Her head swam as she took a moment to relax her brain, while her hands worked under the blue light of the portable sterile field she’d set up. She even indulged in closing her eyes for a few moments, until the field readings bleeped. Sounded like a cannon going off.
Crusher forced her eyes open and blinked a couple of times, focusing on the readings rushing across the miniature monitor screen. “Good, very good…I was right. Data, confirm that the physicians should stop fighting the fever. Let it run its course—it stresses the attacking prions.”
“Relaying that, doctor. Your progress is remarkable for only two days.”
“That’s me—Remarkable Bev. Look at that! I knew it was there…add that they shouldn’t inject supplements of kelassium, no matter how low the levels get.”
Data stopped working the console and looked at her. “Doctor, is it not true that Vulcanoids can suffer irreparable intestinal scarring from lack of kelassium?”
“Absolutely, but this test is hinting to me that the kelassium’s not leaving the body at all. Look…see these protovilium levels? Those only show up when there’s a repository of kelassium. They shouldn’t be reading this way if she is really K-deficient.”
Hashley looked up from organizing the medical instruments. “I’ve heard of that kind of thing! When I was delivering industrial incendiaries to Carolus, one of the company medics told me about how the body defends itself with some really weird stuff.”
Crusher only half-registered what he said. She had learned over the past hours to pick on a word or two without really committing herself to listening. “Mmm, this is weird, all right…if these chemical bonds are leading me down the right track, the kelassium’s being stored in the second liver. That tells me the attacking prions feed on kelassium. At least partially—Data, are you getting this?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Storing kelassium deprives the infection of an energy source. I think low kelassium’s part of the body’s natural fortification. Let’s take a chance.”
“Is that wise?” the android asked. “Some of these patients are dangerously ill already.”
Crusher leaned closer to her patient and checked the moaning young woman’s temperature in a particularly unscientific yet somehow instinctive way—with the back of her hand. “Mmm…brink of death’s a prickly place, Data. Sometimes you gotta dance to keep standing there.”
Even though she wasn’t looking at him, she could still somehow see, perhaps only in her mind, the android’s perplexed expression. He didn’t counter her comment, though, or question the risk she was taking. Instead he turned back to the portable comm console and relayed the latest thread of hope.
She wished she could speak more freely, venture some opinions about the crassness of hereditary rulership, mutter a few truths about how it always compromised freedom somewhere down the line—and not usually that far down either—but the four guards were always there, and one of the two women. The guards took turns standing watch every six hours, never leaving the immediate chambers or sitting rooms. And Sentinel Iavo floated in and out…at the moment he was floating back in.
“Any success, Doctor?”
Crusher looked up and took the moment to stretch her back and shoulders. “A little. Nominal. Enough to give us an idea that we might eventually beat some of this.”
Iavo went to the fireplace, which until now had been stone cold, and turned the head of an unrecognizable carved creature on the mantel; a hissing sound was heard, as flames jumped up in the fake logs, rose to a certain height, adjusted themselves, and settled as if they’d been burning all night. The royal chamber was instantly haunted, medieval.
“The empress may live because of your ministrations,” Iavo gauged. All across the empire, the royal family members are beginning to slowly outlive their symptoms.”
“So,” Crusher said, “you’ve been listening in on our relays, Sentinel?”
He paused. After a moment, he admitted, “Yes, of course.”
Still he did not turn from the fire. Turning in her chair, Crusher surveyed his tall form, narrow and dark against the flickering golden glow from beyond it, and marveled—not for the first time—that no matter where she traveled in the stars, no matter what strange forces she witnessed or what bizarre life forms she encountered, what twisted trees grew or weeds crawled, all over the galaxy fire was always the same color.
And also the same was the smell from the cauldron of ambition.
Sentinel Iavo held his hands toward the fire. Crusher saw them spread before him and slightly to the side, framed in paint-by-number fireglow.
