Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea, page 12
But the moment was fleeting, and soon she felt the returning weight of his grief, his bitterness. “But what I choose to simulate in my own private training sessions…is my business, Counselor. Perhaps I am simply…not ready to let go yet.”
Unconsciously, Deanna wrapped her arms around her belly. She could feel the gaping wound in his soul where his youngest son had been, so much like the one in her own where her daughter’s unborn predecessor had lived for so tragically brief a time. She felt his frustration at his inability to protect his flesh and blood, and she understood it for reasons that had nothing to do with Betazoid senses. “Let go of what, Tuvok?” she asked. “Of futility? Of the desperate fantasy of going back and making it not happen? How do you hold on to Elieth’s memory by continuing to take revenge against an enemy that no longer exists?”
“Elieth’s last moments were spent defending against that enemy. His life was lost only because he chose to stay and defend others.”
“To help them evacuate—not to fight the Borg himself.”
“He defended in his way, as I do in mine. He gave away his life to confront the Borg. That is what I have left of him, Counselor.”
“He…gave away his life? Why that choice of words?”
“Federation Standard is an imprecise language. There are many ways to convey the same concept. Is this relevant?”
“Everything’s relevant in here, Tuvok.”
“No. You simply try to make it so.”
Hostility. Interesting. It was an almost refreshing change from the grief. “Another thing about anger, Tuvok…sometimes you can’t let it go until you realize just who or what it is you’re angry with. When it’s displaced, it brings no satisfaction, no resolution.”
He stared, brows furrowing. “With whom or what would I be angry if not the Borg?”
“Well, who else made a choice that contributed to Elieth’s death?”
“The question is so broadly defined that there are countless possible answers. The admirals who failed to defend Deneva successfully. The Denevans who approved his employment there. Admiral Janeway for crippling the Borg’s transwarp network and triggering their mass retaliation. Captain Picard for choosing not to use the Endgame program to destroy the Borg thirteen years ago. There are many other possible answers to your question.”
Deanna shrugged. “We’ve still got half an hour. Let’s consider some.”
“Commander, we have a problem.”
Christine Vale suppressed a wince at the fluting observation from Ensign Kuu’iut, the lanky Betelgeusian who stood beta-shift tactical. She always hated to hear those words. “Don’t keep it to yourself, Ensign.”
“Close-range scans show the asteroid to consist of considerably denser materials than expected. Possibly large deposits of rodinium, diburnium, indurite. Its mass is sixty-eight percent greater than previously estimated.”
She sighed. “Making it sixty-eight percent harder to deflect. Or is it the square of that? I forget which.”
“One-half the mass times the velocity squared,” said Peya Fell, the Deltan woman at sciences. “Goes linearly with mass.”
“That’s something. Thanks, Ensign. Kuu’iut, can we still deflect it successfully?”
He shook his bald blue head, baring the sharp teeth in his lower eating mouth while responding through his beaklike speaking mouth. “Not by tractors alone. We’d burn out the emitters.”
“And blowing it up would just leave a bunch of smaller rocks heading on the same course. Would that be any better for the planet?”
“Not much. Same amount of kinetic energy delivered, just a bit more diffusely. And given its density, the surviving chunks might still be sizeable. It might actually endanger life across an even wider area of the ocean.”
Oh, great. “Options?”
The ’Geusian leaned forward eagerly. It would be just like a member of his highly competitive culture, Vale thought, to see this as an entertaining challenge to pit himself against. “We could use phasers and torpedoes to vaporize a portion of the asteroid, creating explosive thrust that would push it off course, supplementing the tractor beams. We’d have to use the beams in pressor mode, pushing in the same direction as the thrust reaction.”
Vale nodded. “Do it.” She had almost regretted insisting that Tuvok keep his counseling appointment with Deanna rather than supervising the deflection as he’d requested, but Kuu’iut seemed to have the matter well in hand.
In moments, the Betelgeusian had the target coordinates computed and coordinated with Ooteshk at the conn, who moved Titan into position, reversing thrust until the ship was keeping station with the asteroid. “If my gamble pays off,” Kuu’iut said, “a phaser strike and two quantum torpedoes in that central fissure should blow off a fairly large chunk or two, providing some extra reaction mass. I’m boosting shields in case of blowback.”
