Текст книги "Sword of Damocles "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Thorne

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

  He was about to tell Tuvok to hail them and get this ball rolling when Titansuddenly ceased its pitch and roll, resuming the normal, relatively upright position that her crew enjoyed. The shields were back up.

  Riker couldn’t hear it, but he was sure there was some version of cheering rippling through the decks below. Good news always travels fast.

  “Shields at eighty-three percent and holding,” said the Vulcan without any display of triumph.

  “Well done, Mr. Tuvok,” said Riker. “If you can get Titansome of our new friends’ maneuverability or the warp core back into the green zone, I may have to promote you.”

  “Unnecessary, sir,” said Tuvok, bending to whatever new set of problems had flashed across his screens. “I have Mr. Jaza’s sensor pod team working on the problem now.”

  That made sense. Jaza’s people had the most direct experience with the strange phenomena present in this region. They would have the best chance at turning the new data into something they could use.

  “Good,” said Riker, never taking his eyes off the new ship. It had taken a position almost directly in front of Titanand now hung there, perhaps waiting for some indication from Riker of his ship’s intentions.

   Well, thought the captain, taking in the sight. That’s not provocative.

  He told Tuvok to hail the aliens. “This is Captain William T. Riker of the Federation Starship Titan,” he said when the Vulcan looked up. “We have entered your space peacefully, seeking some missing comrades of ours and-”

   And you killed my wife, he wanted to say. He was suddenly so angry at the thought of her death in this useless situation that he almost wished the aliens would fire on them and give him an excuse to vent.

  His words were cut short by a burst of static as Titan’s universal translator, fighting both the effects of the distortion outside the ship and the vagaries of the alien language, attempted to do its job.

   “You dare to call yourselves peaceful!”said a low, grating voice that was full of clicks and humming. “You dare to approach Erykon’s Eye!”

  “There’s much here that we don’t understand,” said Riker. “Our mission here is only to-”

  Again his words were cut short by a burst of angry static as the UT tried and failed to translate the alien’s angry words. It wasn’t really necessary. Everyone present got the gist.

  “ Orisha is gone, [possible meaning: soulless] creatures!” said the alien captain, enraged to the point of incoherence. “It has been destroyed by the[possible meaning: wrath/judgment] of the Eye! You awakened the[possible meaning: Holy] Eye! You invited Erykon’s[possible meaning: destruction/anger] !”

  “We meant no insult to you or your people,” said Riker, silently motioning for Tuvok to provide him with a visual component to the signal. “We are only-”

   “You will be punished,”said the alien voice. “I am A’churak’zen, first among Erykon’s children, and it is my joy to purge you from creation!”

  Communication was abruptly severed before Tuvok could provide a visual, but Riker didn’t need one now. The alien captain had confirmed her connection to Orisha, and he had a basic idea of what to expect. He pictured a small army of four-armed insectoids, each seething with fury over the death of their world and holding Titanand her crew to blame.

  Oddly enough, he knew precisely how they felt.

  “They are charging some weapon, Captain,” said Tuvok. “The readings are different from the ones we took earlier.”

   When they fired on the away team, Riker finished the thought. When they killed Deanna. “Set to fire quantum torpedoes, full spread, on my mark,” he said. If these bastards wanted to bang heads instead of figuring a way to power down and maybe find a solution to all this, for once, just this once, he was happy to oblige.

  “That is not advisable, sir,” said Tuvok. “The vessel’s proximity to Titanis-”

  Before either of them could utter another word, the Orishan weapon fired. This time it was not the immensely destructive power beam that erupted from the alien ship but a massive lattice of interlocking energy fields.

   It looks like a net, thought Riker, just before it hit.

   Titanshuddered violently as the new weapon overtook them, but it did not suffer the same jolting that it had during its recent difficulties. The shields, for the moment, held the weapon at bay.

  “Tuvok?”

  “Tractor beam,” the Vulcan reported. “Similar to our own but more powerful by several orders of magnitude, and it is contracting. Our shields are holding it back at this time, but I believe its purpose is to crush us.”

  “Can they do it?” said the captain.

  “Eventually, yes,” said Tuvok. “Shield strength has already fallen by four percent.”

  “So we’re on the clock,” said Riker.

  “Captain?”