Stretching one arm out, Crusher snapped her fingers once, quietly, toward Data. Flinching as if awakened, the android swiveled away from his console and sat watching. With her other hand, she waved Ansue Hashley into the corner behind her, then put a finger to her lips and gave him the evil eye. The man paled, his eyes widened, and with some wisdom garnered from years running an illegal route, he measured the sense of not arguing or even speaking.
Crusher leaned over the empress and touched the pallid cheek whose changes of color and heat had been the cusp of the doctor’s life for many hours. The empress moaned softly. A tear appeared in the corner of the quiet girl’s eye. Perhaps she knew.
The two standing guards moved away from the end of the bed. The two who had been resting now stood up.
“I suppose,” Crusher began quietly, “you’ve never had a problem like this come your way, Sentinel.”
Iavo gazed into the fire. “Nothing like this.”
“How does temptation taste to someone who has been loyal all his life?”
For a moment he was silent. He sighed. “It has a certain bitter spice.”
“Are you enjoying the chance?” she asked him. “Or are you cornered by other pressures?”
This time Iavo did not answer. The guards stood now in a line, three on one side of him, one on the other, all four facing Crusher, Data, Ansue Hashley, and the dying empress in her bed.
“It must be frustrating,” Crusher said, “always to be on the periphery of glory, nearly able to touch it, always condemned to taste but never swallow…and now to see yourself within a step of supreme power…and your followers to see themselves jumping all the obstacles in one leap—advisors, attendants…Sentinels…they all see an opportunity that otherwise would never have occurred. The murder of the empress would be hard for the people to accept, I’m sure, but no one here will care if a Federation doctor and her party suddenly turn up missing. Enterprise officers aren’t exactly on the empire’s favorite-people list, are we? Therefore, the empress and her family will die without continued treatment.”
Despite the fact that there was no real wood, the fire was engineered to crackle and snap—even to put forth the scent of burning autumn leaves. Still with his back to her, Sentinel Iavo lowered his head as if watching her words spin inside some kind of crystal ball in his mind.
Barely above a whisper, he told her, “You came here with no guards, madam.”
Crusher turned fully in her seat and rubbed her hands on her knees. “Now that you know I might save her, you have to go through with it, don’t you?”
The guard at Iavo’s right drew his ceremonial dagger. A second guard did the same while the others watched and gripped the handles of their own weapons.
Crusher stood up.
Sensing the change, Iavo now turned around to face her. Now the line of Romulans and the threat they posed clicked gracefully into place. For a brief moment Beverly Crusher stood in awe of this elegant race, so Vulcan in their stature, so human in their passion.
The last two guards pulled their knives. Firelight played upon the blades. And Iavo himself touched the still-sheathed ceremonial dirk that was the symbol of the highest nonroyal office in the Romulan Star Empire.
Data came to her side. Ansue Hashley stood behind them.
Crusher pressed back her shoulder-length hair, steadied herself, lowered her weaponless hands to her sides, and loo
ked directly at Iavo.
“How are we going to do this?”
Chapter Eighteen
“WHAT’VE WE GOT?”
Jeremy White responded with typically terse calm. “We’ve got thirteen minutes before we crash.”
“Yellow alert, everybody,” Stiles ordered.
“Yellow, aye!”
The CST shifted its manner substantially, as certain lights and meters went dark and others popped on, systems deciding which were important and which could wait. The din was maddening—the ship screamed and strained, engines howling right through the bulkheads, setting up harmonic vibrations in every member.
On the main screen and all the other exterior visual monitors, black space and a planet gave way to the filtering gauze of clouds. They were entering the atmosphere!
While he tried to keep control over his voice, to keep from shouting or sounding excited, it was necessary to speak up over the tin bray of the engines fighting to keep them in space.
“Veer out!” he ordered. “Get us some kilometers.”
