by Dayton Ward
Releasing her drill’s firing stud, J’lenn looked down at her tricorder, which she had left activated in order to keep track of their progress. “Everything looks stable. We’ve cleared about fifteen meters, and Mr. Kellerman has almost convinced me that he’s not deliberately holding back to avoid embarrassing me as he leaves me in his tracks.”
She didn’t really need to keep a close watch on the readings her tricorder was gathering as they worked. Back in the control center, al-Khaled and Scott were receiving all of the data the unit was collecting. With many of the outpost’s internal sensor systems off-line, the tricorder was providing the only truly reliable information about the area of tunnel they were working in and, as they drew closer to it, the reactor chamber itself.
In the environmental-control center, Scott saw that al-Khaled was engrossed in one of the monitors at his console.
“Mahmud?” he said, crossing the small room to join his companion. “What have ye got, lad?”
Not answering immediately, al-Khaled continued to study the display for several more seconds before he turned toward Celine. “Chief, are these the most detailed schematics for the outpost that we can get from these workstations?”
Rising from his own chair, the outpost operations chief shook his head. “We’ve got everything mapped. What do you want to see?”
“The conduit system for the reactor coolant,” al-Khaled replied. “Something’s not right here. There has to be a leak somewhere. Maybe we can find the breach and patch it. Then we could direct some more coolant to the reactor and maybe avoid having to dig through to the chamber after all.”
Celine leaned closer to the console and tapped a series of switches, calling up a more detailed schematic that showed the system of conduits directing the flow of coolant to and from the reactor. Areas of bright red highlighted several areas along the conduit lines, illustrating where the breaks were.
“We may have to rig a bypass for some of these damaged sections,” Scott said as he pointed to various areas on the screen. “It’ll take some time, though.” Shaking his head, he added, “More time than we might have. We dinna have any choice but to keep diggin’ for the reactor.”
An alarm suddenly sounded in the cramped confines of the control room. Scott’s head whipped toward the source and he saw that it was coming from the console he had been overseeing a few moments before.
It was the monitor that displayed the scan data from J’lenn’s tricorder.
“Stop the—!”
But then the control room rocked like a shuttlecraft struck by a photon torpedo.
The deck abruptly disappeared from beneath Scott’s feet. With no time to break his fall as he was dumped onto the grimy floor, the impact drove the air from his lungs and he felt a sharp pain in his back as he fell onto something hard and unyielding. In the corner of his eye he could see al-Khaled thrown from his chair to the deck and Celine barely able to hold on to the console. Dust shook from the walls and ceiling, creating a fine shroud that choked the very air from the room.
Still lying on the littered deck, Scott groped for his own communicator, which had been tossed to the floor by the explosion. It was still open and active.
“J’lenn! Come in, J’lenn! Kellerman? Is anyone there?” His shouting drowned out the plethora of buzzers and alarms now sounding in the control room. It did not, however, drown out the pounding sound of his heart.
“J’Lenn!”
They raced through the winding subterranean corridors of the outpost, their steps echoing off the walls of the passageways. Their headlong flight came to an abrupt end, though, before a small mountain of rocks, shattered thermoconcrete and twisted metal beams clogging the tunnel ahead of them.
Scott and Celine were forced to halt momentarily, hunching over to gasp for breath in the still-thin air, but al-Khaled continued to sprint ahead to the newly created barrier of wreckage. He began to dig furiously with his hands, whipping stones and dirt away in all directions, oblivious to the fact that he was flinging some of the rubble back toward his comrades.
Managing to sidestep most of the barrage, Scott approached the muttering and obviously enraged engineer. He could hear the words carried by al-Khaled’s panting breaths as he stepped closer.
“…son of a bitch…son of a bitch…”
He placed one hand on the frantic man’s shoulder, but al-Khaled spun away from the mound to face him, his eyes red with both anger and pain.
“Son of a bitch!”
Scott reeled back a step, as much from the volume of al-Khaled’s voice as from the rage in his eyes. “We do not lose people in the Corps! I have never lost anyone before, and I’m not starting here on this damn godforsaken rock!”
