First Contact, page 5
No direct hits, but so many peripheral ones that there had to be damage down below, and if the Phoenix had been spared, it would be the most major of miracles.
And if there had been any harm done to the blast door and the metal shielding on any one of a dozen components that were radioactively hot—
Damned if she was going to die from a nuke.
Lily squared her small shoulders, walked through the slowly opening door, and at the sight of what lay within the outer control room, sighed.
“Aww, God…”
FIVE
Freshly materialized, Picard drew in a breath and savored the stinging cold of a spring Montana night upon his face, feeling as though he had stepped inside a history text, one both thrilling and horrific. For there in front of him—and the away team of Data, Crusher, and four guards—was Zefram Cochrane’s famous missile silo, situated at the foot of the grim, poverty-stricken mountainside settlement that was so commonplace in the first decade after the Third World War.
That was the thrilling part; but the horror came from the sight of the great smoldering craters the Borg’s weapons had left surrounding the silo itself. At least part of the underground structure had collapsed, or was in danger of doing so.
There, beneath the scarred and muddy earth, Cochrane might already be dead.
For an instant, the seven of them hesitated at the massive concrete door covering the actual shaft where the original missile had lain. No obvious means of entry there; Picard scanned the broken, uneven, sometimes smoking ground, and at last spied beneath a dirt mound a metal staircase leading downward.
He signaled to his team, which was already drawing phasers and tricorders, and pointed. “There.” The word emerged as white mist and hung in the starkly cold air.
So they proceeded underground, the guards leading the way. The staircase, rickety and half rusted, led directly to what had been the original control room, where bored soldiers had sat awaiting a launch order that never came, because their superiors died in the first swift nuclear attack. Had they yielded to the madness infecting the rest of the world, they might have chosen to retaliate on their own; because they hadn’t, the missile had remained intact… until Zefram Cochrane discovered it and beat it into a plowshare that would change not only Earth but thousands of other planets for the better.
Now the control-room ceiling was partially collapsed, most of the equipment crushed beneath chunks of concrete and fallen beams. Three of the consoles were illumined and active, but several others were dark. The lighting, too, was dimmed, and it, along with the wisplike haze of dust, gave the chamber an unsettlingly eerie air. In the ghostly shadows, crushed to death beneath one of the dully gleaming beams, lay the sprawled corpse of a dark-haired man.
His face was turned away, half hidden by the beam, which lay on a diagonal across his back, from his left ear to his right hip. He lay atop the corpse of a woman; apparently his last act had been to shelter her.
In another corner of the room, another man had apparently been sitting in a chair at the console and had been thrown backward when the ceiling caved in on him. His face was covered by a mountain of rocks and silt, but his legs were visible.
The sights chilled Picard to the bone. He stood quietly while Crusher scanned them all, then looked askance when she approached him to report.
“They’re all dead.”
He nodded, grim. “See if any of them’s Cochrane. Data—let’s check on the warp ship.”
The silo was of such historical significance that calling up a detailed map of it on the Enterprise-E’s computers presented no problem; yet Picard could not get over how different it seemed now, in the twenty-first century. He had visited it in the twenty-third, and it had been a clean, well-lit, cheerful shrine, filled with the voices of cheerful tour guides and dotted with commemorative plaques bearing Cochrane’s likeness.
Seeing it now, covered with dust and smoking soot and bloodied corpses, brought the reality home. This was where Cochrane had existed, in a violent, hostile past. No one hailed him then as the genius he was; no one helped him, no one believed, in those hard, embittered times, that the very thing that had destroyed the Earth would become her salvation, or that her greatest artistic and technological renaissance would come about because of Cochrane’s work in these grim, rusting rooms.
Silently, Picard made a solemn promise to Zefram Cochrane, be he living or dead: The Phoenix had risen from the ashes of such horror, and he, Picard, would not permit her descendants to perish in another holocaust or to live without hope.
With Data beside him, he headed out into the corridor that led directly to the warp ship.
* * *
Moments before, Lily had staggered through the same control room, wiping angry tears away with the back of her hand. She had known the three people killed—John and Grace Weir-Quintana and Marcus Lee—in this little community, everyone knew everyone else. As best she could figure, her neighbors had been out strolling that night and had ducked into the nearby silo when the bombs came, figuring that it offered the best protection. They were right; it was far safer than a tent.
Who could have known this spot would have been hit hardest?
Almost as bad as the deaths was the damage done. The minute she saw the collapsed ceiling and the crushed consoles, any hope she’d had for the warp ship’s launch died. The prewar computer that constantly monitored the silo’s radiation levels lay buried beneath a mound of rubble; Zef’s rebuilt console that normally displayed a schematic of the ship and warned of leakage or malfunction had gone distressingly dark.
At best, it meant that the sensors aboard the ship had been damaged or that there had been a jolt to the electrical systems; at worst…
She could not bring herself to finish the thought. Instead, she carefully made her way through the control room—being forced once to squeeze through a narrow opening between the wall and the largest pile of concrete chunks and steel beams that buried Grace and her husband. John lay face down, his boots extending out beyond the hillock of rubble, their patched, worn soles a mere foot from the wall; Lily moaned softly as she was forced to brush against them.
