"Divorce of Steel"

Author: Banshee Squadron
Earthdate: February 29, 2386
Location: Dilithium mines, Rostella IV

Go with me, like good angels, to my end;
And, as the long divorce of steel falls on me,
Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice,
And lift my soul to heaven.
     - William Shakespeare, King Henry the Eighth

The enormous natural cavern in which the Banshees suddenly found themselves echoed with the sounds of the pursuing multitude in the tunnels behind. Lee Carter looked around, seeking an escape route.

The whole place was lit with a hellish, green glow emanating from within a deep chasm that ran from left wall to right, splitting the cavern neatly in twain. Twenty feet wide at its narrowest, it was far too broad to jump, and there was no way around. The only way across was via a slender crystalline bridge spanning the channel, linking the side on which the Banshees stood and the far side and escape. From the way it coruscated and refracted the ambient light, Carter judged it to be composed entirely of dilithium! Noisome, obscene gurgling sounds emanated from deep inside the chasm, accompanied by lumberous, oily, green bubbles rising briefly above its lip before bursting, splattering green slime over the slick rock.

Carter took a few steps forward, every inch in the direction of the chasm a monumental effort, and peered down into a quaking, burbling mass of Smelly Jelly therein. Visible through the semi-translucent ooze, denser globules about the size of grapefruits and colored slightly darker green drifted in an agitated manner. Branching electrical sparks flash between the globules every few seconds. Whenever two globules touched each other, they merged into a single larger globule, and sometimes, the larger globules would split apart into several smaller ones which would then drift apart. But at the center, deep below the surface of the viscous mess, floated a giant brain! It pulsed and throbbed rhythmically, putting out waves and waves of neural energy that Carter could feel prickling her mind.

Six pairs of eyes looked on in horror. This single location was the focus of all the evil and malice that had been directed at them.

Carter shuddered with revulsion, and against her will found herself staggering back from sheer abhorrence, repulsed by the monstrosity, feeling its hunger gnawing even now at the edges of her waking consciousness. She found herself backed all the way against Jazz, who, seeing the glazed expression on her face, shook her roughly awake.

"What have we stumbled on here...?" muttered Sam in revulsion.

"Stumbled? Or herded, driven like the fox before the hounds?" asked Jazz with sudden, sickening insight. "The Smelly Jelly feeds on neural energy so what else could it possibly want from six living beings but to feast!

"The Jelly Brain must be the central locus for the Smelly Jelly on this planet," breathed Jo, the scientist in her fascinated by this revelation even in the face of its unspeakable monstrosity. "All the other Jelly is probably controlled from here!"

Out of the corner of her eye, Jazz spotted the first of the Jelly-controlled zombies break forth from the tunnels into the cavern. They streamed out like ants from disturbed anthills, hands bent into twisted claws raking the air, arms reaching for their prey, leaving snail-trails of green slime on the floor behind them. The Banshees immediately opened fire, but the openings disgorging dead soldiers far more quickly than they could be gunned down. Even when the bodies started piling up, they began climbing over their dead-again comrades, their objective becoming quickly obvious -- to throw the Banshees into the chasm and the awaiting Jelly Brain!

Suddenly, a new kind of horror sprang at the defenders. A half-dozen, huge, fanged bipeds, the like of which Carter had never seen, with inch-long nails, chomping mandibles, glowing green eyes, and black dreadlocks atop bulbous heads tore their way through the other attackers like they were paper dolls and bore down on their position. Two were immediately vaporized by concentrated phaser fire, but that gave the others four the time they needed to close in.

One of the beasts swept with lightening agility beneath Carter's aim and came up inside her defenses. Its rotten, putrefying stench alone was enough to kill, but it also dealt her a vicious backhanded blow with one muscular forearm. She felt her flightsuit automatically respond to the attack by hardening itself into diamond-hard armor at the point of impact, otherwise she would surely have suffered broken ribs and other internal damage, but as it was she was only knocked ten feet through the air to land on her backside in a splatter of green slime, her suit armor still protecting her from the hard landing. The flightsuit softened again, resuming its normal cloth texture, allowing her to spring to her feet and level her phaser at the onrushing behemoth and blast it right between its green-glowing eyes. Down it went at her feet.

