by David Mack
Through his helmet’s wraparound visor he saw Dr. Lense talking at him, but he couldn’t hear what she said. Her features were cast in harsh, unnatural shadows from the violet chemical flares on the floor in front of the pressure suit. She was standing on an empty, small cargo case, and her face was practically pressed against the transparent aluminum of his visor. He keyed his suit’s exterior audio circuit and her voice crackled through in midsentence.
“—vitals appear steady, and your brainwave patterns are normal,” Lense said. Duffy nodded, and she continued. “Conlon tells me this thing will keep its integrity field at a bare minimum while you descend. You’re going to experience some serious pressure effects.”
“I figured as much,” Duffy said. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll be monitoring you from the bridge, just in case,” Lense said. “If you begin to experience aphasia, nausea, tremors, hallucinations, or euphoria, increase the power to the integrity field until your symptoms subside.”
“You got it,” Duffy said, though he had no intention of doing so. If he increased the suit’s integrity field above minimum before reaching the Wildfire device, the batteries likely wouldn’t have enough power left to give him time to complete the disarming protocol. “Anything else, Doc? Clock’s ticking.”
Lense shook her head once. “Good luck, Kieran.”
“Thanks, Doc.” Lense climbed down off the cargo case, clearing Duffy’s field of vision. He looked past Lense to see Gomez standing at the entrance to the auxiliary shuttle bay, arms folded in front of her as she eyed Duffy’s creation. Lense strode quickly past Gomez, leaving Duffy alone with her.
“Hey, Sonnie,” Duffy said, trying to sound casual.
“You call this a plan?” she said. Duffy noted the teasing lilt in her voice, the tilt of her head, her slightly crooked smile. He had always been smitten with her way of kidding him.
“It’s so crazy, it just might work,” he said. And I must be crazy to do it, he thought.
“The timing’s going to be tight,” she said, tugging on the connections that held the suit to the thruster chassis.
“I’ve got it all worked out,” he said with rehearsed confidence. He studied the small details of her face; the graceful slope of her nose; the full curve of her lower lip.
I’ll never get to kiss you again.
She brushed a long curl of sweat-drenched hair from her face.
I’ll never get to enjoy the scent of your hair after you’ve washed with your favorite herbal shampoo.
“You always have a plan,” she said. She stepped up onto the empty cargo case and grasped his thickly gloved right hand with both of hers to steady herself. He looked at her hands wrapped around his. He barely felt the pressure of her grasp.
I’ll never get to touch you again.
Never get to hold your hand again.
“Maybe when you get back, we can talk about your plans for us,” she said.
Duffy smiled, betraying nothing. “Count on it,” he said.
He looked into her dark brown eyes. The effort of hiding his thoughts left him with a grotesque churning in his stomach.
She reached up and touched his suit’s faceplate with her fingertips. “Good luck,” she said. “And hurry back—I’ll leave a light on for you.”
“I know you will,” he said softly. She let go of his hand and stepped down to the deck. She picked up the fading chemical flares from the deck and backed away from him, keeping him in her sight as she moved to the corridor exit.
As she passed over its threshold, the auxiliary shuttle bay was engulfed in darkness, and she was bathed in the pale violet glow of the flares in her hands. To Duffy she seemed to shine, like a lighthouse beacon.
I’m never going to see you again.
She pulled the manual door-close lever. As the door slid shut, Duffy activated his suit’s null-field generator. He felt the mechanical rumble of the space doors grinding open. He heard the high-pitched whine of the force field struggling to hold the churning tides of superheated metallic hydrogen at bay. With tremendous effort, he forced himself to turn the suit around to face the force field.
He was surprised to see nothing beyond the force field but darkness. For all the immense thermal and magnetic radiation that raged in the atmosphere of Galvan VI, there was virtually no photonic activity at this depth. This final mission, apparently, was to be dark, silent, hot, and crushing.
He adjusted the frequency of his suit’s null field to match the force field. Without daring to hesitate, he activated the guidance circuit, keyed the thruster, and passed effortlessly through the energy barrier to the lightless inferno beyond.
