“Thank you, Alyssa.” Deanna gave her a nod, and the nurse moved off. On some innate level, she had known that her daughter was fine, despite her anguished cries when the holodeck went off-line just as they’d started their swim; but it helped to hear someone else say it.
Deanna pulled her robe tighter and used the big, baggy sleeves to cradle her daughter. She tried not to shiver; under the robe, she was wearing her still-wet bathing suit, and damp footprints across the sickbay deck attested to her full-tilt run from the holodeck to Titan’s medical center. Nearby, Doctors Ree and Onnta moved swiftly about the sickbay, checking for concussions or other less immediate injuries. Mercifully, nobody had been badly hurt, but that didn’t keep the crew’s anxiety level from peaking.
Deanna could feel the wave of tension rising and falling at the edges of her empathic senses. Titan’s crew were steadfast and well trained, but this sudden out-of-nowhere shock had shaken them all. She sighed and narrowed her focus to the small child in her arms, giving her a wan smile. Everything is fine, little one, she said inwardly, doing her best to project calm and warmth. It wasn’t yet clear how much of her mother’s gifts for empathy Natasha Troi had inherited, but Deanna did her best to soothe her. It seemed to work, as the baby’s fretful expression softened into something more relaxed.
I wonder if that will work on Will. Deanna saw her husband across the sickbay, behind the curve of clear glass that was the wall of Ree’s office. His expression was set hard, his eyes narrowed, as he spoke with Christine Vale. Like Troi, Will was still dressed for a vacation, but his posture was all command, stiff and severe. She walked over, catching the tail end of the executive officer’s report.
“—so whatever hit the wrecked ship is long gone,” Vale was saying. “All sensors are back up, and we’re reading nothing.”
“Could it be a cloaked vessel?” Will’s arms were folded across his chest.
“If there is a hidden ship out there, then it’s using better tech than we’ve ever seen.” Vale leaned forward to reach for something, and her hand seemed to disappear; then she drew it back with a padd in her grip, and Deanna realized why she wasn’t sensing any emotion from the other woman. Vale wasn’t actually in the office with her husband, more likely up in the captain’s ready room, using the shipwide holocomm system to deliver her report virtually. “Tuvok’s running every profile we have, including data from that Reman ghost ship the Enterprise-E encountered. So far, there’s just dead vacuum out there.” On the padd’s screen, Deanna saw a readout showing wreckage scattered ahead of Titan’s bow.
Will glanced at his wife and daughter, and for a moment his expression softened—but only for a moment. Deanna and Tasha were okay, but Will’s responsibilities also included more than three hundred other lives that made up Titan’s crew complement. “We’re certain that it was another ship that did this? It couldn’t have been an accident or natural phenomenon? Maybe the same thing that threw us out of warp?”
“They were shooting at something,” Vale noted. “And whatever it was, it didn’t like it. If not a vessel, then…” She trailed off, frowning.
Will glanced back at his wife. “Deanna, can you sense anything? Anyone… alive?”
She paused and closed her eyes, let her preternatural awareness briefly extend beyond the starship’s hull. She cast outward, seeking the telltale glimmers of thought color from an organic mind, and found nothing but a lifeless void. Deanna shook her head and shivered slightly. “I don’t feel anything.”
“But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone out there,” Vale noted. “Psionics isn’t an exact science.”
Deanna nodded. “She’s right. There could be survivors, beings with contraempathic brain structures.”
“I want to go out and take a look,” Vale added quickly. “Whatever happened here, whatever it was that kicked us out of warp, I think we’ll find the answers on that alien ship.”
“What ship?” Will replied, shooting a look at the padd. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s hardly enough of it left to deserve the name.”
“Ensign Dakal is tracking one of the largest hull fragments. It’s giving off intermittent energy pulses. If we take a shuttle, we can lock onto the hull and survey the wreck close-up. Maybe find a sensor log… maybe a survivor.”
Will’s lips thinned. “And that’s right in the middle of the densest part of the debris field. It’s going to be like steering through a cloud of knives.”
“A cloud of radioactive knives,” added Deanna, reading the padd.
Vale hesitated. “But you’re still going to give the order, aren’t you?”
Will nodded. “If there’s a chance someone might be alive out there? Of course I am. I just wanted to make sure we’re all clear on how horribly dangerous this could be.”
“Yeah,” said the exec. “I got that. Vale out.” She gave a nod and vanished in a swirl of holographic pixels.
Deanna’s husband blew out a breath, and leaned forward to stroke his child under the chin. Tasha chuckled, and her parents shared a smile. “Well,” he said, “at least there’s someone onboard who isn’t fazed by any of this.”
“She is her father’s daughter.”
Will’s smile lengthened. “Her mother’s, too.”
The Shuttlecraft Holiday exited the Titan’s aft landing bay and performed a half-loop, turning in an arc that passed over the starship’s upper sensor pod and primary hull, then out across the bow.
Ensign Olivia Bolaji fixed her complete attention on the morass of shifting fragments that spilled out in front of the shuttle, each spinning and turning on its own axis. The small craft’s navigational computer projected a holographic heads-up display, complete with predictive analysis of trajectories, impact loci, and areas of potential lethality. She chewed her lip as a piece of dark gray metal loomed, easily the size of a ground car.
