell stared blankly at the engine function display, which remained resolutely at OFFLINE. His orders were simple enough: If that readout changed fromOFFLINE to ONLINE, he was to press the blinking green pad on the helm. He was expressly forbidden from touching anything else.

  Nothing like a vote of confidence.

  He considered mentally composing a letter to Anthony, but the notion of crafting a death note he couldn’t send—and wouldn’t want to, if he survived—seemed morbid and futile.

  Not to mention melodramatic. Anthony always hated when I—

  Hates, Faulwell corrected himself. It’s not a pasttense situation just yet.

  Faulwell fixed his attention on the engine function display and poised his hand above the blinking green pad.

  And he waited.

  * * *

  Gomez forced herself to keep moving from one end of main engineering to the other; her legs felt ready to fold with each step. Her every breath was a gasp, hot and toxic with carbon dioxide. All she saw now were indistinct shadows, some of them sprawled unconscious across the deck.

  She rotated her attention among the crewmembers who were still conscious as she issued orders, offered suggestions, and lent a hand wherever she thought it would help. Above her, Ina seemed confused and disoriented.

  “Mar!” Gomez shouted to the red-haired Bajoran woman. “How’s that phase adjustment coil coming?”

  “Almost finished,” Ina said. Gomez could barely hear her over the shrieks and wails of the da Vinci hull being crushed by the atmosphere. Only a few minutes before it’s all over, Gomez told herself. Can’t let them lose momentum.

  “Step it up, we still have to initialize the power transfer conduit,” Gomez said. Ina nodded her acknowledgment.

  If it were just me… The thought dangled incomplete as Gomez pictured Duffy alone, dying imprisoned in his failing pressure suit; the grieving part of her wanted to surrender now and follow him into the darkness. But it’s not just me.

  She picked up the gravitic calipers and moved to help Stevens finish priming the master EPS control.

  * * *

  Gold hated the waiting more than anything. More than the heat, more than the stench of death on his bridge, more than the threat of sudden destruction. Starfleet Academy never told aspiring young officers about the impotence of command. In a crisis, a captain belongs on the bridge, they told us—especially when he’s missing a hand and can barely breathe.

  There was nothing more Gold could do to help Gomez and her team. The light from the bridge consoles was fading rapidly, and Gold found it almost impossible to distinguish the shapes of Faulwell at conn and Abramowitz at ops.

  The minutes and seconds stretched on, bringing with them for Gold a floodtide of nostalgic reminiscences.

  He thought of his family as he had last seen them, weeks ago. Rachel, his wife, waved good-bye to him from the visitors’ lounge window of the starbase; behind her was their son, Daniel, flanked on one side by his adult sons, Matthew and Michael, and on the other by his wife, Jessica. Running amok behind the two young men were their children—Matthew’s son Adam had become fast friends with Michael’s boy Tujiro. Matthew’s little girl, Jacqueline, was busy being fussed over by her mother, Ilana, and Michael’s wife, Hiroko.

  Daniel’s daughter Esther stood with her Klingon boyfriend Khor. Daniel’s other daughter, Leah, had not been there that day. Leah had severed her ties with the family nearly fifteen years ago, after her marriage to Suvak of Vulcan. Gold had heard from a former shipmate now stationed on Vulcan that Leah and Suvak had two daughters.

  It pained Gold that he had never seen either of Leah’s girls with his own eyes; it hurt him worse to see the lingering sadness Leah’s estrangement caused Daniel. Daniel was Gold’s eldest and had always held a special place in his heart. In many ways Daniel was the spitting image of his father, tempered by the better qualities of his mother. Gold had to wonder now if he had shown too much favoritism to Daniel during his youth. Five other children I sired, how many still talk to me?

  It was just bad luck that Gold’s first command of a deep-space exploration mission came shortly after his second son, Joseph, had been born. He wished he had spent more time with Joey; he wished he’d had more time with all his kids. He’d tried to atone for his mistakes when Nathan, his youngest son, was born. The attention he’d showered on Nate had only alienated Joey further.

