Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

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  He was an entirely compartmental being, having simple but solid walls drawn between his emotions and his intellect in a way that reminded her of Vulcans but that was infinitely more complex. Vulcans shoved all their emotions behind the same wall, denying them access to the surface of their being. Ra-Havreii didn’t have a single wall but a maze. He certainly felt things and showed it, but only what and when he wished. She wondered if all Efrosians were this way or if it was a particular quirk of the engineer’s.

  “One of my colleagues on the Lunaproject felt that way,” he said eventually, frowning over the exposed guts of the tricorders in his lap. “Dr. Tourangeau felt that our work was in the nature of a competition, with us setting ourselves against the limitations imposed by nature and finding ways around them. ‘Sometimes you get the sehlat,’ he would say. ‘Sometimes it gets you.’ ”

  “It’s a good way to see life, Xin,” she said.

  “I pushed myself to follow his example,” said the engineer. “I completely redesigned the drive systems of the Lunaclass, you know. I changed the mixture rates, streamlined the force-field networks. It was like making art rather than building machinery.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about engineering,” she said, smiling. “But I know your work is considered to be cutting edge.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We were always seeking that edge. Living on it as long as we could.”

  “They say that’s where the best discoveries are found.”

  “Mmh,” he said. “It is also the place where Dr. Tourangeau and several hundred others were caught in the matter inversion event that was born of my ‘artwork.’ ”

  Seeing the questioning look on her face, he explained the horrible consequence of matter inversion and how its single positive attribute was a quick death for those caught in the center of the effect.

  The maiming and mutilation of bodies unlucky enough to be at the periphery, like those of his friend Tourangeau and so many others, was something he never let himself forget anymore.

  “I promised I would never lose another ship,” he said at last. “And I would never kill another person or harm another friend. And yet here we all are.”

  She could feel him folded inside himself, like layer upon layer of steel. His pain was deeper and, strangely, more rational than she had ever thought, and in the face of it, she wondered if any amount of quiet conversation could ever lessen his burden.

  “I am sorry, Xin,” was all she could muster. She knew it wasn’t enough, that perhaps nothing could be. Worse, his certainty that he had somehow failed to prevent the death of another ship and her crew sent a sliver of ice through her own soul.

  Seeing that she wouldn’t press him further, Ra-Havreii closed the tricorder’s access panel and switched it on. The green lights lit and the familiar chime sounded, signaling that he had got it working correctly again. To look at him, one would think he had just performed this miracle in the comfort of some workshop on Titanor at Starfleet Headquarters.

  He smiled at her, a surprisingly warm smile, stood and moved off to test the tricorder’s basic functions.

  Keru burst out of the jungle as if a horde of Borg drones were on his heels.

  “We’re going,” he said, and immediately set to packing up the campsite.

  He wasn’t panicked exactly. Troi could tell the big Trill had more control of himself than to allow panic, but he was nervous and in a hurry.

  “What’s happened, Ranul?” she asked, moving to help him gather up their meager store of equipment and supplies.

  “The commander stepped on something,” he said, closing up the first pack and tossing it to her. He looked around, noticed the engineer was not present, and asked about it.

  “He got a tricorder working again,” she said, finishing the second pack. “He’s still testing it.”

  Keru swore. Seeing that Troi had the packing in hand, he dived into the area of the jungle where she indicated Ra-Havreii had gone. He and Vale had the only working combadges as yet, and she could hear his voice relaying the situation to her for a few moments before the sound was eaten by the jungle. Almost immediately she heard, from the opposite side of the little clearing, the muffled sound of phaser fire.

  She finished the fourth pack and was about to round up the stray bits of equipment when Vale appeared. She was winded and sweating, and she held her phaser very much at the ready.

  “No sign of the others,” she said, catching her breath. She cast a glance around the small campsite and frowned.

  “Keru and Xin aren’t back yet,” said Troi. She tossed the younger woman her finished pack, watching as she quickly slid her arms through the loops. “What’s happening?”

  “Stepped into a nest of some very angry bugs,” she said, gathering up the other hand weapons and handing one to Troi. “I think the phaser scared the first few hundred, but the others are massing behind them.”

  Troi nodded, slipping on her own pack and gathering up the other two.