“We’re not here to gamble, Ensign,” Vale reminded him. “I want the surest thing you can give me.”
“Aye, ma’am,” the ’Geusian said, but he sounded like he was humoring her. “Engaging tractor beams in pressor mode.” On-screen, a false-color overlay made the beams visible, a tight cone of lavender rays extending to make contact with the asteroid. Vale idly wondered why Starfleet imaging technicians generally chose blue or purple shades to represent gravitational phenomena.
“Deflection…point oh six arcseconds per minute,” Ensign Fell reported after a moment. “Point oh eight,” a few moments later.
“That’s below projections,” Kuu’iut said, “even accounting for its density.”
“Beam status?” Vale asked.
“Full power is being delivered. But it’s not having its full effect.”
“Boost tractor power to compensate. How long can the emitters run at overload?”
Kuu’iut’s clawed fingers danced across the console as he replied. “At this level, thirty-eight minutes. It should be sufficient.”
“Deflection rate rising to…point one two,” Fell reported in an incongruously seductive lilt.
“Still below projections.”
“Internal temperature and radiation readings beginning to rise,” the Deltan went on. “Something may be absorbing some of the beam energy, transforming it into radiant energy rather than kinetic.”
“Something like?”
Fell tilted her smooth, elegantly contoured head. Bald, Vale thought in passing. There’s a look I haven’t tried. “Readings could be consistent with sarium or yurium.”
Vale recognized them as elements that could store and channel energy. “Could that affect the use of phasers, Kuu’iut?”
“Not materially. As long as I boost the power as with the tractors.”
She turned to Tasanee Panyarachun at the engineering console. “Have engineering stand by to deliver extra power, if needed.”
“Aye, ma’am,” the dainty Thai woman answered.
“Phasers and torpedoes ready,” Kuu’iut said. “We’re in the window, ma’am.”
Vale gave a curt nod. “Fire.”
A red beam lashed out, another enhanced image, though less so than the tractors. It struck the fissure perfectly, and a cloud of vaporized rock erupted around the impact site. Two bright torpedoes followed it a moment later, detonating inside the pit the phasers had carved. There was no sign of the chunk breaking off as Kuu’iut had predicted. “Temp and radiation spiking!” Fell called after a moment. “Some kind of internal surge—”
“Feedback pulse along the tractor beam!” Panyarachun cried.
Kuu’iut’s corvine cry almost drowned her out: “Detonation! Brace for impact!”
Vale raced to the command chair to strap herself in as power surges ripped through the ship, jumping breakers, blowing circuits. The lights flickered and died, and the consoles danced with St. Elmo’s fire, though luckily the new-generation wave guides woven into the material channeled the energies through the walls and away from the crew. But that was small comfort when Titan rocked under a chain of rapid-fire collisions, hitting so hard it felt like the whole asteroid had struck the ship. Vale was sent flying before she reached the chair.
“Tuvok!”
The lights were gone, only the emergency illumination remaining, but it was enough to let Deanna see that the Vulcan was sprawled motionless on the floor beneath the office table, his head coated in something dark and glistening. She couldn’t see color, but she knew it was green. “Oh, God.” She struck her combadge. “Medical emergency, Counselor Troi’s office!” Maybe emergencies, she thought as she felt her insides heave and she vomited up her last meal onto the carpet. She couldn’t tell through the inner turbulence if the baby was still kicking. “Sickbay, acknowledge!”
Nothing. “Computer!” She began dragging herself toward Tuvok. “Where are you, you stupid computer?” But that voice, the one that reminded her so maddeningly of her mother, remained silent. “Somebody!” she yelled. “We need help in here!”
Finally she reached Tuvok and began pulling him toward the door. Her muscles, overtaxed from months of service as a walking baby carriage, strained from the exertion. It felt like that wasn’t all she was straining. “Dammit, Tuvok, wake up! Help me out here! I’ll leave you here if I have to!”
