Star Trek: The Rings of Time (32 page)

He hastily tore away the tape. “Don’t make me regret this.”

“Not yet,” she promised, massaging her wrists. “I think we’ve got bigger problems.”

The thrusters flared at full power, recklessly burning through their fuel. No wonder the ship had been orbiting Saturn quickly enough to keep hitting the rings; never intending to make a return trip to Earth, O’Herlihy had felt free to expend all of their fuel on one final death spiral.

Fontana raced Kirk to the cockpit. She fired the braking thrusters.

“It’s too late!” she shouted. “We worked up too much speed. We’re caught in the gravity well.” She strapped herself in. “Brace yourself! We’re going in!”

2020

They entered Saturn.

Descending toward the planet, the
Lewis & Clark
skimmed the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. Icy wisps of crystallized sulfur and ammonia blew past the cockpit windows as the ship bounced violently off the dense cloud banks below. Freezing winds buffeted the ship, fighting a losing battle against the heat of friction and causing the flight deck to spin on its axis like a carnival ride. Kirk strapped himself into the pilot’s seat to keep from being tossed about the compartment. The hull began to creak alarmingly as the heat and pressure mounted outside. The temperature inside the cockpit climbed toward the hellish. Warning lights flashed all over the instrument panels. Alarms blared. The ship’s outer plating had been built to withstand the unpredictable hazards of a six-month voyage far from home, but Kirk knew that the ship couldn’t go much deeper into the atmosphere without burning up. It was a race to see what killed them first—the pressure, the storms, or the heat.

Kirk wanted to call down to Engineering, to tell
Scotty to divert all available power to the shields. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.

“What about Querez?” Fontana shouted over the chaos. The bumpy ride rattled her voice, giving it more than a touch of vibrato. Sweat poured down her face. “Where is she?”

“The airlock. Safe, last time I saw her.”

But for how much longer?

He let Fontana pilot the ship. She had more experience with this generation of vessel. He unhooked his clumsy gloves and tossed them aside. “Can you get us out of here?”

“I’m trying! But it’s no use. I’m hitting the brakes for all they’re worth, but the thrusters are running out of fuel. We can’t achieve escape velocity!”

“There has to be some way to break free!” Kirk said. Saturn’s tempestuous atmosphere descended for nearly a hundred thousand kilometers, but at this rate, the
Lewis & Clark
would burn up like a shooting star long before they reached the boiling seas of liquid hydrogen and helium far beneath the raging storms, let alone the planet’s molten core. “We just need more power.”

An idea hit him.

“The impulse engines! They’re our only hope.”

Fontana stared at him in shock. “From a cold start? There’s no time!”

The impulse engines had been shut down since they had arrived at Saturn; the crew had been relying
on controlled thruster burns to navigate around the planet. But it was possible that even the
Lewis & Clark
’s primitive impulse engines might have enough
oomph
to get them clear of the atmosphere again—if they could get them fired up in time.

“Trust me! It can be done.” Kirk had seen Scotty work wonders with his engines in the past, usually in the nick of time. “You just need to kick-start the fusion reaction by superheating the deuterium, then keep a close eye on the plasma conduits.”

“Or?” she asked.

“The ship blows up,” he admitted. “But you have to believe me. I know this technology better than you do, and I know what it’s capable of . . . with the right handling.”

She hesitated, uncertain whether to trust him. “I don’t even know who you are.”

He didn’t blame her for doubting him. He was asking a lot. “I know. But believe it or not, I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

Lightning flashed far below them. Deafening thunderclaps shook the flight deck. Banshee winds wailed over the agonized groaning of the hull. The ship was tossed about like a dinghy on an angry sea. The overhead lights flickered ominously. Sparks erupted from one of the auxiliary computer terminals. Sweat soaked through Kirk’s clothes; it was already hotter than Vulcan’s Forge and getting worse by the second. He feared for Zoe, who was still trapped down in the airlock,
with no clue of what was happening. He feared for them all.

“Oh, what the hell,” Fontana blurted. “It’s not like I’ve got any better ideas. Get to it, stranger.”

“Thanks!”