  “Vale to Keru. We’re leaving in one,” said Vale. “I don’t care what Ra-Havreii’s into. Stun him if you have to, but get back here now.”

  “Already on it,” said Keru, emerging from the sea of vines with a very unhappy Ra-Havreii in tow.

  “Glad you could join us, Doctor,” said Vale, grabbing one of the packs away from Troi and throwing it at the Efrosian. “The counselor tells me you’ve got that thing working again?”

  “Yes, Commander,” he said.

  “Think you can find the shuttle?”

  “I was just telling Keru that I could when he-” The engineer was interrupted by a sound like a thousand turbines spinning in unison.

  “Bugs?” said Troi. Vale nodded.

  “Let’s go, people,” she said, as if anyone present needed to be told.

  The swarm stayed with them for two kilometers, right up to the moment they found a wide creek of clear running water and, despite Ra-Havreii’s protest, plunged in.

  Their scents sufficiently masked, the team watched from under the water as the horde of alien insects swept over them. It took only seconds for the swarm to pass-an army of things like crimson locusts the size of small dogs screaming through the brush with blood in mind.

  “Good enough,” said Vale as the others joined her on the surface of the water, each filling their burning lungs with air. She looked at the engineer expectantly.

  “Yes,” he said, bringing the tricorder up. “I have a fix on the warp core. Shall we?”

  It was odd following Ra-Havreii anywhere. He kept up a good pace, but he didn’t bother to tell them when he turned left or right or took a sudden detour through what appeared to be a solid bank of tightly interwoven vines.

  “Have you wondered why there are no signs of technology?” said Troi. “Even the tricorder hasn’t found anything.”

  “As long as it finds the shuttle,” said Keru.

  “Fixed position another kilometer ahead,” said Ra-Havreii. “The pulse is steady and strong.”

  “Heh,” said Keru, huffing a bit through his mustache. “You sound like a doctor.”

  “I am a doctor,” said Ra-Havreii. “A steady, regular pulse means the shuttle is more or less intact. Actually these readings show-”

  Troi sensed a sudden spike in his emotions, a sort of surge that was equal parts confusion and elation. “Xin?”

  Without responding, the engineer took off at a dead run, plunging into the dense foliage ahead as if it wasn’t full of things that could easily kill him.

  “Dammit,” said Keru and went off after him as if fired from the same cannon.

  “I thought he was under control,” snapped Vale, following.

  Troi didn’t respond. She couldn’t. She had caught the tiniest flash of what had appeared in Ra-Havreii’s mind. It was an image that both thrilled her and chilled her to her marrow. She knew why he had bolted, and she felt the same. She actually passed Vale, scrambling after the lanky engineer and his burly pursuer over the treacherous vermillion terrain.

  Vale would have liked to grumble, but she had the others to keep safe. She held the rear position and kept her phaser ready. Whatever it was that had sparked the engineer had set him running toward it, so it was safe to assume something positive lay at the end of their little sprint.

  The tiniest vines, rough spiny things with occasional barbs, clutched and scratched at her exposed flesh as she passed between. She kept sight of Troi, only a few steps ahead as she too tore through the jungle, and was impressed by how easily the counselor was able to adapt to their circumstances. It might be irritating to have her reference her longer time in the field and noteworthy adventures, but if the benefit of all that experience resulted in someone who could take all this in stride, Vale accepted it as a welcome blessing.

  There was a rise ahead, composed of what looked like the exposed sinews of some impossibly giant animal stacked on each other several meters high. Troi scrambled to the summit and disappeared between the massive cluster of leaves that grew there.

   Good climber too, thought Vale. She never missed her footing once-

  Suddenly her mind, her whole being, was flooded with, well, grief was too small a word to describe it. For an instant she felt, all at once, the loss of every friend, the perpetual absence of her father, the pain of every misspoken word or ugly unreasonable thought she’d ever had. It lasted only a second, maybe two, but it hit her hard enough to make her gasp and fall to her knees.

   Titan.

  It wasn’t the shuttle that Ra-Havreii had found after all but the great starship that had been their home for more than half a year. It was no one’s home now. Even the local wildlife kept well clear of this hideous place.

   Titan, what was left of her, lay in hundreds, perhaps thousands of broken twisted bits at the end of a trench that was easily three kilometers long. The pieces were charred black, melted and twisted by the heat of planetfall. What she had seen had been true. Titanwas dead.