* * *
Gold stood between Abramowitz, who sat at the ops console, and Faulwell, who sat at conn. To his left, Dr. Lense occupied the science station Gomez had repaired. Lense monitored every minute fluctuation in Duffy’s bio readings, alert for any sign that the second officer might be in more trouble than he could handle.
A moot point now, Gold thought. He caught himself about to second-guess his decision to let Duffy go, then shook it off. No time now for regrets.
Gomez had drafted Ina and Wong—along with most of the rest of the crew who were able to walk—to assist in the salvage of the Orion’s warp core. Knowing that someone needed to remain at conn and ops on the bridge, Gomez had made a coldly logical assessment of which two crewmembers’ skills were least suited to the salvage and recovery mission.
Right now, Gomez’s logic is the only thing cold aboard this ship, Gold thought. He was unsure which was more suffocating—the heat, or the sharply rising CO>2 content in the ship’s few remaining habitable spaces. Faulwell, Abramowitz, and Lense all drooped languidly at their consoles, slowly losing their individual struggles against heat stroke and dehydration.
“Conn,” Gold said in a level tone of voice that projected perfect equanimity. “Time to Orion intercept.”
Faulwell checked his display. “Four minutes, sir.”
Gold nodded. “Abramowitz, how are we doing for power?”
Abramowitz worked at her console for a moment, then looked over her shoulder at Gold. “Backup phaser generators are starting to fail. Battery reserves are draining rapidly. The computer estimates ninety-one minutes to integrity field failure.”
“Time to Wildfire device detonation?”
“Fifty-eight minutes.”
“Steady as she goes,” Gold said and moved toward Dr. Lense. He attempted to palm the sweat off his face and neck, then gave up and surrendered to his own perspiration.
He watched the numbers parade across Lense’s screen.
“How’s he doing?” Gold asked. Lense shrugged and frowned.
“Too soon to tell,” she said. “He’s only four minutes out. It won’t start to get really bad for him for another three or four minutes.”
Gold swallowed the urge to tell her that for Duffy, it was already far worse than she could possibly know.
Gomez’s voice crackled over the stuttering comm. “Captain, we’re ready to deploy for salvage on your order.”
“Acknowledged. We’ll intercept the Orion in just under four minutes. Stand by.”
Gold returned to the narrow space between Abramowitz and Faulwell. The possibilities of the coming hour seemed to stretch out before him, like time extended on the event horizon of a black hole. Twenty-five minutes from now, the Orion’s warp core would be recovered and aboard the da Vinci, or it would be lost into the atmosphere. An hour from now, the Wildfire device would detonate, igniting Galvan VI into a small star and vaporizing the da Vinci, or it would be disarmed and left floating derelict and abandoned in a fiery liquid-metal sea…with Duffy by its side, sharing its fate.
The twisted shape of the Orion’s secondary hull remained concealed by the superdense metallic hydrogen in which it and the da Vinci were both immersed, but a computer-generated wireframe indicating its position relative to the slowly approaching da Vinci took shape on the main viewer. Gold felt the gentle tre
mor in the deck as the ship’s braking thrusters fired and guided the da Vinci in a slow, rolling maneuver beneath the wreckage of the Orion.
“Sir,” Faulwell said, “we’re in position.”
Gold keyed the switch for the comm. “Gold to Gomez. Deploy when ready.” And God help us all.
* * *
Duffy felt the pressure around him increasing steadily as the plasma thrusters hurtled him downward, toward the core of the gas giant. Minutes earlier, as he had exited the da Vinci, he had looked back and watched the ship’s dim outline quickly disappear into the darkness that now had swallowed him.
He faced forward now, the view beyond his face-plate featureless and black; all he had to look at was his own worried reflection, staring back at him with varying expressions of regret, terror, and growing disorientation.
The rising pressure inside the suit had caused his ears to pop within a minute of leaving the ship; now he could barely hear Lense’s voice trying to soothe him over the comm.
“Just relax, Kieran,” she said. “Your vitals are all still in the clear. How do you feel?”
