Anyone on the surface, he knew—be they Klingon, jeghpu’wI’,or whatever had put this entire nightmarish scenario into motion—was doomed. If they were fortunate, they already were dead, and would be spared the apocalypse that was to come.
“Reverse angle!” he ordered, feeling the ship complete its rotation as his helm officer aimed its bow for the comparable safety of deep space. The image on the viewer shifted as the impulse drive kicked in and the planet began to recede on the screen.
Then there was nothing for Kutal to do except watch with an odd mixture of horror and fascination as the entirety of Palgrenax collapsed in upon itself.
“Shock wave approaching!” shouted Centurion Darjil from his workstation at the center of the Bloodied Talon’s bridge. “Impact in fifteen ewa!”
Pointing to the centurion manning the helm console, Commander Sarith ordered, “Evasive! Deactivate the cloak and engage warp drive! Emergency power to the shields!”
With everyone on the bridge scrambling to carry out their tasks, Sarith watched as the planet came apart, splintering into billions of fragments that along with magma from the ill-fated world’s molten core were hurled outward in all directions. The core itself, freed from the tremendous tectonic and geothermal pressure at the heart of the planet, vaporized as it surrendered to sudden vacuum, generating a maelstrom of frenzied color and violent energy that served only to punctuate the awesome destructive power which had been unleashed.
None of that mattered to her now, however. The largest threat at this moment was what she could not see.
“Tactical plot!” she ordered, and Centurion N’tovek responded by activating a computer-created digital map outlining the ship’s current position in relation to the world referred to by its native inhabitants as Palgrenax. More accurately, it depicted where Palgrenax once had been, along with the trajectory of the Klingon vessel that the Talon’s sensors had been observing from behind the curtain of stealth offered by the ship’s cloaking device. The battle cruiser was already long gone, having made the jump to warp speed well ahead of the spherical shock wave also displayed on the map. The wave emanated outward from what had been the center of the planet, expanding in all directions with speed far greater than that of the Talon.
“Where are my warp engines?” she called out even as she felt the first effects of the wave beginning to wash over the ship. Her bridge crew gripped support struts, consoles, anything that might provide a handhold while bulkheads shook and deck plating rattled. In the depths of the ship, powerful engines attempted to wrestle it from the orbit of the planet at it succumbed to its death throes. Above all of that, she heard the cycling of the cloaking device as it was deactivated and all of the power it required in order to operate was redirected to the warp drive.
Sarith knew her ship. She was intimately familiar with all of its inner workings. She understood its defects as well as its strengths, its idiosyncrasies and the telltale sounds it made. Because of that awareness, she could decipher from the sound of the Talon’s engines—groaning as they received power once hoarded by the cloaking device and clamoring for more—that they would not achieve the levels needed to accelerate to warp speed before it was too late.
“Channel all available power to the shields!” she shouted. “Everything including life-support!”
Sarith heard the objecting groans of the Talon’s power-distribution system as the emergency changeover went into effect. Lights flickered across the bridge, and on the master systems station she saw computer-simulated representations of energy being redirected from systems that—should this tactic fail—would become irrelevant in short order.
Above it all, the force of the shock wave was becoming more pronounced. Every surface of the bridge vibrated, and a deep rumbling reverberated through the hull. In her mind’s eye, Sarith saw the wave coming at her, threatening to envelop her and the Talonlike a wave crashing over rocks on a distant shoreline.
Beside her, Ineti tapped the control on a wall-mounted communications interface. “All hands, brace for impact.” Then there was nothing more for him to do except grab Sarith by the arm and push her toward a nearby bulkhead and the handhold mounted there. She gripped the handle with both hands, muscles tensing as she counted down the ewauntil…
A deafening thunderclap roared through the bridge as Sarith felt herself upended and slammed into the bulkhead. Her handhold slipped from her fingers and she was thrown to the deck as the reverberation of the shock wave playing across the Talon’s overstressed deflector shields was translated through the hull of the ship. The cacophony all but drowned out the alarm klaxons and cries of fear and distress that came as the lights flickered and died, plunging the command deck into near darkness, with the only illumination coming from the room’s array of display monitors and consoles.
Still tumbling without control across the pitching deck, Sarith finally came to a halt as she slammed into the support mounting that housed the central hub workstations. The column’s sharp corner caught her in the side just below her rib cage and she felt bone snap, forcing the air from her lungs and making her cry out in pain.
“Emergency power to structural integrity and inertial dampeners!” she called out, each word like a stab to her injured side. She knew there was no way to outrun or outmaneuver the wave, and that their best option for survival was to ensure the continued operation of those shipboard systems which could prevent the crew from being killed simply by being tossed about the vessel’s interior.
The effects of the shock wave finally were ebbing, and Sarith felt the ship slowly beginning to calm itself as the dampeners compensated and reestablished normal gravity. Holding her damaged ribs, she gritted her teeth and struggled to sit up amid showers of sparks illuminating the otherwise gloomy bridge. The odor of burned wiring and insulation stung her nostrils and she looked up to see two of the master systems monitors erupt into flame, spewing glass and composite plastics across the deck.
Other muffled explosions echoed across the bridge, followed by a howl of agony from somewhere over her left shoulder that made Sarith flinch. She looked up to see N’tovek falling away from his workstation and landing with a sickening thud as his helmeted head struck the deck. Even in the feeble light she could make out mangled and flash-burned flesh on his hands and face.
No!
“Alert the doctor,” Sarith called out above the chaos enveloping the bridge. Clenching her jaw to bite back her own pain, she pulled herself around the central hub to where N’tovek lay unmoving. Ineti beat her there, kneeling down beside the fallen officer and immediately placing his fingers to the side of the other man’s neck. Sarith saw the fragments of shrapnel that mutilated the centurion’s once-handsome face, and that his eyes were fixed and staring at the ceiling, and knew without doubt that N’tovek was beyond any help the Talon’s physician, Ineti, or even she might provide.
“It does not appear that he suffered,” Ineti offered as he reached up to close the dead centurion’s eyes. “That much is fortunate, at least.”
Forcing the gamut of emotions raging inside her to remain beneath the veneer of composure she was fighting to keep in place, Sarith used her free hand to pull herself up, every movement agony as she rose to her feet. All around her, emergency lighting positioned at key points along the bridge’s perimeter struggled to activate, their weak attempts doing little to dispel the near total blackness engulfing the cramped chamber.