Having lost friends on hazardous missions before, Scott could understand the rampant emotions threatening to run unchecked through the lieutenant’s mind. This was no time, however, to lose all self-control, even in the face of tragedy. With that in mind, he tried to temper his voice from reflecting the emotion that he, too, felt burning in his blood.
“Mahmud, lad. There was no way to know this would happen. We all knew this was going to be a risky job. You canna blame yourself for this.”
“Unacceptable! It’s unacceptable!” Al-Khaled’s breathing had begun to deepen and slow, his voice still harsh but losing a bit of the anger that had consumed it only seconds before. Instead, he simply let his head hang in despair. “It’s…dammit, Scotty.”
The two men stood there, their panting and the gentle whine of Celine’s tricorder the only noise in the tunnel. When he heard the chief turn the unit off, he looked over to see the man standing silently a few paces away. Celine comprehended the questioning look in Scott’s eyes and nodded grimly in response.
After a few additional moments the chief finally said, “There’re no life readings. Even with the elemental interference, I’m sure we’d pick up something this close to where they were digging.” Looking to al-Khaled, his expression softened. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”
Al-Khaled nodded, and Celine informed Scott that he wanted to return to the control room and make sure that the outpost had not suffered any other damage.
The chief jogged back up the passageway toward the turbolift, leaving Scott to wait silently as al-Khaled stood before the mound of rubble blocking the passageway. Somewhere beyond the mass of rock and debris, Scott knew, the bodies of the two doomed engineers were buried. For the moment, retrieving them would be potentially hazardous. More air pockets almost certainly existed along the length of the collapsed tunnel, and any or all of them could be filled with leaked coolant, waiting for something to ignite them as J’lenn and Kellerman had unfortunately done.
“Engineers aren’t supposed to die like that,” al-Khaled said after several moments.
“No one is supposed to die like that, Mahmud,” Scott replied. “Engineers are supposed to make sure of it. But accidents happen, and sometimes even we are helpless to do anything about it.” He was only partially aware of how incongruous the words sounded, coming from him. They were words that should have come from the mouth of someone with more wisdom and life experience than he possessed at this point in his life. Had his relatively short career in Starfleet and the things he had encountered in that brief span of time aged him that quickly?
The words, however, seemed to be sinking in as al-Khaled narrowed his eyes at Scott. “This is too dangerous. We can’t keep boring along this passageway. We’ll just hit more coolant pockets, and there’s no way to detect them with all of these minerals fouling up our scans.”
“Aye, that’s likely.” But Scott was at a loss as to how else they might get to the reactor core. A curse of technology, Scott reminded himself, was that it furtively invited dependence, almost an addiction to its developers and users. When the forces of nature stripped away the ability to use such devices as a transporter or a warp drive or a phaser or a scanner, Scott knew, dependence became the enemy of imagination.
It was time for them to think, an
d think fast.
The chirping of his communicator interrupted his thoughts. Flipping open the unit’s antenna grid, he was greeted by the voice of the Lovell’s captain.
“Okagawa to landing party. Our sensor readings up here just showed a large power spike in that reactor of yours. What’s happening?”
Scott paused to look to al-Khaled, whose face showed some regret at what he would have to tell his captain. He offered the communicator to the younger man, who Scott knew was the appropriate bearer of their grim report.
“Captain, this is al-Khaled. We’ve had an explosion and tunnel collapse. Lieutenant J’lenn and Ensign Kellerman have been lost.” Pausing to swallow a large lump in his throat, he added, “They’re dead, sir.” He squeezed his eyes closed and pressed his lips tight as he delivered that last part, fighting to keep his emotions in check. Scott refused to rub his own eyes, allowing the sting to burn into them as they awaited a response from the Lovell.
Okagawa’s words were a few moments in coming. “I’m sorry, Mahmud. I’m sure there was nothing you could have done to prevent that.” After pausing for several seconds he said, “I hate to sound cold about this, but I think they’d understand that we have other concerns now. How quickly can you fix the reactor?”
“It will take me a minute to estimate that for you, Captain,” al-Khaled replied.
