Chapter Text
From out of the shadow a red sword leaped flaming.
Glamdring glittered white in answer.
There was a ringing clash and a stab of white fire. The Balrog fell back and its sword flew up in molten fragments. The wizard swayed on the bridge, stepped back a pace, and then again stood still.
"All right, you heard the announcement," McCoy barked at his staff as he returned to the sick bay. "We've got a certifiable madman in command of this ship and I've got some records to compile. Get ready to receive casualties - lots of 'em!" He plopped down behind his desk and punched the switch on his recording computer. "Medical log, U.S.S. Enterprise, Dr. Leonard McCoy recording. Discovered the starship U.S.S. Constellation crippled and adrift, her entire crew killed by an alien automaton except for her commanding officer, Commodore Matthew Decker. Initial examination revealed no external trauma, aside from a slight concussion that most likely caused a brief loss of consciousness. At the request of Captain Kirk, I conducted an informal psychological screening of Commodore Decker to ascertain his mental state, and found him to be in a state of deep shock and post-traumatic stress. My preliminary evaluation disclosed that Commodore Decker is now preoccupied with death, indicating a bout of suicidal ideation. He has since pulled rank and assumed command of the Enterprise in Captain Kirk's absence, informing First Officer Spock that his top priority is destroying the alien weapon that killed his people.
"First Officer Spock made Commodore Decker aware that the alien machine cannot be damaged by the Enterprise's weapon systems, but the commodore ignored him, and as of this recording he has ordered the Enterprise into action against it. His obsession with destroying it, despite the futility of the effort, alongside his suicidal ideation is bound to result in an exact repeat of the calamity involving the Constellation. It is my professional judgment that - "
All of a sudden McCoy grunted loudly as the planet killer's first blast struck the Enterprise head on. Thrown back from his desk, he had barely regained his balance when the second blow slammed home. He caught himself on the edge of the desk and glared upward, listening to the rattle of fragile items in the display case behind him. If Decker's recklessness caused any irreparable harm to his prized set of Denebian tungsten allotropes, there would be hell to pay. Cursing to himself, he stood up and bent back over the computer terminal.
"Pause entry!" he snapped. He strode into the examination room to find Nurse Chapel and two orderlies picking up hyposprays and instruments that had been scattered all over the deck. "Damn it, don't leave equipment adrift, this is what's bound to happen!"
"Sorry, Doctor," one of the orderlies said plaintively. "We were just on our way to set these out for use."
"Well, get 'em in order and get 'em secured! We'll be taking casualties in here any minute now!" On McCoy strode into the recovery ward, where he found the nurses scrambling to prepare the biobeds.
"FIRE!" Decker roared.
Only the Enterprise's distance from the points of impact protected it from being hit by its own phaser beams as they ricocheted off the stout hull of the planet killer. Even at this close range, the machine was uninhibited.
"Direct hit!" Sulu's gaze darted from one warning light on his control panel to another, warning him of everything from a drain in warp power to the threat of the machine's gravity well.
"It just....bounced off," he uttered, perplexed beyond more cogent words.
"Commodore, I urgently recommend immediate withdrawal," Spock said with an unusual intensity to his voice.
"Recommendation noted, maintain course," Decker replied dismissively. "Fire!"
The Enterprise swooped close in above the berserker as Sulu continued blasting away with the phasers, narrowly avoiding a collision that could surely have crushed the engineering section. He responded by angling the Enterprise away from the planet killer and darting off ahead of it, firing all the while. And still the monster lumbered on, seeming to regard the Enterprise as an elephant might regard a lone mosquito, as if trying to determine if this irritating little starship was the same one that had attacked it earlier, and how it had rebounded from its near destruction.
"Still no effect, sir!" Sulu reported with a vigorous shake of his head. "We aren't even making a dent in that thing! There's just no way to blast through it!"
"Leave the scientific opinions to Mr. Spock, helmsman," Decker said sharply. "Bring us around and get us back up above it! Ready on photon torpedoes!"
"My scientific opinion, sir, concurs with Mr. Sulu's," Spock rejoined. "It is not logical to continue phaser attack and waste our firepower against an invulnerable opponent."
