Long Shot

by David Mack

  “I think we can.” He checked the settings of his console. “We’re still on battery power, but radio pulses don’t use that much energy. Plus I’m still tracking a few working satellites in high orbit that can relay our signal to the surface.”

  “Okay.” She ushered Beiana to Razka’s side. “Commander? Did Doctor Babitz show you how to format the recipients’ information before you wrote your messages to the card?”

  “She did. As long as the backup comm nets on the surface are still operational, you should have all the info you’d need to get these where they’re going.”

  Theriault took the card from Beiana. “Good.” She handed it to Razka. “Send these as soon as possible, Chief. And do whatever you can to confirm their receipt.”

  He nodded. “Understood, Commander.”

  She left Beiana with Razka and returned to the command chair. As she settled into it, Dastin approached her from the other side, his countenance glum. “They’re lucky.”

  Brow scrunched, she turned toward Dastin. “How do you figure?”

  “At least they have a chance to send messages home.” He nodded at the communications console. “We still don’t have enough power for a subspace signal, and launching the buoy’s probably a waste of time. It doesn’t have enough acceleration to escape the distortion field. Which means no matter what we put on it, it’ll either malfunction or get destroyed by a one-in-ten-quadrillion chance collision with a random chunk of rock.”

  It was hard not to share his sense of sadness and envy, but Theriault knew it would be unbecoming an officer—especially one in command—to admit it. She forced herself to preserve her mask of courage. “It’s just as well. We don’t have time to record messages, anyway.”

  “Depends on the message. I don’t need long to say ‘Good-bye, Mom, I love you.’ But then, I always did prefer to cut to the chase.” His point made, he returned to his post.

  Alone once more in the center seat, Theriault thought of the last letter she had sent home to her parents on Mars. She had signed it “Love, Vanessa,” but had she actually remembered to tell her parents that she loved them? When was the last time she had?

  The shallowest man I’ve ever met just made me feel like a bad daughter. A resentful glance at Dastin. Assuming we don’t all die in the next hour, I’ll make him pay for this.

  • • •

  Compared to the impulse core on Starfleet vessels, the fusion reactor inside the Austarans’ energy complex seemed primitive to Terrell. Its output still relied on heat exchange to a steam turbine linked to an electrical generator, rather than the more efficient direct-transfer plasma relay system employed on most Federation interstellar spacecraft. He also doubted its safety. Its shielding looked barely sufficient for minimal protection during routine operation. Would it be able to contain the perilous emissions that would result from pushing it into overload?

  Terrell finished removing the last of three wall panels, behind which stood a number of interfaces—some cross-shaped, others circular, and others that consisted of three parallel vertical slits arranged in a manner that described the vertices of an equilateral triangle. Ilucci stood next to him, studying the conglomeration of blinking panels between the clusters of connection nodes.

  Troubled by the engineer’s pained look of concentration, Terrell set aside the last wall panel and asked, “Every­thing okay, Master Chief?”

  “Hm? Yeah. It’s just . . .” He let that thought trail off unfinished. Then he threw a worried glance back at Terrell. “I’d feel a lot better about this plan if I knew this relay could handle it.”

  “If you don’t trust it, we still have time to abort.” He noted the sound of approaching voices and footsteps, and he dropped his voice to add, “Your call, Chief.”

  Before he could answer, Hesh, Taryl, and Doctor Ka­valas returned, each lugging a huge and burdensome coil of power cable. Ilucci stepped away from the open panels and met them a few meters inside the door. “All right, let’s see what we’ve got here.” He inspected the cables, which each sported a male connector at one end and a female connector at the other. “Lookin’ good. I see these all have cross-shaped connectors, Doctor. That’s the heavy-duty cabling, yes?”

  “As far as I know.” Kavalas nodded at the open interface panels. “The round ports and the three-pronged interfaces are for different kinds of data.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Ilucci said. “I’ll secure the connections up here. Taryl, I need you to run the relays down to the accelerator ring. Hesh, you handle hookups down below.” The scout and the science officer nodded in acknowledgment and hurried off through a small access door, down a steep staircase to the accelerator ring sublevel.