Both hating and loving the fact that Ambassador Spock and the irascible Leonard McCoy were watching him through a dangerous moment, he forced himself to concentrate on anything but the two of them. For a second he thought Spock might stay at the science-readout station, where he so obviously and eternally belonged, where he fit so well on a starship or any ship, but the famous officer subtly stepped aside for Jeremy White to take that position.
Stiles hesitated an instant, soon accepting the appropriateness and grandeur of the sacrifice. Spock was letting them handle their own destiny without interference. How did he know to do that? How could he hold himself in check like this?
His stomach turning, Stiles stepped to the starboard side. “Come on, Jeremy, analyze it.”
Jeremy’s usually sedate expression was screwed into annoyance, possibly because of Spock’s presence. “It’s some kind of hybrid of a tractor beam and a graviton ray. I’ve never seen energy combined this way. If a CST can tow a starship, how can they be holding us?”
Travis asked, “Did they have this tech when you were here, Eric?”
“No, hell, no! Matt, can we—”
Realizing he couldn’t be heard five sections back over the scream, of the engines, he struck the nearest comm.
“Matt, can we effect any kind of a fair-lead landing?”
From section five, Girvan called over the mechanical scream, “Not at seven thousand feet per second at this angle we can’t!”
“Okay, let’s come up with something else. How long before the beam pulls us into the mountain?”
“Calculating,” Jeremy said. “Draw is increasing incrementally with our thrust ratios. They’re pouring the coals to it.”
“Let’s pour our own,” Stiles said. “Let’s try impulse point zero five, helm.”
“Point zero five!”
“Don’t shout.”
Stiles shrugged at the kid, a simple gesture that had a visible effect on the young terrified teenagers, who were all watching him to measure how many points they should go on the panic meter. Going into a battle situation, with rules to follow and procedures to rely on, had been something they could handle after Starfleet training. Having the ship tilt and scream under them as a planet sucked at it—that was something nobody’d ever trained for. Of course, having it smash into a planet’s surface would be hard to come back from, too.
Stiles found orders popping from his lips and responses coming from the crew in a step-by-step manner that had saved thousands of spacefarers in the past, a protocol upon which he now relied.
“Let’s have all the rookies to support positions. Primary crew take your emergency stations. Alan, watch the gyro display and tell me personally if it starts jumping. Let’s have red alert.”
“Red alert!” Travis echoed.
A dozen changes erupted with that order. The lighting all over the CST shifted to muted cherry. The hatches between sections slammed shut and pressure locked—sssschunk.
“Keep up the thrust.” Stiles knew they were doing that already. Just wanted to make sure nobody pushed the wrong button. The ship’s sublight engines whined valiantly. “Let’s see what we’ve got to fight with. Give me some numbers and colors.”
Immediately Travis called into the comm. “Engine thrust control, give us numbers and colors.”
Almost immediately section leaders’ voices from all over the ship started bubbling through the comm system to the bridge, because now all the hatches were closed. Travis, Zack Bolt, and Greg Blake relayed what he needed to know and left out what he didn’t.
“Six GCG, sir.”
“Red over yellow on the plasma injectors, Eric.”
“Green on the pellet initiators.”
“We’re nine points overbudget on the MHD. They’re trying to equalize.”
To his shipmates across the bridge Jeremy called, “Just compensate when it spikes!”
“Hear that, Jason? Compensate the spike only! Jason!”
The engine noise swelled to a howl, as if a hurricane were transferring itself from section to section right through the sealed hatches. Beneath the engine noise squealed the grind of real physical stress, as the ship twisted and cranked against the planetary force hauling on them. It was as if they were towing some great body that insisted upon moving in the opposite direction. And they were losing….
“Thrust increasing!” Greg Blake called. “No effect, sir! We’re slipping down even faster!”
“Put more power to it, then.”
What else could they do?
Stiles glanced sideways at Leonard McCoy, glad the doctor was sitting down. He didn’t want to be responsible for the famous elderly physician being scratched, spindled, or mutilated from falling down in the Saskatoon. Spock, too, seemed stable enough, despite the ravaged tilt of the deck and the slow spin that tore at the artificial gravity.
