Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

M’Benga asked, “Could you help me convince him?”

“Sorry,” Fisher said, turning back toward the console. “I have a lot to do and no time to do it. If you want to go tilting at windmills tonight, you’re on your own.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” M’Benga said, hiding his irritation at being left to carry on alone. “I will.”

Lines, circles, and arrows. That’s all that Reyes could see after staring for too long at the sector chart on his office wall. Dots, rings, and washes of color. It was all bleeding together, turning into gibberish. Part of him suspected that the idea of borders in interstellar space had always been nonsense.

Arrowheads, trefoils, diamonds, and squares—ship markers were scattered far and wide across his map. Arrowheads were few and far between: those were Starfleet vessels. Slightly greater in number were the trefoils representing Klingon warships. The diamonds were scarcest of all, not because the Tholian vessels they represented didn’t exist but because Reyes’s team had no idea where they were. Cluttering the map were the squares: civilian ships. Freighters, tankers, colony vessels. Almost too many to count, but it was his team’s job to protect them all.

Every day he tracked the activity in the sector like a hunter watching for a telltale warning sign in the brush or a rustle of movement in the tall grass. Sooner or later, either the Klingons or the Tholians would make their move to seize control of the Taurus Reach. Assuming I do my job right, he reminded himself, I’ll see it coming and be able to stop them.

Reyes picked at his midnight snack. The lasagna had gone cold while he’d sat staring at the wall, and the salad had marinated in its red-wine vinaigrette to the point of nearly disintegrating. He tried forcing down another mouthful of lasagna, but it had been mediocre when it was hot and had since become all but inedible.

His intercom buzzed. He thumbed open the channel. “Yes?”

“Dr. M’Benga to see you, sir,” said Yeoman Finneran.

He felt himself blink and recoil gently. This is new. “Send him in,” he said. Grateful for an excuse to abandon his meal, he pushed the tray aside.

His office door opened, and M’Benga walked in. The doctor noticed the tray on Reyes’s desk. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner, sir.”

“I was finished,” Reyes said, standing up to greet him. He circled around the desk and extended his hand. “You look familiar. Have we met before?”

“No, sir,” M’Benga said.

Sifting through memories of recent events, Reyes flashed upon why M’Benga’s name was familiar. Snapping his fingers, he said, “You put in for a transfer a few weeks back, didn’t you?”

“About two months ago, actually,” M’Benga said.

Reyes gestured to the chairs in front of his desk as he circled back behind it to his own. “Well, these things take time. If you’re here about speeding up the process—”

“I’m not,” M’Benga said. “I came to talk to you about Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn’s medical records, sir.”

Settling into his chair, Reyes knew this couldn’t be good. “What about them, Doctor?”

“For starters,” M’Benga said, “I’d like to know why they were redacted by Starfleet Intelligence. Regulations require us to maintain complete medical histories on all serving officers. But someone at Starfleet Intelligence modified her records, removed critical information, and inserted fraudulent data. T’Prynn herself gave me false information when answering questions about her medical history. I want to know why.”

Exercising care in his choice of words, Reyes said, “There are numerous reasons why Starfleet Intelligence might classify someone’s records, Doctor.” He slowly adjusted the monitor on his desktop so that he alone could see it. As he continued, he submitted a request for T’Prynn’s medical records using his own security clearance. “What if our medical database was compromised? An enemy might data-mine those records to match dates and places with injuries, to identify undercover field operatives. Even years later, an agent’s history might have to remain redacted to protect others.”

M’Benga shook his head. “That still wouldn’t explain the absence of accurate baseline data. Without that, it’s impossible for us to tell the difference between chronic conditions and acute ones, and we have no basis for detecting anomalies in her vital statistics. Scans I made during her recent visit to the ER suggested some serious neurochemical imbalances, but I have no way to make a comparative analysis.”

“What are you asking for, Doctor?”

“You have the rank and security clearance to override the classification order,” M’Benga said. “I’m asking you to release Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn’s authentic, unexpurgated medical record, if not to the main medical archive, then on a need-to-know basis. Sir, I have reason to believe she’s suffering from a long-term condition that requires treatment, but I can’t make an informed diagnosis until I have all the facts—and I need your help to get them.”

