“It is a threat,” Tuvok said firmly. “And beyond our means to combat at this juncture.”
“Sir,” said Dakal urgently, “the tanker… another one of the Null forms is closing on it!”
The Holiday lurched as the Vulcan pivoted the craft around and aimed it toward the fleeing Sentry transport. As the nose of the shuttle swung around, Pava immediately saw the ponderous shape of the scaffoldlike freighter. The ship was caught among a shoal of fragments from the collapsing refinery platform, making slow turns and wallowing as it tried to light for open space and the safety of a spatial-shear corridor.
One of the oblate chunks of Null matter looped close, knocking aside wreckage in flashes of energetic contact. A single beam cannon atop the tanker’s conning tower shot actinic rays toward it, but each shot was a glancing one that did nothing to slow the approach. Damage was visible along one of the cargo pods, a thin streamer of discharged gases tumbling away into ice crystals.
“Phasers,” ordered Tuvok, and Pava laid her hands flat on the fire controls, the warm-up sequence already started.
“The mass of that object is much higher than its dimensions would suggest,” reported Dakal. “It resembles a form of protomatter. I’m also picking up peculiar subspace effects around it. We may not be able to inflict any major damage.”
“I am aware of that, Ensign.” He didn’t look in Pava’s direction as he gave the next command. “Target the center of mass, and fire, sustained burst.”
“Firing,” said the Andorian.
Hot blue lances of phased energy reached out and hit home, dead on target. Pava rotated the firing arc as Tuvok pulled the Holiday past the Null mass in a sweeping dive. She saw a curling feeler of shimmering matter reaching for the tanker, and it quivered as the phaser bolts struck.
The reaction was immediate and deadly. The mass spun about, extruding more spindly tendrils to reach out after the Starfleet shuttle.
“Holiday to tanker.” She heard the Vulcan speak calmly into the communication grid. “Lieutenant McCreedy, can you clear the debris field?”
The engineer’s voice was tight with controlled horror. “Commander, that thing will eat you alive! Don’t engage it!”
“Your concern is appreciated but unnecessary. The deuterium is of primary concern. You are to exit this area at maximum velocity. Acknowledge.”
“But sir—”
“Acknowledge,” he repeated, flipping the Holiday into a diving turn.
“Orders acknowledged.” The reply was stiff. “Good luck. McCreedy out.”
“Tanker is ten seconds from the edge of the debris field,” Dakal reported. “Null mass is closing on us.”
“Stand by to fire.” Tuvok’s dark fingers moved so quickly across the controls they were almost a blur. “Lieutenant Sethe, bring the inertial dampeners to full power.”
The Cygnian leaped at the rear console and did as he was ordered. “Done!”
Tuvok gave Pava a sideways look. “Weapons free, Lieutenant.”
Before she could answer, the Vulcan did something to the shuttle’s spaceframe that made the hull moan disturbingly. With deft control on the Holiday’s attitude thrusters, Tuvok put the craft in a balletic spin that rolled and inverted it all at once, in a split second bringing the small ship around so that it was flying backward with no loss of forward momentum. The Null sphere abruptly filled the view beyond the canopy, and as Pava watched, the object thinned and opened into a ring-shaped torus, stretching to envelop the shuttle. It wants to crush us like a Zylo egg…
She hit the firing controls again, this time releasing a scattershot salvo of pulsed bursts instead of a continual beam. Pava found herself wishing for a photon-torpedo launcher, but the shuttle’s basic Type IV phasers were all she had to work with.
The impacts were good, and at such close range, she had the dubious pleasure of seeing the strike points blacken and char. Flecks of strange material that could have been organic, could have been metallic, gushed out into the blackness. Flares of exotic radiation coruscated around the mass, and it veered away. Tuvok was already putting power to the impulse grid, and the shuttle reversed direction, streaking down and to starboard in time to avoid the passing swing of a blunt-ended tendril.
“It’s still coming,” said Sethe. “I think we annoyed it.”
Pava’s azure face twisted in a grimace. “That much power, that close a range… any vessel should have been opened to vacuum.”
“What makes you think those things are ships?” said Sethe grimly.
“The analysis can be addressed at a later juncture,” Tuvok snapped. “Ensign, status of the tanker?”
The Cardassian glanced at his screen. “They’re out of the wreckage. I’m reading a shear effect…” He blew out a breath. “Tanker is away.”
From the corner of her eye, Pava saw the sunbow flash of the ship’s escape. “Our turn now?” she asked.
“Indeed,” Tuvok responded. “Divert power to engines and deflectors.”
“On it, sir,” called Sethe.
Dakal’s shout ran over the Cygnian’s words. “Proximity alert!”
The commander spun the Holiday into an evading move by reflex, but it wasn’t swift enough to avoid the sudden wall of strange matter that loomed large through the canopy, blocking out the stars. Pava couldn’t be certain if it was the same piece of the Null that had tried to swat the tanker or some other fragment; the shape of it had changed, becoming a writhing fan of spindly talons. It clawed toward the shuttle, leaving hazy trails of radiation in the darkness.
