Quinn felt like a meat popsicle as he staggered inside the Dulcinea. Two steps off the ramp, he dropped to his knees and slumped against the bulkhead as the hatchway lifted shut behind him. He could hardly feel his feet, and his fingers were almost completely numb. All his layers of cold-weather gear had been barely enough to protect him from the brutal cold once night had fallen.
Bridy was right, he admitted to himself. If I’d had to bring her with me, we might not have made it. The other saving grace for his return journey had been the clear path they had left in the snow as they crossed the frozen lake. Without the tricorder to lead him back to the ship, his only guide had been their footprints.
Between pained breaths he told himself to get up, but his body felt as if it had been cast from lead. Move, you lazy sack of crap, he admonished himself. Bridy needs you. Get your ass in gear! He reached up and found a handhold. By slow increments he hoisted himself back to his feet, and then he hugged the wall as he made his way forward to the dispensary locker. He shrugged off his backpack, opened it, and pulled out the shelter kit to make room for more urgently needed supplies: the ship’s second medkit, a bundle of compact field rations, a large canister of vitamin-enhanced water, and two fistfuls of heat sticks.
A few of those in our pockets’ll keep us from freezin’ to death on the hike back, he reasoned. He zipped the pack half-shut, hurried forward, and grabbed Bridy’s backup tricorder from the equipment locker near the cockpit. So far, so good. He checked the ship’s chrono. Just under three hours. Should be faster goin’ back. As he tried to stuff the tricorder inside his pack, he realized his hands were shaking. And not just a bit—a lot. Hang on, he cautioned himself. If you drop dead rushin’ back to her, you ain’t gonna be doin’ anybody any favors.
Quinn eased himself into the pilot’s seat and scanned himself with the tricorder. Within seconds, its display confirmed what he already suspected: he was hypoxic, borderline hypothermic, and seriously dehydrated. In other words, a dead man walking, he concluded. He turned off the tricorder, put it in his pack, and pulled out the medkit. His numbed fingers could barely fit an ampoule of triox compound into the hypospray, but then it clicked into place. He pressed the injector’s nozzle to his throat just above his carotid artery and pushed the trigger. A fleeting hiss and a momentary twinge of discomfort were followed by a sensation of profound relief. Quinn’s head cleared, and his vision sharpened. That’s better.
He put away the medkit, then cracked a few heat sticks and stuffed them into the inner pockets of his coat and the pouches on the legs of his pants. That ought to keep me from freezing on the walk back, he figured. And I can set up a tube from my canteen so I can hydrate while I walk.
Closing the pack, he got up and started aft—then halted as a ping of sensor contact resounded softly in the stillness of the cockpit. He turned back and checked the display, which indicated the arrival of a starship in orbit above the Dulcinea.
About time, he mused, fishing his communicator from his pocket. He flipped open its gold-plated grille and opened a secure frequency. “Bridy, you read me?”
“Yeah,” she answered over the staticky channel, “I’m still here.”
“I’m at the ship and about to head back. And I’ve got more good news: the cavalry’s here.”
“Thank God. We have to get Xiong and a science team down here, pronto.”
“Roger that. We—” Another signal appeared on the sensor display. “Um, honey? What’re the odds Endeavour brought reinforcements?”
Her reply was freighted with fear and suspicion. “What’s happening?”
“Multiple contacts. Three—no, check that, five ships on approach vectors.”
“Quinn, Endeavour is the only Starfleet vessel in the sector. If you’re reading multiple ships—”
“Then we’ve got company.” He dropped the pack and ran aft to the weapons locker. “You better dig in, darlin’.”
“There’s no time! Listen to me: let the Klingons land and then take off and make a break for orbit. One of us needs to get away.”
“Dammit, Bridy, don’t do nothin’ stupid! Let me call the play this time!”
“It’s too late for that. You need to—”
“No! Not another word! Lay low till I scope the situation.” He slapped the grille shut on his communicator, put the device away, and opened the weapons locker. I need something with kick that won’t give away my position. From his limited arsenal he selected a semiautomatic .50 caliber sniper rifle with a flash suppressor and inertia-free firing mechanism. He nodded. This, two clips of spun-duranium rounds, and a pack of plasma grenades should do nicely.
Rifle in one hand and a bundle of ammunition and grenades in the other, Quinn sprinted to the hatch and elbowed the button that opened it. As soon as it passed the half-down point, he rode it like a slide, dropped off the end, and landed knee-deep in snow. He had dashed a dozen strides toward the edge of the Dulcinea’s narrow mountain perch when the banshee howls of the wind were devoured by the thunderous roar of engines cruising past overhead.
The sound wave hit Quinn hard enough to knock him facedown in the snow. When he lifted his head, he gazed in dismay at three Klingon birds-of-prey making their descent to the frozen lake between him and Bridy. Following the trio of sleek warships were two bulky, gray-green Klingon troopships.
Quinn pushed himself back into motion, and he scrambled into a tight space surrounded by jagged outcroppings of black rock. He balanced the rifle in a narrow gap between two boulders, peered through the scope, and focused its image.
Far below, the birds-of-prey had already set down on the far side of the frozen lake, near the entrance to the caves, and the troop transports were only seconds away from touching down. Wide ramps descended from the warships’ ventral hulls, and armed Klingon troops poured out of them.
Quinn flipped open his communicator and set it beside him on a level patch of rock. “Bridy? You read me, darlin’?”
“I read you.”
“I won’t lie to you, sweetie. It’s bad. Real bad.”
“Give it to me straight.”