T’Prynn’s medical file appeared on Reyes’s monitor; in a glance he noted that it looked remarkably spare in details. As the doctor had said, the file had been marked as classified by Starfleet Intelligence. What alarmed him, however, was the identity of the person who had classified it: T’Prynn herself.

There’s got to be a regulation against that, Reyes figured. Considering the serious nature of the doctor’s allegations, he wondered whether he ought to inform M’Benga of T’Prynn’s role in classifying her own medical history. The consequences loomed large in his deliberations. No doubt Zeke’ll want an investigation, Reyes knew. They could take T’Prynn off active duty, hold an inquest—hell, Starfleet Medical might even be able to have her court-martialed. He thought of all the crises that were unfolding on every front at that moment: the Sagittarius downed on Jinoteur and dependent on one of T’Prynn’s unofficial “assets” for its rescue; a clandestine sabotage-

by-proxy operation on Borzha II that Reyes had set in motion from a plan drafted by T’Prynn; and the downward spiral into violence that was threatening to consume the New Boulder colony on Gamma Tauri IV, and hundreds of Starfleet personnel with it. Of all the possible moments to lose T’Prynn’s counsel and expertise, this was one of the worst Reyes could imagine.

If she sealed her own records, she must have had a good reason, Reyes convinced himself. You have to trust her.

He blanked her information from his screen and looked up at M’Benga. “I’m sorry, Doctor…. Request denied.”

17

Finding tools aboard the Tholian battleship had been both more and less difficult than Xiong had expected.

Several compartments off the main engineering deck were packed with a variety of devices, all formed of substances very similar to the glasslike compound of which the bulkheads were made. Large tools and small tools, some shaped like levers and others like hooks or forks, lined the bulkheads. Locating them had taken less than an hour.

Since then, Xiong had spent three hours trying to figure out what any of the devices did or how he might activate them. Pressing their surfaces at various points had been ineffectual. Touching them against bulkheads or machinery or each other had proved equally futile. He had tried pulling them apart, to no avail. In a moment that had been half inspiration and half desperation, he had probed the bulkheads of the engineering deck seeking apertures into which one or more of the devices might be inserted, only to find them solid, smooth, and unyielding.

Though he had long considered himself to be handy with tools, he had begun to realize that in his hands the Tholian gadgets were little more than a collection of exotic clubs. I give up, he decided, and he left the engineering deck.

After slogging up to the passageway intersection on the main deck above, he checked his air gauge. It showed less than five hours remaining. As much as he tried to convince himself that five hours would be plenty of time to find a way off the ship and safely to the planet’s surface, he found it impossible to forget that he had already been there for five hours without making any significant progress whatsoever.

Stay calm, he told himself. Keep it together. Keep moving.

He worked his way aft, checking each open compartment for any sign of loose equipment. In the aft quarter of the ship he found another intersection that led to a higher deck, and he followed it. The obsidian bulkheads on the upper deck were dotted at irregular intervals with asymmetrical fixtures of corrugated metal. Xiong scrutinized one closely but was unable to determine what purpose, if any, it served.

Most of the compartments he inspected while passing by were packed with blocky crystalline pedestals, which were arranged around the rooms’ perimeters or grouped in trilateral formations. He suspected that these might be analogous to any of several duty stations aboard a Federation starship, such as a fire-control center or an environmental support office. One extremely large compartment was heavily partitioned and seemed designed for quarantine procedures. Either a sickbay or a science lab, Xiong concluded, and he kept moving.

Then he passed a nondescript chamber. After doing a quick double-take he stopped and backed up. He entered slowly, as if sensing that there was something special about this place. It had the focused design and economical aesthetic that he knew Tholians associated with rituals. In its center were two wide crystalline platforms that appeared to be melded with the deck. On each platform was a meter-wide hexagon of a different kind of crystalline substance. To Xiong’s surprise, the hexagon was only an empty frame with what appeared to be a handle attached to its central cross-brace. He extended one finger and tried to push it through the empty space in the frame. A flash-crackle of energy repulsed his hand and knocked him backward as it sent a loud burst of static over his helmet’s transceiver.

Shake it off, he thought, staggering forward toward the platform once again. You’re all right; get it together, Ming.