"You won't find anyone in the Rigel system worrying about logic when that thing eats them alive!" Decker snapped. "One more remark like that and - " He broke off as the Enterprise heaved and jolted under another blast. The planet killer had altered its own angle of attack the same as the Enterprise, not only shooting on an up-angle, but shooting from a point where its energy field was out of view. That attack had come without the warning of the field's increasing brightness. The warning beacon on the helm flashed threateningly along with an alert light on the helm console.
"Photon torpedoes inoperable, sir!" Sulu exclaimed. "The bay's taken damage!"
Decker's Bane struck again. Spock quickly checked his instruments, snapped a couple of switches, arose from his station and paced over toward the aft side of the bridge. "Sir, deflector shields are gone," he reported without undertone.
"Dr. McCoy!" the orderly hollered from the examination-room doorway. "Major casualties on the way up from the main torpedo bay. A dozen and counting!"
"Set up a triage in my office!" McCoy hollered back. He affixed an osteomender to the forehead of a concussion patient and dashed to another crewmember with a broken arm on the other side of the ward, painkiller hypo in his hand. He pointedly aimed the hypo away from both the patient and himself - the episode with the Guardian of Forever had taught him that lesson with brutal clarity.
"Doctor, at this rate, the casualties will be too much to handle inside of ten minutes!" Nurse Chapel protested.
"Tell me something I don't know!" McCoy scowled with the effort he was exerting to reset the fracture. "Decker's off his nut, and Spock hasn't got the sense to stand up to him! Honestly, Nurse, I don't know what you see in that green-blooded hobgoblin!" Another hit nearly threw him off his feet as he rushed down the ward to treat a dislocated hip.
"Dr. McCoy!" the orderly yelled from the exam room. "Lieutenant Levens from phaser control, he's got a fractured vertebra and partial paralysis!"
"I'll be right there!" McCoy's face twisted from scowl to snarl as he feverishly worked to relieve the current patient's pain. "When this is over, I'll have Decker in restraints so fast he won't even have time to consent!"
Another hit. McCoy stormed to the exam room to check on Lieutenant Levens, but his pace slowed. Suddenly the ship had gone strangely quiet. Then a soft, high-pitched, vibrating hum, barely within human hearing range, began to emanate from the bulkheads around them.
"What in the name of...." McCoy looked around. The sound seemed to be everywhere. He had no time to pin it down now, however. He put it out of his mind and strode over to the injured man on the exam table and grabbed another osteomender.
"How's it look, lad?" Scott asked Russ as he stowed away the phase inhibitor.
"Managed to scrounge up enough residual energy from the aft phaser array to ignite a reaction from the deuterium," Russ replied. "It'll give us half impulse power - but whether the warp control circuits will hold up under the surge, you got me."
"No cause for fret, so long as she's still got some life left in her," Scott reassured him. He moved up beside Washburn at the power distribution panel. "Let's link a bypass to the number two phaser bank to prevent the circuits from overloadin'." He had just commenced throwing switches when his communicator beeped impatiently.
"Scotty, give me that power!"
Decker was frustrated beyond words. The berserker had slaughtered hundreds, even thousands, destroyed whole worlds with the same form as Earth, would go on to devour millions more, and all Spock could prattle about was logic. And yet this time, his logic was as inescapable as the tractor beam that had pegged them.
"Veer off!" he groaned finally. As the tractor beam tightened its grasp on the Enterprise, he sagged over the arm of the chair, sick with defeat. He might as well give up the fight and let the damned beast gobble them up here and now. He'd failed to stop the machine for the second time, and for all he had, Spock had just threatened him with relief for the second time. He barely paid a mind to Spock and Sulu fighting to the last, a futile effort, a waste of power for which Spock had criticized him not even ten minutes ago.
"Estimated time to absorption?" Spock demanded.
"No more than three or four minutes, sir...." Sulu glanced into his sensor viewer for confirmation, but he froze in mid-lean. Then he pitched forward again, gripped the viewer tightly in one hand and pressed his eyes deep into it. "Sir, the Constellation! She's underway and closing!"
"What?" Decker blurted, looking up.
"She's only making one-half impulse power, but she's coming in from our starboard hand and closing on the planet killer!"
"Evidently Mr. Scott's ingenuity has yet to fail us," Spock observed.
At last Decker sat up straight, slapping the arm of the chair. "And don't you forget about Jim Kirk's tenacity in action. Full power astern!"
