And still the Tholians came. Kyle thought there might yet be a chance if they could focus the starbase’s phaser arrays on the energy generators the Tholians used to create the web, but that would have required scanning the attacking ships to find those generators, and the scanners had all been knocked out of commission by the web. As had the phaser arrays, for that matter.

Even as he ticked through the possibilities in his head, Kyle realized that there was almost no one left alive to carry out any strategy he might create. Then the command center was rocked by a singularly powerful blast and Kyle’s feet went out from under him. His head smashed against an ops console and then against something else—bulkhead or floor or ceiling, he had no idea. He saw a brilliant flash of light, then he saw nothing for an indeterminable period of time.

When he woke up, he tasted blood. He pushed himself to a sitting position and blinked his eyes open, spat blood onto the floor, fighting off a wave of nausea. Command was full of smoke; his lungs burned with it.

But at least he could sit up. Everyone else was dead.

On a flickering viewscreen he could see a Tholian ship, its red lights completely washing the starbase, so near that a tiny portion of the ship blocked the entire screen. He tried to ignore the frightening image as he stumbled from one corpse to the next, checking for pulses, listening for any faint breath. It was no good, though. Kyle’s heart was the only one that still pounded: so loud he thought the Tholians would hear it from their ships. And he was in bad shape, himself—his left arm and shoulder had been crushed, his scalp lacerated. Burns covered much of his body, and he felt unbelievably thirsty. Something had torn open his right leg almost to the bone.

Giving up on the command center, he left it, limping into the hallways to see if there was anyone alive elsewhere on the ship. He had barely taken a dozen steps when he heard what was unmistakably a human voice. But it was raised in an inhuman scream. Kyle stumbled toward it, drawing a phaser pistol he’d strapped on at the first sign of trouble. As he rounded a corner, he saw Lieutenant Michaud on her knees, tears streaming down her face, and behind her, a Tholian pointing what looked like a crooked stick at her. But it was a crooked stick that spat death in the form of a searing red ray. While Kyle watched, helpless, Michaud’s chest exploded, blood and gore spilling onto the floor even as she fell.

Kyle trained his phaser on the Tholian and squeezed the trigger. The Tholian was large, completely enclosed in a thermal suit that would enable it to survive in what must have been, to it, wretched cold. Its helmet was a faceted, crystalline mass of planes that Kyle couldn’t even really focus on; it was like trying to pick out one plane of a diamond that was spinning in a centrifuge. But he held his phaser on it, and the creature buckled, emitting a terrible, screeching noise that Kyle thought would surely rupture his eardrums, and died. When its suit burst with an explosive boom it issued a blast of heat so powerful that Kyle could feel it, like a desert wind.

Another Tholian, alerted by the first one’s death shriek, appeared at the other end of the hall and took aim at Kyle. But Kyle fired first, and this one fell too. To ease the spatial dissonance that could be caused by living inside a doughnut, the inner hallways of the rings had been constructed as short, straight segments with definite corners. Kyle approached the next corner with caution, and peeked around it, over the corpse of the Tholian he had just shot. His phaser was held in two hands, to steady it against his own shaking. The alien’s internal heat, leaking out through the phaser hole in its suit, was already almost unbearable, and as soon as he had determined that the coast was clear, Kyle hobbled, as fast as his broken body would carry him, to the next corner.

And that was when he knew he was doomed. A pack of them loomed at the far end, all bizarre-looking and carrying those sinister sticks. Kyle stayed close to his corner and fired into the pack. He knew he hit several, but the red beams started shredding the wall that was his only protection, and after a moment he turned and ran. He couldn’t get near the last corner he had passed—the Tholian was already so hot that the polymer bulkheads were melting around it. Instead, he slipped through a door that led to the central core, the “finger” of the space station.

He tried to run, but he was weakening. Behind him, he heard the Tholians following. He kept listening for voices: human voices, friendly ones, anything but the strident screeching of the Tholians, but he heard none. Instead of running, he took refuge in a Jefferies tube, descending several levels and then tucking himself away, phaser at the ready, and waiting.

It seemed to take hours. He could hear the Tholians moving through the core, blasting through walls, knocking down doors, tearing open the tubes. Every now and then he thought he heard a non-Tholian voice, but each time he did it was screaming in agony, until he no longer wanted to hear them. He began to hope that everyone was already dead so their suffering would end. He began to wonder if he should finish himself, as well: if a phaser blast to the head would be less painful than sitting and waiting and finally succumbing to one of those sticks.

But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was Kyle Riker, a survivor from way back, from a long line of survivors. His great-great-grandfather, the stories went, had led the residents of a small Wyoming town safely through the grim days of World War III, fighting off the marauding bands of refugees that had combed the nation’s wild places in those days, as well as the radiation poisoning that had killed millions. The town had lost two residents, both to exposure during a particularly long, cold winter, but otherwise they had all made it through the worst days. Eventually, of course, Jamie Riker had died of old age, and many of those under his protection had gone as well, of natural causes, mostly. But the legend lived on—a Riker had persevered and kept his town alive when the rest of the world was going mad. Kyle already had failed to live up to that example, though—if the starbase was his town, he had utterly missed the mark.

Even so, he was unable to just give up. It wasn’t in his nature.

And finally, they found him again. They breached the tube twenty meters from him, and he started firing as soon as the first Tholian showed his ugly crystalline face mask. At the same time, he tried to stand, to run again, but his injured muscles had frozen up, locked him in place. Stuck where he was, in a half-crouch, he tried to raise his phaser again, but it was so heavy, so heavy. ...

Just as the red beam from a Tholian stick weapon struck him, he stumbled and fell flat, the beam slicing across his back as he landed facedown on the surface of the Jefferies tube.

Chapter 14

Kyle lost consciousness again, so he didn’t see precisely when or why the Tholians left. Maybe they thought they’d killed him. Maybe the Berlinhad come too near and it was time for them to retreat. At any rate, they’d sent their message, loud and clear. Don’t get too close to us,they had said. From now on, Starfleet would pay attention.

Kyle had remained comatose through the whole journey on the Berlin.He hadn’t come around until he’d been transferred to an infirmary in San Francisco, where his care had been taken over by Dr. Katherine Pulaski. She credited his own will to live for his incredible survival, in the face of enough wounds to kill several times over. He had always credited her medical skills. Yes, he had wanted to live, but until she came along he didn’t have the tools to fight for life. She taught him those, and more—she gave him another reason to live, one he hadn’t had since Annie had died eighteen years before.