Equinox - Diane Carey [3]
Staying in his chair, Ransom resisted the urge to help Burke to his feet. The crew didn't need to feel more helpless than they already were.
Burke staggered up and plunged to the nearest monitor. "Shields at twenty-nine percent!"
'Twenty-nine down, or down to twenty-nine percent left?" Ransom asked.
Burke's face was a blot of white against the dark bridge. "Down to twenty-nine percent! They're breaking through!"
The back of Ransom's hand swept a dribble of blood out of his eye. It was hot, gluey. "Let them."
Through a gush of brown smoke, Burke looked at him. "Sir?"
'Take the shields off line and recharge the emitters. That'll bring them back to full power."
Burke digested the idea, but hesitated. "The charging cycle takes forty-five seconds. We'll be vulnerable."
"We'll be dead if we don't get those shields back up." Ransom glanced around at the whole bridge crew, meeting eyes with as many as possible. "Arm yourselves."
Those two words, horrible and hated, doomed them to the next few minutes. He never said, "Red Alert" anymore. He said, "Arm yourselves."
Crew members stepped quickly around and over the blast-curled machinery and circuit guts spread across the deck, grabbing phaser rifles and hand phasers that hadn't seen the inside of a weapons locker in months. Burke struck a button on the console where he leaned. The "Arm yourselves" button for the lower decks.
Give them all a few seconds. Hold back. Hold on. Ransom himself stood up and shouldered his own rifle. So few people were on the bridge anymore ... he worried about the crew down in engineering.
Only five people down there right now. When would they get a chance to sleep again?
His chest constricted at the responsibility. He was
batting about sixtyforty with this kind of order, wild chance, daring risk. Not too good. Bad odds.
When everyone he could see was ready, armed and alert, he counted off five more seconds on behalf of the lower decks, then sharply ordered, "Drop shields!"
Burke struck his controls.
Shields down. Ransom read that in Burke's stance as the first officer worked with his left hand while holding a phaser in his right. Everyone held still, except for heads swiveling, eyes flashing, chests heaving.
The dissonant otherworld frequency began as softly as a mosquito's whine, then speared up to an eye-popping squeal. Louder, louder! Invasion!
"Recharge cycle?" Ransom asked, keeping his eyes moving.
"Thirty seconds!"
Would they beat it?
What a way of life. This was like being caught in a spider's web, being able to rush from thread to thread, only to be caught on each one, to face breaking away again, to get caught again, and the spider didn't like them.
The crew swept their weapon muzzles in short arcs, trying to keep each other out of the lines of fire. The otherworldly whine screwed their feet to the deck, hammering their skulls from inside. From his position in the middle of the bridge, Captain Ransom was the first to see the hideous inevitability.
"There!" He swept his phaser rifle clear of Burke's head, aimed at an opening fissure in midair near the ceiling. The rip expanded as the captain aimed. Sweat
squished between his hand and the phaser grip as he opened fire.
Burke ducked out of the way as half the remaining ceiling crashed to the deck where he'd been standing. While the fissure opened, Ransom kept firing at it, consumed with frustration as he saw another glowing ragged-edged fissure open behind Burke, and a third behind Chang.
The noise, louder now! Combined whining from three fissures, enough to drive a man to screaming. The phasers-more whining, howling added to the unnatural scream of the alien invaders-and bright, blinding heat rays demolishing everything they touched. Phasers on kill, scoring the interior of the bridge. They'd lost a crew member last week in sweeping friendly fire.
All around Ransom, the crew swung to fire