"Aye, sir!" Sulu acknowledged as he engaged reverse thrust. Shudder and shake though the great starship might, the greater mass of the planet killer still filled more and more of the screen as it drew the ship into its gut with agonizing slowness.
"We still can't move," Sulu puffed. "Estimate two minutes to no return!"
"Ms. Palmer, attempt to raise the Constellation," Spock ordered. "If we can ascertain the captain's intentions - "
"It won't do a damned bit of good!" Decker interrupted. "We drained our phasers completely against that bastard!" He gesticulated at the screen - the berserker's maw now filled it almost entirely: only a few stars were visible at the corners.
"And you intend to repeat the action with the Enterprise?" Spock inquired.
"In a few minutes, it won't make any difference!" Decker fiddled restlessly with the computer disks in his fingers and turned to Sulu. "Full phasers, fire, point-blank!"
"Full phasers, aye!" Sulu held onto the edge of his console with one hand and punched the phaser switch with the other, firing a prolonged burst into the gaping, flaming maw before them. The first salvo vanished into the energy field to no visible effect, but the Enterprise shook harder still as it fought the relentless pull of the tractor beam. The second salvo went awry, striking a glancing blow against the side of the planet killer's interior. Before disbelieving eyes, the beam bounced ineffectively off the inner side and proceeded to ricochet haphazardly about the interior until it, too, vanished into the energy field and was lost to view.
"Phasers still no good, sir!" Sulu said with a frustrated huff.
"Lieutenant Palmer?" Spock called aft.
"I'm sorry, sir," Palmer replied. "I still can't get through to the Constellation. The interference is too heavy!"
"Then we must trust that Captain Kirk has a plan of action." Spock stood up straight, still, bracing himself on the helm console against the Enterprise's shuddering, staring into the fiery glare radiating from the planet killer's interior. "Preferably a plan that can be carried out in under a minute."
Emergency power straining, the Enterprise struggled against the berserker's pull. Impulse power alternately surging and weakening, the Constellation staggered closer. Scott and his three men, scrambling to do the work of two dozen, blessed the foresight of connecting the phaser transfer coil to the impulse reactor when Kirk expressed an offhanded wish for weapons capability.
"Constellation is at eight thousand kilometers and closing," Sulu reported. "He - " The report went incomplete as he stared in disbelief at the screen. In one corner, the half-dozen visible stars were lost to view behind a single blue-white beam of phaser fire punching squarely against the planet killer's side. Decker's contention notwithstanding, the unimaginable had lapsed into reality and not a moment too soon. The Enterprise jolted as the tractor beam suddenly dropped, and the forward thrusters regained traction, pushing the ship away from the massive machine as it released one target and turned to face the other: it almost seemed to recognize its former nemesis for a moment.
"We're loose, Commodore!" Sulu exulted.
"Good boy, Jim," Decker muttered. "Between the two of us, we'll kill that thing."
"It's closing fast on the Constellation," Spock observed.
In less than a second Sulu had the main phasers ready. "Standing by, sir."
Spock turned to Decker, his expression unchanged. "Commodore, I suggest - "
"Kirk pulled us out of there by distracting it," Decker cut him off. "Now it's our turn. Fire phasers!"
With two starships to contend with, the berserker's one-on-one advantage dissolved. As before, the Enterprise's assault did no more good than trying to penetrate a cement wall with a haystalk, but it effectively drew the planet killer off its crippled sister, barely breaking away from the machine's gravitational pull and avoiding another peg from its tractor beam.
"Did it!" Decker exclaimed. "Hard about. Gimme some distance!"
For a few heart-stopping seconds it appeared as though the sluggishly thrusting Enterprise would fail to escape the machine's line of fire again. Yet somehow, in only a few seconds, Sulu managed to haul off, opening the distance by several thousand kilometers before the berserker resumed its breathless pursuit back into the debris field.
"We're moving away, Commodore," Sulu exhaled, relaxing only in the slightest.
Decker sighed and shared in the young helmsman's feeling of relief. Even in the face of another massively destructive alien superweapon, maybe they had a chance after all. Just like Dimidium, he and Jim Kirk were on the same mission to stop a planet-smashing alien device with two separate ships. With his decisive authority again coupled to Kirk's resourcefulness, it would take a power beyond comprehension to stop them now.