  Kavalas nodded for Terrell to step aside with him. As soon as they were far enough not to be easily overheard, the scientist shot a fearful look over Terrell’s shoulder at the work going on behind him. “Captain, I continue to have grave misgivings about your engineer’s plan. This entire scheme strikes me as reckless.”

  Reminded of his own concerns, Terrell asked, “Why didn’t you say so before, Doctor?”

  “Because I don’t have a more viable course of action.” He swiveled one eyestalk toward the interface panels, where Ilucci was plugging in the last of the three power cables. “That said, I fear your engineer’s plan might produce effects that are orders of magnitude worse than those we’re already suffering. His labors could make the distortion field seem minor by comparison.”

  It was a dire warning, one delivered with enough gravity to make Terrell second-guess his own decision to proceed. Still, a voice of reason compelled him to seek facts before rendering a judgment. “I understand your concerns, Doctor. What proof can you offer to persuade my team against trying to flood the siphon?”

  An abashed aversion of the eyestalks telegraphed ­Kavalas’s reticence. “None, as such.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t have any empirical proof that would counsel against your engineer’s plan, but neither can I devise any to support it. Lacking a solid rationale for adding fuel to this fire—”

  “Let me stop you right there,” Terrell said. “I know I can’t guarantee my team’s actions will yield success, but I can guarantee that doing nothing will lead to disaster. So unless you can show me solid evidence that we’re making a mistake, we need to do something, Doctor.”

  Kavalas seemed to pull himself inward. His arms were close to his body, his hands were folded one over the other and pressed to his chest, his chin was down, and even his eyestalks seemed to retract by half a centimeter. It was the most easily parsed stress reaction Terrell had seen in some time. Even the scientist’s voice took on a taut, strangled quality. “Are you sure, Captain? What if you’re wrong? The aliens who booby-trapped the master console could have seen this tactic coming as well. What if trying to overload the system causes something worse?”

  “Worse than a coronal mass ejection from your star cooking your planet in two hours?”

  That summation of their predicament gave Kavalas a brief pause. “Is it impossible for a planet to spontaneously explode? Or to be abruptly consumed by an instantaneous merging with its parallel-dimension antimatter-universe twin?”

  “If my years in Starfleet have taught me nothing else, Doctor, it’s that nothing is impossible. Wildly unlikely to a degree approaching infinity? Perhaps. But not impossible.”

  Emboldened, the scientist seized Terrell’s arms. “Then you agree! We need to stop this mad scheme before it pushes us over the brink into the jaws of destruction!”

  “Well, I didn’t say that.” Terrell nodded at the accelerator ring. “Your siphon needs to be shut down, on that we agree. But if you want me to halt the only seemingly viable plan I’ve heard for disrupting this chaos engine, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.”

  From across the room Terrell heard the double beep of Ilucci’s com
municator receiving an incoming signal. The chief flipped the device open. “Ilucci.”

  Hesh’s voice carried clearly, a testament to the design of the communicator’s speakers. “Master Chief, Taryl and I have hooked up the power cables on the accel­erator sublevel.”

  “Good. Both of you get back up here. I need you to help me finish the calculations for a controlled power surge, and we can’t risk anyone being near the connection points when we switch this bad boy on. I get the feeling it’s gonna be a hot time down there when we do.”

  “Copy that, Master Chief. On our way back up. Hesh out.”

  Ilucci closed his communicator and went back to work checking the settings on the console. Terrell faced Kavalas and backed the scientist into a corner. “I know you’re scared, Doctor. Frankly, I’d be worried if you weren’t. But before you try to pull the plug on me and my team, remember this: We’re down here with you, and my ship is currently stuck in orbit, in almost as much danger as we are. If this goes wrong, we’ll die with you. We have no reason to take unreasonable risks with your life or those of your people, because your fate is our fate.”

  Kavalas slowly inflated his vocal sac, then shrank it to push the air into his lungs. He closed his eyes for a moment. When they opened, he seemed the slightest degree more calm. “I understand, Captain. Forgive me if I overreacted. Please . . . do whatever you can.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” He turned back toward the interface panels as Taryl and Hesh returned from the stairwell. “Let’s get a move on, folks! We’ve got a planet to save.”

