Ishtar Rising BOOK 2

by Michael A. Martin

“Barely. But that could change at any moment. The force-field data is changing faster than the team can cope with it.”

  “Even with three Bynars working the problem?” replied a chiming, static-distorted voice that Soloman recognized belatedly as belonging to P8 Blue.

  Soloman glanced over at 1110, who happened to be looking his way at that exact moment. The other Bynar made no attempt to hide his revulsion.

  “We work optimally in pairs rather than in odd-number groups,” Soloman said.

  “As our captain might say, ‘optimal, schmoptimal,’” Gomez said.

  “Excuse me?” Soloman said, trying to ignore the rhythmic throbbing in his temples.

  “I mean we’re going to have to wing it, Soloman.”

  “Wing it how, exactly, Commander Gomez? Has there been a change of plans?”

  “We need to find a way to deactivate the force fields—safely—if we’re going to have any chance of getting everyone off the surface. But first we have to lower the volume of atmosphere that hasn’t been pushed high enough yet to be blown off into space.”

  Ice slowly crept up the length of Soloman’s back. “I understand, Commander. But the force fields have distributed the atmosphere asymmetrically toward the sunlit side, and that makes running the process in reverse extremely complicated. We never ran any simulations of that procedure.”

  “I hope Dr. Saadya recalls that I suggested he do just that before this fiasco started.” This time the voice belonged to Lieutenant Commander Corsi, who sounded extremely unhappy. Soloman was content not to be the target of the security chief’s clearly audible anger.

  He noticed that the numbers had begun drifting again. His eyes felt as though they were about to launch from his head like a pair of photon torpedoes. “I’m not quite sure what I should be improvising, Commander Gomez.”

  “If we all knew the outcome in advance, Soloman,” Stevens cut in, “then it wouldn’t be improvising, now, would it?”

  Soloman knew that his people weren’t noted for their real-time improvisational skills. They were far more comfortable with laying out and following carefully planned, methodically executed lines of code.

  But he could also see that he was rapidly losing control of the numbers. He felt certain that even the basic mathematical shapes and outlines would soon elude him. At least two more critical force-field nodes were in imminent danger of becoming unstable, threatening a lethal chain reaction.

  “So much detail,” he said as the numbers took wing. It took a moment for him to realize that he had spoken aloud.

  “Don’t sweat the details, Soloman.”

  Soloman’s head throbbed painfully as the numbers on the screen continued dancing away, seeming almost to mock him. “This entire project is details, Fabian.”

  “No situation is completely about the details. There’s always a bigger picture, if you look carefully for it. Try to think outside the numbers.”

  Hadn’t Lense told him nearly the same thing? But hearing Stevens repeat the doctor’s words made them no more comprehensible. His head pounding, Soloman glanced once more at the paired Bynars, who were immersed in the dataflow that seemed about to wash them both away.

  He watched them from outside the digital stream, he realized, much as a human might.

  Waves of pain coursed through his skull, making him wonder if his efforts to keep up with his paired brethren were finally beginning to kill him, as Dr. Lense had warned, even without an actual three-way organic datalink.

  Ground Station Vesper shook and rumbled again, as incalculable pressures sought release from far beneath the Venusian crust.

  Pressure, Soloman thought, kneading his crumpled brow. Somehow, I must release the pressure.

  Seized by a sudden inspiration, Soloman released the specifics of the numbers from his attention, allowing them to sail away like ships passing over some abstract mathematical horizon. Think only of the bigger picture.

  Closing his eyes, he stood, leaning forward across his console to maintain his balance as the planet continued its intermittent lurching and bucking. Then he fixed his gaze upon 1011 and 1110, whose attention had been attracted by his sudden movement. The Bynars looked askance at him, their dark eyes hooded beneath their smooth, pale brows. Soloman noticed then that even Paulos and the trio of human technicians had paused briefly in their labors to look in his direction, their curiosity and hope as evident as their fear.

