[Story by Shawn Alpay, Character Art by Thomas Marrone]
Previously on Star Trek: Loma Prieta…
Episode 1: Shifts – Prologue
Episode 1: Shifts – Act 1
Episode 1: Shifts – Act 2
Episode 1: Shifts – Act 3
Episode 1: Shifts – Act 4
Episode 1: Shifts – Act 5
Episode 1: Shifts – Act 6
Episode 1: Shifts – Act 7
ACT 8
Setting down the flashing tricorder and leaning it against the window, Perkins popped open his combadge and quickly inspected its contents. He removed its power cell and held it up in the dim light for inspection; it had been cracked in a couple of places, most likely when he fell during the last exchange of fire. He glanced around the power conduit room for a suitable replacement, then made his way over to a drawer and pulled it open, finding a neat row of PADDs. All of them were locked out with high-level security clearance, no doubt, but each of them possessed a suitable power replacement — so Perkins fetched one up and, holding the edges with his pinky and thumb, slapped the back flatly down on the desk nearby, cracking open the outer casing and revealing the circuitry inside. He deftly extracted a power cell and slotted it into his combadge, then placed it back on the left breast of his sooty uniform and tapped it.
“Tiffany… it’s Zach. Can you hear me?”
“Captain?” Her surprised, almost relieved reply was closely followed by a cough. “Yes, I’m here.”
“Are you alright?”
“Not exactly. There’s a… there was something in my chest. Shrapnel, something, I don’t know. I wrapped it, and I’m trying not to move around, but it’s still bleeding quite a bit.” She coughed again. “I’ll be fine, I’m sure, once we get back aboard the Loma Prieta.”
“I… don’t think that’s going to happen, Tiffany,” Perkins replied, stepping back over to the window and gazing out. “Look.”
Hatches on the Loma Prieta had hinged open, and a school of escape pods had begun to launch from the sides of the crippled Starfleet vessel. Several shuttlecraft exited from the shuttle bays, duly navigating around the considerable amount of debris that had assembled in the area as a result of the firefight. Perkins placed a hand on the bulkhead nearby, watching them engage thrusters and slowly move away from the Loma Prieta and down towards the anomaly, which from his perspective looked not unlike a murky, tempestuous sea. After a few moments, all of the shuttlecraft and escape pods had completed their initial launch and formed up, moving as one undulating mass towards the Anchor.
Perkins tapped his combadge. “Perkins to life pod fleet.” No response. “Perkins to all escaping Starfleet vessels. Archer, Sagan? Can any shuttlecraft read?” Still nothing.
“They can’t hear you, Zach,” Bukowski said. “See that green tint out your window? It’s gas from the destroyed Breen weapons. I scanned it with my tricorder, and it’s blocking communications, transportation… I bet they can’t even tell if we’re alive over here, our light signals notwithstanding. But the cloud’ll dissipate in probably ten or fifteen minutes.”
“That’s time they don’t have. Whoever Rothschild sent is gonna be here any minute.”
Lights in rooms onboard the Loma Prieta began to wink out of existence, first one by one, then in deck subsections, as the ship’s internal power grids were either shut down or began to systemically fail. Perkins watched as the collection of escape vessels meandered towards the anomaly. None of the pods or shuttles were headed towards the research rings, and neither Perkins nor Bukowski were willing to put this to words.
“Zach…” Bukowski coughed, then continued, hoarsely. “Did you actually mean to upload a virus onto the ship?”
Perkins hesitated a moment, glancing at the console nearest him, which flashed red, notifying the station’s nonexistent crew that life support would soon fail. He ignored it, having already determined that every onboard system, even the most minor, had been locked out. “I’m not sure what answer you’re hoping for, Tiff, but…” He sighed. “No, I actually didn’t know. The last time we met, Glenn gave me an isolinear chip and said, ‘Everything you need to know is on here’. The way he said it felt… I don’t know. It felt odd. So I didn’t look at it for a few weeks. It wasn’t until the day Voyager disappeared that I put it into the console in my ready room.”
“And…?”
“And nothing happened.” He scoffed. “Or at least, I thought nothing happened. It was later that day that you reported the first issues with the ship’s computer.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She tried, and failed, to sound as neutral as possible.
Perkins closed his eyes. “To be honest, I had hoped there wasn’t a connection. I had convinced myself there wasn’t.” There was a pause before Bukowski was about to reply — but Perkins continued, guessing at her next question. “I didn’t want to believe that I could be responsible for trying to destroy my own ship. Yes, I wasn’t aware what was on the chip, but as they used to say: possession is nine-tenths of the law. And the minute you entered my ready room yesterday, I knew what had happened.”