  Despite her harsh words, she had been swayed by Troi’s unshaken faith that even this horrible turn could have been avoided or corrected. The scene before them had shattered Troi’s resolve into jagged shreds, and each of those had sliced through Vale.

  Dead. All of them. Dead.

  Troi said nothing, only stood gazing down at it with tears streaming down her face. She had bottled the excess emotion that had hit Vale just before, but you didn’t need to be hit with an empathic broadcast to know she must be dying inside.

  “Deanna,” she said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Troi nodded, a tiny thing, almost imperceptible, but she still had no words. This moment was completely outside anything she had ever experienced or conceived. Even in her darkest moments there had always been a last-minute reprieve or some miraculous rescue to put things right.

  What could ever do that here?

  Keru was like stone. This was, Vale guessed, the face he’d shown when news of the death of his beloved Sean Hawk had reached him. She hoped never in her life to see this face again.

  Ra-Havreii drifted past her and, before Vale could protest, scrambled down the hill of vines, apparently to get an even closer view of the carnage.

  “Keru,” she said, her voice sounding hollow and strange. “Better get after him.”

  “Right,” said the big man after a moment. “Right. On it, Commander.” And then he was off after the engineer.

  The two women stood there silently, hating the sight before them and unable to turn away.

  “We were arguing,” said Troi at last. “Will and me.”

  “Deanna…”

  “We wanted a baby, but there were complications,” she went on, almost as if Vale wasn’t present at all. It was as though the words themselves had to come out, had to be spoken, regardless of how they fell. “There were DNA incompatibilities. Dr. Ree was treating us both. It was invasive, lengthy.”

  “It sounds like a barrel of fun,” said Vale. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It was fine,” said Troi. “We wanted the baby more than anything, but the more procedures we underwent, the more Will and I fought.”

  Troi went on, the words flooding out of her, telling of their battles behind closed doors, about Will’s desire to keep Deanna and the baby they were working so hard to create safe.

  He began shifting her duty schedule, recommending she hand off more and more work to her staff. She would have none of it, of course, and so they fought.

  Was this how he meant to treat her once their child was born, like a delicate, breakable thing? There was no safety to be had in any kind of life and no guarantees about any of it.

  On some very basic level she knew that he understood and even agreed, but, perhaps due to the nature of Titan’s first few missions, some other part of him could not keep the fear of harm coming to her at bay. His mind began to fill with scenarios in which she or their child or both would be somehow killed or stranded or otherwise harmed by the simple facts of life on a deep-exploration ship.

  Never mind that there were already children on Titanand certainly more to come. Never mind that there had been families on Enterprise, going about the business of living, happily, if not always easily. His feelings weren’t rational. This was some animal thing, a vestigial aspect of his primate ancestry maybe, and its grip on him only continued to grow.

  So, they fought and fought and dug that awful chasm between themselves that nothing had ever managed to create before.

  Their last words together had been cold, businesslike. He didn’t want her on this team and she didn’t want to hear another word about her not going.

  She had planned to patch things up on their return from Orisha. She had planned to concede, to accept anything rather than have this rift between them. She had planned many things, not the least of which was their baby. All of it was dust now, charcoal black dust, flaking off Titan’s bones.

   “Keru to Vale,”his voice cut a welcome hole in her reverie. “Dr. Ra-Havreii has something down here you need to see.”

  “What now?” she said.

   “I don’t know what he’s talking about, but he seems pretty happy,”said Keru, obviously perplexed. “It’s something to do with the warp core.”

  “On our way,” said Vale.

  It was worse being there. The blackened remains of Titan, hideous enough from a distance, were like a giant’s charnel pit from within. Vale was grateful that the descent that had burned Titanhad also cauterized the flesh of the crew. There was no stink of death here, at least, only the towering ebony monument to their loss and the absolute, relentless stillness.

  While the jungle teemed with plant and animal life of nearly every description, this area was as tranquil as the graveyard it was.

  The two women moved within the black maze of Titan’s remains in absolute silence, neither daring to break the quiet or disturb each other’s thoughts.

  This lasted all of two minutes before the sound of phaser fire cut through the peace.