Kirk, however, did not share his enthusiasm; he was preoccupied with the near loss of the Enterprise, and furious that Decker had taken it into action without him. Rank, regulation, revenge were of no consequence to the younger man and it was anyone's guess if he would live long enough to face the consequences. Decker already had half a mind to charge him with insubordination: captains didn't speak to other captains, let alone commodores, as if they were trying to herd an uncooperative toddler toward a playpen.
"Commodore Decker." Spock's quiet tone was even more bone-chilling than his unbreakable gaze. "You are relieved of command."
"I don't recognize your authority to relieve me." Decker barely withheld a scoff as he leaned away from Spock and ogled the bridge engineering station, trying to avoid that stare.
"You may file a formal protest with Starfleet Command, assuming we survive to reach a Starbase," Spock told him. "But you are relieved."
Biting his knuckle tensely, Decker twitched, tried to ignore Spock. He had little doubt that the unfeeling Vulcan could and would drop him with a nerve pinch, maybe even a blow to the back of the neck. Damnably, his resolve wavered. If it came to a confrontation of more than words, this was no Stanley Dorian he was facing - there was no way he would last single handed against Spock.
"Commodore, I do not wish to place you under arrest," Spock said, tightening the screw.
"You wouldn't dare." Decker finally turned to stare at him in disbelief. If Spock was playing the game Decker thought he was playing, it was good for two players.
Spock, however, made a wordless gesture to the two security guards standing on either side of the turbolift. They both moved forward, eyes locked on Decker, hands splayed out at their sides. They were like a pair of Iridian sabercats ready to pounce on a crippled, flightless pteryxid. But Spock still hadn't broken his stare.
"You're bluffing," Decker muttered, faking unconcern.
"Vulcans never bluff." Spock's voice was absolutely guileless.
Decker stared at him for what seemed like a long moment, but was truly a blink in time compared to the penetrating gaze Spock had been levelling at him. All that came to mind was T'Prea's unflinching nerve assault on her friend Laurie Galbraith to truncate the Dorian problem. No, Vulcans did not bluff. They took whatever action they deemed possible and logical, even if it came down to subduing a superior officer or assaulting a friend.
"No," he said finally. "No, I don't suppose that they do. Very well, Mr. Spock. The bridge is yours."
With quiet resignation, he slowly hoisted himself out of the chair, imagining what sort of psychological mumbo-jumbo McCoy would concoct to declare him unfit for duty. Spock retook his place and informed Kirk: but he wasn't quite finished with Decker yet.
"Commodore," he said, "I believe you are scheduled for a medical examination. Mr. Montgomery, you will accompany the commodore to sick bay."
"Aye, sir. Commodore?" The security guard gestured for Decker to enter the turbolift and then stepped in with him, standing uncomfortably close. "Deck three," he ordered the lift.
Decker glanced obliquely at him as the lift eased downward. "Maybe Spock's right," he said matter-of-factly. "Maybe I could use some medical attention. I don't know about you, but I could do with a cup of coffee."
"I'm good, sir," Montgomery said simply.
Wordlessly, Decker nodded. He held the young man in the corner of his eye as the lift came to a stop and the doors opened. He took two slow, carefully planned steps, inhaled sharply, and faked a heavy cough.
He successfully caught Montgomery off guard as he backfisted him squarely in the face. Montgomery yelled in surprise, but as Decker snatched his phaser from his belt, he recovered quickly and knocked the weapon out of his grasp, flinging it against the bulkhead. Decker tried to go after it, but Montgomery quickly twisted him around and grabbed him in a quarter-Nelson, trying to pinion his arms.
Age and treachery versus youth and speed. Or better yet, strength versus agility. Montgomery might have been more limber and flexible, but Decker was stronger. Bit by bit, he overcame Montgomery's grip and rammed both fists backward, catching the guard's face in opposing blows. He caught Montgomery by surprise again - the lad hadn't been expecting such scrappy opposition from an older man whose mental health was off kilter. Decker elbowed him in the chest and gave him a double back fist to the spinal column, but Montgomery didn't go down so easily. They circled each other, panting, snarling, squaring off like a pair of timber wolves fighting over a mate. One step at a time, Decker moved in, tried to feint another hook into a right cross, but now Montgomery was ready for him. He deflected the punch, blocked another awkward hook from Decker and threw one of his own, sending him crashing to his knees against the bulkhead.
