“Peak in five … four … three … two … one.”
“Launch drone,” O’Donnell said firmly.
As the drone was shot into space, Fife saw the resonance frequency diminish further and the instantaneous response of the dancing spheres. Their motion grew suddenly chaotic, lacking its previous fluid grace.
For a few seconds, the frequency dropped even lower than their simulations had foreseen. Fife waited breathlessly for O’Donnell to order Falto to initiate the slipstream drive.
When he could bear it no longer, Fife said tensely, “Captain?”
“Initiate slipstream corridor,” O’Donnell ordered.
The deck plates beneath Fife’s feet rumbled.
“Drive on line,” Falto reported. “Helm responding.”
For the first time in days, Demeter moved under the power of its engines rather than its captors. During those few glorious seconds, Fife could actually taste freedom.
An instant later, the ship lurched forward and was brutally pulled back. Fife was thrown to the deck as he heard the captain say softly, “No, don’t.”
Pulling himself upright on hands and knees, Fife watched on the viewscreen as a group of spheres detached from the formation, intercepted the drone speeding toward the planet, merged around it and blew it to pieces.
For the next several seconds, the ship shook and shuddered violently.
“Falto, report!” O’Donnell shouted.
“I’ve lost helm control,” Falto replied frantically.
“Field frequency is increasing,” came Url’s strained voice from behind Fife.
“Take the drive off line immediately,” O’Donnell ordered.
Fife watched in horror as several more spheres broke from their formation and headed straight for Demeter.
“O’Donnell to aeroponics one, three, five, and nine,” the captain called. “Reseed all available pods.”
The spheres continued their inexorable approach. Fife knew O’Donnell’s efforts would be too little too late.
“What is the status of the energy field, Url?” O’Donnell demanded.
“Intensity continues to increase.”
The approaching spheres moved beyond the range of the viewscreen as the rattling all around Fife reached its peak.
Fife held his breath, awaiting oblivion.
Then, as suddenly as the storm had begun, it ceased.
Through the disbelieving silence Url called out, “Field intensity has stabilized.”
Fife hoped against hope that was a good thing. Turning again to the viewscreen, the computer translated the frequency as the pale violet to which the commander had become accustomed over the last several days.
At last, O’Donnell turned to Fife. His utter disdain was palpable. “Congratulations, Commander. We’ve just blown our last, best hope of establishing some form of accord with these creatures.”
Without another word, O’Donnell rose from his seat and left the bridge.
For a moment, Fife was stung. Then he remembered that he didn’t care. As long as they were still alive, there was still a chance that they could escape this mess.
Every face on the bridge was turned toward his.
“Stations,” Fife ordered briskly.
Eyes were lowered all around as Fife slid into O’Donnell’s seat. Only once the danger was completely past did he begin to shake.
O’Donnell charged into his quarters, his anger and disappointment writhing within him.
“It would have worked!” he shouted to the emptiness around him.
His workspace was littered with the tools he had used to construct the hybrid capable of thriving on the fourth planet. With both hands he swept all of them from the table’s surface. The clattering of nutrient dishes, samples, and padds hitting the floor was momentarily satisfying, but his rage was hardly slaked.
Turning, he saw a slight Kressari male standing behind him.
“Minister, I am sorry to interrupt, but there is an urgent message for Lieutenant O’Donnell.”
“It can wait,” O’Donnell replied to one of his worst memories.
“I am assured it cannot,” the page replied.
With every bone in his body, O’Donnell wished he had ignored the page.
Of course, he hadn’t.
“This conversation is not over, Minister,” O’Donnell warned as he hurried toward the door.
Outside the quorum chamber, Alana stood patiently, dressed in a peat-colored tunic. The eyes that met his were a vibrant violet, but he didn’t need to understand the subtle shifts in iris patination characteristic of the Kressari to know she had good news. Absolute happiness lit her entire face.
“Liam,” she said, taking both his hands in hers and pulling him close.
“I’m trying to save two cities, Alana,” O’Donnell said petulantly.
“And I’m trying to save you,” she replied without giving an inch.
O’Donnell bit back further argument. Her implacable nature had been the first thing that had attracted him to her, and countless futile disagreements over the last three years had taught him that she was the only person in the universe more accustomed than he to getting her own way.
“It’s going to take more than you to do that,” he said, though the softness with which the words escaped his lips belied them.
“I don’t think so,” she replied with a knowing look. “I just came from Nurel’s office. We did it.”
Liam felt his heart begin to race in his chest as her hands tightened around his.
“Is he sure?”
Alana nodded, unable to repress her joy.
“It’s a girl.”
For the next few seconds, the residents of Neshan and Plaro were the furthest thing from Liam’s mind. He and Alana had been sealed before the High Anointed almost two years earlier, and over a dozen subsequent attempts to conceive had only solidified Nurel’s firm belief that human and Kressari DNA were genetically incompatible.
“Nurel owes me a drink.” Liam smiled.
“It was a bet he is only too happy to lose.”
