#ah finally the climax of the story
CH 13
The moment Tyomik leaves, Zhenka slowly grabs the dermal regenerator. He removes his rank insignia from the collar of his uniform and carefully uses it to try to pry the regenerator open. His hands are violently shaking and he drops the rank insignia more than once, but each time, he picks it up and continues his efforts. It kills Sidney to watch him do this when he knows he can’t help him; he can feel that Zhenka is in so much pain. But he can also feel the determination within Zhenka.
After what feels like hours (but was probably only half an hour), Zhenka is finally able to take the dermal regenerator apart, and slowly, piece by piece, he removes components until he finally finds the piece he’s looking for. He sighs in relief and slowly stands up, clutching his ribs, unable to stop a small whimper from escaping his lips. He stands there for a moment, breathing through the pain, and then he walks towards the light panel on the wall of his cell. Once again, he takes his rank insignia and begins the arduous process of trying to pry the panel off the wall, but he suddenly hears someone coming. He pockets his rank insignia and stumbles back to the bench, sitting on the components of the dermal regenerator to hide them.
The commander comes walking through the door, smiling an ugly smile. Sidney notices he’s missing a tooth. “You know, I’ve wanted to do that for a long time. I’ve always hated your incessant whining.”
Zhenka laughs bitterly. “Admit it. You’ve wanted to throw me out of the airlock since the day we left for how much I insisted we should return to help the colonies.”
“The thought had crossed my mind, yes.”
Zhenka laughs some more, and Sid can feel how much it hurts his ribs. “So what stopped you, Seshal?”
The commander turns away for a moment. “Despite your…questionable political alignments, you really have been the most competent second-in-command I’ve ever had. It’s…such a pity.”
Zhenka shakes his head. “You make it sound…” he winces and coughs. “Make it sound like you’ve come in here…to kill me.”
The commander turns to Zhenka, and despite the intensity of his anger before, he’s surprised at Zhenka’s words.
“Well? Go ahead. Get it over with.” Zhenka says.
“Zhenka! You know this ship better than anyone else. It should be you in there running the experiment. The work we do here today could change the lives of everyone in the colonies! We must continue with it now! Will you listen to reason? For once?”
Zhenka laughs some more. He laughs so hard he’s sent into a painful fit of coughing.
“Reason!” He wheezes, coughing some more. “You’ve never listened to… my reason, Seshal, so why should I… listen to yours now?”
“Because,” the commander turns his back to him. “Goddamn it, Zhenka, you know as well as I do that this experiment is the last hope for our people!”
Zhenka laughs some more, and tears are streaming down his face, more from the pain than anything.
“You can cut… the bullshit with me, Seshal,” Zhenka coughs. “I know what you actually care about, and it’s not the colonies… or helping our people. You want redemption. You want redemption because you watched our star destroy our world, and what was your reaction? You ordered us to run away. To get as far away from your problems as possible so you could pretend that you still had a Star Empire to answer to and all the power and respectability that comes with it. And I was so young and naïve that I followed your orders like a good little officer. How stupid I was then…”
The commander lunges at the force field.
“Damn you, Zhenka!”
“And then the Tal Shiar come to find you…” Zhenka speaks over him, causing the commander’s ire to grow exponentially. “They tell you exactly what you want to hear, and you believe them. You still do. Sure, I did too, at first. They knew what I wanted to hear. They told us we could help the colonies. But then I actually started trying to implement their little experiment, and the calculations are complete nonsense. This plan of theirs is inherently flawed. And you won’t listen to me—won’t give me the time I need to actually make it work. So no. I will not listen to your ‘reason’. Throw me out of the airlock. Shoot me with your disruptor if you must. But do not ask me now to help you destroy this vessel and the people on it.”
The intercom suddenly beeps. “Commander, we’re ready to begin the first test run.”
The commander slowly unholsters his disruptor, and Zhenka swallows hard.
“I will kill you…”
The commander sets his disruptor down on the control console in view of Zhenka’s cell.
“…after we’re successful.”
-
Once the commander leaves the brig, Zhenka knows he has little time left. He winces as he stands, then rushes over to the light panel and continues his efforts to pry it from the wall.