  “Time, Mr. Tuvok,” said Riker. “We’re fighting time. Either we get free of that thing and give the Orishans a reason to back off or they crush Titanand us like an egg.”

  Tuvok considered the analogy for a moment before responding. “Yes, sir,” he said eventually. “That is essentially correct.”

   “Sensor pod to bridge,”boomed Lieutenant Roakn’s gravelly voice.

  “Go ahead, pod,” said Riker.

   “If you can spare us one second, Captain,”said Raokn. “We think we may have something for you.”

  Riker didn’t spend much time in the sensor pod. After seeing it for the first time when he’d taken his initial inspection tour of Titan, he hadn’t been up again until they’d begun to map Occultus Ora. Then he’d only stayed long enough to get Mr. Jaza’s report, have a few words with his team, and then head back to the business of running Titanand trying to get his wife to see sense.

  The pod was darker than he remembered, running with emergency lighting to conserve precious power. All he could see of the upper tier was the grid work, and that only barely.

  Jaza’s people-Roakn, the two Benzites, the Deltan woman Fell, the Caitian female Hsuuri, the acerbic Thymerae, and Jaza’s pet project, Dakal-all stood there, expectant, weary, waiting for Riker’s command.

  “Well,” he said, not too gruffly. “Let’s have it.”

  For some reason all of them looked at Cadet Dakal, which was odd considering he had the least experience of the lot. Jaza had taken a shine to the kid, pulling him out of his rotation in systems analysis for duty with this crew.

   “He thinks he’s an operations specialist,”the science officer had written more than once. “But he’s got a mind that’s made for science.”

  Dakal looked as surprised as anyone that the rest of the team expected him to deliver their news, but he sucked it up, put on his best expression of Cardassian detachment, and began to speak, only stammering once at the outset.

  “Space-time, sir,” said the cadet. “Everything the Orishan technology has done has in some way manipulated space-time similarly to the way we use warp fields to travel.”

  “Similarly,” said Riker. “But not the same way.”

  “No, sir,” said Dakal. “At least, not in every case. We’d need to get a look at their technology to see how they’re doing it, but we now know that the instability in this area is the result of multiple folds in the local space-time. Even their weapons are not warping space so much as aggressively folding it. I have to admit that I didn’t know the difference before, but it’s significant.”

  Riker knew the difference. Warp fields created bubbles, relatively small ones, around a given vessel, allowing it to mildly bend physical laws in order to bypass relativistic speed limits. His mind flashed to his Academy days and a lecture hall where a very stern professor had stripped a hard-boiled egg of its shell, squeezed it into a plastic tube that was slightly too small, and then applied suction at both ends.

  The analogy wasn’t exact, of course: the demo had been to show the fragility of any object traveling within a warp field. The technology was so ubiquitous that most sentients forgot very quickly exactly how dangerous it actually was to circumvent physical laws in that way. The image of that egg exploded all over the interior of the tube never left Riker’s mind for long, and with Dakal’s little lecture, it resurfaced.

  Space folds, by contrast, needed no such visual analogies. Their name told the story quite literally. Usually by means of massive manipulation of gravimetric fields, space-time could be folded in on itself in order to bring two usually distant points close together. But the technology to make even simple short-distance folds was so dangerous that most civilizations abandoned it in favor of warp fields early on. Those that didn’t tended to destroy themselves when their folds destabilized their suns or knocked their planets out of their normal orbits.

  “Someone has folded a lot of space-time here, sir,” said Dakal. “Too much for anything like safety, and something has caused the knot they made to unravel.”

  “This is all well and good,” said Riker, trying not to seem too harsh with them. They had obviously been attacking this problem nonstop since the first quantum ripples had been discovered. “But how does that help us now?”

  “Well,” said Dakal. “We think, now that we know the exact nature of the effects in question, as well as the nature of the Orishan weapons, we may have a solution.”

  “A partial solution,” said Hsuuri softly. Dakal nodded.

  “You can get us moving again?” said Riker.

  “Maybe not that, sir,” said Roakn, stepping in to make sure they didn’t give the captain more hope than was warranted. “Local conditions and the ship’s own geometry still make the warp core too unstable to generate a viable bubble around Titan.”

  “But,” said Peya Fell, “we think we can stabilize things enough to get the shields up to full and keep them there. And we can give Titanher phasers again.”

  “What’s the catch?” said Riker.