On his second approach he avoided the hexagons and focused on the peculiar, slender objects beside them. He crouched to examine the closer one. It appeared to be made of the obsidian bulkhead substance; roughly twenty-five centimeters long, it looked like a handle for a tool. As he tilted his head to look at it from a slightly lower angle, a glint of light on a microthin blade emanating from the object pierced the shimmering haze of the Tholian ship’s superheated, hyperdense atmosphere.

Now he understood. It was a sword.

A difference of a few degrees could render the blade all but invisible. After studying it for a few minutes, Xiong deduced that it was likely composed of monofilaments. Its meter-long edge was likely so atomically fine that it could cut through nearly anything.

On a hunch, he grasped the haft of the weapon with great care, turned it in his grip so that the edge was poised to cut, and lowered its tip slowly to the deck. He barely felt the vibration of contact. Pivoting slowly, he watched a gouge appear in the black perfection of the obsidian floor. The glimmer of the blade came and went from his vision as he inscribed the cut in a half circle around himself. Lifting the monoblade from the deck, he grinned. Yes, this’ll do nicely.

Carrying it back to the escape pod he had found was more nerve-racking than he had expected. Every time the unfamiliar atmosphere of the Tholian ship caused a slight wobble in his step, he worried that he might amputate a digit or a limb or his head with one careless turn of his wrist. Most of the time he couldn’t really see the blade he was carrying, which made navigating corners and portals hazardous.

He stopped when he reached the hexagonal entrance to the escape pod. Space inside the pod was limited. One careless turn of the monoblade inside there could rupture its hull and render it useless. Worse, the interior of the pod was a zero-gravity environment, which would make it difficult to get the necessary leverage to control the blade’s movement while cutting. It would take only one fumble to cut himself in half while using the blade to access the systems inside the pod’s bulkhead.

He decided it was time for a change of strategy. Even if he could open the bulkhead, he had no reason to think he would be able to fathom its inner workings. He chided himself, What do you expect to find, Ming? Duotronic cables?

A flicker of anger drove him to fantasize about skewering the pod with the monoblade. Then he stopped and considered the sorts of features that were often found in escape pods, regardless of the species for which it was made. Most relied on manual operation for launch, but on many ships there were conditions that would trigger the automatic release of escape pods. On Starfleet ships, some self-destruct sequences ejected escape pods as part of their protocol. In many cases, an ejection sequence could be triggered by fire…or by a sudden loss of hull integrity and air pressure.

Xiong set the monoblade on the deck between his feet and climbed carefully into the pod. Then, clinging to the edge of the portal, he reached out and picked up the sword. He looked around until he saw a part of the Tholian ship’s hull that could be easily perforated without harming the escape pod—and he thrust the monoblade into it.

A groan of wrenching metal, the roar of escaping high-pressure fluids, the shattering of obsidian. Xiong fought the blowout effect caused by the explosive decompression and pushed himself back inside the escape pod. Grabbing any hand-holds he could find, he wedged himself inside the tiny space as the thunder of the disintegrating bulkhead was drowned out by the screech of venting gases.

An iris snapped shut over the pod’s portal. Sudden acceleration hurled Xiong against the iris as the pod was blasted away from the Tholian battle cruiser. Seconds later its inertial dampeners kicked in, and he was once again floating freely inside the pod. Looking toward its far end, he saw that its black surface had become almost transparent, showing him the curve of the planet as it spread wide beneath him.

He was about to congratulate himself for his ingenuity when he realized that he had absolutely no means of controlling the pod’s descent or landing. As a vast ocean rolled into view, Xiong hoped that the pod’s automated features extended to more than just its ejection sequence.

The tropics, he mused as the pod fell. Assuming I survive the splashdown, this might be the start of a nice vacation.

Niwara stood at the river’s edge as Commander Terrell waded out into the rapids. An orange safety line from her pack was tied around his torso and secured to a thick tree trunk several meters behind her. She controlled the slack of the line as he moved into deeper water, anchoring him so that the current didn’t sweep him away as it had Theriault. The bright orange rope chafed the pads of her paws as she fed out a few more meters of it to Terrell.

He called back to her, “How much farther?”