He’s getting so close to being able to get it off when he suddenly feels the vibrations of the engines powering up.
Tyomik! You need to stop them! Zhenka thinks. Don’t let them continue!
Zhenka’s determination soon turns to desperation as he feels the ship begin to move forward. He knows what will happen next. They will go to warp, they’ll bring the modifications they’ve been working on for months online. If one thing is out of place, it could rip a hole in spacetime, which will affect the area around the ship for a radius of…he doesn’t even know how many lightyears. His gut tells him it’ll cause a cascade reaction, possibly more powerful than a matter-antimatter explosion. But the truth is, he doesn’t know the extent of the chaos it could unleash.
The ship begins to speed up and he begins desperately clawing at the light panel. He has to get out. Why did he tell Tyomik to lock him in? It was for Tyomik’s safety. He knew Seshal would come in to gloat and then try to persuade Zhenka to his side. It was a well-established pattern by this point. Seshal wouldn’t be able to help it. But maybe none of that matters anymore. Not if they’ll all be dead soon.
Please…Tyomik, please…
The ship speeds up. Zhenka claws at the panel.
They’re at warp. Zhenka claws at the panel.
The panel finally comes loose from the wall.
But reality suddenly seems to warp, and his vision blurs. The panel melts out of Zhenka’s fingers, all of his joints crack and his fingers seem to bend backwards. He cries out in pain and doesn’t make a sound. The wall loses its shape for a split second before snapping back to normal. The air around him seems to crackle with static electricity, his hair stands on end, something smells like copper, and Zhenka knows immediately that he’s too late.
A shiver runs down Sidney’s spine. He can sense that something is terribly wrong in engineering. The people there are suffocating. They’re trying to scream, but they can’t. He closes his eyes and listens to their final thoughts.
They’re drowning. Choking on a black mist that’s filling engineering, quickly escaping through a crack in that little box that contains their quantum singularity.
Suddenly, there’s an implosion. Ion discharges crackle through the walls, and the power conduit in the wall behind Zhenka’s cell ruptures, throwing Zhenka headfirst into the wall in front of him with a sickening crack.
Then, everything is black.
—
Sidney blinks in the darkness. What happened? Had the meld been broken? If it had, why is it so dark? Why does he feel pain in his ribs? Why is it so hard to breathe? …or is it Zhenka who feels like that? The fact that he currently can’t tell himself and Zhenka apart frightens him, but he wills himself not to panic.
It’s dark for so long…he tries to call out Zhenka’s name, but he finds that he can’t make a sound.
Suddenly, finally, after what feels like an hour, his ears catch a faint sound behind him and he turns around.
Laboured breathing.
He’s suddenly able to see what looks like a green emergency light through the wisps of dark haze. The ship is so still…until an ominous creaking noise rings out across the bulkheads and sparks rain down from a conduit in the wall with a sharp crackle. The light from the conduit briefly illuminates the shape of a person lying on the floor, rhythmically shifting under his laboured breaths. It’s Zhenka…and what Sid feels from him now mirrors everything he felt when they first met. Confusion. Anguish. Elation. Horror. Sorrow. Terrible pain.
After a moment, Zhenka whimpers as he struggles to get up. He’s wheezing, and he loses his footing a few times, falling back down to his knees. There’s a fresh cut on his left cheek with a piece of something black and glassy stuck in it. With a trembling hand, he reaches up and pulls it out, letting out a scream of anguish that crushes Sidney. Zhenka drops the fragment like it had burned him and falls to his knees, tears streaming down his face.
As he sits there, his wheezes seem to grow more intense, until Sidney suddenly realises that Zhenka is… laughing. Sidney feels cold all over. There’s something so unsettling about that laugh that he finds himself wanting to run…part of him wants to break the meld, but the part of him that needs to know what happened wins out, and he stays rooted to the spot.
Suddenly, the emergency lights start to blink, and the broken sound of a partially-damaged proximity alarm crackles over the comm system. Zhenka’s laugh sharply ends and his head snaps up.
“No…Get away….” He growls deep in his throat. “Not…safe….”
