The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [146]
Near Romulan Space
TRIP REJOICED WHEN THE INSTRUMENTS confirmed that their ship had actually made it past the known boundaries of the Romulan Star Empire. Of course, his joy was mitigated by the grim realization that Admiral Valdore’s ships weren’t about to be stopped by a border arbitrarily drawn onto some stellar cartographer’s maps.
Trip could be thankful at least that he and Ehrehin had managed to widen their small lead over their pursuers, albeit only modestly. Or until the next time this rust bucket’s warp drive conks out, he thought, hoping he wasn’t tempting fate by visualizing that scenario.
Perhaps a minute later, as he spared as much power as he dared to scan the subspace bands, Trip’s earlier elation vanished entirely.
God, no. No, no, no. Trip’s heart plunged abruptly into a headlong freefall as he continued putting together stray bits and pieces of the farrago of highly agitated chatter that was coming through the console and echoing inside his suit’s helmet. A relatively small number of words and phrases predominated, and thanks to the translation gear the Adigeons had installed inside his ears, Trip heard them distinctly in what had to be at least a dozen human and nonhuman languages:
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—struck—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—projectile—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—impact—”
“—catastrophe—”
“—Coridan disaster zone—”
“—continents ablaze—”
“—dilithium fires—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—devastation—”
“—conflagration—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—billions dead—”
“—burning dilithium—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
All Trip could do was sit and imagine the ignition of the mother of all nuclear core meltdowns, touched off by a collision containing orders of magnitude more energy than the asteroid impact that killed off Earth’s dinosaurs. Coridan Prime’s rich veins of dilithium would have ignited as a result of the Romulan ship’s impact, a disaster accompanied by an enormously destructive, uncontrolled release of antimatter from the vessel’s engines.
Would the Romulans have sent a pilot on such a mission? Perhaps they’d been planning to use the kidnapped Aenar to remotely launch more such attacks against other worlds, using ever faster and harder-to-intercept ships. His stomach lurched at the thought.
Trip noticed belatedly that Ehrehin was standing beside his seat and leaning toward him, apparently trying to listen in via his own suit’s com system. “Tell me, Trip. What’s just happened?”
I wasn’t fast enough. That’s what’s just happened.
“The Romulans already launched their attack against Coridan Prime,” Trip said aloud, his throat suddenly feeling as dry as Vulcan’s Forge. “And it sounds like it turned out pretty much the way you’d expect. The Coridanites probably never stood a chance.”
I couldn’t protect them from the Romulans. Just like I couldn’t protect my sister Lizzie from the Xindi.
Trip felt Ehrehin’s gloved hand gently pressing against the padded shoulder of his environmental suit, in what Trip took to be a fatherly gesture of solace. He reached up and placed his own hand on the scientist’s arm.
It was only then that he noticed the length of cable that coiled away from his shoulder, leading down to the floor near Ehrehin’s seat to the not-quite-closed floor-level compartment that housed the cockpit’s power relays.
“What the hell?” Trip tried to stand, but failed because of the unexpectedly hard downward shove the frail old man administered. Trip plopped awkwardly back down into his seat as Ehrehin scrambled away from him, retreating awkwardly toward the aft compartment. Trip struggled out of his chair again, laboriously regaining his feet as he tried to get hold of the cable that he only now realized was attached to the back of his own suit, rather than to Ehrehin’s.
But before his glove-clumsy hands could get a solid grip on the cable, a brief flash of light sent blinding golden spots swimming before his eyes, and his muscles suddenly went rigid. Trip’s paralyzed body swayed, tipped, and finally crashed all the way down to the deck. He fell with a bone-jarring impact onto his side,