Star Trek: ALL - Seven Deadly Sins (49 page)

Reed rushed over to help Massey.

“What
was
that?” she yelled at Thayer.

“Impulse turn!” he stammered, in a haze of confusion. “The engines fired all by themselves, boss—evasive maneuvers, trying to shake us loose!”

“Shut it down!”

“Helm negative! Still not answering!”

Reston
tilted hard to port. Even more havoc broke loose on board
Celtic,
conveyed in bits of audio scattered across a stroboscope of nightmare images. In the middle of it all, Reed spotted Walsh searching for her through the viewscreen, his voice cutting in and out as he screamed over the insane pandemonium on his own bridge.

“Jenna . . . for God’s sake
 . . . stop—”

“Evan!” she pleaded in return. “Break off now! Get the hell out of there!”

Reed didn’t even know if Walsh could hear her, but she heard
him
when he gave the order to kill the tractor beam.
Celtic
cut the transmission at the same time, the small ship appearing on
Reston
’s viewscreen as she throttled up her engines and started pulling away.

“Engineering, bridge,” she said. “Disengage navigation and tactical.”

“I’ve already pulled the node, Jenna!”
Harlow replied.
“It didn’t have any effect! Those subsystems are still active, jacked through another location!”

“Where?”

“The starboard core!”

“Jesus,” Reed whispered, looking up at the viewer. She prayed
Celtic
would be gone, but instead, the ship loomed larger and larger as
Reston
picked up speed to pursue. “Core, bridge—initiate emergency failsafe! Halt all processes!”

Locarno didn’t answer.

“Are you listening, core? Take it down now!”

Reston
poured on even more speed, swinging around
Celtic
in a wide arc.

“Weapons going hot,” Massey said. “Phasers acquiring target.”

“Goddammit, Nick! Where are you?”

Feedback pierced the overhead speaker before it went dead. Reed shot to her feet, hurling herself over the deck railing and taking the tactical controls for herself. She mashed her hands against the panel, which ignored her commands. All she could do was watch helplessly as
Reston
closed in, her forward phaser banks charging to full power.

And then lightning split the darkness.

A single burst—impossibly hot, impossibly bright—seared the distance between the two vessels, scoring a perfect hit before
Reston
roared over and then away from
Celtic.
It happened so fast that Reed couldn’t fathom how such a strike could leave any serious damage. A fleeting sense of hope swelled within as
Reston
withdrew to a safe distance, coming about like a hit-and-run predator to survey the condition of its prey—but that notion soon collapsed when
Celtic
crossed back into view, and the full extent of
Reston
’s lethal blow revealed itself in horrifying detail.

A thin column of atmosphere vented from
Celtic
’s bridge, like blood hemorrhaging from a jagged wound. The ship listed into a slow roll, her thrusters firing off at random even as her impulse engines struggled to keep her on a level course, but it soon became apparent that
Celtic
was just tumbling through space. Reed stepped forward to peer through the fog, making out the bits and pieces of debris that trailed the ship—until it dawned on her that in the flotsam, she could
trace the unmistakable shape of human bodies. Almost all of them were dead, killed instantly by the force of impact and sudden decompression; but at least one still lived, arms and legs thrashing for a few agonized seconds before succumbing to the frozen vacuum.

Reston
fired again.

The phaser beam struck
Celtic
’s warp nacelle, blowing a hole clean through to the other side. The hit knocked her into a flat spin, streams of hot energy plasma spilling into the void. Impulse engines flickered as she made a feeble attempt to right herself, her aft photon launcher spitting out a single torpedo to provide some cover. The shot careened off into nowhere, but
Reston
punished her nonetheless. One final salvo took out
Celtic
’s impulse deck—a spectacular detonation that left the ship dead in space.

The battle had taken all of one minute.

Reed stumbled back, her jaw agape.

“My God,” Massey whispered, tears streaming down her face. She resumed the tactical station, quickly getting a read on their status. “Holding position, phasers standing down. Power diverting to the main weapons pod.”