  Troi and Vale broke into a dead run, bringing their own weapons up almost in unison. Far ahead of them, tens of meters away, they could see shapes, Keru’s and several others scuffling. Keru’s phaser fired again, slicing a bright narrow slash in the air.

  Whatever they were smashed him to the ground and ran off into the place where the jungle crept closest to the crash site.

  They had almost reached Keru, already back on his feet, before they realized the large black pillar towering over him was Titan’s warp core and that it was somehow still glowing with power.

  “Orishans!” said Keru as he dashed into the jungle after the unseen attackers. “They took Ra-Havreii!”

  His phaser had time to fire once more before Troi and Vale plunged in after him.

Chapter Seven

ORISHA, NO STARDATE

   Jaza had a plan, but Modan didn’t like it. They needed to get the shuttle’s flight capability back and get off the planet sooner rather than later. The longer they stayed on Orisha, the more damage they might do to its natural timeline. They could only hope that Modan had not killed the Orishan soldier who had attacked Jaza or, if she had, that he would have died anyway as a result of the conflict raging around them.

  The plan was simple enough in itself. Titan’s unstable warp core had to be neutralized. The shuttle’s flux regulator had been burned out by the energy discharge, but at least two of its counterparts in Titan’s warp core were still active and could be adapted.

  The problem was that, though he had the necessary expertise to neutralize the core, the rad levels around the crash site were too high for him to get close. Modan’s Selenean physiology would allow her to survive the effects long enough to get the job done, but she was not an engineer.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “I’ll talk you through it, and then we will take this shuttle somewhere else where there are no sentients to corrupt with our presence.”

  “This will work?” she said again, still dubious about the role he had set for her.

  “It will,” he assured her. The isolation suit, one of two left when the others had vanished (along with a good portion of their emergency supplies) was set in rest mode, but it was working. She would be essentially imperceptible in the visible spectrum and well into the infra and the ultra as well.

  “I’m not sure I have the skill set to do my part,” she said. “I’m just a code breaker, Najem.”

  “Modan,” he said, a strange intensity in his voice that she had not heard before now. “The Prophets have put us together here for just this purpose.”

  “The Prophets.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The beings who exist in Bajor’s stable wormhole.”

  “Yes, Modan,” he said. “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “You believe your Prophets are controlling your actions, your life?”

  “I believe,” he said, “that the Prophets guide my steps and shape my fate. Or, in this case, ours.”

  “That’s perverse,” said Modan. “Selene doesn’t have deities. We know the universe is a mechanism.”

  “It’s that,” Jaza acknowledged with a smile. “That simply isn’t allit is.”

  “We are rational beings, Najem,” she said. “You are a scientist. You cannot seriously believe what you say.”

  “I can,” he said. “I do.”

  “I cannot process how this can be.”

  He smiled. It was the first real smile he’d managed during this ordeal, and she was strangely glad of it.

  “I was like you,” he said. “I was worse. But a mind that rejects new data, even if the data contradicts what the mind thinks it knows, is not functioning at peak.”

  “And you have received this data?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  She stared at him then, the turquoise orbs of her eyes seeming to bore straight through his being. He could only remember being scrutinized that closely once before in his life.

  “The Mother has made me to think, as you say, at peak,” she said at last. “Present your data. If I agree with its rationality, I’ll obey your orders. If not, we must find an alternate plan.”

  “I am the senior officer here, Ensign,” he said, not unkindly.

  “There is no Starfleet now, Najem.” She wasn’t making an argument, she was stating a fact. Starfleet and any authority over her it granted him were a thousand years in the future. “There is no Federation. I can’t risk my life for an irrational notion.”

  “Modan,” he said. “We’ve already wasted enough time. You don’t need to believe as I believe to get this done.”

  She sat. She stared. She said nothing, and somewhere not far off, the dangerous substances inside Titan’s warp core continued their unregulated ebb and flow.

  “All right,” he said. “All right, listen.”

  The shrine was an old one, the kind that was usually built near the founding days of a settlement. It harkened back to those times before Bajor had developed space travel.

  The hands of the founders of Ilvia had surely excavated the stones, seeded and cultivated the garden. Some local artisan had surely carved the image of a Tear that dominated the faзade.

  It was exactly the sort of place the Cardassians usually destroyed under some pretext or another in their bid to separate the Bajoran people from their backward spiritual past.

