O’Herlihy was fighting for his child’s life, as he saw it, which made him a dangerous opponent, plus he had the advantage of a weapon. Weightless or not, that wrench could still do serious damage if it connected. Kirk started to regret taking off his space helmet.
He glanced around for something to even the odds. Zoe’s slender tablet was still strapped to his wrist, but it wouldn’t be much use in a fight. His gaze fell on a fire extinguisher taped to a melted lab counter. Outside of a phaser, the sturdy metal cylinder was just what he needed. Pushing off from a warped steel cabinet, he flew for the canister.
“Leave that alone!” O’Herlihy saw what Kirk was up to and frantically tried to stop him. He hurled the wrench at Kirk’s head. The sturdy tool spun through the air between them. Kirk ducked and heard it clang against a bulkhead. Executing a barrel roll above the counter, he yanked the fire extinguisher free and rotated to face O’Herlihy, who was diving at him with a murderous expression on his face. Kirk fumbled with the trigger.
Foam sprayed from the nozzle. The blast struck O’Herlihy, driving him back, while simultaneously propelling Kirk in the opposite direction. Kirk grunted in pain as his back, already bruised from being tossed about the brig earlier, smacked into a wall. The padded spacesuit cushioned the blow to a degree, but it still smarted. He eased up on the fire extinguisher to keep from caroming around the deck.
“Stop it, Marcus! You don’t want to do this!”
“It doesn’t matter what I want!” O’Herlihy sputtered through a mouthful of foam. The frothy mixture coated his face and front, making him look like a survivor of a coolant explosion. He wiped it from his eyes. “I’ll do whatever it takes to save my daughter!”
He grabbed the hatchway ladder to halt his flight. Choosing the better part of valor, he scrambled up through the open hatch, disappearing from sight.
Not so fast, Kirk thought. He couldn’t give O’Herlihy the chance to lock him out of the flight deck above. Using the fire extinguisher as a makeshift thruster, he rocketed through the hatchway after his quarry. Drifting foam splattered against his face as he blasted up into the flight deck, past Fontana, who was still floating unconscious by the top of the ladder. Duct tape bound her wrists to an upper rung, while her legs floated free. She stirred restlessly.
But where was O’Herlihy? Kirk had lost sight of his foe. Killing the fire extinguisher, he looked about for the other man. “Marcus?”
A metal meal tray smashed Kirk in the face, knocking him across the deck. The fire extinguisher slipped from his fingers. He tasted blood. Glistening crimson beads sprayed into the air, dispersing weightlessly through the atmosphere. He tumbled backward, dazed by the blow. The fire extinguisher banged into a bulkhead several meters away. Kirk felt as if he had just been slapped across the face by a Gorn. He spit out a tooth.
The ruckus roused Fontana, whose eyes fluttered open. A floating bead splattered against her cheek. She gazed about groggily. “Shaun?”
O’Herlihy tossed away the tray. Before Kirk could recover from the blow, he bounded over to the helm and hastily worked the controls. Not bothering to strap himself into the pilot’s seat, he keyed new commands into the ship’s computer.
“Wait!” Fontana said, coming to. “What are you doing? Get away from there!”
“You can’t stop me!” His fingers jabbed at the instrument panel. “I have to save Tera!”
Even if it meant sending the Lewis & Clark on a suicide mission into the heart of a gas giant.
The thrusters ignited. A burst of acceleration tossed Kirk back against a bulkhead. Fontana was tossed about the ladder like a flag flapping in the wind. Saturn’s turbulent atmosphere filled the windows of the cockpit, growing larger and clearer by the moment. Kirk could make out the planet’s sulfurous yellow bands in alarming detail. Lightning flashed across storms the size of continents. The ship plowed through the inner rings.
“Shaun!” Fontana tugged at her bonds, fully awake now. “Stop him! He’s changing our orbit, sending us into the planet!”
So much for the scenic route, Kirk thought. O’Herlihy had evidently given up on his plan to drag out the ship’s final orbits long enough to make more observations of Saturn and its rings. Cutting to the chase, the crazed scientist and father was taking them on a downward trajectory straight into Saturn. The thrusters continued to fire, accelerating the ship. Kirk guessed that they had only minutes before the ship entered the atmosphere.
No, Kirk thought. This has gone far enough.
A crimson haze literally floated before his eyes. Shaking the cobwebs from his brain, he swept the drifting globules aside and tackled O’Herlihy at the helm. The doctor’s face slammed into the instrument panel, and Kirk yanked the other man’s hands away from the controls. Kicking against the console, he sent them both tumbling away from the helm.
“Let go of me!” O’Herlihy raged. “You’re going to get Tera killed!”
Kirk disagreed. “Nobody’s dying today, Marcus. Least of all us.”
The two men grappled in midair, much as Kirk and Zoe had earlier, but much less enjoyably. O’Herlihy elbowed Kirk in the gut, but the captain’s spacesuit shielded him from the blow; it was like wearing a heavily padded suit of body armor. Twisting around, O’Herlihy grabbed Kirk’s throat and squeezed. His nails dug into Kirk’s neck. Crimson bubbles percolated from his nose.
“Have you forgotten your oath, Doctor?” Kirk wheezed. He’d been choked once today already, and he’d had enough. “First, do no harm…”
He butted his head into O’Herlihy’s bloody face. The scientist shrieked as his busted nose took another hit. More weightless red bubbles contaminated the air, joining drifting flecks of foam. Pushing down on O’Herlihy’s shoulders, Kirk swung his legs up and kicked the other man squarely in the chest with his sturdy space boots. The force of the kick sent the scientist flying backward — toward Fontana.
She snagged him with her legs, wrapping them around his neck. “Hurry!” she shouted at Kirk. “Finish this!”
“Let go of me!” O’Herlihy struggled to extricate himself. “You don’t understand what you’re doing!”
Kirk bounced off a wall, launching himself at the trapped scientist like a missile. His right fist collided with the man’s jaw. The thick white glove felt like a boxing glove, protecting his knuckles. O’Herlihy’s head snapped backward, then swayed atop his neck. Frantic eyes rolled upward until only the blood-streaked whites were visible. He went limp.
Kirk had scored a knockout.
“Sorry about that, Doctor, but I left my phaser at home.”
Fontana gave him a quizzical look. “Okay, consider me impressed, whoever you are.” She let go of the unconscious scientist and nodded at her bound wrists. “I’d give you a round of applause, but I’m a little tied up.”
“Let me do something about that.”
The captain briefly wondered if it was a good idea to release her, since she was the one who had tossed him into the brig in the first place, after nearly choking the life out of him earlier, but he judged that circum-stances had changed. After O’Herlihy’s rampage, there was no longer any question who the real saboteur was, and Kirk guessed that he was going to need Fontana’s help to undo what the doctor had done and save the ship.
He hastily tore away the tape. “Don’t make me regret this.”
“Not yet,” she promised, massaging her wrists. “I think we’ve got bigger problems.”
The thrusters flared at full power, recklessly burning through their fuel. No wonder the ship had been orbiting Saturn quickly enough to keep hitting the rings; never intending to make a return trip to Earth, O’Herlihy had felt free to expend all of their fuel on one final death spiral.