She frowned slightly at his boat reference, and he was certain she was remembering their honeymoon. Suddenly, an urgent voice pulled his full attention back to the crisis at hand.
“Captain, one of the Remans is closing on our port bow! Collision course!” Rager’s voice was high-pitched, though not panicked.
“Evasive maneuvers!” Riker roared.
The viewscreen flickered back on just in time to display an obsolete D-7 cruiser barreling toward Titan,filling almost the entire image area.
Then the incoming vessel appeared to pull away. Riker felt intense relief.
Until the other ship was hit by some other vessel’s disruptor fusillade, breaking her hull into burning, atmosphere-venting fragments that careened in every direction.
One rather large, jagged piece was headed straight for Titan’s new evasive heading.
“All decks, brace for impact!” he shouted into his combadge. He saw Lavena and Rager frantically entering commands, but he knew that even their considerable skills wouldn’t be enough.
A cacophonous sound rent the air, and Riker felt himself thrown violently backward. The lighting dimmed to near-darkness, lit only by a shower of sparks. Amid the blare of klaxons and the tortured moans of strained structural integrity fields, Riker heard a scream, and a wet sound. Then he crashed against something hard, a flare of pain igniting within his left shoulder.
A few seconds ticked past before the bridge’s emergency lights kicked on, bathing the scene in an eerie orange glow. Will struggled to sit, aware that he had landed near his command chair, his back up against the upperlevel support frame for the bridge’s raised aft work stations. He heard Deanna moan, and saw her sit up from where she was slumped over her chair’s armrest, held in place by the autorestraints.
Riker placed his hand against the deck, feeling something wet and warm there as he turned toward Vale’s chair. He saw that she was sitting in it, held in place by her harness; she looked dazed, though not obviously harmed. An errant thought flickered through his mind: Clearly the lesson here is to stay in my chair.
As Riker struggled to his feet, he heard the other members of the bridge crew moaning and moving around him. He stooped near the conn, where Ensign Lavena lay after evidently having opened her restraints; her suit had sprung a leak, and its fluids were rapidly spilling onto the deck. Riker realized that this was the source of the moisture he had felt on the deck, and was thankful that it wasn’t anyone’s blood.
“Everybody, sound off,” he said, turning. In quick succession—though accompanied by many moans and groans—Lavena, Rager, Jaza, Deanna, Vale, Akaar, Tuvok, the Rossini twins, and three other members of the bridge crew called out their names.
Which left only Keru.
Riker turned to see Tuvok kneeling beside one of the aft consoles. “Captain, your tactical officer is badly injured.”
Riker tapped his badge, as Deanna and Christine rushed to the upper level. “Riker to sickbay. Prepare for incoming wounded.” He sighed, and turned to Jaza as the science officer moved back toward his station. “Status report.”
The Bajoran ran a shaky finger across his console’s monitor, following as he read. “Titanwas turning when she was struck. We were lucky. We appear to have sustained only minor hull damage. There’s a small breach on deck five, and emergency forcefields are already in place. But our shields were overloaded by the impact.”
“How badly?”
“They’re down to thirty percent, Captain. Sir, we can’ttake another hit like that.”
“Will.” Deanna was calling him from the upper part of the bridge, aloud this time.
“Contact Khegh, Rager. We’re going to need the Klingons protecting our flanks.”
“Will!”Deanna’s voice had become more insistent. He moved in behind her, steadying himself against a console as he looked down.
Ranul Keru lay in a crumpled heap, contusions about his face from the console circuitry into which he had crashed. But of far, far more serious concern was the spanner that protruded from his chest. Deep red blood oozed out around what he recognized as one of Ensign Rossini’s tools.
Then he noticed that the large Trill was not breathing, either.
Simultaneous to this observation, Vale tapped her combadge. “Vale to transporter room four! Beam Commander Keru directly to sickbay. Sickbay, prepare a trauma team. We’re beaming Mr. Keru directly to you. He’s critically injured.”
As the shimmering curtain of energy surrounded and dissolved Keru, Deanna stood. Riker saw that her eyes were wet. “I could barely feel him, Will. I don’t know if he’s going to make it.”
Not caring how the gesture would look to Akaar or anyone else, Riker gathered Deanna into his embrace. He looked over her head at Vale.
“Let’s get this ship running again,” he said grimly.
SEVERAL MINUTES EARLIER
Olivia Bolaji had screamed so much that her voice was hoarse, and not even all the asinolyathin in sickbay seemed to be of any help.
Ogawa checked the biobed display again, then kept her voice as low and calming as possible as she addressed her infuriated patient. “I’m sorry, Olivia. I don’t see any change. If we don’t get your baby out now, we’d be risking both of your lives.”
Axel Bolaji stood near the biobed, his dark-hued hand now purplish from the hard squeezing Olivia had been giving it. “He’s four months early. Will he survive?”
“There are always risks, but we’ll make certain they both do fine, Axel,” Ogawa said. Though it was rare in modern Federation medical experience, human babies still occasionally arrived prematurely.
“Noah wasn’t premature, but he had a difficult birth,” Ogawa said, giving Olivia a small smile. Calling thirtytwo hours of labor “difficult” is a bit of an understatement,she thought. I was ready to yank him out with a tractor beam if he’d taken a minute longer.
“You’re sure the transporter won’t hurt him?” Olivia asked, wincing.
Ogawa shook her head side to side. “We’ll be using a small, confined transporter beam. It’s the least invasive procedure we can do.” She gestured out toward the rest of sickbay. “I’m going to need Dr. Onnta’s help though, since he has the most experience in this arena. I’m going to go get him now. The sooner we get this done, the better it’ll be for the three of you.”
The Bolajis nodded, and Ogawa turned and exited the OB/GYN room, deactivating then reactivating the bio-isolation field as she left. She made her way to Surgical Three, where Dr. Onnta and Dr. Ree were working on Lieutenant Denken. The young Matalinian had been grievously injured during the raid on Vikr’l Prison, and lay unmoving in the surgical bay.
Ogawa was about to ask how the surgery had gone when she noticed that Nurse Kershul was wrapping Denken’s severed right arm up in cloth.
“You weren’t able to save his arm?” she asked.
Ree shook his head, the sensor cluster’s bright surgical lights making his scales look almost iridescent. “Whatever they cut him with in the prison was poisoned. We were barely able to stop it from spreading throughout his nervous system. Another five minutes and he would have lost seventy-five percent of his mobility, another ten and he would have died.”
“He has that to be thankful for then,” Ogawa said. She was always careful to be positive around trauma patients, even those who were sedated or even apparently unconscious; she knew that their subconscious minds often heard everything being said in the room, and that their waking minds might later access those memories.
The red-alert klaxons suddenly came on, startling everyone in the room. Although the klaxons were quieter here in sickbay than up on the bridge, they were no less effective.