Honor Bound

been using as a shield. Her face was pale, her eyes open but unseeing and two gaping holes in her upper chest were frothing oxygenated blood, adding to the red mist that filled the air. The medics were on the way and even as he watched, two of the Security troops boosted over to slap smart bandages on the wounds, but she was clearly dead.

” Jesus,” McKay moaned, feeling as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. “I thought he was shooting at me.”

The young woman was waif-skinny, her brown hair shoulder length and drifting into her lean, hawk-nosed face. And she’d died because of him. But there had been no other choice… just as he had no choice now but to see to the safety of the ship.

“Commander Kopecky,” McKay turned to the Chief Engineer, who was finally free of the tape that had been restraining his wrists and ankles. “Can you get the fusion reactor restarted?”

Kopecky ripped the tape away from his mouth, cursing in Czech as it took part of his close-clipped beard with it. His eyes were on the body of the apprentice engineer as he spoke, but his tone was professional. “Yes, it is not even flushed… he did not know how. He just cut the power feeds. Give me a moment.”

The engineer pushed off from the floor and came up against the main command station, his hands flying over the controls. “Bridge,” he called over the intercom, “reactor power is restored: the plasma drive is online.”

“Good to hear your voice, Commander,” Patel replied. “We’re going to be holding off on the plasma drive until the shuttles get back… we’ve managed to recover some of the antimatter storage canisters and to be brutally honest, without them there’s no way we’re outrunning those Shipbusters on conventional power.”

“Aye, sir,” Kopecky answered. Then he closed his eyes and took a breath, looking as if he might collapse if there’d been any gravity. “Her name was Mary Boudinot, Colonel,” he said softly, not looking at the dead woman. “She was just 23, only six months out of the Academy. This was her first cruise.”

“I’m sorry, Commander…” McKay began, but Kopecky interrupted him.

“You have nothing to be sorry about, Colonel,” he said sadly, shaking his head. “You did what had to be done. But Ensign Boudinot… she gave her life for us, in a way, you know? And I just think we should try to remember her.”

“I’ll remember her, Commander,” McKay assured him grimly. In my nightmares. For years. “Vinnie,” he said to the Captain, who was helping the Security troops to free the other engineering personnel, “I’m heading up to the bridge. After everything is secure here, I want you to get with Lt. James and find out where Mironov got the gun and if he had any help.”

“Yes, sir,” Vinnie said, eyes still fixed on Mironov’s corpse. “Sir, you really think this guy was some sort of copy of Antonov?”

“Yes I do, Vinnie,” McKay told him. “He was either a duplicate of some kind or he’d been brainwashed into thinking he was. I got suckered,” he declared bitterly. “It cost that girl her life and now it might cost us all our lives.”

“Hell, boss, that’s not something I’d expect you to account for,” Vinnie insisted, shaking his head. “There’s no way you could have known that was even possible.”

“It’s my job to know,” McKay said flatly, then headed out of the room, making for the lift station.

McKay didn’t bother trying to contact Patel on his ‘link as he rode the lift back to the bridge. The Admiral probably had his hands full already and he needed the silence.

This is a fucking disaster, he thought, closing his eyes. They were over 200 light years from home, in the enemy’s home system, surrounded by Protectorate ships, disabled and now they couldn’t even be sure that they actually knew the way home even if they did get away. And if they didn’t use the wormhole matrix, they were not getting home.

And worse, what about the Decatur? They’d been counting on Mironov’s directions to take her home, but now… for all they knew, he could have been directing them to a Protectorate stronghold. They could already be dead. He knew that Antonov would never have let them return to Earth safely with the secret of how to navigate the wormholes.

By the time he arrived at the bridge, McKay was deep in a funk and pissed off that he was going to have to find a way to hide it from Patel. He needn’t have worried: the bridge was so abuzz with activity that the Admiral hardly noticed him enter and take a position behind the command chair.

One look at the main viewscreen told him why: the Shipbuster missiles were only minutes away, so close they could see them on the optical cameras. Wedges of blackness hunted the Sheridan like wolves, framed by the star-bright glow of fusion drives; and there were so many of them…

“The countermeasures are almost there,” Pirelli announced calmly, eyes flickering back and forth between the readouts at her station and the camera view onscreen. “Ten seconds.”

“Damage control,” Patel snapped, “what’s the status on the canisters?”

“We’ve recovered ten of the fifteen ejected canisters,” Devlin’s voice came over the intercom. “The others are too far away to get to them in time. The shuttles are loading the first three right now… five more minutes for those.”

“Get those loaded then get the shuttles into the bay,” Patel ordered. “We can transfer the rest internally and load them through the engineering bay’s service locks.”

“Aye, sir.”

Patel looked a question at Pirelli.

“Twelve minutes, three seconds till the Shipbusters hit us, sir,” she told him. “Countermeasures are on target.” There were small starburst explosions on the screen that lit up the dark wedges of impending destruction, and then two huge, spherical fusion blasts that whited out the screen. Pirelli grinned, checking her readouts. “Two of the Shipbusters prematurely detonated,” she announced. “And I read two more as losing their fusion drives… the blast knocked them off their course, they should miss us. Two more still tracking us, still accelerating.”

“Open fire with the Gauss guns, Commander Pirelli… maybe we’ll get lucky. Commander Devlin,” Patel contacted Damage Control again. “I need to know when those shuttles are secure in the bay! Commander Kopecky,” he called to engineering, “tell me the second the Eysselink drive is back online.” He glanced back, noticing McKay for the first time. “This is going to be uncomfortably close, Colonel. Thanks for taking care of Mironov before he could do any more damage.”

“He did enough,” McKay said, his voice flat, eyes on the viewscreen.

Patel shot him a glance but withheld comment.

“The antimatter canisters are secure, Admiral,” Commander Devlin reported. “The shuttles are moving into the docking bay now… just a couple more minutes.”

“If they don’t get inside in the next five minutes, Mr. Devlin, you’re fired,” Patel deadpanned.

“Understood, sir,” Devlin said, a grim humor in his voice.

McKay watched the approaching missiles and didn’t feel fear so much as a crippling guilt. It would have been different had there been something for him to do, some duty he needed to perform, but as he could only stand and watch, he had the luxury of stopping to feel guilt. Would Shannon have seen through him? He asked himself. Would she have been more suspicious?

“McKay,” Patel looked to him. “You might want to strap in,”

“Yes, sir.” He moved to the acceleration couches behind the command chair and belted himself into it, eyes never leaving the screen and the approaching missiles.

“Gauss rounds hit one of them,” Pirelli reported, “but it’s still on target. Two minutes.”

“Admiral,” Commander Kopecky called from engineering, “the antimatter injectors are connected, field is ready to power up on your order.”

““Excellent, Commander, stand by for my order.” He switched over to Damage Control. “Commander Devlin, the shuttles?”

“They’re all inside the bay, sir,” Devlin reported. “We’re still getting them secured to the docking locks-if we accelerate, they could break loose and cause some serious damage, but you can activate the field.”

“Mr. Sweeny,” Patel said, a relieved sigh in his voice, “activate the drive field… station keeping only.”

“Aye, sir,” Sweeny said with the grin of a condemned man who’d just been handed a reprieve, “station keeping only.”

The view on the exterior cameras shifted as the drive field began propagating outward from the emitters in the pods on either side of the hull. Space-time warped outward and the ripples slammed into the oncoming missiles,