“I mean . . . did I leave one . . . on the bulkhead?” Raden closed his eyes again.
I think he’ll be all right, Pike thought. “How long have you been awake?” he asked Nhan.
“Never passed out. Believe me, I wish I had.” She coughed.
“Oxygen, gravity, lights—they ought to be on battery.” Nothing seemed to be working. “Where the hell are we?”
“No idea. I stopped paying attention when I threw up the second time.” She shone the light off to the side. “Watch your step.”
It was starting to come back to him. “I remember the inertial dampers going out,” he said. “We got tossed like a salad.”
“I’m begging you, Captain. Don’t mention food.”
“Let’s get a head count.”
With a light source of his own, Pike found the rest of the bridge crew—Dietrich, Nicola, and Galadjian—slumped but rousing against the bulkheads at various points of the bridge’s circumference.
He checked on the older man. “You all right, Doctor?”
“Captain,” Galadjian said, rubbing his head, “I should like to retire.”
“I’m afraid the turbolifts are out.”
“I did not mean to my room.”
Pike shone his light above to what had once been the floor. Chairs descended like stalactites. “They stayed put. We didn’t.”
He decided to take advantage of his lighter weight. Reversing in his mind where things were located, he found his way to the environmental station. The light gripped in his teeth, he leapt for the top of the chair, hanging over his head. Grabbing it, he heaved himself up and reached for the station’s console. An awkward minute in the dark later, he was lying atop the undersides of the control panels, his head and shoulders dangling underneath as he tried to work their controls.
“Everything’s dead,” he said. “Environmental systems’ battery is offline at the source. Same for gravity.”
“More victims of the shield feedback,” Galadjian said.
Pike heard Amin speak. “How is that possible? Some of the battery systems aren’t connected to anything.”
“Yes,” Galadjian said, sounding tired, “but the entire ship was part of the circuit. Results would be unpredictable.”
Dietrich had crawled near the edge of the skylight. “Captain, I think we’re floating.”
“It doesn’t feel like it,” Amin said. “I mean it sort of does—like we’re in gelatin.”
“I said no food,” Nhan growled. “And I definitely feel it. We’re moving. Just barely.”
Nicola had been trying his communicator. “I’m not getting anyone on the rest of the ship.”
Down to just seven? Pike refused to accept the situation. He dropped to the deck—or, rather, to the overhead—as if he were hopping off his bed.
“Okay. One, we need to get life-support going again. Doctor, Dietrich, that’s you. Two, we need to find everyone else—and get medical help for Raden and whoever needs it. Nicola, you’re on it. Amin, let’s go have a look where we are.”
“What about me?” Nhan asked, no enthusiasm in her voice.
“Stay with Raden. And try not to move much.”
She fell to her knees. “You’re a saint, sir.”
* * *
“I think we’re going to be climbing a lot of ladders.”
“The wrong way,” Pike said as Amin ascended into the darkness ahead of him. At least the gravity made it a much easier ascent, though he could hardly feel a spring in his step given the circumstances.
He hoped that wherever she was, Una had survived. Better yet, that she was nearby, with a repaired stardrive section and ready to beam them all up. That seemed impossible, given the condition of the engineering hull and considering the masses of Rengru he’d seen assaulting it.
They passed another deck. “I keep having to think of everything in reverse,” Amin said.
“Just count levels,” Pike said. “It’s easier.”
Climbing ahead of them on the turbolift ladder, Galadjian and Dietrich disappeared into the primary hull circuit room, in normal circumstances the next-to-lowest deck of the section. Pike’s destination was an earlier stop: the viewing lounge whose ports were designed to look down and out.
This time, the viewports were skylights—and something was lightly pelting against them. Pike glanced at the navigator. “Sounds like rain.”
Amin handed Pike the tricorder she’d found. “It’s working,” she said. “You ought to at least be able to do spectral analysis through the viewport.”
“Right.” Pike dragged over a table and scaled it. He pressed his hands to the sloped port and stared out.
Oh, that’s not good. He activated the tricorder and pointed it outside. No, not good at all.
“What is it?” Amin asked.
“You remember at the Academy,” Pike said, “when they took you on that field trip to Saturn?”
“Yeah?”
“And the moon, Titan. Really cold, with the hydrocarbon oceans?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s nicer than this.” He handed the tricorder to her. “Look at our rain.”
Amin focused on the results—and did a double take. “It’s raining cyanide.”
“I think the ocean we’re on is methane or ethane. No land at all.” He climbed down—and sighed. “This doesn’t get any easier.”
Amin nodded. She looked again at the tricorder. “Hey, I’ve got a working chronometer on this.”
“That’s something. How long have we been here?”
Amin looked—and laughed.
“What gives?” Pike asked. “Nothing could be funny about this.”
“No, it’s just—while we were knocked out, our one-year mission ended.”
Pike shook his head. “Still not funny, Lieutenant.”
40
* * *
U.S.S. Enterprise
Stardrive Section
Little Hope Boundary Region
“Captain on the bridge!”
“Inaccurate on both counts,” Una said as she stepped gingerly into the crowded control room.
