Star Trek: The Original Series: The Rings of Time

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.

Fontana raced Kirk to the cockpit. She fired the braking thrusters.

“It’s too late!” she shouted. “We worked up too much speed. We’re caught in the gravity well.” She strapped herself in. “Brace yourself! We’re going in!”

Twenty-seven

2020

They entered Saturn.

Descending toward the planet, the Lewis & Clark skimmed the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. Icy wisps of crystallized sulfur and ammonia blew past the cockpit windows as the ship bounced violently off the dense cloud banks below. Freezing winds buffeted the ship, fighting a losing battle against the heat of friction and causing the flight deck to spin on its axis like a carnival ride. Kirk strapped himself into the pilot’s seat to keep from being tossed about the compartment. The hull began to creak alarmingly as the heat and pressure mounted outside. The temperature inside the cockpit climbed toward the hellish. Warning lights flashed all over the instrument panels. Alarms blared. The ship’s outer plating had been built to withstand the unpredictable hazards of a six-month voyage far from home, but Kirk knew that the ship couldn’t go much deeper into the atmosphere without burning up. It was a race to see what killed them first — the pressure, the storms, or the heat.

Kirk wanted to call down to Engineering, to tell Scotty to divert all available power to the shields. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.

“What about Querez?” Fontana shouted over the chaos. The bumpy ride rattled her voice, giving it more than a touch of vibrato. Sweat poured down her face. “Where is she?”

“The airlock. Safe, last time I saw her.”

But for how much longer?

He let Fontana pilot the ship. She had more experience with this generation of vessel. He unhooked his clumsy gloves and tossed them aside. “Can you get us out of here?”

“I’m trying! But it’s no use. I’m hitting the brakes for all they’re worth, but the thrusters are running out of fuel. We can’t achieve escape velocity!”

“There has to be some way to break free!” Kirk said. Saturn’s tempestuous atmosphere descended for nearly a hundred thousand kilometers, but at this rate, the Lewis & Clark would burn up like a shooting star long before they reached the boiling seas of liquid hydrogen and helium far beneath the raging storms, let alone the planet’s molten core. “We just need more power.”

An idea hit him.

“The impulse engines! They’re our only hope.”

Fontana stared at him in shock. “From a cold start? There’s no time!”

The impulse engines had been shut down since they had arrived at Saturn; the crew had been relying on controlled thruster burns to navigate around the planet. But it was possible that even the Lewis & Clark’s primitive impulse engines might have enough oomph to get them clear of the atmosphere again — if they could get them fired up in time.

“Trust me! It can be done.” Kirk had seen Scotty work wonders with his engines in the past, usually in the nick of time. “You just need to kick-start the fusion reaction by superheating the deuterium, then keep a close eye on the plasma conduits.”

“Or?” she asked.

“The ship blows up,” he admitted. “But you have to believe me. I know this technology better than you do, and I know what it’s capable of… with the right handling.”

She hesitated, uncertain whether to trust him. “I don’t even know who you are.”

He didn’t blame her for doubting him. He was asking a lot. “I know. But believe it or not, I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

Lightning flashed far below them. Deafening thunderclaps shook the flight deck. Banshee winds wailed over the agonized groaning of the hull. The ship was tossed about like a dinghy on an angry sea. The overhead lights flickered ominously. Sparks erupted from one of the auxiliary computer terminals. Sweat soaked through Kirk’s clothes; it was already hotter than Vulcan’s Forge and getting worse by the second. He feared for Zoe, who was still trapped down in the airlock, with no clue of what was happening. He feared for them all.

“Oh, what the hell,” Fontana blurted. “It’s not like I’ve got any better ideas. Get to it, stranger.”

“Thanks!”

Kirk rapidly called up the impulse controls and started streamlining the start-up procedure. The computer flashed a stream of alerts, warning him that he was exceeding established safety parameters. He ignored the cautions and overrode the computer’s increasingly strident attempts to block him. He remembered reviewing the engine specs back in Shaun’s quarters; what he was attempting was risky, to be sure, but it was doable if you didn’t push these crude engines too hard. There was no way he could achieve the sort of thrust that more advanced impulse engines were capable of, but he wasn’t trying to approach light speed, just to get them out of this oversized pressure cooker before they went too deep. Good thing Saturn’s gravity isn’t proportionate to its size, he thought, or we wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Almost set.” He let Fontana keep control of the helm, while he monitored the fusion reactor, the accelerator/generator, the drive coils, and the vectored plasma exhaust vents. All indicators were in the red zone, and the computer thought he was a maniac, but that couldn’t be helped. He was asking the Lewis & Clark to do something no Earth-based ship had done before. He could only hope that she was up to it. “On my count, three… two… one…”

Blastoff.

The impulse engines awoke with a roar. A burst of acceleration drove Kirk back into his seat. A bone-jarring vibration rattled the flight deck. Kirk anxiously watched the gauges. If the overtaxed engines were going to explode, it was going to be now. Fontana wrestled with the nav controls. The ship’s nose lifted upward.

“Yes!” she exulted. “We have liftoff!”

The deadly heat began to abate as the Lewis & Clark climbed toward safety. Wind, thunder, and lightning, coming from Saturn’s furious depths, chased them out of the planet’s atmosphere. Fontana let out a whoop as sulfurous vapors gave way to the frigid black emptiness of space and the dazzling brilliance of the rings.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “We did it!”

Kirk wiped the sweat from his brow. “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure that would work.”

“Now you tell me.” She eased back on the throttle, guiding the ship into a stable polar orbit that slipped through the gaps in the rings. The violent rattling subsided. For the first time in too long, the mission was back on track.

They were safe.

I’ll have to tell Scotty about this someday, he thought. If I ever get