Reed didn’t listen. She was already at the science station, clicking through a chain of interfaces until she found one that gave her access to the ship’s sensors. Releasing a wave of active scans, she trembled while she waited for the signals to bounce back. There, amid all the clutter, tentative life signs emerged from
Celtic
’s battered hull.

Survivors . . . 

Reed obsessed over those readings, even as a powerful tremor welled up through the decks. She blocked out everything around her, even as the bridge swelled with a tsunami of coherent white light. And she dared not look at the viewscreen, even as she ran for the turbolift—because she knew the purpose of the terrible shriek that followed, and what the cutting beam would do to what was left of
Celtic.

She had to stop it.

If it wasn’t already too late.

Ten decks below, the lift doors opened into a maze of swirling red lights and alarm klaxons. Reed plunged headlong into that chaos, phaser in hand, heedless of direction but unable to stop. She caught a
glimpse of a deck plan against one of the bulkheads, and followed the arrows that pointed to the starboard computer core. By the time she reached it, Reed’s heart was banging against her ribs like some caged animal, her body racked by adrenaline tremors. Discharges of electric blue spilled through a window that looked into the core chamber, illuminating plumes of smoke that leaked out from underneath the closed doors—but a rusty odor and the sudden constriction of her lungs told Reed that this was no fire.

Krylex mist . . . 

The gas sucked oxygen out of the air, making her double over and cough. Reed took one last deep breath and made a dash for the door, prying open the access panel and trying to disable the magnetic lock. She punched in the default code, her fingers shaking as she stole glances through the glass to see if anyone was still inside—but all she saw was a churning cloud of toxic chemicals, lit up like a thunderstorm in the black of night.

Until a dark mass launched itself at her.

Reed jumped back at the sight of it, her vision blurring as hypoxia started to creep into her brain, but even in her stupor she could see that its motions lacked reason or conscious thought. It raised one hand and clawed at the window, hooked fingers leaving behind smears of blood as it dragged itself off the floor. At first, Reed thought it was one of the Borg, from the pallid complexion of its skin to the thatch of veins that crossed its eyes—but then she suddenly
recognized
its features, concealed behind the breathing mask that covered its face.

Nick Locarno rolled away as Reed pointed her phaser at him.

She shattered the window with a short burst, shards of transparent aluminum raining down around her. Reed then crawled forward, grabbing Locarno by the arm and dragging him away from the lethal cloud. She propped him up against a nearby wall, his head lolling as he drifted in and out.

“Nick!” Reed implored. “Stay with me, Nick!”

“Celtic
 . . . tractor beam . . . triggered a defense routine.”

Reed shook him hard, trying to get through.

“Tell me how to shut it down, Nick.”

“Failsafe . . . didn’t work . . .”

“What do I do?”

Locarno slumped over, losing consciousness. Leaving him, Reed staggered back to the opening and stood there, krylex mist billowing all the way up to her waist. She was vaguely aware of the phaser still in her hand, of her thumb pushing the power up to maximum, but had no clue of where to take aim—or if it would do any good. All she could do was level the weapon at the largest component she could find, while a fury she had never known burned her from the inside out.

“Just DIE!”
she screamed.

And mashed on the trigger.

The turbolift doors opened onto the bridge—the post Jenna Reed had abandoned, something Evan Walsh would never have done. She already hated herself for that, even before the crew—
her
crew—turned their stares on her, just long enough to convey their awareness of her sin. Reed knew they wouldn’t forgive her, nor did she want them to. They needed their anger, just as she needed to maintain control—or at least the illusion of it.

Confronted with the horrors unfolding on the viewscreen, however, it was all Reed could do to keep it together. Shuffling forward, she joined the others in bewildered silence as they witnessed the final destruction of
Celtic.
The fires on board still burned, leaving trails of expanding smoke between the pieces of her hull, each section neatly severed from the others. They drifted apart slowly, rending the shape of the old vessel until nothing recognizable remained—just a collection of scattered parts meant for assimilation, deck lights flickering in the frozen dark as
Celtic
consumed the last of her remaining power.