Ensign Yamata looked at her apologetically from one of the two stations. “I thought I had that right. I don’t really work the bridge. You are acting captain.”
From the other chair, Colt rolled her eyes. “She’s saying that Christopher Pike is still our captain, Sam. And that this isn’t much of a bridge.”
“I’m sorry.” Yamata stood and offered his seat to Una. “I’ll get back to work on the transporters, Commander.”
“Thank you, Sam.” Una sat—and tried to focus on breathing. It had been twenty-four hours since she last slept. That was just as well, considering there were many times more people on board than there were living quarters. She had spent most of that time trying to stabilize the warp drive.
Her efforts had succeeded—helped, ironically, by the saucer separation. Main engineering had been on battery power since the crisis began; halving the ship had allowed the team to allocate more power to the antimatter injectors. The reaction had stabilized.
As soon as propulsion had been partially restored, she had directed the stardrive section out of the rift and into a thick nebular cloud bank for safety. She hadn’t been able to learn what had happened to the saucer section; the last she had seen, a blast from one of the larger ships that had attacked the stardrive section had sent it tumbling. Attempts to hail Pike from within the cloud had been met with silence. Una suspected that he might be in hiding too.
Colt stared at a screen that showed little. “I wish we could see outside.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“You’re right. I didn’t care for the look of those things at all. The second bunch. What were they called?”
“Rengru.” Una had looked up the word in the primer from Courier 5. Once the Boundless’s shipboarding attempts had failed, the beings had lost interest in the stardrive section—and departed to chase their true enemies.
“
What a mess we’ve wandered into.” Colt shook her head. “I don’t know what’s going on here.”
Una had been working on it herself. “The Boundless attacked us. The Rengru attacked us—but they seemed to dislike the Boundless more.”
“The Hellmouth food chain in action,” Boyce said as he entered. Then he paused to gawk at the size of the command center. “Groucho Marx would ask room service to send up a larger room.”
“I don’t know who that is.” Una gazed back, drawing ever more on her reserves of patience.
“It’s all right. I’m working out of a sickbay that isn’t much more than a first-aid station.”
“You have a report, Doctor?”
Boyce consulted his manifest. “Seventeen injured, mostly in main engineering from the drop out of warp. A few knocked about in the attacks. All on rest and improving, except for a couple of burn patients, stable. I’m watching a couple of concussions.”
“You don’t have staff here, correct?”
“No, but I’ll make do. Some hands have pitched in. Here’s the roster.” He passed her the manifest.
Una took a look. “Seventy-four?”
“Yeah. And I need so many of the billets for patients that you’ll be stacking your off-duty people four deep.”
“There are cots in the shuttles. They’re not going anywhere.”
Boyce frowned. “Not repaired yet?”
“We’re working on the warp drive first—but either way, we don’t exactly have a place to go.”
The doctor grew animated. “We’re going after Chris, right? There’s a hundred people over there!”
“Ninety-nine,” Una corrected.
“And the last we saw, it was spinning out of control,” Colt said. “Right through where the Rengru and Boundless were fighting.” She bit her lip. “It didn’t look good.”
Una nodded. She’d barely had a second to think about next steps. “Doctor, our mission in the Pergamum is officially over today—”
“But you’re going to stay—to find the captain. We’ve got to!”
Having known Boyce of old, she tolerated the interruption. “I was going to say that we may not be able to go home—or anywhere—even if we’re at a hundred percent. The Rengru look like they had the upper hand out in the Hellmouth, as you call it. If the saucer section is in there, there’s not much we can do.”
“This part of the ship has weapons.”
“Which are best operated from a bridge we do not have.” She gestured around. “Starfleet’s shipwrights aren’t going to design a full ‘battle bridge’ unless they think we’d be likely to use it. Obviously, we haven’t had to try this maneuver often.”
Colt nodded. “Maybe they’ll change their thinking after this.”
“Or after the Klingon War,” Boyce said, calming down. “I wonder if that’s even still going on.”
“You know what communications are like around here.” Una pointed to her console. “That’s another reason I’m not going to try to hail the captain again. The odds are very high that we wouldn’t get through to anybody but the Rengru.”
“The what?”
“We’ve been making all kinds of new friends,” Colt said.
Boyce sighed. “Well, I guess that’s what Starfleet wants from us, after all.” He leaned against a support column, clearly spent.
Una smiled gently at him. “If Chris is here, Philip, we’ll find him. For now, please take care of your patients—and send back any ensign you can find that’s not on repair detail. We’re going to need help creating new rotations and tracking consumables—for however long this lasts.” She paused. “And get some rest, Doctor.”
He grinned weakly. “I may have to climb into a storage locker to find space.”
After he departed, Colt looked to Una. “I’m ship’s yeoman—I guess I should help with that too.”
“I need you with me. But you’ll want to study this,” Una said, passing her Boyce’s manifest.
Colt scanned the names. “I just noticed something. During the emergency it was all hands on deck—even the transporter crews came down to help. So we have every single engineer aboard.”
“No.” Una shook her head. “All but one.”