  By the time Sarah and Rebeccah had come along, Gold spent so much time away on starships that the two young girls once mistook him for a stranger when he came home on leave. His eldest daughter, Eden, had always seemed distant to him, despite the fact she was his “princess,” and that he was as close as humanly possible to Eden’s oldest daughter, Ruth, currently expecting the latest in a series of great-grandchildren. As for Eden, Gold hadn’t seen or spoken to her in over a year—not since near the end of the Dominion War, after the liberation of Betazed, when most of the extended family had gathered for the funeral of Nathan and his wife, Elaine.

  The memory of the funeral was like an open wound for Gold; the merest thought of it stung his eyes with tears. Can’t believe I had to bury my baby boy…. Goldreminded himself that his family had been fortunate—many of his friends’ families had buried several children each; some had lost entire generations to the war. Gold took comfort in the fact that Nate and Elaine were survived by two wonderful daughters, Danielle and Simone—two strong young women who clearly had been cast from the same mold as their grandmother, Rachel.

  Gold didn’t remember now how he and Rachel had ever found time to make six children. Those six children had in turn raised nineteen grandchildren, whom Gold and Rachel—Well, more Rachel than I, he admitted to himself—doted on. And now the grandchildren were having children—fifteen so far. Gold had long since lost count of the nieces and nephews his five brothers and sisters had sired, not to mention the grandnieces and grandnephews, and their scions after them.

  Like a small army, this family, he thought, with amusement that quickly turned bittersweet. And when do we see each other now? Weddings and funerals. We need to find some other reason to get togeth—

  Gold winced at a distorted boom of implosion that was both thunderous and delicate, like a giant’s foot crushing a glass sculpture underwater. There goes one of the warp nacelles, Gold realized. As a similar sound rumbled ominously, signaling the destruction of the other warp engine, Gold feared his family’s next gathering would be yet another funeral.

  * * *

  Lense had been unable to stay on the bridge once she’d realized that Duffy wasn’t coming back. I tend to the living, she had told herself when she bolted away from the science station.

  After she had retreated to the solitude of her corridor full of unconscious patients, she’d realized the real reason she had fled was so that no one on the bridge would see her cry.

  She blinked the tears from her eyes and struggled to pierce the darkness. She checked the ampoules’ markings by the light of her medical tricorder, and loaded up three full hyposprays of concentrated melorazine.

  That should be enough for everyone still on board, she thought. I just hope I can reach e
veryone in time…. No—wrong. She closed her hands around the hyposprays and amended her wish: I just hope I don’t need to use these.

  * * *

  Faulwell stared at the flashing green pad on the helm console. He fixated on it, clung to it as a symbol of his last hope.

  The light stopped flashing. It dimmed, flickered weakly for a moment, then went dark—along with all the rest of the bridge stations. No light came from the corridor aft of the bridge. The command center of the ship was dark as a grave.

  “Sir?” Faulwell said, unsure how to continue. He swallowed nervously even though his mouth was dry and pasty.

  “I know,” Gold said quietly from somewhere unseen.

  Isolated in blackness, Faulwell heard Abramowitz’s shallow, agonized attempts to breathe the stiflingly hot, putrid-smelling air that grew thicker and more rank with every exhaled breath.

  He felt a prickly heat spread across his back, dogged by wandering beads of sweat that made him think of insects crawling on his skin.

  The ship’s outer hull howled like a pack of drowning wolves. Faulwell’s knuckles tightened reflexively on the edges of his console. He braced himself for the searing impact of the liquid-metal atmosphere that threatened to surge through the ship in the next few seconds.

  The sudden flaring brightness and deafening whoosh still caught him by surprise, and he let out a cry of terror—

  —which caught halfway in his throat when he realized the sudden brightness was coming from the bridge’s main overhead lights, and the whoosh was the sound of the resurrected life-support system pumping fresh, cool air into the bridge.

  “Engineering to bridge,” Gomez said over the comm in a weary monotone. “Partial main power restored. Starboard impulse engine online.”

  Faulwell and Abramowitz turned in unison to look at Gold, who stood cradling his handless left forearm. His eyes were closed; his mouth was pursed tight. He nodded slowly. After a few seconds he opened his eyes, swallowed, and spoke slowly and distinctly in a brittle near-whisper: “Good work, Gomez.” Gold looked at Faulwell with a dark and melancholy expression. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Gold said.