For a few seconds Decker knelt there, wheezing heavily, pretending to be injured and exhausted. He kept his peripheral vision on Montgomery, waiting for him to move in for the knockout blow. The kid's pride must have been wounded worse than his cheekbones at being bettered by this curmudgeonly senior officer. He edged forward and was just about to kick Decker in the face when Decker shot upright, landing a blow in Montgomery's stomach and doubling him over.
That was it - time to finish this. He elbowed the pressure point on the back of Montgomery's neck, driving him to his knees, and gave him a hard kick in the kidney, sending him sprawling. Montgomery made one last attempt to struggle back to his feet, but Decker clasped his fists together, drew himself upright and landed a double hammer blow on the guard's lungs, knocking the wind out of him. Down and out for the count, Montgomery flopped forward into the opening doorway of a nearby storeroom. Without wasting another slug, Decker strode into the room, dragged Montgomery inside and tossed him up against the aft bulkhead.
"You should've gone for the phaser when you had the chance, you dumb kid," Decker muttered at the unconscious Montgomery as he deposited him on the deck in the storage room. He was on his way back to the door when he glanced at a shelf beside it - a shelf holding a dozen portable log recorders, apparently unused. He sighed, picked one up, hastened back to the corridor, glanced furtively in both directions, and grabbed Montgomery's still-adrift phaser. He ducked back into the turbolift and ordered it to the observation deck.
"Mr. Spock, I have Dr. McCoy on the internal channel," Palmer called over her shoulder.
Spock's only reaction was to turn on the speaker beside him. "Doctor, this is Spock. We have made contact with Captain Kirk and - "
"Never mind the preamble to the Constitution, Spock, what in blazes is going on up there?!" McCoy burst out. "I got damn near a third of the crew in triage down here!"
"Please reserve your emotional reactions for a more appropriate moment, Doctor," Spock replied. "The captain has enabled Commodore Decker's relief. He will arrive in sick bay momentarily."
"It's about damn time! I'll show him right to the head of the line so he can see what he's done to these people! Now are we withdrawing, or is that thing going to run us completely ragged?"
"We are attempting to withdraw, but the object does not seem willing to permit it. However, I am quite certain the commodore will appreciate your impassioned display of medical professionalism." Spock's words infringed on sarcasm. He turned the speaker off and asked Sulu for an update on the planet killer's range: it was holding steady, but only so long as the Enterprise's main power would hold out.
He'd lost his wife, his crew, his ship, and his chance for vengeance. He couldn't keep going like this - if he did, God only knew how much worse he could possibly make this situation.
There was only one thing for it.
So much of this battle called to Decker's mind the encounter with the Manticore over Dimidium. Himself in command of one ship and Kirk in command of another - a badly damaged ship that wasn't even his. A planet-killing weapon that shook off every attempt to stop it, far less destroy it. They had only stopped the Manticore thanks to the sacrifice of one man, a man who had thought himself a coward but had let himself die rather than face judgment. Decker couldn't even remember that scared lieutenant's name now. All he knew was that the man whose panicked voice he'd heard over intercom, but whose face he'd never seen, had steered the Leonis straight into the Manticore's warhead to buy escape time for Kirk and the survivors. Whoever that man was, Decker had him to thank for showing him the only open path left.
How had that young man acquitted himself in the Kobayashi Maru test? Had he ever even taken it?
Decker paused for a moment in the deserted corridor and thought back to his own trial, so many years ago, before he'd ever envisioned having his own ship. His own solution had been to evacuate survivors in shuttlecraft and escape pods, and hope to God the simulated Klingons wouldn't pick off every escape craft to be set loose. The last thing he remembered from the test was an impenetrable wall of smoke blanketing the entire bridge simulator, cutting visibility to little further than the tip of his nose. No one had ever told him whether he'd succeeded in evacuating the crew: he had decided there was little to lose by repeating the gambit once the Constellation had been disabled. But this time they weren't dealing with simulated Klingons, not even with real ones - and definitely no Organians around to throw a spanner into the works. They were hard up against an indiscriminate, utterly murderous superweapon that had no time to deal with a disabled ship when there were hundreds of planets to demolish and devour.