“You have to get home and off your feet,” Liam chided her. There was nothing delicate about his wife, but for the next ten months she would pretend that there was. “I’ll be done here shortly and I’ll meet you—”
“You have to get to Nurel’s office now,” Alana corrected him. “He wants new samples, and if he can process them tonight he’ll be able to formulate my next series of injections for tomorrow.”
“Genov-see is stonewalling. He’d rather let his people starve than disappoint the ancestral elite that put him in office.”
“And given the amount of money they all spent to put him on the quorum, that’s not going to change this afternoon,” Alana replied knowingly.
“You want this as much as I do, Alana. The eradication of the famine cycles is within our grasp now. And I’ll be damned if politics is going to stand in our way.”
“Right now, I want to see the face of our daughter,” Alana said.
“I’ll get to Nurel’s office. I promise.”
“Don’t fail me, Liam.”
“Never, my love.”
The next fourteen weeks had been the happiest of Liam O’Donnell’s life. Regular hormonal injections had successfully prevented Alana’s body from rejecting the fetus. The baby was growing and developing perfectly. O’Donnell had even managed to convince Genov-see to reallocate hundreds of acres desperately needed to feed his people.
And then, one evening, Liam had returned home, flushed with excitement at the news that the yields he had promised the quorum would likely be double what they had anticipated, and found Alana standing in the doorway of their bedroom, her hands covered with blood.
Their daughter was dead, and three days later a combination of hemorrhaging and grief had taken Alana’s life as well.
Liam stood in the midst of his latest loss, overwhelmed by the speed with which rage could transform itself into mind-numbing emptiness.
&nb
sp; His dream—Alana’s dream—had been so simple. All they had wanted to do was to prove the gods wrong; to meddle where science told them they could, but some inexorable power of greater magnitude demanded they should not.
“I will prove you wrong one day,” Liam said aloud to the gloom.
He knelt on the floor and carelessly picked up a few shards of a shattered dish that hours earlier had held the beginnings of another life-form never meant to exist.
But his daughter had lived once. For fourteen brief weeks, she had lived inside Alana’s womb, where the gods had said nothing borne of human and Kressari cells should ever live.
Fourteen weeks.
As he chuckled at the absurd limits of his formidable abilities, a new thought flickered through his mind.
He caught it just before it disappeared, turned it over a few times, and a faint smile creased his lips.
It wouldn’t even have to survive that long.
“Why not?” he said.
Url couldn’t believe that he was still alive. The moment those spheres had broken formation and flown toward Demeter in fury, he knew for certain that they had finally pushed the Children of the Storm too far.
Why did they spare us?
The question didn’t intrigue him so much as plague him.
In his short life, Url had never wanted anything as much as the Children of the Storm appeared to want to witness the birth, life, and death of the simple life-forms housed aboard Demeter. Their focus on this process, the energy they expended aiding it along, had almost been enough for them to lose their hold on the ship. But the speed with which they had recovered their attention had brought all Url’s hopes to naught.
No.
The beings that composed the field surrounding Demeter had not recovered in time. They had required the assistance of several dozen more spheres to regain their hold.
Url quickly scanned the sector and counted the number of spheres in the immediate area.
Four hundred sixty-three.
That was more than enough to destroy Demeter several times over.
Or was it?
He estimated that a little over a hundred merged spheres composed the field around them. If, as O’Donnell had theorized, only some of the inhabitants of each sphere resonated at the proper frequency to hold or move or destroy a ship, then perhaps only a fraction of the number of life-forms contained in each sphere were capable of destroying anything. And if they wanted Demeter intact badly enough to sacrifice their own to reinforce the field strength, then perhaps …
“Commander Fife?” Url said.
“What is it, Lieutenant?”
“I have an idea.”
Fife turned an expectant face toward him.
“Let’s hear it,” Fife replied.
Chapter Twenty-one
STARDATE 58463.8
U.S.S. VOYAGER
“Boy, you never get the easy jobs, do you?” Harry asked Lieutenant Conlon once he had appeared on the transporter pad.
“I’m starting to think it should be part of the job description for Voyager’s chief engineer,” Conlon replied without looking up from the transporter controls.
Harry stepped off the pad and moved to Conlon’s side, saying, “Patel confirms they are ready for transport.”
Conlon took a moment to glance at Harry, but it was clear from her face that her mind was light-years away, aboard Quirinal on the planet below.
The previous afternoon, Eden had ordered Harry to oversee the transfer of the alien sphere from Quirinal’s cargo bay to one of Voyager’s. Whether or not they succeeded in locating the “mother,” they were going to attempt a rescue of Demeter, and for that Eden wanted the sphere on board.
Conlon’s people had been working to install a psionic force field shipwide. Harry had begun by asking Seven and Patel to find a way to transport the sphere. They had quickly informed him that it was impossible to get a transporter lock on the alien vessel’s energy shell, though they did believe they could get a lock on the individual life-forms within the sphere. Unfortunately, they would have to destroy the shell to do it, which created a bigger problem in that they could not precisely reproduce the atmosphere within the sphere.