Kirk rapidly called up the impulse controls and started streamlining the start-up procedure. The computer flashed a stream of alerts, warning him that he was exceeding established safety parameters. He ignored the cautions and overrode the computer’s increasingly strident attempts to block him. He remembered reviewing the engine specs back in Shaun’s quarters; what he was attempting was risky, to be sure, but it was doable if you didn’t push these crude engines too hard. There was no way he could achieve the sort of thrust that more advanced impulse engines were capable of, but he wasn’t trying to approach light speed, just to get them out of this oversized pressure cooker before they went too deep.
Good thing Saturn’s gravity isn’t proportionate to its size,
he thought,
or we wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Almost set.” He let Fontana keep control of the helm, while he monitored the fusion reactor, the accelerator/generator, the drive coils, and the vectored plasma exhaust vents. All indicators were in the red zone, and the computer thought he was a maniac, but that couldn’t be helped. He was asking the
Lewis & Clark
to do something no Earth-based ship had done before. He could only hope that she was up to it. “On my count, three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Blastoff.

The impulse engines awoke with a roar. A burst of acceleration drove Kirk back into his seat. A bone-jarring vibration rattled the flight deck. Kirk anxiously watched the gauges. If the overtaxed engines were going to explode, it was going to be now. Fontana wrestled with the nav controls. The ship’s nose lifted upward.

“Yes!” she exulted. “We have liftoff!”

The deadly heat began to abate as the
Lewis & Clark
climbed toward safety. Wind, thunder, and lightning, coming from Saturn’s furious depths, chased them out of the planet’s atmosphere. Fontana let out a whoop as sulfurous vapors gave way to the frigid black emptiness of space and the dazzling brilliance of the rings.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “We did it!”

Kirk wiped the sweat from his brow. “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure that would work.”

“Now you tell me.” She eased back on the throttle, guiding the ship into a stable polar orbit that slipped through the gaps in the rings. The violent rattling subsided. For the first time in too long, the mission was back on track.

They were safe.

I’ll have to tell Scotty about this someday,
he thought.
If I ever get back to my own time.

She turned toward him, a thoughtful look on her face. Shrewd green eyes examined him. “I still don’t know who you are, mister, but I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thanks. That means a lot.”

She eyed him pensively. “Can you please tell me one thing? Where is the real Shaun?”

“I wish I knew,” Kirk said.

Before he could even try to explain, he remembered something else they needed to deal with first.

O’Herlihy.

He spun his chair around to check on the unconscious scientist, only to find the man missing. “Damn!” Kirk swore. “He’s gone.”

Fontana knew at once who he meant. After all, there was only one other man aboard the ship. An obscenity escaped her lips. “That bastard. He must have slipped away while we were saving the ship.” She clenched her fists. “God, he had me fooled this whole time. I still don’t get it. Why is he doing this?”

Kirk gathered that she hadn’t heard about O’Herlihy’s daughter. “I’ll explain later. We have to find him!”

Unstrapping himself, Kirk lurched from his seat and headed for the hatch. With any luck, O’Herlihy hadn’t gotten far. Maybe they could still catch him before he did any more damage. “Stay here!” he instructed Fontana, leaving her at the helm. “I’m going after him.”

He dove headfirst into the mid-deck below. Fire-retardant foam still drifted about the compartment. He put a hand over his mouth and nose to keep from inhaling it. The fans and filters labored noisily to scrub
the atmosphere, even as Kirk searched for the fugitive doctor. His eyes scanned the deck.

A warning light flashed above the airlock. An alarm sounded.

Kirk rushed to the entrance to the docking ring. Peering through the porthole in the hatch, he spied O’Herlihy inside the airlock, struggling with the outer hatch. According to the indicators, the compartment was still pressurized. He was not wearing a spacesuit.

“Marcus!” Kirk yelled at him through the door. “What do you think you’re doing?”

O’Herlihy turned to face him. His face was haggard and bloody. His nose looked broken. He spoke like a man who had lost all hope.

“Don’t blame yourself, Shaun. It’s not your fault. I’m the one who failed Tera, not you.”

Kirk realized that O’Herlihy intended to flush himself out the airlock.

“Don’t do it. We’ll find a way to save your daughter!”

“It’s too late,” the doctor said. “We’re too far away to do anything. I’ll never see her again, at least not in this life.” He smiled ruefully. “Look at it this way. I’m going to be the first man on Saturn. If I’m lucky, people will remember that part . . . and not everything else.”