Kirk's own solution to the Kobayashi Maru scenario was by now the stuff of Starfleet legend. From the bridge simulator to the bridge of the Enterprise, he had built his entire career on cheating death. And now it occurred to Decker: did his old first officer even care who had to die so that he could go on fighting?
One day, someone close to Kirk would die, and he would be unable to prevent it, much less bear the guilt of it. No better than Decker could now bear the guilt of destroying his crew. Leaving Shona Edgerton and her daughters without a husband and father, leaving uncounted other families without sons and daughters.
Sucking in a deep breath, he lurched into motion and headed for the nearest utility ladder.
He heard a damage control party rushing aft in the corridor just below him and paused, holding his breath. Once their footfalls had faded, he continued descending the ladder, looked furtively up and down the corridor, and checked the plating on the bulkhead next to the ladder well to see what section he was in. Still four decks to descend. He ran for the next section aft and jumped into another ladder well.
When he finally reached a solid deck, he peeked out of it again to read the plate on the bulkhead: SHUTTLECRAFT HANGAR DECK. This was where he wanted to be. He was just about to hasten down the corridor when three more crewmembers appeared from an intersecting corridor and headed for a turbolift. Decker concealed himself in the ladder well, waited for them to get out of sight and then headed for the junction. He looked around, made sure he was unobserved and then made a mad dash for the airlock.
"McCoy to bridge!"
Evidently the channel was still open. Frowning, Spock turned on the speaker and responded.
"Are you sure Decker's on his way down here?" McCoy demanded. "I'm still waiting on him, and there's plenty more important things I could be doing right now."
"He left the bridge with Lieutenant Montgomery approximately ten minutes and fifty-five seconds ago," Spock's frown deepened. "If he has not yet arrived...."
"He sure as hell hasn't. And in his condition, he's the last man I want running around the ship unescorted."
"We find ourselves in a rare moment of agreement, Doctor." Spock half-turned. "Ms. Palmer, security alert to all decks. Locate and restrain Commodore Decker, and convey him to sick bay at once."
So far, so good. He hadn't gotten caught, now the only trick would be getting out of the hangar before someone on the bridge noticed a warning light. This would involve a risky move, but what the hell? He'd taken enough risks in the past couple of days and come up fatally short. He checked the pressure meter in the airlock and ascertained that the hangar deck was pressurized, then slipped into the hangar and ran for the shuttlecraft parked on the launch pad.
Fortunately the shuttlecraft didn't seem to have been damaged in any of the planet killer's attacks. More fortunately, there seemed to be no one present in hangar control - whoever had been manning that station must have been critically injured and rushed to sick bay. Still, no time to lose - the security alert lights were already flashing. Decker clambered into the shuttlecraft and started the engines, punching up the remote controls for the hangar deck. Now would be the tricky part - opening the doors without depressurizing the bay. Hopefully this shuttlecraft and the others were weighed down enough not to be sucked straight out of the bay like soap bubbles.
As it turned out, no such fate awaited any of the shuttlecraft: though the one Decker had commandeered was jolted off the landing pad by the gust of evacuating air as the doors opened. So much, the better. Decker punched the maneuvering thrusters and powered on out of the hangar, just as the process reversed and the doors began to close.
Once clear of the hangar, Decker allowed himself a minute of relaxation. As he'd hoped, the crew of the Enterprise was so preoccupied with outrunning the berserker that they'd not noted his departure until it was too late. There was no chance of flying to his fate completely unnoticed, and thus he tensed again, concentrating on outranging the Enterprise's tractor beams.
He peered into the sensor viewer on his left. Already the Enterprise was scores of kilometers behind him and still there were no indications that his departure had been noted, beyond the hangar doors closing. He'd had command of that ship after all. Maybe for only a couple of hours, but it was a fine ship, a far cry from the Constellation.
Decker refocused the sensors on his own poor, half-destroyed ship. This was the first he'd seen of it from outside since its first engagement with the berserker. Were his spirit not already broken, seeing its pathetic, shredded appearance would have finished it for sure. The dying Constellation was now on a rendezvous course with the Enterprise as it struggled to cling to life like a dying man trying to finish one final task. He was just such a man, he mused – Dr. Jol had told him that his own psychological condition was directly proportional to the condition of the ship: and now, indubitably, the Constellation was as unsalvageable a wreck as he was. In hindsight, the Enterprise might well have ended up the same way if not for Kirk's intervention. As far as he was concerned, losing two commands in as many days on top of his other losses - all four hundred of them - his life was forfeit.