He wanted to say, Like an ant being stepped on by an elephant, but he couldn’t draw enough breath to force the words from his mouth.
His legs cramped up and began to twitch. Damn, he thought. Only eight minutes out and already I’m losing it. And I’ve still got more than twenty minutes to go. He concentrated on suppressing the tremors in his legs, but the effort only made the spasms more frequent and severe. Great. Just great.
“Duffy, can you hear me?” Lense said. She sounded like she was speaking through a thick blanket. “I’m reading neurological anomalies in your motor cortex. Your central nervous system is beginning to react to the pressure. Are you all right?”
Duffy struggled to harness a single breath and force it outward. “Okay,” he said. It was more of a grunt than a statement.
“Try increasing the suit’s integrity field,” she said. “And be careful. Now that you’ve got the shakes, you need to be on the lookout for pressure psychosis. It might manifest as paranoia, hallucinations, or euphoria.”
Duffy’s ribs started to ache, and he was getting dizzy as his blood pressure climbed. He was sorely tempted to increase the suit’s integrity field strength, perhaps just for a few moments. Then he reminded himself the numbers didn’t allow it. There was barely enough power to get him to the Wildfire device and spare him five short minutes to disarm it. He glanced at the power-level gauges on his visor’s HUD—and was alarmed to realize he couldn’t focus his eyes to read them. Wonderful. Now I’m going blind, too.
He closed his eyes and let the high-pitched whine of the plasma thrusters lull him a step closer to relaxing and enjoying his headlong plunge into the abyss.
Look, Mom, he thought, fond memories of his youth springing to mind. I’m flying.
* * *
P8 Blue led the way into the Orion’s main engineering compartment, followed closely by Madeleine Robins from security. The room was completely flooded and pitch-dark. A fast scan from the built-in tricorder on P8’s suit confirmed that most of the surfaces inside the derelict ship had been scoured bare by the superheated metallic hydrogen.
Lucky for us, a warp core is made to contain matter/antimatter reactions, P8 mused. It has to be tough inside and out. Otherwise, there’d be nothing here to salvage except slag.
She scanned the core and was pleased to find it still intact. She keyed her suit’s comm. “We’re good to go,” P8 said. “Plant the charges in pattern alpha, just like we planned.”
P8 and Robins split up and moved toward different points around the upper and lower perimeters of the warp core. Each began planting specially shielded, shaped explosive charges that P8 had fashioned in a matter of minutes from old geological survey mines left over from one of the da Vinci’s past assignments. P8 had made her best educated guess about the optimal placement for the charges, based on the rapid rate of structural deformation the Orion was suffering.
“No extra points for neatness,” Gomez had told her before the salvage team left da Vinci. “Just bring me a warp core.”
P8 planted her first charge and primed the detonator.
One warp core coming up.
* * *
Stevens stared out the cockpit of Work Bug Two, straining to see anything other than an unbroken curtain of darkness.
The da Vinci was roughly eighty-one meters away from the Work Bug. Inside its main engineering compartment, Gomez and the rest of the salvage team were waiting for the away team to deliver the Orion’s warp core.
The Orion, meanwhile, was only a few meters away; the Work Bug was docked to its ventral emergency hatch, yet Stevens couldn’t see even a hint of it through the superdense murk surrounding it and the battered-but-sturdy utility craft.
A wireframe image and detailed sensor readings projected holographically onto the windshield gave him highly precise position and relative-motion data regarding the husk of the Orion’s engineering hull, but being unable to see the ship with his own eyes gave the entire salvage mission the feeling of a low-resolution holoprogram, like the piloting simulations used in Starfleet basic training.
Stevens was surprised to find he wasn’t alarmed by the absence of normal visual contact; if anything, the oddly virtual nature of the experience put him at ease. Just numbers and a few quick maneuvers I mastered fifteen years ago, he told himself. Nothing to it…. Justdon’t screw up, or else everyone dies.
“Salvage team to Work Bug Two,” P8 said over the comm.
Stevens snapped to full attention. “Work Bug here.”