Now her own voice was starting to remind her of her mother’s, in attitude if not in timbre. So be it, she thought. Lwaxana Troi’s sheer cussedness got her through the occupation of Betazed in one piece. And kept her baby boy alive. She’d never been more glad to be that woman’s daughter.
Finally she reached the door, which shuddered halfway open—better than nothing. Forcing it the rest of the way, she channeled her mother’s sheer vocal volume and began screaming for help.
“Report,” Vale tried to say as the emergency lights kicked in, but her own emergency power hadn’t fully engaged yet. She gathered herself and managed to get out something others could hear. “Somebody report!”
“Shields and main power…down,” Panyarachun said between groans. “We’re drifting.”
“Casualties?”
“Internal communications are damaged,” Dennisar reported from the security station. The hulking Orion hardly seemed shaken up at all. “Internal sensors unreliable. Most of us are alive, at least, but I can’t pinpoint exact numbers.”
“Commander!” Fell turned to catch Vale’s eye. The left side of that gorgeous Deltan face had been badly bruised. “Intense radiation from the asteroid. With shields down…”
“Say no more. Evacuate the bridge. Dennisar, please tell me the alert system is working.”
“Initiating radiation alert now,” he called. The computer began intoning the alert, advising all personnel to evacuate the outer sections of the ship.
“Fell, get to sickbay. The rest of us will reconvene in engineering.”
“I’m fine,” the Deltan insisted as the crew began leaving through the emergency ladder. “I can manage the pain.”
“Peya, you could have a concussion. And this ship doesn’t lack for science officers. That’s an order.”
Fell lowered her head. “Aye, Commander.”
By the time the bridge crew reassembled in engineering, with the Syrath astrophysicist Cethente filling in as science officer and with Ranul Keru taking over from Dennisar as security officer, internal power and communications had been restored. Weapons, propulsion, and shields were still down, though, as were inertial dampers—whose failure was why the debris from the asteroid had inflicted such a damaging blow. “The good news,” came Doctor Ree’s reassuring growl from sickbay, “is that we have no fatalities.” Vale was profoundly relieved. They’d lost too many to the Borg—she couldn’t tolerate losing any of her crew to some hunk of rock. “There have been a number of concussions and fractures, all under treatment. Commander Tuvok sustained both, and Counselor Troi suffered a herniation in pulling him to safety. Both should recover in a few hours. The baby suffered minor impact trauma, nothing serious. No radiation sickness reported yet; I’m sending Nurse Kershul around to administer hyronalin shots to key personnel, beginning with you.”
The crew took a moment to absorb the news. The chamber was disturbingly silent with the warp core down; the ship was operating on fusion power. “Can anyone tell me yet what happened?” Vale asked.
Cethente’s wind-chime voice sounded underneath the vocoder-generated translation of its speech. “Further analysis shows that the asteroid contained sizeable pockets of bilitrium and anicium in addition to yurium,” the Syrath said. Its tentacles stretched out from under the wide dome of its saucerlike upper body, atop which an array of sensory bulges glowed a pale green as it studied the readings those tentacles brought up on the consoles. A radially symmetrical being whose body tapered below the dome into a fluted trunk with a diamond-shaped bulge on the underside and four arthropod legs extending from just above the bulge, Cethente was able to “face” its console and its crewmates simultaneously. “All these substances can store large amounts of energy and channel them explosively. Bilitrium in particular is a rare energy amplifier; it cannot create energy, of course, but it can concentrate the energy of a reaction and release it in a tighter, more intense pulse.”
“So it took the energy of our weapons and tractors and threw it back in our faces.”
“Those of you who have faces,” Cethente replied. “Actually I found the energy surge rather appetizing.”
Vale blinked, reflecting on how poorly Federation science understood Syrath anatomy. Cethente looked so fragile in construction that it seemed it should have been shattered by the impact, but the asexual astrophysicist was probably the most durable member of the crew, a semicrystalline life form evolved on a Venus-like world of hellish temperatures and pressures.
“Status of the asteroid?” Vale went on.
“Still on an impact trajectory with Droplet. The explosion was not sufficiently directional to achieve the desired course change.”