He trained the sensor viewer on the planet killer, still dead astern of the Enterprise, still gaining. It was undeniable, insufferable, ghastly in its size and appearance, gulping down rubble by the mega-ton. Decker shook his head, still swept with incomprehension that the accursed thing could so coldly devour whole solar systems for the sake of a war that it had singlehandedly ended eons ago. This must be its last meal, even if it meant putting himself on the menu.
"Enterprise to shuttlecraft! Come in, shuttlecraft!" There it was – Palmer's voice cutting into his ruminations. "Come in, shuttlecraft!"
He was too far out to be reeled back in. He slowly reached forward and pressed the switch beside the speaker. "Shuttlecraft to Enterprise," he answered in a voice bereft of tone. "Decker here."
"Commodore," Spock exhorted, "I must insist that you return to the ship."
"You said it yourself, Spock. There is no way to blast through the hull of that machine, so....I'm going to take this thing right down its throat." Decker pressed another switch, his pulse quickening as the viewing ports slid open and the monster came into plain view beyond: the last thing those hundreds of men and women under his command had ever seen, fittingly the last thing he would ever see, no worse a sight than he deserved.
"This is Kirk." The voice on the speaker was piercing and urgent. "Matt, you'll be killed."
"I've been prepared for death ever since I....ever since I killed my crew," Decker said in a long sigh.
"No one expects you to die for an error in judgment!"
"A commander is responsible for the lives of his crew," Decker replied, the resignation to his fate underscoring his sentiments. "And for their deaths. Well, I should have died with mine."
"You cannot succeed, Commodore," Spock interjected. "Your only logical alternative is to return to the ship."
He might as well have tried to warn off a Klingon battle cruiser. Decker had already asked for logical alternatives once. He'd heard them all, from Zhour, from T'Prea, from Marlowe. The last had seemed the most promising, and how had that gone? Kirk was dead wrong - his error in judgment had cost hundreds of lives, and death was the only possible penance.
"Matt," Kirk persisted. "Matt, listen to me! You can't throw your life away like this!"
Decker didn't reply. As he stared fixedly down the throat of his Bane, those hysterical screams for help echoed in his mind's ear again, the earthrending crashes of the machine's antimatter beam tearing the planet to shreds. Kirk hadn't been there to witness the horror of seeing up close the results of his last fatal mistake.
"Matt, you're a starship commander!" Kirk's protests became louder and more desperate with every kilometer of closure. "That makes you a valuable commodity! We need you, your experience, your judgment. Matt!"
Decker switched the intercom off. He would never know that Kirk was still pleading with him, that Kirk, Spock, and the entire crew of the Enterprise were staring in rapt disbelief at his final act of sacrifice.
As he drew inexorably closer to the planet killer's evilly glowing maw, as it continued to gulp down rubble by the mega-ton, his tortured mind perceived the features of a face in every rock it devoured. Edgerton. Seppala. Samuels. Dorian. Masada. Zhour. Galbraith....four hundred rocks, four hundred faces, all swallowed whole by Decker's Bane.
Maria....
In his emotional breakdown aboard the Constellation, he'd only been able to imagine how much terror his crew had had to endure at the end. He no longer imagined it as the great ghastly maw filled the entire viewport and the shuttlecraft passed beyond the point of no return. All he could see, all he could think, was the same shocked hysteria he'd felt as he watched that monstrous abomination pulverize the third planet and his crew along with it. He remembered his desperation, felt their dread, remembered his impotence, felt their despair, and the terror mushroomed in him as he now faced the same fate they had.
Masked with abhorrence, he pushed himself back in his chair, clapped his hand over his face as the energy field blinded him. But it was far too late: the infernal monster had him. He felt what the rest of them must have felt, saw the visions of his crew reproachfully awaiting him from the other side, beheld the dreadful end that lay only seconds before him.
He had crossed the bridge and he had broken it with his own hands.
At that moment Gandalf lifted his staff, and crying aloud he smote the bridge before him. The staff broke asunder and fell from his hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked. Right at the Balrog's feet it broke, and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf, while the rest remained, poised, quivering like a tongue of rock thrust out into emptiness.
With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered, and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. 'Fly, you fools!' he cried, and was gone.