She spun around to see that one of the creatures lunge at Alex, who was bravely standing her ground. It was blasted by Sam and Max, outstretched claws inches from Alex's throat. Jo was standing over the body of another, but she herself sported a nasty-looking cut down her left cheek that was dripping blood on her uniform front. Jazz was dragging the heavy pack that Jo and Sam had brought towards the crystal bridge, using her phaser to clear her path of lesser undead as she went.

Carter was breathing heavily. She took a half-second to yet again replace the spent power coil in her weapon; there seemed no end to the attacking horde. Not only were the Jelly-animated humans and Mullurans still streaming steadily from the tunnel openings, but no sooner had the last fanged creature been dispatched than a dozen more appeared from among the ranks of lesser creatures. If someone didn't come up with a brilliant plan real soon, they'd be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, or else be turned into creature-kibble by those big monsters! She chanced a sideways glance to check what Jazz was doing.

Jazz had made it to the crystal bridge with her package and was beginning to pull out its contents and dump them on the cavern floor. Carter realized they were blocks of C-12! She wondered briefly what Jazz was planning on doing with super-high-explosives, but then with a shock realized her intentions; phasers couldn't destroy a bridge made of solid dilithium, but that much explosives could! Jazz looked up from her work and caught Carter's eye, and saw that she understood the plan. "Across the bridge!" she yelled at the others. "Then run for it!"

No one needed to be told twice; they began edging towards Jazz immediately. The Jelly wasn't about to let them get away that easily though. Shambling corpses pressed forward on all sides, trying to cut off their retreat, and a fresh batch of Jelly-controlled mandible-monsters was almost upon them again. The five women backed as quickly as they could towards the dilithium crystal bridge, all the while keeping the zombies at bay with phaser fire.

Sam was the first to reach the bridge. She looked over the lip of the chasm at the evil Jelly Brain within, its heaving mass shooting forth fleeting tentacles and other extrusions, all reaching for her. She skipped out of their way, and after taking a deep breath, ran across the bridge as fast as her cybernetic legs could carry her. Once across, she spun and reached out her hands, calling to the next one to reach the bridge: "Come on, Alex! You can do it! Just don't look down!"

Alex gulped and ran, not daring to think about what she was doing lest her nerve fail again. The Jelly slashed forth with dripping tentacles at her speeding legs, and caught her a grazing blow. Alex screamed and went down on her hands and knees, phaser skittering over the edge of the bridge to plop into the slime pit below. From out of nowhere, Max had her by the waist and hauled her up, and together they stumbled to the temporary safety of the far side.

Sam and Max now laid down cover fire for Carter and Jo, who had been keeping the Jelly's human and Mulluran puppets from clawing Jazz. They now took their turns avoiding angrily whipping green tentacles while sprinting across the slippery arch of solid dilithium.

Finally, only Jazz was left on the same side as the army of darkness. With an armful of C-12 bricks, she retreated to the mid-point of the bridge, where the arch of dilithium apexed above the Smelly Jelly Master Brain, then dumped the load at her feet. She had enough C-12 to blow up half the mountain. Feet planted apart in a brazenly immovable stance at the center of the crystalline span, she defied anything to try and get past her. Popping her last power coil into her phaser, she began blasting away, keeping the creatures firmly on their side of the chasm.