Travis punched at the controls with one hand while holding himself in place with the other. “Maybe we can twist out sideways—use the lateral—”
“We’d gulp too much fuel,” Jeremy argued. “We’re already burning the deuterium at fail-safe rate! It’s all we can do to hold position. Ten more minutes and we won’t have anything left at all. We’ve got nothing to twist with.”
Pulling himself bodily upward to Jeremy’s side, Stiles tried to make sense of what he saw on the maps and visual analyses of the planet below. “What’s the source of this beam? Anybody reading the surface?”
Greg Blake was the one to answer. “Reading an energetic pulse station at the northern foot of the valley. It’s east of the…looks like a swamp. No lifesigns. It must be automated.”
“Yes, there’s a swamp. Zack, target that facility.”
“Targeted,” Zack Bolt responded. “Phasers armed.”
“Fire phaser one,” Stiles ordered.
A single phaser beam broke from the ship’s weapon array and bolted down toward the planet, but hadn’t made it a half second away before suddenly bending sharply and bouncing like a ricocheted bullet off an invisible field between them and the planet.
Alan Wood covered his head, as hot sparks and bits of melting metal blew into the bridge from section two.
“Insulate!” Stiles yelled at the same time. From where he stood he could see his experienced shipmates grab the trainees and yank them to the interior areas of the CST.
Sure enough, the phaser beam lanced around, bending every time it hit the egg-shaped energy field and shooting back past the ship, until finally, inevitably, it struck hull.
An explosion ripped through the midsection electronics, blowing sparks, hissing—and somebody cried out in pain. Shouted orders and desperate measures shot forward, audible even through the closed hatches.
“So much for phasers…”
“Rupture! Section four, starboard PTC! Automatic sealant nozzle heads are fused—”
“Tell ’em to do it manually,” Stiles called. “Is everyone okay?”
 
; Jeremy looked at him grimly. “It’s a reflector envelope! Our own phaser hit us! We can’t fire out!”
“Pardon me…would you take a suggestion?”
Spock!
The voice jolted Stiles. He spun around and looked up to the grand figure on the starboard deck. “Are you kidding?”
The stately Vulcan kept a grip on the buffer edge of the science console and somehow made his awkward position look graceful on the wickedly tilted deck. “Quicksand. If we struggle, the beam sucks us down at a commensurate rate, drawing upon our own energy to exert more pull than we can exert thrust. If we hold still, all it may do is hold us in place.”
While the engines howled and the hull peeved, Stiles gazed at the ambassador and Spock back at him as if they had all week. Doubt and illogic spun through Stiles’s training and experience, then jumped the gully to irrational trust.
He looked at the readouts, at Jeremy’s face skewed with doubt, at Travis desperately trying to make sense of what the ultrascience officer had just suggested…as precious seconds slipped away, Stiles found himself adding up the crazy numbers.
His eyes flipped again to Spock, and he shook his head and winced. “I was about to fall for something again, wasn’t I?”
“Literally.”
“Sir…I hope you’re everything I think you are.” Without turning away from Spock’s steady eyes, Stiles tossed over his shoulder, “Cut thrust.”
“That can’t be right!” the panicked trainee at the helm protested, his eyes swiveling wildly. “We’ll get pulled into the planet!”
Stiles started to explain, then cut himself off and waved. “Travis!”
Perraton instantly yanked the midshipman from the helm and slid into the seat himself. “Cutting thrust. Sorry, kid. Go sit down till we see how dead we are.”
His own order eating at his stomach, Stiles leered at Spock as if to share the burden. His mind raced, as he scoured his memory of all those recorded missions on the first Starship Enterprise, when Spock faced the worst mysteries of the cosmos as Captain Kirk’s unswerving sidekick.
The whine of the engines depleted noticeably, like howling wolves running over a hill and disappearing into the mist.