die, don’t you think?”
“Listen to yourself, Morgan. Listen to the things you’re saying.” It was all Burgoyne could do to keep hir voice level and calm. S/he had to keep reminding hirself that s/he was dealing with a malfunctioning machine, not a human being. “This is not something that you would have said or done back when you were alive. You’ve lost all sense of conscience. You’re severing your ties to humanity.”
“Mac was the one who started it,” she retorted. “Talk about severing ties. He was the one who made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with me. That he wanted to explore ways to put an end to me. You’re saying I’m not human? What can be more fundamentally human than a desire for self-preservation? I ask you.”
“And how far will you go in that quest for self-preservation?”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning where does the rest of the crew fit in to your quest for self-preservation? Here you’ve talked about how much you owe Mac, and the way you thanked him was abandoning him…”
“On his home planet, when I could simply have—as you pointed out—killed him. I think I was being generous.”
“So what about the rest of us? Those to whom you may not think you owe any personal debt?” Burgoyne continued to keep hir voice flat and even, not betraying so much as the slightest hint of the rising urgency s/he was feeling. S/he was determined to keep Morgan talking while s/he tried to come up with some course of action that Morgan might not expect. Unfortunately, nothing much was coming to mind, plus s/he was trying to outthink a computer mind. Yes, Morgan had been tripped up by the error of not considering body scent, but that was certainly no reason to think that any future mistakes would be forthcoming. “What happens to us? To them?”
“Do you really think I would just commit wholesale slaughter?” She sounded disappointed that s/he could even conceive of such a thing. “It saddens me that you’d think I’d do that. However…”
“However what?”
The red alert klaxon suddenly began to sound. Burgy looked around in confusion, thinking for a moment that the stopped turbolift had somehow triggered some manner of fail-safe. But that didn’t make any sense to hir.
Then, with hir superb hearing, Burgy detected a distant sound, a very distinct discharge of concentrated energy blasting away from the ship.
The big guns of the Excalibur’s phasers were cutting loose at a target. But nothing was shooting at the ship; s/he would have heard the blasts careening off the shields. If they weren’t under attack, though, then who the hell were they shooting at? He looked to Morgan questioningly.
“Well,” and now she smiled, and it was a smile without any humor, or compassion, or mercy, “you can’t make an omelet…”
ii.
In Tania Tobias’s quarters, Kalinda was lying on the ground, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her eyes were wide with shock and she was trembling.
Her voice was barely above a whisper as carnage was unleashed far below her.
“So many lives… so many dead… so many… I knew bad things would happen here… I knew it…”
She kept saying it over and over, and there was none to hear her.
iii.
“Shut it down! Shut it down!” Xy was shouting from the science station.
“Thank you for the advice. That would never have occurred to me,” Kebron shot back, keeping his tone flat and professional, even as he labored over the tactical board, trying to determine what in the world was going on. “Tobias, change our angle. Aim us away—”
“Already attempting to. Helm is nonresponsive. The entire navigation system has locked me out.” Tobias turned to the ops station and called out, “Morgan! Whatever’s causing this to happen, override it and shut it down.”
“I’m trying to raise the captain,” said Kebron. “He’s not responding. Transporter room can’t even get a lock on his combadge to bring him back up.”
Morgan was seated at the ops station, her hands resting lightly on the console, her eyes fixed on the front screen. On it, the bridge crew was able to see exactly what their instruments were telling them was occurring: The phaser banks of the Excalibur were unloading on New Thallon, causing untold, incalculable damage wherever they were striking. There was no one section that was being targeted. Instead the shots were being scattered all over the surface, in the hearts of major cities, hammering away at full strength. Tania almost imagined she could hear the screams