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 Dulcineawas 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.

18

“Over here!”

Katherine Stano turned to see who had called out over the baleful cries of the wind. Several meters away, Lieutenant Paul McGibbon, the Endeavour’s deputy chief of security, waved over the rescue team, which consisted of engineers, medical staff, and a pair of security officers, all of them bundled in awkward combinations of cold-weather gear and dusky red radiation suits. Stano, attired in the same clumsy double outfit, jogged with the others to join McGibbon.

Doctor Anthony Leone, the ship’s chief medical officer, was the first to reach the security officer. “Report.”

“One human life sign, weak.” McGibbon held out his tricorder so Leone could see its display. “Buried about four meters down, inside part of the ship.”

The team circled Leone and McGibbon. Stano pushed through the line to join the surgeon and security officer. “Can we get a transporter lock?”

“Negative,” McGibbon said. His tricorder’s screen was hashed with static. “Still too much radiation from the blast. It wouldn’t be safe.”

Stano waved everyone away from the entombed fuselage. “Move back!” She flipped open her communicator. “Stano to Endeavour.”

Captain Khatami answered, “Go ahead, Commander.”

“Lieutenant McGibbon is sending you some coordinates.” She nodded at McGibbon, who started the data upload from his tricorder. “We need you to beam out a layer ten meters square by three-point-five meters deep. It’s sitting on top of a buried survivor. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you time is a factor.”

“Understood. Move your people clear and stand by.”

“Acknowledged.” She turned to see the rest of the landing party had already withdrawn to a safe distance, and she joined them in a hurry. “McGibbon, have your men stand by to help excavate the survivor for Doctor Leone and his team.”

“Aye, sir.”

The mellisonant drone of a transporter beam filled the air, and then a ten-meter-square patch of snow shimmered with golden light. Seconds later, the radiance faded—and took the snow with it.

Stano pointed at the pit. “Someone cut us a slope, pronto.”

McGibbon and his men drew their phasers, adjusted their settings, and took aim. “On three,” McGibbon said. “One. Two. Three.” The security team fired wide-dispersal, low-power beams of blue energy and melted one side of the pit into a thirty-degree slope. McGibbon lifted his hand. “Cease fire!”

Chief engineer Bersh glov Mog stepped forward and scanned the slope with his tricorder. “Ground’s solid,” he said. “Engineers! Let’s go!”

The engineering team deployed into the pit and went to work melting snow and ice and excavating dirt, rocks, and debris. Within minutes they had unearthed the main fuselage of Cervantes Quinn’s ship, the Dulcinea. Its hull had been twisted, crushed, and shredded. Mog emerged from the wreck and beckoned Leone. “Site secure! Ready for evac!”

Leone was already in motion and hollering for his team of equipment-toting nurses and paramedics to keep up. “C’mon! We don’t get paid by the hour!” On their way down to the wreck they passed Mog, who climbed back up to join Stano.

“Data banks are gone,” the Tellarite engineer said, his gray-maned, porcine face a portrait of bitter disappointment. “It’s just a husk. Nothing left to salvage.”

Stano nodded. “All right. Pull your team out and fall back to the shuttles.”

“Yes, sir.” The engineers followed Mog back to the landing party’s pair of shuttlecraft, the Tysonand the Murakami.

Minutes passed while the medics worked out of sight inside the battered fuselage of the Dulcineaand the security officers lingered at the edge of the pit. Then Leone and his team emerged carrying Cervantes Quinn on a stretcher. They were moving on a direct path toward the shuttles when Stano intercepted them. She nodded at Quinn as she told Leone, “I need to talk to him.”

Leone shouldered past her and waved his team onward. “He just spent five hours buried alive, Commander. This is no time for a debriefing.”

“I just need to ask him one question. Please.”

The doctor rolled his eyes and said to his team, “Hold up.” He and Stano caught up to them and stood on opposite sides of Quinn’s stretcher. “Mister Quinn? This is Doctor Leone from the Endeavour. Can you hear me?” One of Quinn’s eyes fluttered weakly half open. He said nothing. Leone arched his brow skeptically at Stano. “One question.”

Stano leaned close to Quinn and modulated her voice to a dulcet tone. “Quinn, where is Lieutenant Commander McLellan? Where’s Bridy Mac?”

Quinn looked to his left, and he pushed one trembling hand out from under his thermal blanket to point into the distance— toward the smoldering crater and slowly dissipating mushroom cloud on the far side of an ash-covered lake. Then he pulled his hand back under the cover and shut his eyes.