  • • •

  This is crazy! Petty Officer Karen Cahow darted from one panel to another on the engineering deck of the Sagittarius, racing to stay ahead of the ship’s cascade of system failures. They’d tried to power up the warp core and impulse drive using a risky protocol for main engine cold restarts they’d culled from the memory banks, only to unleash a torrent of misfires. I’ve never seen this many unforced malfunctions, not even on rigged training sims.

  “Tor! Choke the negative feed! We’ve got an imbalance in the mix!” She increased the flow of deuterium to the intermix chamber, hoping to prevent a breach in the ship’s warp core.

  Her crewmate Torvin, the ship’s only true enlisted man, hustled from the plasma relays to the panel opposite hers. She was on the main intermix control, and Tor manned the auxiliary panel. His fingers flew across the controls, but his panic outran his talented hands. “The mag valve’s locked open! I can’t shut it down!”

  Threx, the senior engineer’s mate and top dog on the top deck when the Master Chief wasn’t around, came running from the impulse control station. “Talk to me, K.”

  “Bad mix! Jammed neg valve!” The engineers had evolved a shorthand for emergencies. In basic training, jargon cost recruits points during sims. In action, it saved both time and lives.

  The huge, burly Denobulan engineer sprinted past his crewmates and climbed the warp mix assembly like a wild brachiating primate. He wrapped his tree-trunk thighs around the tubular structure, just above the blocky intermix chamber. His hands moved between his tool belt and the malfunctioning component as he attacked the problem with every trick in his arsenal.

  Cahow was torn between watching him—because the best way she had found to learn her craft was to observe her betters—and monitoring the ongoing mess on the intermix control panel. To her relief, the error signals from the valve controlling the flow of antideuterium ceased, and the reaction statistics inside the mix chamber normalized as the automated mix regulators automatically balanced the levels before closing. “That did it,” she shouted to Threx over the din of the engines. “We’re backing off the redline. Emergency shutdown engaged.”

  Threx mopped the sweat from his brow with a long drag of his jumpsuit’s sleeve. “Look on the bright side: At least we’re gettin’ our exercise, am I—” A deep ka-bang of impact from the hull overhead interrupted him. He looked around, eyes wide with alarm and brow furrowed in irritation. “Damn, this just never lets up, does it? How much can go wrong in one—”

  An ear-splitting boom, a roar of escaping air. Cahow’s ears popped from the violent loss of pressure, which left Torvin, with his super-sensitive Tiburonian ears, writhing on the deck. In the span of a few seconds extended by her adrenaline rush, she felt the return of air as the ship’s automated environmental controls fought to compensate for whatever had just happened.

  She looked up and saw Threx pinned to the overhead, even though the artificial gravity hadn’t been disrupted. Sound returned as the narrow, tunnel-like compartment pressurized. Another stab of pain pierced Cahow’s ears, and then she heard the telltale hiss of escaping air, and she realized that Threx was being held by the merciless pull of vacuum, trapped against a tiny breach in the ship’s hull. Then her nostrils caught the odor of scorched metal, and she saw a red-hot ingot of some unknown provenance wedged in the deck less than half a meter from her. One step at the wrong moment, and that thing would’ve killed me.

  Above her, Threx screamed in pain. There was no time to ask what was wrong, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she knew. Cahow was no doctor. Assessing his injuries wasn’t her job. She had to free her shipmate and close the gap in the hull, and fast.

  “Tor!” She opened an emergency equipment locker, grabbed a pressure mask, and lobbed it to Torvin. “Put it on! Now!” He did as told, and then she tossed him a second one. “Get that one on Threx! Hurry!” She opened an intraship channel. “Engineering to Bridge! Hull breach! We’re going for containment! Tell sickbay to stand by for wounded!”

  Theriault replied over the comm, “We read you, Cahow. Standing by.”