  “The catch, sir?” said Dakal, looking to the others for assistance.

  “There’s always something, Cadet,” said the captain. “A downside to the plan. Some tiny flaw that makes the course of action we’re contemplating less than appealing.”

  “Time, sir,” said Dakal at last. “It will take us another three hours, minimum, to complete the necessary modifications.”

  “Riker to bridge,” said the captain. When Tuvok responded, he asked the Vulcan how long the shields could withstand the pressure from the Orishan grapple before collapsing.

   “If all local conditions remain constant,”said Tuvok’s voice evenly. “Approximately two hours and thirty-six minutes.”

   Titanlurched violently, forcing all present to grab the nearest stationary object or be knocked to the floor.

   “The Orishan vessel has increased the pressure, Captain,”said Tuvok again. “We now have two hours and seventeen point six minutes.”

  Riker’s eyes fell on the TOV apparatus clustered dark and unused in its designated alcove. He smiled.

  “All right, people,” he said. “Why don’t we see if we can make local conditions a little less constant.”

Chapter Ten

   The second quake was worse than the first, and the third and fourth were worse still. Vale and Ra-Havreii sat, listening in silence to the mounting chaos around them.

  They could hear the Orishans chittering and calling to each other in terror and desperation. There was so much happening so quickly that their translators could only lift out the odd word here and there among the screams.

   The end! Erykon! Fire! No! No! Please!and on and on.

  As the foundations of the Spire trembled and shook, Vale allowed herself a grudging admiration for these creatures. They had built downward, deep into the ground, in an attempt to hide their civilization from the wrath of their god, and so far, their structures had withstood the worst their angry deity could dish out.

  Still, that didn’t mean Vale wanted herself and the others to be there when and if the walls did come tumbling down.

  Had this been a normal cell, with solid doors and pickable locks, she might have had them free already. She had a knack for that sort of thing left over from her peace officer days. The trouble was, there were no locks. Like most of Orishan technology, the cells were a combination of organic material, that metallic resin that seemed to make up ninety percent of their constructions, and the ubiquitous energy fields that had already caused her people so much grief.

  Without tools or even a tricorder to generate a disruptive field, they were stuck here in the bowels of a world that was shaking itself to death.

  She looked over at Ra-Havreii who, despite their current predicament, seemed somehow more relaxed than she had ever seen him. It was as if he’d been carrying an invisible weight around all this time that was suddenly removed.

  He had his combadge off and was fiddling with its guts, trying perhaps to boost its signal enough to contact Keru or Troi. The Orishans, ignorant of their function, had left both Vale and Ra-Havreii with their badges. If Keru had gotten out somehow, or Troi for that matter, the field around Vale and Ra-Havreii might still prevent them making contact.

  “How’s it coming, Doctor?” she said.

  “Well enough,” he said, still fiddling away. “This is delicate work to be doing in the middle of an earthquake with only a bit of wire for a tool.”

  “I feel your pain, Commander,” she said, bracing herself to ride out the current temblor. “But I’d like to feel it on the surface with Troi and Keru, if we can manage that.”

  He said something-something pithy, she was sure-but just at that moment, the quaking grew so severe that she was smashed to the floor despite her efforts to hold on.

  Then, just as abruptly, the shaking stopped. She pulled herself up again, casting around to see if maybe that last jolt had ripped an opening in the wall that they might climb through. She would even have settled for the damned force field losing power as its unseen generator was crushed under tons of dirt and crystal. No such luck.

  The fields and the walls and the ceiling and the floor were all as intact and functional as when she’d been tossed in.

  “Dammit,” she said, angry at her complete impotence in the face of this catastrophe. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”

  “Wait, Commander,” he said.

  “Wait? Wait for what?”

  “Just listen,” he said.

  She was about to ask him what there was to hear when she heard it.

  Silence.

  Absolute, all-pervasive silence had descended on their little prison and, apparently, the universe beyond. There were no screams, no sounds of shredding or exploding machinery, so abject Orishan pleas for Erykon’s nonexistent mercy. There was nothing, nothing at all.

  Ra-Havreii smiled and extended his hand. “May I have your combadge, please?” he said.

  She gave it to him and watched, fascinated, as he held them both up against the wall containing both the exit and the energy field blocking it.