She glanced down at the screen of her tricorder, which lay flat on the ground by her feet. “Two more meters,” Niwara said. “Then dive.” Paying out some more line for the first officer, she wondered how he would find anything in the churning murk of muddy water. Opening his eyes underwater would be all but impossible. In every practical sense, he would be diving blind.

Terrell took a deep breath and submerged. Niwara monitored the slack in the line by touch while she watched her tricorder screen. It was centered on the signal from Theriault’s communicator, which lay unmoving on the river bottom. Slowly the first officer’s bio reading closed in on it, then stopped. A few seconds later he surfaced and gasped for breath while fighting to tread water against the current. “Am I close?” he asked.

“Half a meter more to your left when you dive,” she said.

He nodded, took a few quick breaths, then ducked back under the water. When he surfaced again half a minute later, he had Theriault’s communicator in his hand. “Reel me in,” he said.

Hand over hand, Niwara helped pull Terrell back to the riverbank. He dragged himself out of the water and slumped to a sitting position. His body, bare except for some regulation-issue dark gray underwear, was covered in dirty water that dried quickly in the warm air, leaving him coated with sandy grit. His close-cropped wiry hair was packed with silt. He untied the safety line from his body.

Niwara asked, “Was there any sign of her?”

“No,” Terrell said, shaking his head. “Just her communicator.” He looked out at the river. “Probably got knocked loose when she went over those rocks.” Niwara nodded and began undoing the knots that held the safety line to the tree trunk. As she expected, Terrell tried to put a positive spin on his discovery. “I’m just glad she wasn’t down there,” he said. He gazed into the distance, following the river’s path into the jungle. “That means there’s a chance she’s still alive, somewhere downriver.”

Although Niwara always hoped for the best, she made a point of preparing for the worst. Theriault could be dead, she admitted to herself. Floating away, a slave to the current. She knew not to say so aloud. Terrell had no patience for pessimism.

Terrell stood up and brushed off as much of the water and dirt from his body as he could. He retrieved his clothes, which he had placed in a neat pile several meters from the water. In less than a minute he was dressed. He rejoined Niwara, who coiled the last few meters of the safety line, knotted it around its middle, and stowed it in her pack. “We’ve got about an hour of daylight left,” Terrell said. “We’ll continue downriver till it gets dark. Then we’ll make camp for the night.”

“Aye, sir,” Niwara said, putting on her pack. The first officer was right to recommend halting their trip downriver when darkness fell. Niwara could only hope that Theriault had found the opportunity to do likewise.

The top deck of the U.S.S. Sagittarius looked like a junkyard.

Master Chief Ilucci and his engineering team were surrounded by the disassembled components of several different systems, ranging from shield emitters to plasma conduits. Several pieces were scorched; a few had been warped by intense heat. Kneeling in the middle of it all was Threx. The brawny Denobulan poked and prodded the item in his hand with various tools and sensors, then he chucked it over his shoulder. “Well, that one’s dead,” he said. “Toss me another.”

Karen Cahow lobbed an identical component to him. “If we don’t find a working regulator soon, we can forget about fixing the shields,” she said.

“Two more pieces, and I can build a new one,” Threx said.

Torvin stood with one of his enormous Tiburonian ears pressed against the impulse reactor and glared at the other engineers. He pressed his index finger to his lips in a shushing gesture. Cahow grinned with amusement at the boyish engineer’s brazen rebuke of his superiors. Ilucci rolled his eyes; Threx simply glowered and turned away. They all stopped talking, however, giving Torvin a few moments to listen for whatever was going wrong inside the delicate reactor assembly.

After several seconds he pulled back from the machine. “It’s the vectored exhaust director,” he said despondently. “The inner and outer vanes are totally misaligned.”

“All right,” Ilucci said. “We can’t fix that. Realign the warp-core EPS taps instead. I want to be ready to hook up the new fuel pod as soon as it gets here.” If it gets here, he prevented himself from adding.

“You got it, Master Chief,” Torvin said. He picked up his tools and went to work.

Ilucci kneeled beside the transporter emitter. The entire engineering team had taken half an hour to decouple it from its housing beneath the cargo deck and transfer it with antigravs to the top deck. Moving it back belowdecks and resecuring it was just one of many labor-intensive tasks the engineers had to look forward to this evening. First, however, Ilucci had to find some way to fix it. “Cahow,” he called out. “We got any spare imaging scanners?”