Zhenka staggers forward, grabbing the commander’s disruptor from where it had ended up on the floor and limp-running through the crumpled door to the brig out onto the deck. Sidney follows as best he can, nearly tripping on the debris scattered all over the corridor.
About halfway down the corridor Zhenka suddenly stops—so quickly that Sidney almost crashes into him—and turns his head, disruptor pistol held at the ready. Sidney hears faint whispers coming from the corridor behind them.
Zhenka…
Zhenka, you are dead…
I have won…
The unmistakable sound of the Romulan commander laughing echoes through Zhenka’s ears. A low scream rips from Zhenka’s throat, and Sidney presses himself against the bulkhead to avoid being hit in the face with the disruptor pistol as Zhenka points it down the corridor and fires a shot.
Sidney carefully turns his head to look down the dark corridor.
There’s nothing there.
Zhenka’s breaths are wild and stridorous, and he squints down the corridor as he slowly lowers the disruptor. The proximity alarm sounds again, and Zhenka lets out a sharp, hissing breath as he runs down the corridor, back towards what Sidney somehow knows is the bridge.
-
As they pass more and more closed doors in the corridors, Sidney becomes increasingly aware of a low hiss of whispers; the same whispers we heard during his first meld with Zhenka. He can feel Zhenka trying so hard to ignore them, but the whispers grow louder with every step they take, until Sidney can hear what some of them are saying.
The Star Empire has died with us…
The Tal Shiar has eliminated the empire. We won.
No survivors. We have dealt the final blow…
Zhenka ignores these whispers. But he can’t ignore the next whisper he hears.
Zhenka…I’m sorry…
I failed you.
“Tyomik…no…” Zhenka breaks into a run. His eyes are swimming with tears. The proximity alarm sounds with a faster frequency.
Zhenka comes up to a door, wrenching back a small compartment next to it and grabbing the handle inside. The door lets out a hiss as it slowly opens, and Zhenka slides through onto the bridge as soon as the gap is large enough for him to fit through.
When Sidney follows him in, the first thing he sees is the warbird’s main viewscreen, streaks of static periodically sweeping across it. It’s hard to see, but he can just make out the unmistakable orange glow of a federation probe. The one the Seabird sent into what they thought was a dark matter nebula. Sidney looks at Zhenka as he stares at the screen; he can tell that Zhenka has no idea what the object is, and the sensors are non-operational, so they can’t help him find out. But the probe is about the size of an escape pod…and the wave of contempt and hatred that comes off of Zhenka nearly knocks Sid off his feet.
“So this is how the Tal Shiar operates, ah?” Zhenka screams at the screen. “You destroy us and go on your way…ready to grasp all the remaining power over the Romulan people…We just…” Zhenka laughs. “We were renegades…outcasts…and you still felt we stood in your way…” he pauses to breathe, then continues in a low raspy voice. “In your insatiable pride, you had to…have one last victory…over the star empire…” He wheezes, reaches a shaking hand out to the weapons array.
“Choke on your pride.”
Zhenka fires a single shot at the probe, and Sidney watches it explode as if it were in slow motion. The explosion sends a reticulated network of blinding white bolts rippling through the entire cloud of dark mist, and sends a shockwave hurtling towards the ship…harrowingly similar-no, the same one that that was fast approaching the Seabird—
The bridge of the warbird is suddenly enveloped in a blinding white light and Sidney feels the impact…and he suddenly feels stretched, as if his mind is riding the edge of that shockwave, reaching out, calling for help, warning to stay away…
and, finally, impacting the Seabird.
Sidney opens his eyes, and suddenly, he’s on the bridge of the seabird. He sees his own body on the flaming bridge, crumpled against the wall behind his station.
He hears a woman’s laugh. He sees the kindly old Romulan woman. He sees a white hot explosion. He sees his own little sister and the dock by their house on Earth.
Sidney breaks the mind meld, and the two of them fall back onto the floor, gasping for air.
Sidney understands now. He and Zhenka don’t just have a connection because of these mind melds…it happened then. The shockwave brought them together. Bound them.
They were both alone before, and now…
Now, they’re each other’s only hope.