  Somehow this one had survived, even doing duty as a makeshift hospital where Jaza Chakrys tended to those deemed undesirable or unacceptable by their Cardassian occupiers.

  He stood there, thanking the Prophets that his father wasn’t present after all and that at least one of the charges he had set, the one at the secondary target near the data processing station, had failed to blow.

  Then it did.

  He felt the explosion before he heard it and, in fact, never actually heard it at all. The shock wave flung him forward like a rag doll, smashing him against the broken stone courtyard of what once had been the first interior garden,

  He felt he should have lapsed into unconsciousness-that was normal for this sort of bone-crushing injury-but instead, he heard the chimes.

  “Hello, love,” said a voice that was enough like Sumari’s to send a hot electric thrill rippling through his body.

  “Hello, Jem,” said another familiar female voice.

  “Mother?” he said, knowing it couldn’t possibly be, and yet longing to believe it anyway.

  He rose and found that the shrine around him had transformed. There was no damage now, not from the bomb or anything else.

  A strange preternatural glow suffused every visible space and, within that halo, people. There was his wife, Sumari, alive again. There was his mother alive as well. There was his first teacher, Donal Leez, still sporting that perfectly trimmed goatee and the sparkling bright eyes. Leez was also long dead, of the same Orkett’s epidemic that had taken his mother, and yet, here he was. Here they were.

  “You’re confused,” said his mother.

  “You’re broken, Najem,” said Leez. “Shattered into splinters.”

  “What is this?” he said, forcing himself to his feet. His body felt just as insubstantial as everything else around him yet this was no dream. He was alert, lucid, thinking as clearly as he ever had in his life. And there was the pain in his neck and spine where he somehow knew he’d taken shrapnel though there seemed to be no wounds.

  “Pain is a ghost,” said Sumari. “Only the Prophets are forever.”

  Even here, even in this weird dream that was not a dream, Sumari would invoke those laissez faire deities who did nothing but watch and wait in their damned Celestial Temple.

  Suddenly he was filled with a rage that he had never felt before. It was like fire inside him, hollowing, cleansing, ripping the chaff from his mind and leaving behind the only thing that mattered: the question.

  “Why don’t they help us, Su,” he said, his body literally vibrating with anger. “We’ve worshipped them for thousands of years. We’ve done everything to honor them and they still let the Cardassians come! They let them come and kill us and torture us and destroy what we’ve built.”

  “You can’t solve everything with a hammer, Najem,” said his mother. “You can’t answer violence with more violence.”

  “They haven’t left us anything else,” he said, whirling on her. Years of anger over everything, the occupation, his mother’s death, his estrangement from his father, the loss of so many friends, all of it fairly erupted out of him, spewing his hot wrath on these ghosts or whatever they were. “They won’t help us. They won’t stop the spoon-heads. People pray and pray and they do nothing.”

  “There is a purpose to everything, Jem,” said Leez. “You have to trust the Prophets.”

  “You can’t keep saying that, over and over,” said Jaza. “Don’t you understand; it doesn’t mean anything. We pray to them. They do nothing. We still die. All we do is die.”

  “The Prophets are outside life and death, Jem,” said his mother softly. “You have to try to see things the way they do.”

  “How can I?” he said and suddenly became aware of the tears that had been pouring out of him the whole time. “I’m just a man.”

  He was just a man, just one little soul, doing what it could, anything it could, to free his people from oppression. Fighting, dying, killing, whittling away bits of himself every day when, with a wave, they could end all this.

  How did they dare do nothing? How did they dare to call themselves gods?

  Suddenly he was elsewhere, somehow transported to a new locale with a foreign landscape and an unknown sun in the unfamiliar sky. Or was it the sun? He could see something that looked like what he understood to be a sun setting near the distant horizon. This other object, this weirdly glowing and oscillating orb hanging in the sky above him, was something completely new.

  Eight turquoise crystals grew in the moist dark soil, clustered by chance or design into the shape of an Orb of the Prophets, and behind him something made by sentient hands, a vehicle or a structure, loomed, casting a long dark shadow. There was a charge in the air as if there had been a recent lightning strike or maybe a ground quake.

  “What is this place?” he said, more to himself than to the others who had somehow followed him here.