The Smelly Jelly down in the chasm was growing increasingly agitated now that its quarry had managed to elude its army of puppet creatures, its tentacles slashing about in frustration in the air above the slime pit, and as the Jelly's dissatisfaction grew, the odor it exuded grew exponentially more vile. On the far shore, the zombies' motions became more frantic in response to their glabrous master's wrath. One of the mandibled Jelly-covered creatures had reached the bridge and took a few testing steps out onto it, but Jazz barred its passage. She shot it, and it fell with a sucking plop into the Jelly below, but it was instantly replaced by three more beasts, fangs slavering in unholy anticipation as they advanced on the lone woman facing them.

Carter and Max fired their phasers at them, intending to give Jazz a chance to retreat, but Jazz wasn't cooperating. "Come on, Jazz!" shouted Carter.

Just then a disruptor blast screamed past Carter's head so close she felt her eyebrows singe from the heat. It exploded harmlessly against the cavern wall behind her, but suddenly the air was once again filled with disruptor beams. Obviously, the Smelly Jelly Brain had decided it wasn't going to get the Banshees alive, so it had directed the puppet army to use their weapons again to stop them at all costs. Carter and the others dove for cover.

On the crystal bridge, Jazz ducked under a wild shot aimed at her, but that left her open to the nearest mandibled horror. It saw its chance and pounced at its infuriating opponent, knocking Jazz flat on her back. Lunging forward to finish her off, it grew overconfident. Jazz twisted her legs between the onrushing behemoth's, sending it sprawling as well. It scrabbled across the slick crystalline surface with its sharp claws, trying to find purchase, and managed to grab hold of one of Jazz's legs. Her automatic flight suit armor kicked in, hardening the programmable fabric around her lower legs into a substance harder than diamond, and she kicked at the beast's face to convince it to let go.

Being no longer actually alive, it was impervious to pain, but the impact from Jazz's adrenaline-fueled kicks jarred it loose. Jazz leapt to her feet and shoved her boot into the creature's midsection. It toppled over the lip of the bridge, arms flailing futilely, to disappear into the all-consuming green morass below.

Jazz turned and bent to quickly retrieve her dropped phaser, but in that moment of inattention, a disruptor beam struck her in the leg. Her suit armor absorbed as much of the energy as it could, keeping her from being completely and instantly vaporized, but enough of the full-power beam bled through the armor to utterly disrupt the living tissue underneath. Jazz tried to choke back a scream but failed; the burning pain was just too much. She dropped to the remaining knee, her other leg little more than a charred, smoking cinder now.

The army of zombies pressed forward, smelling blood, knowing their way across the bridge would soon be clear.

Max saw her friend take the hit and go down. "Jazz!" she cried. With renewed vigor, she began firing into the crowd of lurching Jelly-puppets, eyes ablaze with black fury, determined to mow down every last one of them to save her friend. Disruptor blasts zipped all around her, exploding chunks out of the cavern floor and spraying her with a steady fallout of dirt, but she ignored it all.

Out on the bridge, Jazz assessed her situation through a red haze of searing pain. Her right leg was gone -- fried to a crisp. There was no way she was going anywhere without being carried, and that would just slow everyone else down; and the army of Jelly-controlled creatures was clambering closer by the second. She turned her head towards Max and saw her old friend striding heedlessly forward, oblivious to the danger, back towards the bridge to rescue her. Carter and the others were following, all firing their phasers trying to keep the zombies back. They were all going to get themselves killed!

She shook her head in consternation, thinking for the last time that that was no way to run a fighter squadron; Carter should know better. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one... Then again, she had to admit that Carter's style seemed to be effective. The short while she'd flown with the Banshees since being rescued from the Cardassian prison planet had taught her that much. Carter's people had heart. Maybe there was some merit to this new thinking after all; these were different times than twelve years ago. But she still couldn't let them all sacrifice themselves for a hopeless rescue attempt. She caught Max's gaze and shouted. "Forget about me, Max! I'll hold them off while you escape!"

"We're all leaving this place, Jazz, so shut up and let us rescue you!" shouted Max back.