  “I believe I may have found a solution,” Soloman said, the pain in his skull still oscillating like a pulsar. It took all the effort he could muster to keep himself from resuming his fruitless chase of the force-field parameter figures.

  The Bynar pair appeared to be about to make a tart response when Paulos chimed in, stepping on their words. “We’re listening, Soloman. We don’t seem to have many good alternatives left. Or a lot of time either.”

  Soloman nodded, struggling to master his own rising fear. Tapping his combadge, he said, “Commander Gomez, I will require your assistance, as well as that of the da Vinci. But everything will have to be done quickly….”

  Chapter

  4

  “Two of the equatorial force-field nodes just failed,” Stevens reported. “The rest of the network seems to be trying to compensate, but there’s a time-lag while the Bynars reinterpret the atmospheric models and decide which of the remaining active nodes to reinforce, and by how much.”

  Great, thought Gomez, her knuckles white as she clung to the armrest of the seat directly behind the two pilot’s stations. The little shuttle lurched and bucked, and Gomez watched anxiously as Corsi piloted the Kwolek through swirls of dense, hot vapor while brief but intense cloudbursts of concentrated sulfuric acid sluiced the hull.

  On its way planetward once again—following the same parabola whose upward arc had just enabled the orbiting Ishtar Station to beam the rescued Aphrodite personnel to safety—the Kwolek dived swiftly through Venus’s upper atmosphere. Normally, the Venusian air at this altitude—around eighty kilometers above the surface—would be somewhat calm, a relatively thin haze of carbon dioxide gas and the occasional minuscule sulfurous particle. But with the upward push that Project Ishtar’s force fields were imparting to the lower atmospheric levels, the air at this height was far denser than usual, and had been whipped into a frenzy of chaotic motion. The effect was only intensifying the deeper the shuttle dived toward the upper edge of the planet-girdling force-field network.

  “Some stretch of weather we’re having, isn’t it?” Stevens said, glancing out through the forward viewport, whose transparent aluminum was already beginning to show signs of scoring from the increasingly caustic atmosphere. Stevens sat in the secondary cockpit chair, where he worked the console to Corsi’s immediate right.

  Corsi said, “Better keep your eyes on the road, Fabe, or you’re walking back to the da Vinci.”

  “I may have to let you handle the driving by yourself, Dom,” Stevens replied, not sounding chastened in the least. “Say the word once we reach optimal distance from the field’s equator.”

  “When we get there, you’ll be the second one to know,” Corsi said, apparently adjusting the sensors in an attempt to use the nearest free-floating atmospheric probes as navigational aids. “I just wonder why Soloman’s ‘optimal distance’ had to be the one place on this planet where winds are strongest.”

  “Chalk it up to Finagle’s Laws,” Gomez said.

  “We’re receiving more revised force-field specs from the Bynar,” Tev announced. His rotund body was wedged into one of the port-side chairs, his attention riveted to the console display before him. P8 Blue stood nearby, leaning forward to reach her own customized display. Gomez noticed that her tough, chitinous carapace was marred by sootlike streaks, apparently singed during the rescue of the Ground Station Aphrodite team. Fortunately, the Nasat seemed to be in no pain.

  “Good,” Gomez said, refocusing her own attention on the small science console beside her. A new stream of data was marching across the display, m
oving faster than she could read it, let alone interpret it.

  The little ship lurched again, even harder this time. The external noise baffling did little to mitigate the howling of the corrosive Venusian winds.

  “Full stop relative to the planet’s surface,” Corsi announced. “I’m keeping station nearly at the dead center of the superrotational layer, just like Soloman asked. I just hope he knows what he’s…what we’re doing.”

  An alarm on Gomez’s console suddenly revealed three more key node failures, even as Soloman’s force-field reconfiguration data continued to appear. Soon the node collapses would spread uncontrollably throughout the system, leading to an irreversible planetwide collapse. With the data changing this quickly, if Soloman doesn’t know what he’s doing, then nobody does.

