Chapter 8
The bed wasn’t much more comfortable than the one in Brett’s cell. No matter how he arranged himself on the mattress, he couldn’t find a comfortable position. After an hour of thrashing around, he sat up and with a sigh knew the problem wasn’t with the bed at all.
He’d been such an idiot with Robyn. For years after she left, he imagined scenarios of seeing her again: serving on the same ship, at a conference at Starfleet headquarters, or even casually bumping into each other on Risa. Each scenario ended with them embracing and making love the way they did at the cabin before she left.
None of his scenarios included picking a fight with her and hurting her feelings. In all of his dreams she realized her love for him, not how much she despised him. Somehow he’d allowed himself to give in to the anger and hurt festering for the last fifteen years when he wanted nothing more than to rediscover the love they’d lost.
That damned ring on her finger. That’s what had drove him to it. While his love life had consisted of one meaningless tryst after another, she’d gone and found comfort in the arms of Captain Shawn Lichen, hero of the Federation. The fact she still wore the ring years after his death spoke volumes about how much she still loved him.
Of course he should have seen this coming. Why shouldn’t a woman like Robyn find someone else to be happy with? A sweet, caring, upstanding officer like her was bound to draw the interest of some handsome, straight-arrow like Lichen.
Brett went to the replicator to get himself another beer, his eighth of the evening. As he tossed it back, he asked himself why he was moping around like this anyway. She may have been a sweet and caring woman, but she dumped him, abandoning him in the Sierra Nevadas in the middle of the night. She lulled him to sleep with sex and then vanished with only that stupid note left behind.
“Please don’t hate me,” she’d written. Why the hell shouldn’t he hate her? He ought to get out of here and go down to the armory, get himself a phaser, and disintegrate her. So what if they put him in prison for the rest of his life? It would be worth it to exorcise the demon once and for all.
As he took a step towards the door, the entire deck seemed to shift beneath his feet and dump him to the ground. He lay on the deck for a moment, trying to deduce what had happened. He must be drunker than he thought.
Then the deck shook again. It wasn’t him. Something was rocking the Orion. Some kind of turbulence maybe, or maybe something worse. Whatever it was, he’d be damned if he’d stay in here and wait for the ship to fly apart.
Bypassing Robyn’s security lock on the door wasn’t much more difficult than reprogramming the replicator. The most challenging part of the operation was trying to do fiddle with the controls as the ship was rocked again.
The doors parted to reveal red lights and whooping klaxons in the corridor. Whatever was going on was not simply a little turbulence. His mind flashed to the Serparnian ship that had destroyed the Cassandra. It couldn’t be here, could it?
Brett raced forward, bracing himself against a doorway as the ship sustained another hit. If that were the Serparnians, it sounded like they were winning. Of course they would be with Babs in command. She was a political animal, not a warrior. Everything she knew about battle came from textbooks.
“Robyn,” he whispered. She was up there on the bridge in the middle of this like a good Starfleet officer. If Babs asked her, Robyn would probably throw herself into the warp core if it meant saving the day.
An ear-splitting screech interrupted his thoughts. Behind him, the ceiling gave way in a storm of sparks and shower of debris. Brett pressed himself into the doorway to avoid getting his head taken off by a flying piece of deck. He didn’t have much time left before the entire Orion became debris.
He took off running down the corridor again, searching for one of the turbolifts. The moment the doors to one opened, Brett was thrown back into a bulkhead. He felt the back of his head for any blood but didn’t come away with anything. Picking himself back up, he lunged for the turbolift doors.
The hit that had nearly opened his skull like a ripe melon had also knocked out power to the turbolifts. “Great. I needed some exercise anyway,” he muttered to himself.
The top of the turbolift opened to reveal a shaft stretching up for as far as Brett could see. Somewhere up there at the top was the bridge—and Robyn.
He began to climb.
The last time he’d attempted such a feat had been on the Icarus during the war. He’d been taking a rare nap in his quarters and catching up on the dreadful task of writing letters to families of the fallen when a pair of Dominion ships ambushed the Orion. Brett scrambled up the turbolift shaft with the agility of a Prenian baboon. He opened the bridge doors before the Dominion ships could turn around and come back for a second pass at the Icarus.
That had been almost nine years ago when he was younger, in better physical condition, and hadn’t been drinking alcohol by the barrelful. A quarter of the way up sweat began dripping into his eyes. Halfway up he started to get winded. The only thing keeping him going was the thought of Robyn up there in trouble, needing him. He forced himself onward.
Three-quarters up, the turbolift shaft rattled him around like ice in a glass of scotch. He lost his grip on the handholds along the side of the shaft, dangling in the air a moment before he began to plunge towards the bottom. He didn’t have the strength left at this point even to scream.
As he fell, he considered what a fool he’d been to take the job from Ril. Coming back to the Serparnian system, the scene of the crime as it were, had done nothing but ruin what remained of his life. Smitty and Grek were dead. His ship was destroyed. Soon enough Robyn would be dead, hating him in their last moments together. He supposed after all this, splattering himself on the bottom of the turbolift shaft wouldn’t be so bad.
Except he didn’t reach the bottom. With no more than ten feet left, another hit shook the turbolift shaft and Brett found himself floating in the air. Artificial gravity had been lost, at least in the turbolift shaft.
Brett lazily rolled over to stare at the bottom of the shaft in disbelief. Then he forced himself to paddle upwards, staying close to the side in case gravity returned. The swim in zero-g wasn’t much less tiring than the climb had been. He kept himself going with thoughts of Robyn until he reached the top and his destination—the bridge.
He opened the doors and entered a nightmare.