Nurse Kershul arrived, beginning to deliver the hyronalin shots to the crew. Vale thanked the Edosian after receiving her shot and asked, “So what are our options? Can we repair the tractors and weapons in time to try again?”
“Unlikely,” said Mordecai Crandall, the thin-faced human ensign commanding engineering in Ra-Havreii’s absence. “We’ve got, what, five and a half hours to impact? It will probably take most of that to get the warp core and shields back. Unless you want us to shift priorities.”
Vale shook her head. “No, shields have to come first.” The bulk of the ship could protect the crew against the radiation for only so long, and she needed to get them all back to their stations if they were to function at peak efficiency. “Other options, people?”
“The shuttles,” Panyarachun said after a moment. “What if we jettisoned their warp cores and detonated them against the asteroid?”
“Negative,” Cethente said. “The bilitrium would amplify that even worse than the phasers and quantum torpedoes. It’s particularly effective at concentrating and blue-shifting the gamma-ray energy of an antimatter reaction. No, thank you,” it went on, apparently speaking to Kershul now, though it was hard to tell without a head it could turn. “It would have no more effect on me than the radiation.”
“But Tasanee may be on to something with the shuttles,” Keru said. “What if we use them to push on the asteroid? No energy beams to destabilize it further, just sheer brute force. Could their engines push it far enough to miss Droplet?”
“There’s a problem there,” Crandall said. “The energy surge fried the hangar bay’s force field and power systems. We can’t open the doors, and we’d lose a fair chunk of atmosphere if we did. And we’d need radiation suits to work in the hangar under these conditions—it would slow repairs.”
“What about the captain’s skiff?” Keru said. “Is the La Rocca in working order?”
Crandall checked a console. “Some system damage, mostly to sensors, com arrays, transporters. But it was powered down, so its main systems are still intact. It would need a few swapouts, but it could be ready to go in…two hours?”
“I want it sooner, Crandall. Top priority along with shields. That skiff may be all we’ve got.” Vale sighed. “What about communications? Can we use the shuttles’ systems to contact our teams at Droplet, let them know what’s happened?”
“Not through this interference,” Kuu’iut said.
“But they have a shuttle monitoring us optically from orbit,” Cethente chimed. “They should have observed the event by now, and should be able to determine fairly soon that the asteroid’s course has not materially changed.”
“Will they be all right?” Panyarachun asked.
“Probably, as long as they stay far enough from the impact site,” Vale said. “But I can’t say the same for the squales. They may be in for major loss of life if we can’t fix this.”
Keru moved in closer and spoke softly. “Chris…technically the Prime Directive says not to interfere in natural disasters on pre-warp planets. And impacts like this probably happen on Droplet more often than on most worlds. We didn’t cause this, and we may even have made it worse.”
“Maybe, Ranul. But we’ve already disrupted their lives enough without meaning to. Besides, we’re already committed. If we stop now, then hundreds, maybe thousands of squales could die because of our choice to stop. That’s as bad as if we’d chucked the asteroid at them ourselves.”
“I can accept that,” Keru said. Then he leaned still closer. “Just between you, me, and the warp core, I think it’s crazy to let people die because we’re afraid of damaging their culture. I’m always happy to find a loophole around that part of the Directive.”
“No comment,” Vale said, though her smile belied it. “But there’s more. Theory says our people should be safe so long as they keep their distance. But theory’s only as good as the data plugged into it. We didn’t know about that bilitrium and anicium. This system keeps throwing surprises at us.” Her gaze turned outward. “Who knows what else we might have overlooked?”
DROPLET
Ensign Lavena had actually managed, after hours of cajoling, to persuade the senior members of the squale pod (for that seemed to be their basic social unit) to approach close enough to the scouter gig that they could meet Riker and converse with him directly, with Aili interpreting between English and Selkie. Normally Riker’s combadge translator could do that; without a translation matrix for squale, it would default to the language of the next nearest individual, Lavena. But Aili had recommended against that, for the squales would be uneasy with a technological mediator. He had the gig’s systems and all their equipment powered down or on standby.