“Three birds-of-prey and two dropships, right outside your front door. I’d say two full companies of ground troops, another hundred in flight crew.”
“Okay. Go ahead and say it.”
“You sure?”
“I’ve earned it.”
He sighed. “Told you so.”
Bridy lifted the ordnance package from her backpack. It was heavier than she’d remembered from just a few hours earlier. Part of her refused to believe she was really holding her own death in her hands, or that she would find the will to do what she knew needed to be done.
She wanted to believe there was still a way out, but her training told her that was all but impossible. She and Quinn were outnumbered more than a hundred to one, and he was too far away to do much more than bear witness to the inevitable.
“Listen up,” Quinn said over the communicator. “Use your phaser to collapse the tunnel to the big cave. That’ll slow the Klingons down and buy us some time. I can advance to sniper distance in about ninety minutes.”
“And then what? You’ll start a firefight with two hundred Klingons? In the open? With no cover? Are you out of your mind?”
Her retort was met by several seconds of silence. She admired Quinn’s fighting spirit but couldn’t stand the thought of him sharing her fate.
Suddenly, she regretted all the times she’d taken him for granted, all the moments when she’d cut him with sarcasm or pulled rank simply because she knew he would let her get away with it. Only then, when she knew she would never see him again, could she admit to herself just how much that deeply flawed, strangely idealistic, ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, crazy-brave, barely reformed drunkard of a man truly meant to her.
With the flick of a toggle and the press of a button, Bridy armed the ordnance package’s detonator. Her only remaining decision was whether to set a countdown or to trigger the device manually.
From the caverns beyond the tunnel, she heard Klingon voices shouting.
“Okay, new plan,” Quinn said. “Collapse the tunnel and give me time to get the Dulcinea’s transporter working. Once it’s back up, you phaser that crazy machine into slag and use your recall transponder to beam out.”
Her fingers trembled above the detonator switch. “We don’t have that much time. You need to go back to the ship now, Quinn.”
“Why? It ain’t like they’ve spotted me.”
She wiped a rolling tear from her cheek. “Please—you need to hurry.”
“Tell me you didn’t bring that goddamned bomb with you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not good enough.”
“There’s no other way.”
“Yes, there is! We just haven’t—”
“No, there isn’t! If even one of those bastards gets in here with a scanner, they’ll relay this intel back to their ships, and that’ll be game over. We’ll never stop them all in time. I can’t let them have this.”
“If you blow it up, we won’t have it, either.”
“I know. But those are my orders.”
“Goddammit, screw your orders! Just give me a little more time!”
Footfalls echoed in the tunnel. She had only seconds left. Her voice cracked with grief. “You know I love you, right?”
Quinn’s stoic façade crumbled along with Bridy’s. “I love you, too.”
She shut her eyes. “Then for the love of God, run.”
Quinn looked up from behind his rifle’s scope, his eyes fogged with tears. Dread rooted him in place as he picked up the communicator. He didn’t know whether he was begging mercy from Bridy or from God. “Please, just wait. . . .”
Over the open channel, he heard a translated Klingon shout: “Halt, human!”
Bridy’s last words were calm and softly spoken. “Close your eyes.”
The last sound from the communicator was the screech of a disruptor, angry and close. Quinn winced, his grief a reflex. His breath caught in his chest, trapped behind a choked-back roar of fury and sorrow.
The night flared red. An apocalyptic booming split the frigid air and buried his angry screams. Quinn ducked behind his rocky cover a fraction of a second before the detonation’s shock wave hammered the mountainside with heat and brute force, kicking up clouds of snow and ice and churning them into spindrifts. Thunder rolled and echoed without end.
He peeked over the rocks, in the direction of the blast. A mushroom cloud of black smoke and ruddy fire climbed into the sky, and the formerly frozen lake had shattered and boiled, swallowing the five Klingon vessels instantaneously.
Then a more present rumbling snared his attention.
It was behind him. He turned. The snow between him and the Dulcinea was churning like a muddy river, but it wasn’t the origin of the sound. He looked up.
The mountain’s snowcap was plunging toward him.
He abandoned his rifle and ran toward the Dulcinea. It had been hard enough slogging through the knee-deep snow before; now it shifted and slid like an ocean’s riptide and threatened to sweep his feet out from under him.
Stumbling and staggering, he fought his way back to the ramp and clambered awkwardly inside the ship. He slapped the button to close the ramp on his way forward. The ship heaved to starboard, throwing him hard against the bulkhead. Fighting for balance and momentum, he pushed off the wall and lunged toward the cockpit.
He was three steps shy of the pilot’s seat when the avalanche hit the ship.
The vertigo of free fall was arrested by his first brutal collision with a bulkhead. Then the nose of the ship pitched upward, and Quinn fell nearly the whole length of the ship into the main cabin. One jarring impact after another threw him in random directions, and the only sounds were the omnipresent roar of the collapsing mountainside, the monstrous groans of wrenching hull plates, and the high-pitched shriek of metal being torn asunder. Every loose object inside the ship was tossed into a maelstrom with debris smashed free from the Dulcinea’s broken frame.
Entire sections of the ship were torn away as it rolled down the mountain. Something unseen sheared through the main passageway. The bow of the ship disappeared, and for a moment Quinn glimpsed the sky.
Then a final, bone-jarring impact brought the main fuselage of the ship to a halt—and a wall of snow and ice rushed in like a river. Broken and stunned, all Quinn could do was shut his eyes as he was entombed in bone-numbing cold and suffocating darkness. He thought of Bridy as his world went black, and hoped the universe would spare him the pain of awakening without her.