“More than two hours?”
“To reach it and repair it?” Al-Khaled looked to Scott as if to pose the question to him as well as to the captain. Scott shook his head no. If that was the team’s time frame, they might as well write off the outpost and its subspace communications relay. Their only hope would be that the Romulans were busy enough with other matters on their side of the Neutral Zone that they didn’t notice anything untoward until such time as the outpost could be repaired or replaced.
Nodding in silent agreement with Scott, al-Khaled raised the communicator to his mouth once more. “I’m sorry, sir, but we’ll need more time than that.”
“You haven’t got it,” Okagawa replied. There was no mistaking the quiet confidence in the captain’s voice. He had weighed the situation and made a command decision. “Let’s start evacuating the outpost. Pass my order to Chief Celine and the rest of the outpost crew. I’ll send more personnel to start salvaging key equipment and copying computer data. That’s the best we can do, son.”
Scott allowed himself a sigh. Sometimes, retreat was the only option left in battle, and they had waged war against the reactor, the outpost, and the asteroid itself long enough to know a losing fight when it confronted them. Though he refused to consider the deaths of J’lenn and Kellerman as losses in vain, he was certain he would carry the lessons of Outpost 5 for the rest of his Starfleet career.
“No, sir.”
The tone of voice startled Scott. It was still al-Khaled’s voice, but now it sounded older. No, not exactly older, but there was definitely an edge to the man’s voice that it had not possessed earlier.
“Give us one more shot at this, sir. I can’t leave this outpost and watch it destroy itself, not with so much at stake. The relay is too important, and we’ve already got blood on our hands.”
The two merely stared at one another, waiting through what seemed to Scott to be the longest, quietest moment of the entire mission. He was certain that any captain in his right mind would simply tell al-Khaled that while his intentions were well-placed and his passion was heartening, time was simply no longer on their side.
Daniel Okagawa, however, was either not in his right mind or else he was accustomed to engineers and the crazy plans they tended to hatch when under pressure to succeed in the face of overwhelming odds.
“All right, Lieutenant. What have you got in mind?”
Chapter
6
“I’m not sure if this qualifies under Occam’s razor, but it might just be our only chance.”
Scott said nothing as al-Khaled tapped a keypad next to the control center’s main viewscreen. In response to his command, the screen’s image shifted to show a computer-generated schematic of Outpost 5 and the asteroid playing host to it. The station’s damaged PXK fission reactor, buried in its own control room beneath tons of solid rock, was highlighted in bright red. A pair of parallel lines colored a brilliant green hue traced a straight path from the surface of the asteroid to the reactor’s location.
“Drill down through solid rock?” Scott asked. Contrary to al-Khaled’s comment, the idea itself did indeed seem to be as simple as it sounded. It was well in keeping with the centuries-old axiom the younger engineer had referenced, or at least the most common interpretation of the principle widely attributed to William of Occam, a human philosopher who had lived on fourteenth-century Earth: “The simplest solution is often the correct one.” Translations and contextual application of the notion had evolved almost continuously to the point that nearly every engineer who heard or invoked the age-old theory simply referred to it in the spirit of, “Keep it simple, stupid.”
Aye, a fine idea, Scott mused, but will it really work? Given the dire nature of their current situation, he still needed convincing.
At another workstation, Chief Celine tapped a series of switches on his console and the image changed again, this time zooming in on the drilling path al-Khaled had proposed. “The limited scans we’ve been able to perform show more coolant leaks in several of the tunnels leading from the upper levels down to the engineering spaces. There’s sure to be more that we can’t detect farther down. If you take this route, you can avoid that hazard altogether.”
When al-Khaled didn’t say anything after several seconds, Scott turned to look in his direction and saw by the expression on the younger engineer’s face that his mind was not entirely focused on the problem at hand. It was obvious that he was still haunted by the tragic deaths of J’lenn and Kellerman less than an hour before.
Scott felt the loss as well, even though he’d only first met J’lenn at the briefing on Starbase 10 and he hadn’t known Kellerman at all. The immediacy of their mission simply had not allowed him the luxury of getting to know too many of the Lovell’s crew.
