Casden took a deep breath, yet another in a series of deep breaths that wouldn’t sustain him much longer, that barely sustained him now. No one was answering their communicators anymore, his last contact forty minutes before, with a dying ensign who was locked in her quarters. The very thought of it made him sick and weary, though he had no doubt he’d be sleeping soon enough, and for eternity; the only question was which would hold out longer, the air or the ship herself.
Was it worth it? Worth losing everything, just to die alone in the middle of nowhere?
There wasn’t an answer; the question as futile as his situation. If he’d seen it coming, if he hadn’t acted so rashly, if he’d given some thought to politics earlier in his career . . . worrying about what he might have done to make things different was useless in the here and now, it only worked to stoke the fires of his panic, and his self-control was all he had left. Everything else—his ship, his crew, his reputation—was gone, lost to his mistakes and those men and women who had exploited them.
Desperate, Casden held himself tighter against the growing cold, returning to theories and plans that he’d already rejected as impossible, sorting through them just to reject them again; short of giving up, it was all he could do. The ship’s computer wouldn’t answer, all bridge controls were locked out and unresponsive, and the subspace communications arrays had been damaged beyond repair. Even if he could find a way to record what was happening, to somehow explain himself, the ship was at warp five or six already and rising, he could tell by the sound; he figured she would blow up before she shook apart, and either way, there would be nothing left of her.
The bridge life-support had been cut last; his crew was surely dead. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to live his last moments in total despair, but there was no help for the dense and dark responsibility that would serve as his shroud. Thirty-six people, men and women who had been his family for the last four years, trapped and asphyxiated. And all because of him, because of his stubborn inability to accept the truth. Because he hadn’t opened his eyes until it was too late.
Behind him, the doors to the lift swished open, and there stood the unwelcome passenger, phaser in hand. A personal oxygen filter was fixed across his lower face, but Casden could see the glitter of false apology in his dark blue eyes.
From the station—
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, and before Casden could think twice, he was rushing at the bastard, cold and dizzy and determined to take down the man responsible for the nightmare, his own life hardly worth saving in the face of what he’d helped create.