  A low-pitched whine began to emanate from the badges. She felt it in her bones as much as she heard it, a persistent and, frankly, discomfiting vibration that made her teeth ache.

  There was a flash, a brief rainbow halo around the two badges, that was followed by what appeared to be a liquid ripple running through the wall. When the rippling stopped, so did the ache in her teeth. The noise was gone.

  Ra-Havreii handed her badge back to her and pressed his palm against the exit door, which slid instantly and easily to one side.

  “Pressure sensitive,” he said.

  The field was down. The door was open. They could, with a little luck, locate the others and get the hell out of here before the quakes resumed. She had no plan beyond that yet, but just now, she didn’t need one. Let them find Troi and Keru first. Let them all get to the surface. Then they could search for the shuttle and maybe get off this rock.

  “Well done, Commander,” she said, replacing the badge on her tunic. She also was beginning to feel a bit more like herself again. Even with Ra-Havreii’s findings about the crashed starship, they had no real evidence that Titanhad not still been destroyed in the conflagration, but she had what she needed: hope. “Very well done.”

  “I believe, Commander Vale,” said the Efrosian, moving past her into the corridor beyond, “this is the appropriate juncture in our relationship for you to start calling me Xin.”

  The Orishan holding cells were really just storage containers as it turned out, the place where the larval jelly was mixed and warehoused until it could be processed and consumed.

  There was no crime on Orisha, after all, and therefore, no need for jails. Vale had been unsettled by the idea of being broken down into base chemicals to supply meals for the Mater’s young. Now, seeing the jelly itself flooding out from behind each cell door Ra-Havreii opened, and moreover, seeing the remaining bits of animal and insect carcass still breaking down inside-well, unsettling just didn’t cover it.

  She hurried the engineer to the last few doors and hoped, whatever else Erykon’s wrath might have done, that it had allowed their friends to survive.

  They found Keru first, essentially unharmed but for the bruise on his head and itching for some one-on-one time with the bug who had hit him. Vale was happier to see the big Trill than she could have imagined. She actually felt a bit naked when he wasn’t present to cover her six. He took the news about Titan’s possible survival fairly well.

  “I knew it,” he said, slapping the Efrosian’s back. “I knewshe wouldn’t go down without a fight.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” said Ra-Havreii, gasping. “But my scapulae might not be so sturdy.”

  They found Troi almost instantly, and though she had not been physically damaged either, she had, nonetheless, been hurt. When the door on her cell slid away, she never moved from the corner of the room into which she had presumably crawled. She only sat there, hugging her knees and staring straight ahead, her enormous ebony eyes seeing nothing.

  She didn’t respond to their entry, and at first Vale feared the worst.

  “What’s wrong with her?” said Keru.

  It was the fertility treatments she had undergone, Vale realized in a flash. The same side effect that had made it possible for the little Betazoid to project emotions intensely enough to incapacitate a passerby had also left her more open to the emotions of those around her.

  Vale and the others had sat through the Orishan cataclysm, listened to the terror in their screams, the horror in every cry for mercy as the apocalypse they had feared for generations finally rained down.

  Troi had not only heard all that, she had felt it as well. Vale could only imagine what damage all that terror flowing in and out of her mind might do. Catatonia might be the least of it. But even now she knew that the true reason for Troi’s state was a private matter between her and her husband, so Vale answered Keru’s question with a simple, “I don’t know.”

  “Let me talk to her,” said Ra-Havreii softly.

  There was no time to argue with the engineer or to express their surprise at his stepping up in this way. Either Troi would come back from wherever it was she had gone inside and walk out of here, or she wouldn’t and Keru would carry her.

  The engineer bent close to Troi, cradling her in an oddly fatherly gesture, and began to speak into her ear so softly that Vale couldn’t make out any of what he said.

  She heard the words Rikerand aliveand she might have heard the phrase Rhea or Oberon, but she couldn’t be sure of either. Regardless, after a few seconds of listening, Troi’s posture relaxed into his arms, the life returned to her eyes, and she looked up at Vale.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said at last.

  The damage was worse than any of them had imagined. The bodies of Orishans, large and small, some with wings, some with sluglike protuberances instead of lower legs, lay crushed and broken all around them.