Colt studied the list again—and her eyes widened. “That means wherever the saucer section is, their only engineer is—”
“Yes,” Una said, a tired but patient smile on her face. “We don’t speak ill of other officers, Yeoman.”
“Of course, Commander.” Colt set down the manifest and returned to her duties. But Una caught her mouthing three words: Heaven help them.
41
* * *
U.S.S. Enterprise
Saucer Section
Little Hope
“Botany Bay?” Raden asked. “Sounds like it ought to be a storage unit off the terrarium.”
“I think he’s feeling better,” Pike said, grinning down at the Ktarian. “What’s the reference, Nurse?”
Surrounded by a dozen injured crewmembers spread out on mats on the ceiling-turned-floor of sickbay, a dark-haired woman looked up from the data slate she was holding. “Since our usual entertainments are nonfunctional, I’ve been reading to the patients,” Gabriella Carlotti said. “For some reason, we keep coming back to shipwreck stories.”
“I get it,” Pike said, surveying the portable lamps on the deck. “Sure feels like we’re camping.”
“We’re onto the Flying Dutchman,” she said. “I was mentioning that one of the early descriptions of it was in A Voyage to Botany Bay from 1795. It was a ghost ship.”
“Condemned to sail with its lost souls forever, never reaching port,” Pike said with a dramatic flourish. He gestured to her slate. “Let me know if you get to one about a ship on a flammable sea under a poison sky.”
Ten days after the forced landing, Raden seemed a little better, though his road back remained long. Among the many injuries sustained from the episode, his had been among the worst, and like others, he had not been able to draw upon the full medical resources of the starship. Galadjian had quickly gotten life-support working again, but not much else, meaning that much of the sickbay’s diagnostic and curative equipment had no power. Carlotti and Boyce’s other assistant, Yan, had been limited to handheld self-powered implements and hyposprays.
They had many of those, though the trick was reaching them, locked away in their cabinets, suspended above. With all the tremendous technology at their disposal, the most popular implement on every deck had been a stepladder. As easy as jumping was, Pike had found too strong a leap often resulted in a knock on the head.
The past week and a half had also been difficult for those in sickbay, forced to sit on the sidelines as Pike and the able-bodied fought to restore the basics. Raden appealed to Pike. “I never thought much about sea travel where I grew up, but these stories have me wanting to get back on the job. I’d love to pilot something on that ocean.”
“You’d be disappointed,” Pike said. “We’re barely moving. The wave action is measured in centimeters.”
“I never would have thought Enterprise could float,” Carlotti said.
“You’d be surprised. There are many places where she would. Here, it’s no problem—liquid methane is many times denser than water. But we’ll have to restore more power before we can even consider leaving.” Pike looked around at the other patients, listening intently. “So if you need something to do, think of ways of getting off this teardrop. It should be a fun little puzzle.”
“Aye, aye,” Raden said.
Pike rose and made his way past the patients into the hallway, pausing to step over the upper jamb of the propped-open doorway. Every automatic door aboard had needed to be pried and jammed open.
He saw Carlotti step out after him. “Thank you, Captain. You don’t need to come by every day—I know you’re busy, and it’s an effort to get anywhere.”
“Believe me, it’s something I’m happy to do.” You have no idea. “You don’t have to read to ever
yone either.”
“Well, the doctoring is done, and there’s not much for them to do. The working data slates are tied up with the repair crew.”
“Just tell me when you get to Swiss Family Robinson. I always liked that one.” He turned to go, but paused to take a last look back at sickbay. “Anything else I need to know about?”
“Not since my last report. One hundred people still functioning, at various levels.”
Pike stopped in his tracks. “You mean ninety-nine.”
“No, I mean a hundred. There’s the pregnancy.”
The what? He turned to face her. “Did I know about this?”
“It would have appeared in Doctor Boyce’s report to you at the appropriate time. Don’t you read them?”
Pike shook his head. “He normally just tells me what I need to know.”
“And brings the martinis. You know he wouldn’t talk outside the report. Patient privacy. Besides,” she said, brown eyes beaming, “I wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet.”
Pike did his second double take of the minute. “You? Wow. I had no—” He put up his hands and smiled. “I’ll stow the curiosity. Congratulations.”
“Appreciated.”
“When?”
“Five months from now.”
He took that in. “Okay.”
“Yan knows,” she said, referring to the other medical aide. “I’m fully checked out. No complications during the crash. But there could be other considerations.”
“I’ll say.” Pike looked back at the sickbay with trepidation. “We’re not exactly set up here for a baby, even under normal circumstances.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be here. The mission was supposed to end last week.” She crossed her arms. “If Starfleet had kept us around here longer I’d have asked for a shuttle home.”
He nodded. “We’d all like a shuttle home.” He took a breath. “What are the other considerations?”
“I currently weigh a seventh of what I do on Earth. That might feel delightful for me in a few months, but it won’t really be. I’ll be losing muscle mass when I need it most. It’s more complicated for the fetus. Our systems are evolved for Earth gravity. Here, there could be changes to circulatory, bone, and muscle-tissue development.”
The Enterprise War Page 20