She felt the impact through the bones of her spine as the resonance echoed up through the Holiday’s deck plates and through her acceleration chair. Puffs of white smoke belched from the rear compartment, and every screen and panel in the cockpit flickered. Power dipped sharply, and she saw the energy levels of the deflector grid fall to almost nothing. Outside, the view of the debris-clogged orbital space spun around, the shuttle’s nose flashing past the smoldering wreck of the refinery, the white ocean of ice across the planet below, the distant suns, the sullen and watchful bronze moon.
Something familiar in design tumbled past the cockpit, trailing fumes. It was one of the Holiday’s nacelles. Dimly, she was aware of a thin shrieking from somewhere behind her.
“Hull breach!” shouted Sethe. “I’m reading critical failures in all subsystems!”
“It hit us,” Dakal said. “Swatted at us like we were a spine-hornet…”
Tuvok’s console went dark and vomited a shower of bright sparks. The Vulcan threw up his arms to shield his face, and the shuttle bucked again. Pava pushed off from her seat and realized that the internal gravity had failed. As she reached the commander’s side, the white landscape of the ice world rose once more to fill the forward screen—and this time, it began to inch closer.
The Vulcan waved her away. “Main power is off-line. Thrusters are inoperative. We are entering an uncontrolled descent.”
Sethe had already secured his helmet, and Dakal was in the process of doing the same. Pava coughed; the air was thinning, and what little was left was filling with the acrid smoke from burned electronics.
Tuvok pulled Pava’s helmet from the magnetomic adhesion pad on her belt and thrust it into her hands before gathering up his own headgear. “Quickly. It’s coming back.”
Pava locked the helmet tight to her environment suit’s neck ring. “We won’t survive another hit like that.”
“Agreed,” said Tuvok, moving to the rear compartment. “Follow me.”
Against the far bulkhead of the Holiday was a cramped alcove large enough to fit a single person, perhaps two if they didn’t have concerns about personal space. Pava watched the commander rip open the access panel to the one-man transporter with an effortless burst of innate Vulcan strength. He reached into the mass of isolinear chips and optic cables, which, thank fate, were still powered.
Sethe started forward in sudden panic. “What are you doing?”
“Please rema
in calm, Lieutenant,” replied Tuvok. “The activation-reset cycle on this model of transporter will take too long to beam us off the Holiday one by one. Therefore, I am overriding its control functions to take us all in a single sequence.”
Dakal threw a worried glance back toward the cockpit and the oncoming Null. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“In these circumstances, that is a question of degree,” said Tuvok. “Setting coordinates for the planetary surface.” He tapped in a string of commands and hit the activation key. “Energizing.”
Pava couldn’t help it. As the familiar tingling sensation enveloped her, she closed her eyes—
Caught in the ice world’s gravity well, the Shuttlecraft Holiday fell straight and steady, on an uncontrolled course toward the frozen surface that would have ended in a destructive impact and a crater a kilometer wide; but instead, the Null mass spun around its own axis and turned into something resembling the head of an arrow. The tip changed states from phased matter to something so dense it could only be tolerated by the physics of this dimension for fractions of a second. The Null tore through the canopy of the shuttle and ripped it open from bow to stern, tearing the Starfleet vessel into pieces with the force of its passage.
—and then the prickling of her skin faded away, and Pava felt the tug of gravity on her body. She released a breathy gasp that sounded like a gunshot concussion inside the suit helmet and staggered, falling to her knees. The impact was painful. Blinking, she opened her eyes to fogged vision. Fighting off the shaking in her hands, she took a moment to take stock. She’d been through rough transports before, and she knew the drill. It was something they taught you in security operations school: how to handle what the instructors had euphemistically called “a hard beam.”
Mentally, the Andorian checked herself over—no pain in the joints, no aches in the torso that could be the signs of an incorrect integration of body tissues or some other minor pattern mismatch. The soft tissues in her mouth and the skin of her face felt dry, a sure sign of electrolyte loss, but that was the worst of it.
Pava sank back into a crouch, blinking furiously until her vision started to clear. White blobs resolved into the shapes of humanoid figures in bulky Starfleet spacesuits. To her relief, there were three of them, and each one appeared to have the requisite number of arms and legs in the right places.
“Lieutenant sh’Aqabaa?” Tuvok’s voice sounded in her ear. “Are you injured?”
She glanced down at the biomonitor on her wrist guard before answering. “A little shook up, sir, but otherwise fine.” Pava straightened and saw Sethe bend over, his shoulders rising and falling as he hyperventilated.
“That…” said the Cygnian, “that was extremely unpleasant.”
“Better than being dead,” said Dakal. She immediately heard the pain in his voice.