  As they made their way upward from the food storage bins, the extent of the destruction only widened. The few glimpses any of them had had of the subterranean civilization had shown it to be a masterwork of smooth honeycombed arches, massive open causeways spanning from one side of a great cavern to the other, lights and sounds and technologies both strange and intriguing even to their practiced eyes.

  Now all there was to see was death.

  There was smoke everywhere, belching up in huge exhalations through the cavernous cracks in the floors. Great shards of the blue crystals, some as large as the missing shuttle, had broken through the walls, in some places exposing new fissures that reached all the way up to the surface.

  “We’re almost half a kilometer down,” said Ra-Havreii, staring up into one of the enormous tunnels.

  “Look at the sky,” said Keru, though he needn’t have bothered.

  It wasn’t fire, but it did a damned good imitation. Gigantic undulating tongues of it crossed and crisscrossed the sky like some sort of enormous net. Bolts of something like lightning ripped down at the surface, their impacts unseen but their resulting destruction obvious to all.

  And behind it all the strange undulating orb of Erykon’s Eye showing soft and green through the intervening veil of fire.

  If this was the author of the cycle of destruction that had plagued Orisha, it was small wonder that their fear of its attention had driven them to such lengths. To have that hanging over you all the time? Believing it could see every thought, every action, and would punish any misstep with the fires of heaven?

  Vale couldn’t bring herself to hate the Orishans anymore or even muster anger. All she had left was a growing sympathy for an entire civilization that had been so abused, and not a little awe at the sight above her.

  “Is that what you and Jaza saw before?” Troi asked, breaking off to look at Ra-Havreii, at anything, really, other than that terrible beautiful sky.

  “Not exactly,” said Ra-Havreii, puzzlement seeming to win out over all his other concerns. “It seems the destructive field is between the planet and the Eye rather than being projected by it.”

  “We have to stop this,” said Vale quietly. “Whatever else we do, we have to shut this down.”

  It was slow going making their way back to the Spire’s control chamber, with the party having to shift the corpses of dead soldiers from their path or navigate around a sudden chasm that was filled with exposed cables writhing like serpents and spewing lethal energies in random directions. Vale’s memory of the trip down and the near uniformity of the details in the structure itself made for many wrong turns and dead ends.

  Finally they won through to find the place as empty of living Orishans as everywhere else but crowded nonetheless with their bodies.

  The chamber was more or less intact, perhaps having been built with the intention of surviving this sort of cataclysm, with all of its machinery humming and buzzing away.

  The visual displays showed the Spire’s counterparts, now clearly arranged all over the planet, if the multitude of dots blinking on the holographic map were any indication. Whatever this thing had been built to perform was still very much under way.

  Ra-Havreii wanted a close look at the console, finding much of the technology familiar somehow despite the alien pictograms dotting the instrument panels and flickering on and off on every screen.

  “Go ahead,” said Vale.

  As he approached the unattended control console, Ra-Havreii literally stumbled over the tricorders the soldiers had stripped from his hands, still working.

  As the others shifted the bodies and searched for signs of any survivors, Ra-Havreii scanned and examined the alien device.

  “You said they called this the Veil?” he asked at last.

  “Yes,” grunted Vale as she helped Keru move another body from where it had fallen. She, Troi, and Keru moved nearly all of the Orishans into several rows where they could at least rest in apparent repose rather than in the contorted positions in which they’d been found.

  Vale knew it was a useless gesture in some respects. Nothing they had seen had indicated the Orishans cared one way or another about the bodies of the dead.

   Burials are for the living, her mother would say. She understood it now in a way she hadn’t before. Her mother had been in her mind a lot lately, she realized. Now she wondered why.

  “You notice anything?” Keru asked as he hefted his side of the last dead Orishan. He kept his voice low so the others wouldn’t hear. “About the bodies, I mean.”

  “You mean that they haven’t been crushed or burned or whatever like the ones farther down?” said Vale. Keru nodded, dropping the arm he had been using to pull the last soldier into position. “Yes. I noticed.”

  “Suicide,” said Troi, coming up behind them. Keru actually blushed when he realized she’d heard their exchange. “Mass ritual suicide.”

  Vale understood. The Orishans had failed. They had failed to protect their people. They had failed to appease their god. Rather than face Erykon’s awful judgment, they had taken the verdict into their own talons. Was it some final act of defiance on their part or simply acquiescence to what they perceived to be their fate?