  The whine of the shuttle’s overtaxed station-keeping thrusters soon drowned out the keening of the wind as the small vessel struggled to maintain its position. Normally, the winds at this altitude topped out at around three-hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, a respectable velocity. But thanks to Project Ishtar’s atmospheric “blowoff,” the air here was currently moving at perhaps four or five times that speed. As the shuttle jumped and bucked, Gomez began to wonder whether the engine nacelles would fall victim to shearing forces. If we still had the old shuttles, we wouldn’t have been able to pull this off, she thought grimly. The da Vinci’s previous shuttlecraft, the Franklin and the Archimedes, were lost at Galvan VI, and were replaced during the da Vinci’s recent overhaul with the Kwolek and the Shirley. Both were fresh out of the shipyards, with the most up-to-date shielding and toughest hull alloy Starfleet science had to offer—and, Gomez thought, much better able to withstand this mess.

  “A pity we couldn’t keep station in the clear-air zone around twenty kilometers closer to the surface,” said Pattie, her vaguely crystalline voice sounding like the peal of a bell. “The temperature and pressure are greater down there, but the wind problem would be negligible.”

  “Fantasizing about the impossible is no help,” Tev said, his porcine countenance sour. “If we were down that deep, we would be too far from the force-field network to do it any good.”

  “We’d also be on the wrong side of those fields,” Corsi said. “Not a very good place to be if the whole thing really does come crashing down.”

  The Kwolek rumbled, its various overtaxed systems shrieking in a chorus of technological agony. Gomez could only hope that the procedure they were about to undertake would be finished before even Starfleet science’s best gave in.

  A burst of static issued from the comm system, followed by the voice of Soloman, evidently still doing his best to help Team Ishtar keep everything together down at Ground Station Vesper.

  “Soloman to Kwolek. Have you received the new data?”

  “Yup,” Stevens said. “Along with the targeting coordinates. We’re ready to tie our deflectors into the equatorial nodes you specified. Assuming we can spare the power, anyhow.”

  Doing her own quick mental calculation, Gomez looked significantly at P8 Blue and Tev for their input.

  “It will be close,” Pattie said, looking up from her console. “But I believe we can spare the required shield power with enough of a safety margin to avoid destroying the shuttle. At least until the da Vinci arrives to take over for us.”

  It would have been nice to have the luxury of waiting until the da Vinci arrived before beginning the process of propping up the force-field network from the outside. But given the larger ship’s current position in its orbit, that simply wasn’t an option.

  “What’s the da Vinci’s ETA?” Gomez asked Stevens.

  “About one minute and thirty-eight seconds. With maximum output to the network and minimal shielding for us, our shield generators and thrusters ought to hold out for nearly twice that long.”

  Tev snorted. “Shuttlecraft shield generators were not designed to take this sort of punishment. I don’t like this one bit.”

  “Neither do I,” Corsi echoed, though she remained intent on her flying. “Any more than I like placing the da Vinci’s first and second officers both into harm’s way at the same time.”

  “Not your call to make, Domenica,” Gomez said gently. “Especially when so many other people are still in danger.” I just hope you learned the true meaning of stubbornness when you tried to make Tev and me stay behind.

  Soloman’s static-laden voice came over the comm channel once again. “There’s so much pressure. So much pressure. Kwolek, da Vinci, please help….” Soloman trailed off again into the ionized hash of subspace background noise.

  Gomez recognized the fear and desperation in the Bynar’s voice. And though she wasn’t happy about having had no opportunity to check his figures before acting on them, she knew she could afford to deliberate no longer.

  “Fabian,” she said, “hook our shield-generator output into the network grid, and give it every erg Soloman asked for.”

  There. I’ve rolled the dice. If chance smiled upon their efforts here, the prize would be the lives of the dozens of people still trapped on the planet’s broiling surface.

  If not…

  Gomez watched as Stevens nodded, deliberately entered a brief command sequence into his console, then tapped the EXECUTE button.

  Then the Kwolek lurched again, as though drop-kicked by a giant. Gomez heard the sickening sounds of rending metal competing against the noxious Venusian wind’s renewed fury.