  “The end,” said Leez, bending to inspect the stones. “And the beginning.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said as he took in the sight of the alien landscape, imprinting it on his mind.

  “That’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said,” said Sumari, smiling her beautiful wicked smile. How he missed her even after all this time.

  “But what is this place?” he said. “Why do you show it to me?”

  “The end,” she said. “It’s the end for you, Najem.”

  “The end?” he said, trying to follow. “You mean-you mean this is where I die?”

  “Only at the end can you see as the Prophets see, Najem,” said Leez. “Only then will you know.”

  “A hallucination,” said Modan when he had finished.

  “No,” he said. “A vision.”

  “You were injured,” she said. “The explosion.”

  “Yes, I considered that,” he said. “When I woke up the shrine was in bits around me. I wasn’t scratched. I wasn’t even concussed. The Prophets protected me.”

  “This is irrational, Najem,” she said thoughtfully. “Many survivors of disaster tell such stories. Have your Prophets protected them all?”

  He laughed. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. But I know what they did for me.”

  “And this visionyou saw,” she said. The word twisted in her mouth, but he let it go. “You know its meaning?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know my death, Modan. Until I’m in that place and in that moment, nothing can kill me. That’s why I survived the bomb and the occupation and everything we’ve been through. Until that moment, nothing can touch me.”

  She protested again, citing simple coincidence and the need in primates like himself to see patterns in everything even when no such pattern was present.

  “Modan,” he said. “How many coincidences will convince you of the pattern? Don’t you find it the least bit odd that we have been sent back to this moment and place with precisely the right skills between us to prevent Titan’s warp core from blowing a continent-sized hole in Orisha? This defies coincidence, Modan. There are hands at work here, and they’re not ours.”

  Modan was silent. She had heard everything he had to say, but it was not clear she understood. Around their hidden shuttle, the Orishans continued to bomb and shoot each other with zeal.

  Whatever fuel had sparked this fighting, there was no sign of its running dry in the near future. Yet he knew that, as a result of this conflict or something that came after, the Orishans not only put aside their differences but became peaceful enough and unified enough to build a stable, aesthetic culture on a par with many in the Federation. They had to be allowed their chance to survive this dark moment in their history.

  “All right,” said Modan at last. “I do not share your conclusion, but your reasoning is sound. I will do as you say.”

  Things went more smoothly than he had anticipated. Despite the confidence he’d shown Modan, the Prophets’ protection was not always as clear-cut as he’d led her to believe. He still carried deep and painful ambivalence about his wife Sumari’s death from a disruptor blast that could have been meant for him.

  He had never known for sure at which of them the Cardassian gunner had been aiming, but the possibility that her life had been sacrificed to protect his had tormented him for years. He’d put their children in his father’s care after that rather than risk their lives as he had their mother’s.

  Indeed it was with Sumari’s death that he knew he must eventually leave Bajor. So, first the Militia and then, when the opportunity came, Starfleet, adventure, and discovery and so many friends.

  He didn’t want Modan to be another sacrifice to the Prophets’ will, but there was no other way.

  “Almost there,” came her whispered words over the comlink. “Only a few more meters.”

  The Orishan war zone had expanded in their direction while he had related the story of his epiphany, so she was obliged, even with her holographic invisibility, to skirt the farthest edge of the battle rather than take a direct route to the core.

  “Acknowledged,” he said as he kept one eye on the sensor scans of the battle. Titanhadn’t yet been discovered by the Orishans; there was too much blasting going on in the region for even that awful crash to have been noticed by more than a few. The readings of the warp core, if they could be trusted, were stable enough. If they held, Modan would easily shut the thing down, lift out the flux regulators, and return. They could be off the planet inside two hours.

   “Done,”she said softly. There had been a tense moment when the primkeys had jammed instead of opening the manual shutdown plates, but he had talked her through the use of the link glove to get them open. After that it was a simple matter to perform a manual shutdown.

  Jaza talked her through it, step-by-step, and she did precisely as she was told.

  The entire process took ten minutes. After another ten, she was a good way toward pulling the first of the flux regulators free of its housing. As she worked in silence, he continued to scan periodically for signs that the deuterium suspension was still becoming solid or that the antimatter was not securely held by the thickening plasma.