Ironically, the corridor that led toward the missile chamber itself was less damaged and thus more easily navigable. Lily made her way quickly to the lead blast door—still sealed, still protecting her from whatever might lie inside.
She let go a long exhalation of pure relief. The blast door, at least, had not given way—a sign that the Phoenix might be basically intact and that she hadn’t absorbed a fatal amount of radiation already without knowing it.
Even so, she hesitated. There was simply no way to know whether the inner chamber was hot, with the computer destroyed. A few old Geiger counters—antiques used by a miserly army just before the war—had been stashed in a cabinet under the buried computer console, but they were now impossible to retrieve. Zef kept a couple of the Geiger counters in the missile chamber, just in case the main alarm system failed.
To know whether the chamber was hot, she would have to enter it. Lily drew a breath and stepped forward; the great leaden door rumbled as it slid slowly over the smooth concrete floor.
When it was open, she released all the air in her lungs with a single gusting sigh. If there was a leak, she was already a dead woman. Nothing to be done about it; she didn’t care, she told herself, didn’t care. Hadn’t cared about anything after Dad died.
And yet, stepping over the threshold onto the catwalk, she felt fear seize her imagination. Her skin began to tingle and crawl—was she sensing the radiation?—and her breathing grew shallow, as if her lungs rebelled at the notion of taking in tainted air.
Lily stood on the highest catwalk, the one that led to the ship’s cockpit in the vast chamber’s heart. Beneath, two more floors of metal scaffolding led to the engineering and reactor levels on the Phoenix. The ground level was scattered with Zef’s tools and equipment, partially buried beneath chunks of fallen ceiling; all, including the catwalks, were sprinkled with rubble and the same pulverized-concrete dust that had coated the outer control room.
When Zef had first brought her here, she had protested each step of the way—first because the very thought of walking into such a place evoked the blind panic that had so often seized her during the war, and then because she was outright terrified of heights, and the sweeping, vertiginous view from the entry sickened her as much as the sight of the slumbering death missile.
Now, she saw only the Phoenix.
To Lily, the warp vessel remained a thing of beauty, though it looked to be little more than an ICBM missile whose warhead had been replaced by a cockpit. She had carefully painted Phoenix across its shining flank, and had smiled when Zef had christened it with a bottle of stinking moonshine; now, the sight of ugly gashes on the ship’s hull pained her more than if they had been etched upon her own flesh. Worse, some of them were scorched, as if the mysterious and blinding blasts had simply reached through the layers of earth and lead and fingered the warp ship, leaving the silent message: Do not dare hope in this.… See how easily it is crushed?
There was damage, yes, but perhaps not fatal; much of the fuselage seemed intact. A week’s repair work, maybe, unless there was more damage inside…
Boots ringing against the metal grating, Lily ran across the trembling catwalk to the cockpit. It lay open, the way she and Zef had left it late the night before, and she immediately slipped into the pilot’s chair.
The previous midnight, she had sat in one of the copilot/passenger seats, her stomach fluttering with excitement, and tried to imagine what it would look and feel like to sit beside Zef and stare out at the stars—at warp drive. Her one condition, when she first had agreed to become his “supplier,” was that he had to take her with him on the test flight, had to teach her enough about the ship so she could assist him in piloting it.
Now, her stomach in knots from a very different kind of excitement, Lily glanced down at the control panel: dark. Electrical systems all down, and the cockpit stank of scorched metal and fabric. She tried to flick on the overhead lighting, but only the dim running lights came on. She swore softly, then opened a compartment and retrieved a flashlight. Next to it rested one of the old Geiger counters—a safety backup, Zef had said, in case the ship’s sensors failed. Lily had never quite understood the point. If they were either working in the silo or up in space and the Phoenix’s metal shielding suddenly ruptured, what possible good would it do them to know how much radiation they’d absorbed? Dead was dead, whether the dose was six hundred or three thousand rads. They’d know soon enough, when the vomiting started.
And if that ever happened, she’d vowed darkly, she would put a bullet through her brain.
Still, she stared at the Geiger counter a good ten seconds before reluctantly picking it up—but she could not yet bring herself to turn it on.
Don’t want to know. Not yet.
Not yet…
She put an arm through the counter’s long strap and slung the instrument over her shoulder, then aimed the flashlight at the cockpit ceiling and examined it for damage.
What she saw made her gasp: directly over the right passenger seat, the fuselage had completely buckled, leaving a great smoldering wound that had spilled a mound of blackened cinders and pulverized concrete into the chair, which had collapsed. Worse, a jagged scorch mark indicated the trail of the blast, which had seared the back of the copilot seat, then split open the small hatch leading down to the engine room.
Her pulse quickened at the sight, but she wasted no time following the path of the damage. She hooked the light to her belt, pushed the splintered hatch aside, then grabbed the first metal rung and began the tedious climb down.