“No,” said the blond engineer. “But I can rig you one if you let me raid the dorsal sensors for parts.”

It wasn’t the answer he was hoping for; cannibalizing the array would create large gaps in the ship’s scanning capabilities. Weighing the value of restoring the transporter against the loss of tactically useful data, Ilucci decided that it was a necessary trade-off. “How long?”

“At least eight hours,” she said.

He sighed. “Okay, get on it.” She nodded, grabbed a box of tools, and disappeared into the starboard forward crawlspace.

Ilucci walked over and joined Threx, who removed the housing from a metallic shaft the size of his forearm. Studying the cables and circuitry inside, the Denobulan said, “This one looks like it might be okay.” He pointed at an oddly shaped device near Ilucci’s right foot. “Can you hand me that, Master Chief?” Ilucci picked up the object and passed it to Threx, who test-fitted it against the cylinder in his other hand. “Yeah, that’ll do. I can make a new regulator with these. Have the shields back by morning.”

“A hundred percent?” Ilucci asked.

Threx cocked his head sideways. “More like sixty-five.”

“All right,” Ilucci said. “Keep me posted.” He watched Threx shamble away with half-disassembled machine parts in each hand and prepared himself for what promised to be a long night of jury-rigged repairs.

One crisis at a time, he told himself. That’s how we do it.

The escape pod was sheathed in fire. Plunging like a stone through the atmosphere, it shook and spun around Xiong. He ricocheted off the bulkheads, despite his best efforts to brace himself with his outstretched arms and legs.

Images of the view outside the pod rippled over its every interior surface, creating the impression that the pod was little more than a capsule of clear gelatin inside a flame. Then the fire dissipated and faded away, yielding to a seascape that was half day and half night.

Xiong saw the image distort where his hands and feet touched the bulkhead. Must be some kind of holographic projection, he realized, amazed at the total panoramic visibility. Though some aspects of Tholian technology had seemed inferior when compared to that of the Federation, this was one achievement at which he marveled.

Below his feet the horizon flattened into the distance, and the ocean became all that he could see in any direction. Splashdown was only moments away.

No sound but the roar of wind, no light but the glow of two moons over the sea. The pod spiraled down, turning like the bit of a drill as it struck the water. Sudden deceleration hurled Xiong against the bottom of the pod. His impact was cushioned by the extreme density of the atmosphere inside the pod and the protective servomotors and shielding of his EVA gear.

Boiling plumes erupted around the pod as it sank. The distorted surface became distant and faded into blackness. I survived splashdown, Xiong thought as his helmet beacon activated. Then he noted with dismay that the pod remained sealed as it sank into the ocean.

His next dilemma became clear. After all the effort he had gone through to make the pod seal itself and eject from the Tholian ship, he now had to find some way to make it let him out. For a moment he wished that he had kept the monoblade, but then he remembered that in all the turbulence of reentry he would likely have filleted himself, or damaged the pod.

Think like a Tholian, he told himself. You live in a high-pressure environment. You like it really hot. You need your escape pod to keep you alive for days or weeks until you’re rescued. The inevitable conclusion was exactly what he didn’t want to contemplate. They wouldn’t want this thing to open, he realized. Not unless it landed in a Tholian-friendly environment—which is the one thing I’m trying to escape.

Absolute darkness surrounded the pod. He couldn’t tell whether he was looking at its natural obsidian surface or at a faithful representation of the lightless depths outside. Several challenges now demanded his attention: open the pod, return to the ocean’s surface, and survive both events; then find some means of staying alive in a vast expanse of untraveled open water on an uninhabited planet.

All right, time to get creative. He activated his helmet beacon and eyed his surroundings. Seeing no other resources, he began looking at his environment suit. What have I got?

Taking stock of his heavily modified EVA gear, he replayed in his memory the process by which Ilucci and the engineers of the Sagittarius had built the suit around him. They had added several nonstandard components to the suit, in order to make it strong enough to survive inside the Tholian ship. Miniaturized structural integrity fields protected him from the pressure. Myo-electric servos enabled him to move through the dense, semi-fluid atmosphere. Additional power packs had been installed to drive the new components. And a tricorder had been built into the suit’s bulky control block.