  In either case, as she had sat confined in her little cell, Troi had felt each and every death, felt the terror and bleak acceptance of their deity’s will. That more than anything had immobilized her mind. Fear was one thing after all-eventually it could be processed and put away-but the absence of hope? That was worse than dying.

  They stood there for a moment, taking in the sight of all the dead Orishans. There was rumbling in the distance that none of them mistook for thunder. Only Ra-Havreii, occupied as he was with the alien machinery, seemed unaffected by the atmosphere of mass death that still hung over the place.

  “Commander,” he said, looking up from his work. There was something in his eyes none of the others had seen in their time with him. It was a sort of sparkle, as if a giant fire was raging in his skull that could only be seen through the tiniest of keyholes. “I think I may know what-”

  Something large and dark and possessed of an extra set of arms dropped, chittering and screeching, from the darkness above them. It hit Ra-Havreii hard, knocking the wind out of him, its weight and momentum smashing him first into the control console and then to the floor.

  “You!” said A’yujae’Tak, turning on the others even as she lifted Ra-Havreii’s limp form in one massive talon. “You have brought this upon us! The Eye slept until you desecrated this creation!”

  Before the others could move or speak, she launched the engineer’s body at them like a missile. The Mater herself was close behind. Even as Ra-Havreii crashed into Troi and sent her flying, Keru had stepped in to grapple with the enraged alien.

  “We’re not responsible for this,” said Vale, scrambling to see if their phasers had also been left behind with the tricorders. “Your people took their own lives!”

  A’yujae’Tak screamed a clicking chattering response that the translator simply could not decode. Not that Vale needed the help. The Orishan leader’s actions told the story quite effectively.

  She was more massive than the biggest of her soldiers, standing a full meter over Keru, whose burly form seemed almost childlike before hers. Somehow, so far at least, it didn’t seem to matter. She flailed at him, attempting to claw him or tear at him with her talons or shred his flesh with the serrated ridges on the backs of her arms and legs. Nothing seemed to touch Keru, who danced under every swing, swerved away from every lethal blow as if he were playing mag ball with his friends.

  Of course he wasn’t playing mag ball, and he let her know it in short order.

  “Commander,” he said, narrowly avoiding decapitation as he ducked under and between two of A’yujae’Tak’s flailing arms and sweeping her legs with one of his. “I could do with a lot less talk here and a lot more shooting.”

  He managed to land several blows on the Mater’s abdomen as she fought to keep her balance, but because she was covered in a super-dense exoskeleton and he was just flesh and bone, the punches did him more damage than they did her. Keru’s knuckles were already a bloody mess.

  “You will die for what you have brought down on us!” said the enraged Mater, slashing at him, this time missing his throat by millimeters.

  He was good; those Ligonian battle forms he’d been practicing had worked wonders on his already formidable skill at hand-to-hand. Still, eventually he would slip or dodge a second too slowly and she would connect. It was only a matter of time before A’yujae’Tak landed a blow, and all of hers were killing strikes.

  As Vale cast around for something she could use to at least stun the hysterical alien, she caught sight of Troi helping Ra-Havreii back to his feet.

   Tougher than he looks, she thought, getting back to the weapon search and finally maybe spotting the grip of one of the phasers poking out from beneath a fallen bit of crystal.

  “Any time now, Commander,” said Keru, clearly beginning to struggle to keep the pace. A’yujae’Tak seemed under no such difficulty.

  Vale dived across the several dead Orishans that lay between her and the weapon. She landed near it, slid the rest of the way, palmed it, armed it, swung around, and fired just as A’yujae’Tak finally landed a bone-crunching blow to Keru’s chest.

  Keru groaned and fell away even as the phaser beam struck the Mater squarely in the face. A’yujae’Tak made another untranslatable chittering noise and staggered back a few paces, but she did not fall.

   Damn, thought Vale, getting to her feet and keeping A’yujae’Tak square in her sights. She adjusted the weapon to its highest setting and took careful aim.

  “Don’t make me kill you,” she said.

  “You have murdered my world!” bellowed the enraged insectoid, and lunged for Vale. “My entire world!”

  Vale fired again, again catching A’yujae’Tak square in the face with the phaser’s now-lethal beam. Only it wasn’t lethal. The beam’s impact hurt A’yujae’Tak, that was clear, but it didn’t put her down and certainly didn’t kill her.