Harry had left them to try and find a better solution, but it had been Nancy Conlon who had hit upon it, almost as soon as he asked.
“Why don’t we just transport the entire cargo bay?” had been her suggestion.
“I’m not kidding,” Harry had said, believing that she was joking.
“Neither am I,” Conlon had replied. “Come to think of it, we don’t need the whole room. We could build a containment box for the thing and just bring it up.”
“I don’t get how that helps,” Harry had said.
“The box gives the transporter a focal point beyond the sphere. Anything within the box will remain intact because it will be protected by the box, so even if the energy shell is disrupted by transport, it can be reestablished instantly once it rematerializes.”
If Harry hadn’t been so conscious of his attraction to Conlon, he would have hugged her right then out of sheer relief. As it was, he had settled for a congratulatory pat on the arm and his profuse thanks.
“Don’t thank me,” Conlon said. “Thank the Koas.”
“Who are they?”
A faint smile flashed across Conlon’s face. “Remind me to tell you the story one day. It’s a good one. They put their whole planet in a box.”
Now Harry was certain she was teasing, but he had been too pleased by the thought of her wanting to tell him a long story someday to care.
He watched her fingers slide gingerly over the transporter controls. Seconds later, a sigh of relief came from her lips.
“Done,” she said, nodding officiously.
“You made that look really easy,” Harry offered.
She started to shrug off the compliment, but Harry added, “You know, you’re doing a great job.”
“Thanks,” she replied, unconvinced. “Now I have to get down to the cargo bay and make sure we get that sphere unloaded so that Lasren can continue his work.”
“Hey,” Harry said, moving to prevent her from leaving the room. “You okay?”
“Sure.”
Now Harry was the one who needed convincing.
“Eight hours ago two of the smartest people on this ship told me what you just did couldn’t be done,” he said.
Conlon’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Who?”
“Seven and Patel.”
“That’s your problem. You needed an engineer, not a scientist or whatever the heck Seven’s designation is for this one.”
“I’ll keep that in mind in the future,” Harry said, nodding. “But you don’t seem … I don’t know … happy.”
Conlon paused to consider Harry’s words.
“It’s tough to be really happy right now,” she finally said. “Quirinal was a thing of utter beauty, and now she’s lying in pieces on that planet down there.” Raising a hand to forestall argument, she went on, “And we don’t even have the pieces of Planck. I just … I guess you never really get used to … I mean, this is the part of the job that’s tough.”
Harry sympathized. Actually, her feelings were so similar to his own, it was a little scary.
When he didn’t respond, she took a quick breath and tried to shake it off. “I’m sorry. I just remember when I joined Starfleet I had this crazy, stupid idea in my head that we were the good guys. We would go charging around space, saving the day wherever we were needed.”
“But some days we can’t,” Harry said.
“I hate those days,” Conlon admitted.
“I do too,” Harry agreed. “But this one isn’t over yet, and so far, we’ve done pretty good.”
“Yeah,” Conlon replied, and with a faint smile stepped around Harry and moved to the door.
“Nancy?” Harry called after her.
She stopped and turned back.
“You still owe me a workout on the holodeck.�
��
Her eyes widened a bit. “You’re not angry with me?”
“For what?”
“For setting you up with Cambridge last time.”
Harry shook his head. “Not at all.”
This time, Conlon’s smile was genuine.
“I’m glad. How about we set a time when all this is over?”
“Sounds good.”
As she left, Harry decided that this mission couldn’t possibly end soon enough.
Miral squirmed mercilessly on Tom’s lap while he tried to pull her small boots onto her wriggling feet.
“Come on, honey. Help your daddy out,” Tom pleaded.
B’Elanna emerged from the bedroom, a duffel bag draped over her shoulder.
“You all packed?” Tom asked as the second boot slid up to Miral’s heel and refused to budge another centimeter.
“Yep. Miral, you know how to put your shoes on,” she added as she crossed to the table and downed the last of her raktajino.
Miral threw a sneaky glance at her father and then threw her arms around his neck in apology before settling the wayward boot firmly in place.
Tom thought he loved Miral as much as a human could. He realized then that the feeling of his heart breaking that had become so common since Miral had once again become part of his daily life was actually his heart growing larger to accommodate all the love it held for her.
As Miral pulled away and rushed to join her mother at the table, clambering up on a chair to grab the last piece of toast from his plate, Tom tried to feel good about the fact that he was about to say good-bye to his family again, if only for a short while. He rose from the sofa, knowing he was about to be late for the start of his shift but unable to tear his eyes away from his wife and daughter.
Perhaps feeling the intensity of his gaze, B’Elanna turned and offered him a knowing smile. She crossed silently to him and took him in her arms.
“You take care of yourself,” she said firmly.
“You too” was all he could manage through his tightening throat.
A chime sounded at their door, and B’Elanna pulled away as she called out, “Come in.”
The door slid open and the Doctor stepped in. “Commanders,” he greeted Tom and B’Elanna with a barely repressed grin. Turning to Miral, he said, “Where is my new roommate?”
Star Trek: Voyager: Children of the Storm Page 26