Reed didn’t even presume to mount a rescue. The cutting beam had done its work.

Nick Locarno, who had remained behind in the lift, now emerged to see the damage for himself. His face was drawn, his eyes red, bloodied beneath the surface from ruptured capillaries—but still
he managed to shed tears, the pain only heightening his disbelief. He rammed a fist down on the nearest console, drawing everyone’s attention—including that of Rayna Massey, who flew into an instant rage at the sight of him.

“You!”
she hissed.

Massey slammed Locarno against the bulkhead before anyone could react, her fingers dug into the skin of his throat. Had she coordinated her attack, she might have killed him right there, but Massey just pounded on him, tearing at whatever she could find, scratching him deep before Reed and Thayer could pull her off.

“You son of a
bitch
!” she seethed, still lunging at him.
“You
did this!”

Locarno slid to the floor, wheezing. Nicole Carson rushed over to his side, opening up his collar to help him breathe, but he refused the help. From his haunted expression, Reed could tell he also blamed himself.

“You routed tactical through the computer core!” Massey shouted. “You
let
that thing cut loose with full phasers against our ship!”

Reed lowered her head. “That’s enough, Rayna.”

“Why’d you do it, Locarno?” Massey goaded, showing no signs of slowing down. “You have some kind of beef with the old man? Was this your way of settling the score?”

“I said, that’s enough.”

“Or maybe you just like getting people killed. Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

“That’s an order, Massey!”

Reed had no idea where her voice came from, but it slapped Massey hard, demanding no less than total compliance. She drove the point home with an acid stare, while everyone else stood by and held a collective breath. Reed wasn’t even sure what she would do if Massey refused to back down, though the hand that reached for her phaser suggested otherwise.

“Look
at him!” Reed snapped, motioning toward Locarno and all his wounds. “The core damn near suffocated him when it flooded the compartment with krylex mist.
That’s
what happened when he tried to pull the plug.”

Massey didn’t appear convinced. Reed, for her part, didn’t care.

“I don’t need a loose cannon, Massey,” she finished. “Not here, not now. The way I see it, you got a choice to make.”

Reed gave it a minute, then let the tactical officer go. She nodded at Thayer, and he did the same. Massey shook them off, retreating a short distance while she weighed her options. Reed could tell that the woman was gauging the others, to see whose side they would pick—but everyone was still in limbo, reeling from
Celtic
’s death spiral. They weren’t about to take that kind of step.

At least not yet.

Massey folded her arms and turned away. It was a truce, of sorts, though Reed doubted it would last very long.

“Anyone else?” Reed asked, daring each member of her crew to answer. When no one did, she projected the best image of authority she could muster. “Right now, I don’t give a damn about who did what. We need to focus on the
problem
—which means I need all of you clear and thinking. Is that understood?”

No one objected. For Reed, that was enough.

“Very well,” she said. “Where do we start?”

Locarno got back on his feet and cleared his throat.

“We have about fifteen hours before Starfleet arrives,” he said quietly. “After that, it won’t take them long to find us.”

“That’s good, right?” Carson asked, eager for any kind of hope. “All we have to do is hold out until they get here.”

“And take us into custody,” Thayer finished. “We’ll be lucky if they don’t hand us over to the Klingons when they’re done.”

Reed saw Locarno shake his head. She knew exactly what he meant.

“It’s not that simple,” she informed them. “There won’t be any arrests. Starfleet will destroy this vessel the moment they find it.”

“What?”
Carson gasped.

“This ship is a Borg relic,” Locarno explained. “They’re not even allowed to attempt contact. Once they see what we are, they’ll blow us out of the sky.”

“But if we send them some kind of signal,” the medic stammered. “Let them know that we’re on board—”

“It won’t make a difference,” Locarno said, withdrawing. He paced all the way across the bridge, where he hovered far away from the
others. That left only Reed to handle the crew, every last one of them looking to her to make a decision.