“I’m sorry, Zach,” was the best Bukowski could offer in consolation.
“All I wanted to know was the truth,” Perkins said, looking out the window, watching the vanguard of escape pods begin to enter the anomaly. He put his back against the bulkhead and slid his back slowly down, coming to a rest in a seated position on the ground, his legs tucked up in front of him. He rested his forearms on his knees, a defeated expression on his face. “Sometimes, maybe you shouldn’t know.” He rubbed his forehead, then ran a hand through his hair, letting his hand come to a rest on the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, Tiffany.”
“For?”
Perkins scoffed, a wry smile on his face, which quickly disappeared. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe getting us both killed?” He leaned forward. “I wonder what’ll get us first. Will it be toxic shock from the heavy barium exposure? Asphyxiation as the station’s life support systems fail? Or will one of Rothschild’s goons be kind enough to administer an old-fashioned phaser burst to my chest?”
“Zach…”
Perkins collected himself, placing a thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. “Listen… sorry. I just…” He gestured out, trying to come up with the right words. “I can’t do anything right now.” After having successfully shepherded his crew through a bevy of dangers in the past year, his inability to conjure a happy ending frustrated him enormously.
“Zach, look outside. You were able to save the entire crew from a lifetime of Starfleet deception, and you’re returning everyone back to our rightful home. You could’ve ignored the truth, and then yes, you and I wouldn’t be stuck out here — but to be honest, I’d much rather it be like this.”
Perkins wanted with every fiber of his being to protest, but recognized its futility. “Thanks,” he said, finally.
A long moment of silence passed. Then, Bukowski spoke up. “Look outside.”
“I get what you meant, Tiffany.”
“No, I mean, look.”
Perkins pushed off the bulkhead and, still sitting, turned his upper body and looked out the window. A lone shuttlecraft was headed in their direction, although it had to often divert course in order to avoid stray pieces of secondary hull. It was engaging a tachyon pulse to force dissipation of the emerald cloud, although it cleared only a directional cylinder, which quickly filled in with more gas once the tachyon pulse was deactivated.
“Shuttlecraft Watson to Perkins,” a weary voice stated, partially shrouded by crackling static. “Lieutenant O’Connor here. You out there, sir?”
Perkins slapped his combadge, standing to his feet. “Perkins here. I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you. Are you able to get us off this thing?”
“Transporter lock is pretty weak, and I have to time it just right — but yes. Stand by, sir.”
“Roger that. Careful with Bukowski — she’s wounded.” Perkins stood rigidly, standing forward, preparing to be beamed over.
“I’ve already beamed her over, Captain. Getting you now.”
Within a moment, Perkins had been scooped off of the research station, materializing in the aft compartment of the shuttlecraft Watson. Bukowski was next to him, sitting on the ground, clutching her abdomen. Her uniform was nearly soaked through at the midsection, with a rudimentary binding of her wound having been attempted with a ripped piece of her uniform sleeve. “Oh God, Tiffany,” Perkins exclaimed, then turned to his left to fetch a medkit. It was then that he noticed Sung, Hesser, and Roberts all passed out in the seats nearby, strapped into their seats with harnesses. Perkins looked up to the forward compartment, seeing Lieutenant Edward O’Connor looking back to him, giving him a wave as he sat in the pilot’s seat. “You alright back there, Captain?” O’Connor offered with a congenial smile, despite the woozy look on his face.
“What happened to them, Ted?” Perkins said, gesturing over to the unconscious trio of senior staff.
“Heavy barium exposure, sir,” O’Connor replied. “Once the deflector dish went down, it was a race against time to…” O’Connor brought a hand to his head. “A race to…”
Perkins gave a puzzled look to O’Connor, then to Bukowski, who looked up at him with a pale face, tricorder in hand. “I’ll be alright, Captain. But he’s about to succumb to toxic shock,” she said, gesturing her tricorder in the pilot’s direction. Sure enough, O’Connor slid forward out of his seat, collapsing on the ground next to him. Perkins gave Bukowski a last look and made his way to the cockpit, kneeling down and turning O’Connor over onto his back.
O’Connor smiled up at him. “I told them I could get you out of there, it would just take a minute. Maybe just… a minute too long…” With that, O’Connor fell unconscious.