Ranul Keru placed a hand on her shoulder. “Time to earn your pay, Liv.”
The shuttle banked evenly, smaller fines of wreckage sparkling across the bow where they bounced off the deflector shields. “I’m a leaf on the wind, sir,” she replied without looking away, her focus total and absolute.
Easing the thrusters up to one-quarter power, the Holiday entered the danger zone.
Ranul stepped back into the main compartment, where the rest of the boarding party was going through final safety checks. They all wore heavy Starfleet-issue environment suits and watched one another as they donned gloves and closed atmosphere seals. He threw a nod to Chief Dennisar, and the burly Orion returned it, stepping closer. “Boss,” he said in a low voice. “I took the liberty of bringing a compression rifle along, just in case.” Dennisar didn’t need to say more; until Ranul knew different, he was treating this away mission as a sortie into hostile territory. If the place looked like a war zone, that was probably because it was.
“Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it,” said the Trill.
“Aye, sir.”
Across the compartment, Commander Vale patted Ensign Fell on the back. “You’re good to go, Peya.”
The Deltan woman nodded and reached for her helmet. Zurin Dakal handed it to her, and she took it with a weak smile.
“Never really liked these suits,” said the Deltan. “The idea of this much material between you and deep space…” She held her thumb and forefinger very slightly apart. “It doesn’t really sit well with me.”
At Dakal’s side, the other member of the away team, a Benzite engineer named Meldok, shot her a look. “Suit failures are a statistically uncommon cause of death for a Starfleet officer,” he noted, his slightly nasal voice echoing inside his own helmet. “You’re much more likely to perish from any one of a number of other causes, such as—”
Ranul saw Fell’s face go pale and leaned in, clapping a hand rather harder than he needed to on the back of Meldok’s torso plate. “Less talk, more walk,” he snapped. “We’re on a tight timetable, people.” To underline his point, he snapped th
e seals shut on his own headgear and nodded to Vale, who did the same. Fell was the last to complete the process, and Ranul gave her a smile he hoped was reassuring.
Dennisar was at the airlock hatch, working the controls. “Ready.”
“Ready,” called Bolaji from the cockpit. A forcefield sprang up, sealing off the crew compartment as atmosphere bled swiftly away.
Ranul felt the suit stiffen slightly and heard the silence creep in as the air around them was drawn off. He looked down at his gloved hands, and for a moment, an old and hatefully familiar pain turned over inside him. He didn’t like wearing these things any more than Fell did.
The suit’s faint scent of tripolymer and life-support circuits reminded him of death. His lover Sean Hawk had been killed outside the Enterprise by the Borg, in a suit just like this one; he had died tasting the same artificial tang of recycled air. Ranul sighed and pushed the thought away.
“Do it, Chief,” Vale was saying, her voice issuing from the communicator near his ear. Ranul looked up as Dennisar opened the hatch in the Holiday’s roof.
Outside, weak starlight caught a slow blizzard of debris and, beyond, the distended shape of an ingot of hull metal.
Ranul pushed forward, returning to the moment and the job at hand. “I’ll go first,” he said.
Olivia had brought them as close as possible to the wreckage, reducing the distance they had to travel to less than five meters. Vale pushed out of the hatch and made a slow tuck-and-roll maneuver, turning herself so the alien wreck was below and the Holiday was above. Her gravity boots thudded dully and adhered to the hull. Fell came next, and Dennisar was last, the three of them joining Keru, Meldok, and Dakal where they crouched low on the curve of gray metal.
The Benzite was sweeping a tricorder back and forth. “Interesting construction,” he noted. “The fuselage is not a single form but actually a series of smaller, articulated frames, doubtless capable of multiple-geometry configurations.”
Vale looked across to the shuttle’s canopy, where Bolaji was visible. The pilot looked up and gave her a wave. “The exposure clock is running, Commander. I’ll give you the three-minute warning if you’re not already back by then.”
“Copy,” she replied. “We won’t stay out here a second longer than we have to.”
Dakal pointed toward a massive tear in the alien ship’s hull. “We should make our entry here, ma’am.” The gouge in the metal was like a ragged-edged wound, as if a huge talon had raked the craft in passing and opened it to the void.
“Lead on,” she ordered, and the Cardassian set off with Dennisar pacing him, the wary Orion holding the compact shape of a heavy phaser at his hip.
Vale went in after them, activating the suit’s built-in lamps to get some illumination. For a moment, she felt disoriented. Instead of something that could readily be defined as a “corridor,” the team found themselves drifting in an elongated internal space, choked with a snake’s nest of conduits and cabling that ranged forward and aft. There was nothing that seemed to be a floor or a ceiling and no regularity to it. Dead-eyed panels, perhaps systems consoles, poked from snarls of thick tubing like boles in tree trunks. In some places, the conduits had burst, spilling fluids that had flash-frozen into fat knots of chemical ice. Some of the cables were severed, the razor-sharp ends showing bright coppery cores.