It was hard work: the air was surprisingly warm and smelled of ozone, dust, and burned wiring; the lingering smoke made her cough. Ominously, the walls of the shaft itself bore the dark, powdery scars of the blast, as if a nuclear lightning bolt had descended its entire length. After a few feet down, she realized the ladder had become molten and sagged like a Dali clock, then rehardened. Some of the rungs were welded fast to the bulkhead, making purchase impossible. Halfway down, it was clear that she’d either have to climb back up or else get down without the ladder.
Lily was not a tall woman, but the shaft was sufficiently narrow. She finally managed to wedge her shoulders against one wall, her feet against the other, and “walked” down—a terrifying experience, as the bulkheads were uneven, pitted; twice, she slipped and nearly went hurtling downward.
By the time she arrived at the entrance to the claustro-phobically small engine room, she was simultaneously shivering, sweating, and feeling queasy. Nerves, Lily, just nerves. Keep worrying about a leak and you’ll make yourself puke.
As she hopped from the shaft down into engineering, water splashed beneath her boots: a good two inches of water covered the deck. A sweep of the flashlight revealed that a conduit in the coolant system had ruptured—an easy fix and no big deal, but she had no idea how they were going to get all the water out. In a way, the mundaneness of the problem was comforting: one of her repetitive nightmares involved being trapped aboard the ship during a fire.
Abruptly, a wave of dizziness swept over her, and she caught the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger and closed her eyes until it passed.
It was just anxiety and the rotten air, she told herself; the circulation system was probably malfunctioning, and the burned-ozone smell was even stronger here. A sweep of the flashlight revealed that the powerful bolt had slashed its way across the engine room, skittering over the equipment and leaving spots of damage before ending in a deep gouge in the lead deck, which just happened to serve as the major shield that protected the rest of the ship from the core reactors in the nacelles. Had it been pierced, the reactors would have been exposed, and the entire silo—and most of Montana—would have gone to kingdom come in a white-hot blaze of glory.
It was as though someone had—impossibly—known what Zef was doing down here and had intentionally targeted the Phoenix.
Easy, Lil; you’re starting to sound paranoid.
She moved carefully over the slick deck, checking out each system—not just those along the jagged scar left by the blast, since ricochets were entirely possible. From time to time, she touched a piece of equipment and could feel its emanating heat even through her thick gloves. Luckily, the engines themselves were untouched, as was the lead casing, thick as an elephant’s leg, surrounding the fuel line—both sights that made her smile. There would be repairs and a delay, but the Phoenix would launch after all.
Lily stripped off a glove and lowered herself to a squat, using flashlight, fingertips, and eyes to examine the encased tubing down to the throttle complex. The square, lead-clad complex sat directly atop the thick leaden deck that shielded the entire ship from the core reactor one level below. The throttle’s purpose was to regulate the flow of fuel from the core to the engines via a system of valves; hence, it was crucial to the project’s success.
She examined the front of the assembly first. It was unmarked, but the wavering elliptical glow of the flashlight revealed a dark ash butterfly painted on the bulkhead behind the throttle. Instinctively, she reached around the casing until her hand rested between the bulkhead and the throttle complex, then ran her fingertips over the startlingly hot metal surface.
Within two seconds after she began the tactile scan, the metal gave way to nothingness; her fingers, then entire hand, reached through all the way until they touched the sizzling-hot throttle itself.
“Shit!” Startled, she dropped the flashlight and snatched her hand away, falling onto her rump against the Geiger counter hanging at her hip; her already-blistering fingers were coated with fine gray ash. Both the casing and the throttle should have been cold, stone cold—so they must have been directly struck by a ricochet from the blast.
Or so Lily told herself… until she stared up from her burned hand at the black powder butterfly on the bulkhead.
It was captured now in a brilliant circle of white light—not the pale stream from the fallen flashlight, but a painfully intense glow, as if the casing instead housed a small sun.
“The valve,” she said calmly, as though explaining something to Zef. “The valve to the warp cores must have somehow been displaced. There’s a leak.”
She stared at her blistered fingers, which had touched the superheated throttle assembly, and watched as the dark-brown skin of her hand turned slowly to scarlet. A burn, caused by direct exposure to the radiation streaming from the core. Strangely, there was little pain.
Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe it wasn’t that bad—
You’re dead meat, Lil. Be honest.
No, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Somehow. Somehow …
Her hands trembled violently as she pulled the Geiger counter out from under her left hip and fiddled with the controls. She knew how to use the embarrassingly simple device, but her fingers refused to cooperate. Worse, the counter’s readout panel became suddenly blurred as an intense wave of nausea swept over her.
You’re not going to puke. You’re just terrified, the air in here is awful, and it’s all giving you a terrific headache. Calm down, calm down…
She closed her eyes for several seconds; when she opened them again, the nausea had eased, and she somehow managed to turn on the counter and calibrate it. No point in exposing herself again to the direct stream coming from the damaged throttle; instead, she remained sitting on the deck and sampled the air there. Within a few seconds, the readout began to flash—in red—a number: three-one-two-nine.
Three thousand, one hundred twenty-nine rads, five times the minimum lethal dose.
She pitched forward onto her hands and knees and vomited.