  Chapter

  5

  “There’s so much pressure. So much pressure. Kwolek, da Vinci, please help….”

  “Hang in there, Soloman,” said Captain Gold, leaning forward in his command chair. I shouldn’t have let them replace the whole seat after Galvan VI. I only use the edge of the damn thing anyway.

  Gold watched the viewer like a raptor stalking its prey. The darkened limb of the planet gave way to the bright, crescent-shaped terminator. The ochre-and-black swirls of the uppermost cloudtops rose to greet the da Vinci’s prow. The ship shuddered as she entered a region of increasing atmospheric turbulence.

  Gold turned his chair toward the aft section of the bridge, where Lieutenant Anthony Shabalala busied himself at the tactical station. “What’s our ETA, Shabalala?”

  “We should be within visual range of the Kwolek any second.”

  “There!” Lieutenant Wong cried out. Gold spun his chair forward in time to see his conn officer pointing at the viewer. Near dead center, the acid-scoured hull of the shuttlecraft was now intermittently visible through the endless churn of the harsh Venusian clouds.

  “Her hull is buckling and they’re losing power,” Shabalala reported. “Their shield generator can no longer support the collapsing force-field nodes. But at least all the life signatures aboard the shuttle are holding strong.”

  “Good. Wong, bring us to within five klicks of the Kwolek and hold our position there.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Wong as he executed the order.

  “Shabalala, inform Gomez that the cavalry has arrived.”

  Shabalala scowled. “I’m having trouble raising them, Captain. Their comm system may have suffered some damage. Wait a minute, I’m getting something…. Dr. Saadya is hailing us from the orbital station.”

  “On screen.”

  The shuttlecraft’s intermittent image was abruptly replaced by the static-distorted visage of Pascal Saadya. The unsmiling planetologist seemed to have aged at least a decade during the past hour or so. Watching your life’s work circling the drain can do that to a man, Gold thought, feeling an intense surge of sympathy for his old friend.

  Saadya wasted no time on pleasantries. “David, the force-field network is fluctuating so severely now that we’re having trouble maintaining contact with the ground stations. And we can no longer raise your shuttlecraft.”

  Gold put on what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, Pas. Some of my best engineers are aboard the Kwolek, and I’m sure they’re still coordinating with Soloman and your groun
d teams to work the problem.”

  “Captain, I believe I can establish a transporter lock at this range,” Shabalala said. “I recommend we beam the Kwolek’s crew to safety now.”

  “No!” Saadya shouted, his voice nearly breaking. “Don’t you see? They’re working in real time with an extremely fluid and volatile data situation. You’ll drop the entire Venusian sky right on top of the ground stations if you interrupt what they’re doing!”

  But I can’t just let this planet eat my shuttle crew either, Gold thought, feeling miserable. He was grimly aware that neither Soloman nor anyone else on the surface could be beamed up unless and until the force-field network—along with the bulk of the atmosphere it had raised but not yet consigned to space—was brought down safely. As long as the force fields remained in a state of chaotic flux, they couldn’t maintain the directed-energy-permeable “holes” necessary for safe operation of the transporters.

  He also knew that he had been told precious little about the specifics of the ad hoc plan that Soloman and the shuttle crew were presently trying to carry out. There simply hadn’t been enough time to go over it in detail. All he really knew about the scheme was that it was heavily dependent upon calculations made on the fly by Soloman, who was working under what might charitably be called less than ideal circumstances.

  But Gold trusted his people and their talents implicitly. And he recognized that this was an occasion when it was best that he stay out of their way as much as possible—and to intervene only if circumstances made doing so absolutely necessary.

  “Sir?” Shabalala said, dragging Gold harshly back into the here and now. “The Kwolek’s hull—”

  Coming to a decision, Gold interrupted the tactical officer. “Steady. Extend our shields and structural integrity field to cover the Kwolek, and use our tractor beam to help them maintain their position relative to the shield nodes they’re feeding power into. And use the deflector dish to back the Kwolek up with as much power as they can safely take.”