“Ensign, what’s wrong?”
“This.” He held up his right hand, and something seemed off. Pava moved closer, and she noticed that the material of the suit’s glove was discolored, turned gray.
Then Pava realized that what she was actually looking at was part of Dakal’s fingers, merged into the matter of the glove. “A slight transporter error, it would appear.” He was trying to be stoic, but the young officer couldn’t quite pull it off.
Sethe pulled a tricorder from his belt and ran it over the Cardassian. “I’m not detecting any other mismatches. If we can get to another transporter soon, we could probably reverse the effect before any permanent damage is done, sir.” When Tuvok didn’t respond, Sethe turned toward him. “Commander?”
Pava turned as well, looking in the same direction as the Vulcan, and that was when it hit her. There was no ice around them, no fields of featureless hydrogen snow, only a steep-walled canyon the color of beaten copper and black carbon. She looked up into a sunless sky.
“Where the blades are we?”
The g-suit felt restrictive and uncomfortable around Melora’s body—more restrictive than normal, she noted—and it was almost as if she could feel her heart hammering through her chest, against the inside of the field-generating garment. In her hands, she gripped the padd containing the downloaded sensor data she had gleaned from the stellar cartography systems. The lieutenant could have contacted the bridge via the intercom, relayed what she had learned that way, but she felt an urge to be up there, to deliver this face-to-face. If she was right about what she was seeing…
The turbolift doors hissed open, and she dashed out onto the command deck—and halted. She had arrived at a moment of silence on the bridge, one of those odd lacunae when everyone speaking halted at the same time.
What she saw on the viewscreen told the story. Every set of eyes was on the same thing, the sight rising before the bow of the Titan.
The starship’s straight-line, fast-burn impulse run from the Demon planet out to the ice world had brought it in toward the day side, then up and over the terminator toward the location of the orbital refinery complex. With the weak sunlight of the binary stars at its back, the Titan’s crew was confronted by the sight of a freakish war zone.
Hanging in a wide, shaggy cloud of gas ice, fragments of metal, and other tumbling pieces of debris, an object roughly ovoid in shape turned and flexed like a massive ocean predator amid a shoal of drifting bait. Sentry ships were engaging it in fast, looping passes, antiproton bursts lashing out in green flares.
As they watched, a massive rope of matter issued from the surface of the mass and clipped one of the AI craft with a cursory flick. The vessel was ripped into pieces and came apart in a flash of detonation. The viewscreen began to flicker and break up, static hazing it as they drew closer.
“Clean that up,” she heard the captain demand.
“Trying, sir,” said Panyarachun. “There’s a huge amount of ionizing radiation on the area. It’s fogging the sensors.”
“Is that thing… ?” At the ops station, Sariel Rager could barely bring herself to ask the question. “Is it actually eating the wreckage?”
Through the corrupted, flickering images on the screen, it was hard to be certain, but the strange alien object seemed to be using tendrils to draw in the larger fragments of what had been the refinery. Melora couldn’t see anything like a maw, however, only more strands of glistening matter weaving together across the metal shards.
Melora moved to the science console, where Ensign Fell was looking pale and drawn. The Deltan threw her superior officer a wary look, and Melora nodded back at her. “Carry on,” she said quietly, and Fell returned the nod.
“Any sign of the Holiday?” Riker was asking.
“Negative,” said Vale. “Short-range communications are thick with distortion, and sensors are throwing up nothing but echoes and feedback.”
“It’s the radiation overspill,” began Melora, but another voice spoke over hers.
“We are entering a zone of multiple energetic discharges and radioactive bleed from subspace incursion aftereffects.” Titan’s holographic avatar stood to one side of the trio of command chairs. “I read ionic interference, high tetryon outputs, and incidences of theta flux.”
Melora glanced at the science console. The same data were there, appearing as the avatar announced them.
“These effects are typical of Null events.” Alone by the far turbolift, White-Blue’s droneframe stood unmoving. “I would advise you to maintain a safe distance.”
“I agree,” added the avatar.
Riker didn’t appear to be considering the advice either of the artificial intelligences was offering. He turned to the counselor, seated at his left. “Deanna, can you sense Tuvok and the others? Are they out there?”
The Betazoid frowned. “I… I don’t hear them. Not silence, just a wall of chaos.” She shook her head. “Like white noise.”
“It could be the Null,” Melora said quickly. “It’s putting out so much energy, it’s possible some could have psionic properties.”
“You have an idea what that thing is?” said Vale.
“You’re talking about protomatter.” Fell gasped. Everyone on the bridge knew the significance of the term; protomatter was a highly unstable and utterly lethal form of energy matrix prohibited by almost every starfaring culture in existence.
Melora nodded. “But more than that. The physiology of it, if you can call it that…” She trailed off for a brief moment, looking back at the thick, oblate mass before them. “It’s almost like a virus.”
Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Page 21