“We’re set and coming out. Get ready for some fireworks”
“I love fireworks,” Stevens said, shocked at his own perverse level of cheerfulness as he fired up the engines.
* * *
Two minutes later, P8 and Robins scrambled aboard the Work Bug, squeezing into the narrow space behind Stevens, who was strapped securely into the pilot’s seat. P8 moved to the port side cargo-arm controls while Robins sealed the starboard hatch.
“We’re tight,” Robins said over her suit comm. “Punch it.”
Stevens disengaged the docking clamps and struggled to hold the Work Bug steady as it separated from the Orion. He knew from P8’s rushed pre-mission briefing that his next destination was the Orion’s severely damaged port side.
The shimmering green holographic wireframe image on his windshield rotated slowly as he reoriented the Work Bug and keyed the navigational thrusters. A second, bright-orange holographic diagram appeared, superimposed over the original wireframe. This diagram was P8’s best estimate of the escape trajectories for the various shattered pieces of the Orion’s hull that were about to be explosively separated.
“Watch out for that one on the left,” P8 said.
Stevens snorted in amusement. “No problem,” he said. “I’ve had enough collisions for one day.” He angled the nose of the Work Bug back toward the Orion as he cleared its port side ventral edge. “What’s minimum safe distance?” he said. P8 made a few quiet clicking noises, followed by a low whistle.
“Five-point-one-four kilometers,” she said. “No time. Hold on to something heavy.” Stevens didn’t like the sound of that.
“What do you mean hold—”
The shock waves from the quick succession of blasts made his teeth hurt. Each cacophonous explosion stabbed at his eardrums, and for the first time in his life he became aware of each of his internal organs as he felt them shuddering against one another inside his torso.
He jabbed a finger at the null-field generator control and tried to boost its power, only to discover it was already at maximum. The lights inside the Work Bug hiccuped as the hull was peppered from outside by myriad tiny collisions.
“Forward thrusters!” P8 said over her suit’s crackling comm circuit. “Get in there and match the warp core’s rotation so I can grab it.”
Stevens fired the main thruster and studied the wireframe of the warp core, which no
w floated ahead of him, tumbling loose in a cloud of twisted duranium wreckage.
When P8 had described this phase of the recovery mission to him, she had made it sound as if the core would be in a slow, regular spin. He had assumed retrieving it would be as simple as approaching its center point, matching the rotation, and adjusting his bearing to parallel the core’s long axis so P8 could snag the core in the Work Bug’s cargo claw.
Ahead of him, the warp core tumbled erratically.
Of course it’s not that easy, he thought sourly. It’s never that easy. The core was rotating on one axis, spinning on another, and generally wobbling to and fro as a result of random interactions with invisible but immensely powerful currents in the planet’s superdense atmosphere.
“Pattie,” he said, “this thing’s all over the place. I can’t line it up.”
P8 pushed forward to study the schematics and sensor data. “Well, you could always just give up, let it drift away in the atmosphere, and condemn our only hope of survival to a fiery doom,” she said. Stevens growled in frustration and accelerated.
“Stand by on the cargo claw,” he said, and pitched the Work Bug into a chaotic spinning tumble in an effort to match the unpredictable movements of the Orion’s orphaned warp core. “And hang on, this is gonna get messy.”
Stevens tried following the core’s tumbling motion, hoping to discern a pattern he could anticipate and intercept. But the core’s movements refused to be predicted. He tried to sneak under it, and it rose away; he tried to roll alongside it and ended up narrowly dodging a potentially disastrous collision. As he chased the core in circles, he became painfully aware of the precious minutes the rest of the team were losing while waiting for him. Every second I’m chasing this damn thing is one that Gomez isn’t hooking it up, he chastised himself.
He accelerated again and followed the core through another chaotic tumble-roll.
He waited until he saw its balance shift and was certain it would pitch upward to an intercept point.
He forced himself to steer in the opposite direction.
The motion of the wireframe on his windshield was a blur. A jolt shuddered through the craft as the sound of a metallic impact echoed inside the cabin. He was certain he’d rammed the core by accident until he heard a long string of satisfied-sounding warbling noises from P8.