His inventory completed, he asked the next question. What do I need to do? Unfortunately, it seemed that the only way to open the pod and get back to the surface would be to blast open its bottom, releasing its superheated atmosphere and causing an explosive decompression whose exhaust would propel the pod upward. Just one problem with detonating something inside the pod, he realized. Any blast strong enough to penetrate the bulkhead will cause an overpressure that’ll turn me into salsa.

He pondered whether a shaped charge might mitigate some of the blast effects before he realized that he still had no idea how to create an explosion in the first place. Come on, Ming, he thought, trying to boost his own morale. First, figure out how to blow this thing open. Then worry about how to survive the blast. Solve one problem at a time.

Of the various components in his suit, the ones that seemed to hold the most promise for generating explosive force were the power cells. They were composed primarily of sarium krellide and had been fully charged when he’d beamed over to the Tholian ship. Even after several hours of use, they were likely still at least half-charged. The key would be releasing all the energy of a power cell at once and directing its force against the bottom bulkhead. Thinking back to the engineering training he’d had at Starfleet Academy, he remembered all the things the instructors had warned him never to do when working with power cells.

Never, they had cautioned, allow an ungrounded conductive wire to contact an exposed sarium krellide power cell.

He searched the pockets of the EVA suit and found that all the standard-issue equipment was still there, including an insulated tether cable of three-ply kelvinium. It was insulated, of course, because kelvinium was superconductive and could be a hazard during EVA operations if left unprotected. Using a small wire cutter from the suit’s repair kit, he stripped the insulation from the kelvinium tether cable and unwound its three-ply wire into separate, delicate filaments. Watching the gossamer-thin wires float in the dense, shimmering atmosphere of the pod, he began thinking about how to dislodge one of the suit’s power cells without compromising the suit itself. The last thing he needed was to fill the inside of his suit with superheated, sulfur-rich gas.

There were only two power cells that he could reach: the ones located just behind each hip of the suit. They powered the servos in its legs. Disabling either one would make it very difficult for him to move until he reached an area of lower pressure. Because that was the cause for which the power cell was being sacrificed, he decided it was a fair trade.

After a few minutes of work, he had almost succeeded in freeing the power cell behind his right hip when the pod jolted to a stop. The impact pinned him against the bulkhead for a moment. Guess I’ve really hit bottom, he mused, then berated himself for the joke. He wondered briefly whether the presence of land under the pod would help or hinder his attempt to return to the surface.

The power cell detached from his suit. Holding it in his hands, he knew that he had the means of generating a fairly potent detonation. His next challenge was to direct its energy and protect himself at the same time.

You’ve made it this far, Ming. You’re doing great. Reason it out. It’s just physics. Just do the math.

The only thing he could think of was to make a force field. If he could generate a conical subspace field above the power cell before letting it make contact with kelvinium wire, all its explosive force would be directed downward, against the bottom bulk-head—and it would do so without causing an overpressure inside the pod. All I need is a subspace field generator.

The tricorder that the engineers had integrated with the suit contained a fairly powerful subspace transceiver assembly, used for relaying data back to a ship in orbit. Unfortunately, it was nestled in the back of the suit, at a place Xiong couldn’t reach. I wish I had a communicator, he thought—and then he remembered the comm assembly attached to his helmet. Although the speakers and sensing unit were inside, the transceiver components were accessible from the outside. As he reached back and started disconnecting it, he knew he would have to work quickly once it was off. The internal components of the transceiver were fairly delicate, and they wouldn’t last long exposed to the pod’s superheated atmosphere.

All-or-nothing time. Guiding his hands by watching his dim reflection on the obsidian bulkhead, he detached the transceiver assembly from his helmet. He kneeled beside the power cell and set the circuit next to it. He powered down the transceiver and attached two filaments of kelvinium to it. He shaped the wires into a crude circle around the transceiver and the power cell.

The key to his plan would be the timing. He twisted the last piece of wire into a loose ball and made a few test drops away from the power cell, to see how long it would take the wire ball to fall from the top of the pod to the bottom; it took just less than three seconds, and he concluded it was because of the density of the pod’s atmosphere.