An alarm squealed in protest as O’Herlihy fumbled with the hatch’s manual override. The ship didn’t want to open the hatch before the airlock was depressurized, but the suicidal scientist was determined to open it
anyway. Kirk didn’t underestimate the man’s abilities. O’Herlihy knew this ship as well as anyone.

“Wait!” Kirk pleaded. “Give me a chance to fix things.”

He remembered Zoe’s upgraded tablet, which was still clipped to his suit. He took hold of it and hacked into the airlock’s locking mechanism again. O’Herlihy cursed as the outer hatch refused to budge. The inner hatch slid open.

“Sorry, Doctor,” Kirk said. “I told you before, nobody is dying today.”

“I guess we’ve got a lot to talk about,” Kirk said.

Kirk, Fontana, and Zoe had convened on the flight deck. Prying Zoe out of the broken airlock had been a challenge, but, working together, he and Fontana had managed to get the damaged hatch to open. O’Herlihy was under a suicide watch in the infirmary, strapped down to the examination pad and monitored 24/7 by a closed-circuit camera. At the moment, the suicidal scientist was sleeping restlessly, having been sedated by Fontana in an instance of poetic justice.

“And plenty of time to do so,” she said. “Even with the impulse engines up and running, we’ve got a long trip back to Earth. Maneuvering is going to be tricky, now that we’ve used up most of our thruster fuel, but Mission Control is already working on a new flight plan to get us close enough to Earth. I’m going to cross my fingers and assume that everything will work out. I mean, we’ve beaten the odds so far.”

“That’s the spirit, Alice.” Zoe had traded her elastic cooling suit for a spare T-shirt and shorts. “Speaking of rescues, what about the doc’s daughter? What’s going to happen to her?”

Kirk was worried about that, too. “We’ve notified the authorities back on Earth. Last I heard, they were planning a rescue attempt, but it’s going to be a gamble. Apparently, HEL is holed up in a heavily fortified compound on an island in the Pacific Northwest. The odds are against anybody getting to Tera before her captors can execute her.”

“You’re not kidding,” Zoe said. “I’ve been to that compound, to interview HEL’s leaders.” She shuddered at the memory. “It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

If only he could do something to rescue Tera himself, but Earth was still three months away. Kirk could only hope that the special forces of this era were up to the task and that an innocent young woman wouldn’t end up as collateral damage.

An electronic chime came from the main communications panel.

“Hark!” Zoe said. “We’ve got mail.”

Fontana flew over to investigate. “Looks like we’re receiving a transmission.”

“From Earth?”

Kirk frowned, fearing bad news regarding O’Herlihy’s daughter. No matter what the man had done, Kirk didn’t want to have to tell him that Tera had been killed in a raid on HEL. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose one’s only child.

Maybe it’s just our new flight plan,
he hoped.

“No.” Fontana looked up from the terminal with a stunned expression on her face. She gazed at the empty reaches of space beyond Saturn’s rings. “Unless this equipment is malfunctioning, the signal is coming from . . . out there.”

Kirk felt a surge of excitement. He had almost given up waiting for a moment like this.

Could it be?

“What does it say?” he asked urgently. “Is there a message for us?”

“I’m not sure,” Fontana said. Her smooth brow furrowed in confusion. “Let me put it on the speakers.”

An unmistakable mellifluous voice emerged from the comm system.

“Hailing Captain Kirk,”
Uhura said.
“If you can read me, please respond.”

2020

Gravity hit Kirk like a ton of thermoconcrete. He staggered on the transporter platform, and McCoy rushed forward to prop him up. “Easy, Jim. Give yourself time to adjust.”

“Thanks, Bones.” He let the doctor help him off the platform. His bones and muscles, debilitated by weeks of zero gravity, felt like overcooked pasta. “Guess I’ve got some physical therapy in my future . . . if I don’t get my own body back.”

“Count on it,” McCoy said. “And don’t expect me to go easy on you.”

Kirk chuckled. It was good to be home.

“Welcome back, Captain.” Spock greeted Kirk. “I apologize for the delay, but as you know, we had other matters to attend to, and time travel is hardly an exact science.”