Beneath the crystal bridge, the Smelly Jelly Brain throbbed violently, sending out more tentacles to try dragging Jazz off the bridge, while the animated corpses were crowding onto the bridge, now only a dozen feet from where Jazz lay. Disruptor beams still criss-crossed through air already thick with ozone, seeking any targets they could, keeping Max and the others from getting to Jazz.

A sizzling shot flashed past Max's head, who ducked just in time thanks to her prescient ability, but behind her Sam wasn't so fortunate. The shot hit her square in the left arm, shearing it off at the elbow. She went down with a scream, dropping her phaser and cradling the sparking, sputtering cybernetic limb with her remaining arm. Jo was at her side immediately with a helping hand.

A few of the Jelly Brain's tentacles had found Jazz and were trying to gain purchase on her suit armor, which had automatically gone frictionless where the tentacles touched, but that tactic was only proving partly effectual. Slowly she was being dragged to the edge.

Looking back at her friends, she caught Carter's eyes and locked gazes with the Banshee Squadron Commander. In that instant, they communicated silently, old Wing Commander and new Wing Commander. Jazz's eyes said, I'm done for and you know it. Get your team out of here. Save them. It's your job.

Carter understood perfectly, and what was worse, she knew Jazz was right. In that instant of communion, she silently thanked Jazz for what she was doing, then turned to Max. "Vasser! Help Sam! We're getting out of here while Commander Phoenix covers our retreat!"

Max spun on Carter as though she had just voiced the most unutterable blasphemy. "We can't leave Jazz!" she yelled hotly in response, and turned back towards the bridge once again.

A pair of re-animated Mullurans were grappling with Jazz, trying to shove her off the side of the bridge into the embrace of the Jelly Brain below, and she was doing her best to avoid their clawing grips. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Max still coming. Yanking a small blinking device from a pocket, she held it aloft for Max to see. It was the detonator for the C-12, which lay scattered all about her on the bridge. She placed her thumb over the trigger and yelled as loudly and firmly as she could in a last-ditch effort to get Max to abandon her suicide course. "RUN, YOU FOOLS!"

Then the Mullurans finally managed to drive her to the ground, but not before her thumb went down on the trigger.

Carter grabbed Max by the fabric of her uniform and dragged her bodily after her as she ran for the far exit. Alex and Jo, none too steadily themselves, supported Sam between them and ran as fast as they could. Behind them, a deafening explosion shook the cavern, and the searing heat of the fireball pursued them down the mine shaft as they fled, singeing their hair and clothes. They didn't dare stop, for the entire mountain had started rumbling, its stability disrupted by the detonation of so much C-12 explosive.

Behind them, in the large cavern, the dilithium bridge vaporized, forever barring the way for any pursuit from that sector, and the cavern's ceiling crumbled to ruin and caved in, burying the army of darkness and the monstrous Jelly Brain under gigatons of solid rock.

Carter ran and ran, Max staggering at her side, the other three following along behind, for what seemed like hours. Now and then Jo would give a direction to turn. Carter almost ceased seeing the way ahead; it all became a blur from the tears streaming freely and unashamedly down her face, and afterward she could never really recall how they eventually found the second exit from the dilithium mines.

When the first wafts of cold night air blew past their faces after being so long in the stale darkness of the tunnels, the relief was palpable. They had emerged from the mountain into the Rostellan night at a somewhat higher elevation a few miles south of the main gate where they had parked their starfighters, amid a small stand of fir trees. High above, the stars flickered as they always had, unconcerned with mortal affairs. The five remaining women didn't stop yet though; the threat of the horrors in the mines behind them propelled them onward.

Scuffling down the steep incline amid a miniature avalanche of loosened stones and other debris, they reached the bottom of the mountain slope and turned north. A small stream ran through a ravine here, swerving around some large, round boulders. Another stand of tall pines screened the spot from the view of the tunnel from which they had escaped. Completely exhausted, physically, mentally and emotionally, they collapsed amid the rocks, at last wholly overcome by grief, and wept.