  Torvin climbed the warp core assembly to help Threx put on the full-head respiration mask. Cahow pulled on her own mask, then hit the emergency containment switch for the top deck’s center compartment. The ladderway hatch slammed down and locked, and then the bulkhead hatches that subdivided the narrow top deck of the Sagittarius slid closed. As soon as the compartment was sealed, she activated her mask’s comm circuit, which connected to all other nearby masks’ transceivers as well as the ship’s internal comm network.

  “Threx! Is your mask working?” She waited until she got a weak thumbs-up from the senior engineer’s mate, then she looked at Tor, who also raised a thumb. “I’m shutting off the internal gravity, then purging the atmosphere! Tor, stand by to patch the hull as soon as Threx is clear.” She pivoted toward the master control panel and keyed in the commands. “Here we go!”

  Gravity vanished at the touch of a button, and Cahow’s feet lifted off the deck. She found it easy to suppress her body’s natural reflex toward nausea in weightlessness, but over the comm circuit, she heard Torvin gag and choke back a surge of emesis. Then she vented the air from the compartment, undoing the hold of vacuum on Threx, who floated free above them.

  Cahow grabbed Threx’s hand and pulled him down toward her. Torvin launched himself with a gentle push off a console’s edge and floated straight toward the roughly four-centimeter hole in the hull. He examined it for a moment, then looked down at Cahow.

  “Toss me a quick-patch, will you?”

  She opened a tool drawer, retrieved a tube of the binary sealant compound that was fitted with an applicator nozzle, and sent it up to Torvin with a subtle push.

  He nabbed it on the fly, jammed the nozzle’s end into the gap in the hull, and filled the puncture in seconds. Then he flipped the tool around and used the ionizer on the other side to rapidly solidify the compound. He finished, turned off the device, and rapped his bare knuckle on the spot repair. “Okay, we’re solid. Let me scan for other damage.” He pushed off the overhead and floated down to his post, where he tapped some queries into the system. After a moment he looked over his shoulder at Cahow. “All green.”

  She restored the air pressure first, then pulled Threx to the deck before she reactivated the artificial gravity. She felt its reas
suring pull on her boots, pulled off her respirator mask, and thumbed open a channel. “Bridge, top deck secure. We need the doc up here, pronto!”

  Torvin stumbled past Cahow to the master console and opened the safety hatches in the bulkheads as well as the ladderway hatch. No sooner was the ladderway open than Doctor Babitz climbed through it, followed by Nurse Tan Bao. Each of them toted a medical satchel and a tricorder. Cahow waved them over and pointed them at Threx. “He’s hurt, don’t know how bad.”

  “It’s okay,” Babitz said, “we’ll take care of him.”

  The doctor and nurse crowded Cahow away from Threx. She was reluctant to look away until she knew he was all right, but she forced herself to accept there was nothing more she could do for him. Then she turned and found herself facing Lieutenant Commander Theriault. The first officer looked over Cahow’s shoulder at Threx. “How is he?”

  “No idea. But I’ve never seen anything put him down. Must be bad.”

  Theriault rested a hand on Cahow’s shoulder. “We don’t know that, Karen. Let’s hope for the best.” She paused until Cahow looked her in the eye, then she continued. “Right now, I need you and Torvin to get the ship back to full power, as soon as possible.”

  “Without Threx?”

  “If need be.” Theriault’s normal joviality was absent. “We’re running out of time, Karen. If we don’t get full power back before the coronal mass ejection, we’re all dead. Even impulse power could make the difference right now. But I need something, and I need it fast.”

  The challenge lingered in the air as Doctor Babitz and Nurse Tan Bao passed between them, carrying Threx on a portable antigrav stretcher toward the ladderway.

  Cahow felt stymied. “Sir, main power’s out of the question. We tried to cold-start the warp core and nearly blew up the ship. And the fusion core’s a hydrogen slushie right now. I can’t just wave a wand and fix it by saying ‘Abracadabra.’ So unless you’ve got a better idea—”

  “Karen, if I knew how to do it myself, I would. But I don’t. Fortunately, pulling miracles from hats is what Starfleet engineers do. And right now we’re in a zone of weirdness that makes two things likelier than not: miracles and disasters. Disasters we’ve got covered. So if you’ve been waiting for a chance to show me your chops as a miracle worker, now’s the time.”