Tobias was out of her chair, crossing to the ops station, and she shouted, “Morgan!” one more time and reached for her.
Her hand passed right through her. Morgan wasn’t even bothering to maintain the solidity of her holographic form. It was just sitting there as an illusion, nonresponsive. Tobias waved her hand through a few more times, as if she were trying to clear the air.
Kebron tried everything he could think of to override the weapons systems, but nothing was working. “As long as there’s power going to the phasers, I can’t shut it down—”
“Then we need to shut everything down,” said Xy.
Kebron realized what he meant. It was a majorly risky move, one that would leave the Excalibur disastrously vulnerable. A decision like this was normally above his pay grade. But the captain had left the ship and couldn’t be reached, and the second in command was MIA. The decision, and possible consequences, were on him. He didn’t nod because he had no neck and so nodding was problematic. Instead he simply said, “Do it.”
Immediately Xy called out, “Bridge to engineering!”
“Engineering!” came back the voice of Lieutenant Ronni Beth, the right-hand woman to Chief Engineer Mitchell. She sounded concerned, which was understandable. There were certain protocols that were always followed when the phaser banks were engaged, and none of them was being followed in this instance.
Xy could not have cared less about protocols at that moment. “Shut down the core and the power couplings! Shut down everything!”
“Everything?”
“Everything! Take us to black!”
He didn’t have to explain the severity of this decision to Lieutenant Beth; she knew as well as anyone how open to attack they’d be leaving the Excalibur. They would have as much offensive capability as a paperweight. And it would remain that way for as long as it took them to start the engines back up, which would be a process of some minutes since a cold start-up was courting disaster. But there was simply no alternative. “Initiating shutdown, aye,” came back Beth’s voice.
Seconds passed like hours as the phaser banks continued to punish the surface of New Thallon. The world had planetary defenses, big guns that were capable of returning fire, but the lack of assault on the Excalibur led Kebron to suspect that they had been the first targets. If that was the case, then that eliminated any possible theory that the attack was random. Then again, he had already come to the conclusion that there was nothing random about any of this. He had figured out who and what was behind it because it was the only thing that made any sense.
This was even further affirmed, as if he needed any further confirmation, when Beth’s voice came back from engineering: “Shutdown failed! Repeat, shutdown failed! The system is keeping us out! Every time we try to initiate the shutdown sequence, the system itself countermands it! It keeps changing all the access codes, even the prefix code! We’ve got nothing down here!”
Xy exchanged a look of growing hopelessness, even as he said, “Acknowledged. Keep trying and keep us apprised.” Quickly he left the science station and crossed straight to Kebron. In a low voice, or as low as he could go while still being audible over the red alert klaxon, “Morgan’s not a victim of whatever this is, is she. She’s the cause of it.”
“Yes,” said Kebron, reverting for once to his former terseness.
“What do we do?”
Kebron glanced at him without turning his head. “We wait.”
“For what?”
“For this to play out. This isn’t happenstance. There’s a plan being enacted, and all we can do at this point is bear witness to it, and hope we get a chance to make things right.”
“Make things right?” Xy’s face was grim. “How? Wave a magic wand and restore to life all the poor bastards who are dying down there?”
Kebron didn’t answer, because they both knew there wasn’t anything that he could say.
iv.
S/he knew it was pointless. S/he knew that nothing was going to be accomplished by it.
But after five minutes of being trapped in the turbolift with a smug computer entity that was pretending to be sympethic, deaf, dumb, and blind, knowing perfectly well that the phaser banks were unloading on the surface of New Thallon, trying to raise anyone on the crew via hir com-badge and getting absolutely nowhere, and finally, unable to take it anymore, Burgoyne unleashed a full-throated roar. Hir claws extended from hir fingertips, and hir lips