“This could be a service conduit,” said Meldok, ducking low. All of them were hunched over in the tight space, with big Dennisar forced into a crouch.
“We’ll break up,” Vale decided. “Keru, Meldok, Dakal, you three proceed aft. Ensign Fell, you and Chief Dennisar will head toward the bow with me.”
Dakal pointed up the conduit. “Do we know which end of this ship is which?”
“I made an executive decision,” Vale replied dryly. “Move out, and watch your dosimeters. I don’t want anyone coming back to Titan cooked.”
Keru glanced back at her as he floated away. “We’ll keep a comm channel open.”
Zurin tried not to bump his helmet against the lumpy, uneven walls of the conduit. Without any visual cues to keep his sense of balance centered, it was hard for him to picture the cable-wreathed tunnel as a vertical plane; instead, his mind insisted on perceiving the distended tube as a well he was slowly falling into, extending away into the gloom. Hardly any ambient light came from the wreck, barring the insipid glow of an occasional illuminator panel here and there.
Meldok drifted past him, working his way by one hand along the far side, occasionally returning to the heavyduty sciences tricorder tethered to his belt. “Compensating for the radiation wash, I am detecting very few open internal spaces beyond the bulkheads. Certainly, nothing large enough for any one of us to navigate.”
“We’ll contact Titan and ask them to send someone smaller, then,” said Keru.
Zurin peered at Meldok’s scans. “I think even Doctor Huilan might find it a tight fit, sir,” he noted, referring to the ship’s diminutive S’ti’ach counselor. “This vessel does not resemble any conventional starship that I am aware of.”
Meldok’s bald blue pate bobbed behind his faceplate. “I have yet to detect even a trace of atmospheric gases anywhere. Also, while there is evidence of structural integrity-field generators, there appears to be no sign of any internal artificial-gravity matrix.”
“Perhaps whoever built this doesn’t have that technology,” said Keru.
“Or perhaps the crew don’t need it,” Zurin added, warming to the idea.
The Benzite continued. “The craft appears to be a mass of decentralized subsystems with multiple redundancies and a high degree of internal automation. From an engineering standpoint, the closest analogies I am aware of are the modularity of design in vessels of Suliban, Borg, or Breen origin.”
Zurin’s skin prickled reflexively, and he saw the Trill security chief stiffen. “This ship isn’t any of those,” said Keru, and he made the statement sound like an order.
The Cardassian swallowed hard, feeling uncomfortably chilled all of a sudden. “Whatever this craft is,” he found himself saying, “it wasn’t built for beings like us.”
Drifting downship, Zurin reached out to steady himself, and his fingers brushed one of the black, glassy panels. Moving as he did, the ensign missed the soft pulse of light that rose and fell across the screen in the wake of his passage.
“What do you think this is for?” said Dennisar, swinging his weapon right and left, letting the spot lamp mounted under the barrel cast a disc of cold white light across the walls.
“Storage chamber?” offered Fell.
Vale drifted in after them. The open space was the largest they had encountered so far, a spherical room where the maintenance conduit terminated. She could see other dark entryways around the radius of the chamber, doubtless connecting to more conduits leading deeper into the wreck. The room was no bigger than the Titan’s bridge, but the dark and the depth of it gave a false illusion of volume. In the zero gravity of the room, the three of them were forced to move slowly. The open space was filled with fragments of machinery and broken hardware, much of it stained carbon-black by some powerful but fleeting discharge of energy. The commander moved closer to one of the curved walls and saw small, peculiar cages lined around the equator, some open, some closed. In one of the sealed compartments was a device that resembled a flask made of turned metal, with a dull blue lens at one end. It had a machined, engineered look to it.
“Do you see these?” she asked.
Nearby, Fell reached out for something drifting in front of her, caught by her suit’s lamps. “There’s another one here—”
The device came alive in a flash of motion, and the Deltan barely had time to scream. Vale saw the eye lens blink on, and from the seamless flanks of the cylindrical construct emerged four angled pincer arms, wicked and curved like blades. It leaped forward on a puff of thrust and clamped itself over Fell’s helmet. The blade arms bit in and applied pressure, webbing the clear faceplate with cracks.
Fell tumbled backward, grabbing at the insectile device, trying to pull it free. Vale saw Dennisar spin and bring his weapon to bear, then curse in gutter Orion. He couldn’t chance taking the shot, not when the slightest error would strike the Deltan girl.
Vale braced her feet against the wall of the chamber and pushed off, launching herself like a missile at the panicked young science officer. Small bits of debris pelted her as she moved, but she ignored them, timing the motion perfectly. She collided with Fell and sent both of them into an awkward, tumbling embrace. Their helmets bounced off each other.
“Commander!” Fell cried, and very distinctly, Vale saw tears of fright on the other side of the Deltan’s faceplate, floating there like tiny diamonds.
The machine ignored her, all of its attention set on puncturing the transparent aluminum keeping Peya Fell from explosive decompression. Vale pulled at it without success, watching the cracks widen. If she didn’t deal with this in the next few seconds, the woman would be dead.
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 4