In some ways that was fortunate, for it allowed him to push away the feelings of anger and despair over the engineers’ deaths, to isolate them to a certain extent. Still, two people had died, and they deserved to be mourned and remembered.
But not here, and not now. Now, there was a job to do.
Placing a comforting hand on al-Khaled’s shoulder, he said, “Easy lad. I know what you’re feelin’, believe me. But right now, the best thing we can do for them is see this mission through, otherwise their deaths’ll have no meanin’.”
On another of the control center’s viewscreens, Captain Okagawa watched the exchange via the communications channel linking the two engineers with the Lovell. “He’s right, Mahmud. There will be time for remembering later, but only if you give us that opportunity.”
Nodding at the comforting words provided by Scott and his captain, al-Khaled took a few deep breaths before returning his full attention to the task at hand. “The actual procedure shouldn’t be terribly complicated. We have heavy drilling equipment on the Lovell that will make fairly short work of it. Once we get down there, if we can’t shut the reactor down or repair the cooling system, then we’ll have to remove it outright. The drilling rig has its own tractor beam, so we can pull or push the reactor right back up the tunnel, at least far enough for the Lovell to latch on with its own and pull it the rest of the way.”
“That’s a mighty bold plan, lad,” Scott said, with no small amount of admiration for the tenacity al-Khaled was displaying. The plan was indeed audacious, but the younger engineer had proposed it with an almost matter-of-fact demeanor, as if the risk and the potential consequences were simply factors to be considered in the equation and nothing more. “We’ll have our work cut out for us, that’s for sure.”
Celine said, “Even with the risk, though, this is the fastest way given the time constraints you’l
l be working under.” Captain Okagawa had ordered the evacuation of the station’s personnel to the Lovell, but only thirty-two of the outpost’s fifty crewmembers had been able to get out. Most of the others, including the outpost’s commander, were still trapped in the facility’s lower levels beyond the range of the ship’s transporter, given the interference from the asteroid’s mineral composition. Of those, three had been assigned to the reactor area and had not been heard from since the storm had first hit the outpost, and the worst had already been assumed.
As for the remaining fifteen people, no one involved in the current operation had to say aloud what was already known. If the reactor could not be repaired or removed, those people would die.
“We can transport anything you need to you in ten minutes,” Okagawa offered over the comm link. “And I can put a crew to work getting the heavier equipment down to you as soon as you give the word.”
Al-Khaled studied the series of calculations he had requested from the station’s computer. “According to this, it will take us nearly two hours to drill down through the rock to the reactor chamber. We won’t be able to scan the room or the reactor itself until we’re within a few hundred meters of it. It’s very possible the room will be flooded with coolant.”
Shrugging, Scott countered. “If we do nothing, we’ll lose the reactor and most of this asteroid. Seems to me we dinna have much choice, lad.”
Och, how I hate wearin’ these blasted contraptions.
Scott tried to ignore the sound of his own breathing, echoed as it was within the confines of the environmental suit he wore. Instead, he concentrated on keeping himself safely behind one of the protective shields protruding from each side of “the Mole,” as the aptly nicknamed drilling vehicle chewed its way through the dense rock of the asteroid.
A squat, bulky piece of machinery, the Mole’s most prominent feature was the large, intimidating phased-energy drilling array mounted on the rig’s forward section. In addition to the pair of multiterrain treads that helped propel the Mole over ground, the vehicle also had a series of maneuvering thrusters and magnetic plates that would allow it to work in low-gravity environments or even totally exposed in space. Scott had encountered such a rig before, early in his career when his ship had ferried a group of dilithium miners to the newly established colony on Rigel XII. He had taken advantage of the long voyage to acquaint himself with the mechanics who saw to the mining vehicles’ maintenance. With an unmatched construction and operational record, drilling rigs like the Mole were a preferred favorite, used at mining establishments throughout the Federation. Upon first seeing this particular unit, however, Scott had not been able to suppress a chuckle when he saw a yawning mouth complete with large, irregularly sharpened teeth painted on its frame just behind the drilling array.