The flight console beeped, and Perkins looked up to it, then stood up and slid into the pilot seat as Bukowski shuffled over to him, holding her stomach. She glanced down to O’Connor, then over to Perkins, who had a strained expression his face, his fingers flying over the controls. “Those research stations were designed to mitigate the heavy barium,” Bukowski said, “But out here, I’m guessing we’ve got less than five minutes before we end up like Ted.” She wanted to help O’Connor, but the very thought of bending down conjured up enough pain to make her light-headed.
“We’ve got a lot less time than that,” he said with a stony expression, gesturing over to the middle console, which displayed a countdown in a large red script. Just then, the computer spoke up. “Warning. Loma Prieta self-destruct in thirty seconds. Exit blast radius immediately.”
With a half-open mouth, Bukowski looked out the sloping forward window and up to the crippled Loma Prieta, which had gone completely dark except for the warp nacelles, which had begun to glow hotter and whiter. She brought a hand to her mouth. “No…”
“Take your seat, Yeoman — we’re doing as the computer says,” he said, engaging his shoulder harness. Bukowski glanced to Perkins, then gingerly stepped over O’Connor and sat down at the co-pilot console, activating her own harness, wincing as it moved over her midsection.
Perkins took the controls and engaged impulse and maneuvering thrusters, turning the shuttlecraft around and hurtling towards the Anchor. As a straight shot, Perkins could’ve reached the anomaly’s horizon at top speed in fifteen seconds — but owing to the myriad debris, he had to make a relatively slow go of it, nimbly guiding the Watson up, over, and around various chunks of twisted metal.
Bukowski had activated her console, reading over the short-range scanner data. “We’ve cleared the debris field, sir,” she said with a glance to the middle display, “But I think we’re just too late.” The countdown read five seconds, but they had easily ten seconds of ground to cover at top-speed.
“Not if I have something to say about it,” Perkins muttered, keying in several commands as the shuttlecraft started to slow.
Bukowski looked up from her console at Perkins, her eyes wide. If they had had a slim chance of making it, he had just eliminated it by slowing them down. “What are you doing, Zach?”
“The only thing I can do.”
Bukowski raised a brow, then looked back to her console, her expression of confusion giving over to one of shock. “Oh God.”
Perkins hovered a finger over a final command. “Here we go,” he said, pressing down on the console as the countdown reached zero.
Aboard the Loma Prieta, the matter and antimatter chambers of the warp core automatically mixed. Almost instantaneously, the chain reaction overloaded the core, engulfing the entire ship in a cataclysmic explosion. The white-hot ball of flame expanded immediately outward, reaching the Watson just as its warp nacelles activated, and the shuttlecraft slingshot into the anomaly, faster than light.
—
Perkins awoke in his seat to the beeping of the display before him. His vision slowly returned, and he sat forward, trying to focus on the message.
“Runabout Minnesota to shuttlecraft Watson. Do you read?”
Perkins glanced around, blinking. O’Connor still lay at his feet, and Bukowski sat unconscious in the seat next to him, strapped in. He shook his head and closed his eyes hard, attempting to concentrate, before opening his eyes once more and looking out, seeing a Danube-class runabout floating above and to the left of his own vessel.
He tapped on the console and opened the comm channel. “This is Cap— This is Zach Perkins, of the USS Loma Prieta.”
“Good to see you’re through, sir. Captain Glenn will be extremely pleased to hear that you made it.”
“Were you sent by Glenn?”
“Aye, sir. Captain Glenn’s been hoping someone else would come through the Anchor ever since we left, so we’ve been patrolling this sector for the better part of a week, and we picked up your distress signal. The anomaly usually appears for a few minutes at a time on this side, but it disappeared as soon as you came through. And you came through in a hell of a way, sir. What happened?”
“The… Loma Prieta was forced to auto-destruct.” The story was too long to tell in full, and this one sentence sufficiently related everything the runabout pilot needed to know.
“I see. Not to worry, sir — I’m sure Starfleet’ll have you and your crew back onboard a new vessel in no time. Anyhow, we’re in the midst of picking up your ship’s escape pods. If you’ve got wounded, then we’ll beam aboard a medical team ASAP. A transport vessel is inbound, and we’ll be getting you to Starbase 415 as soon as possible. The actual Starbase 415.”
Perkins smiled. “Very good. I’ll take that medical team. Perkins out.”
He leaned back, staring up and out into space, his arms limp on the chair’s armrests. It had been a long day, and Captain Zach Perkins of the USS Loma Prieta was completely exhausted.
—
TO BE CONTINUED… STAY TUNED FOR THE EPILOGUE NEXT TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5th.
