Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (40 page)

Kamemor had thought of that herself. If there was a war coming, the Empire would face it with confidence, but she had no desire to start it. “Issue instructions to the fleet. Find the
Challenger
and establish her role in this. Then take any action deemed appropriate.”

Aboard
Tomalak’s Fist,
Saldis was doing his best to help out with the scan of the Alpha Six-Four system, when he noticed an interesting subspace reading. It was a sort of granulation that he had seen mentioned in intercepted Starfleet signals. “Commander,” he called, “look at this. I think it’s a wake, of sorts, left by a drive signature.”

“Challenger?
A new drive?”

“Perhaps. All I do know is that ships encountering this effect have been reported damaged.”

“Then I must set my engineers to study it, and strengthen ourselves against it. Then, perhaps, we can follow
Challenger
wherever she has taken our people.”

On the command deck of his ship, Varaan sat back in his large command chair, digesting his orders. Avenge the half-blood. Not Kamemor’s words, but his interpretation. An interesting concept, to avenge someone who was not truly Romulan. When Sela was alive she was respected as an officer, and more recently as chairman of the Tal Shiar, because she did her duty and had connections. But she was not truly trusted or liked. Not by Varaan. There was too much human in her.

“Something troubles you, Subcommander?” Varaan’s first officer, Tornan, scowled when he saw the orders. For a long moment, Tornan remained silent, but his lips thinned. “There are no secrets between us, Tornan,” Varaan reminded him softly. “Speak your mind. You don’t much like our new assignment, do you?”

“My likes and dislikes don’t matter, Commander. I’ll do whatever it takes to ensure the mission is a success.”

“I know. That’s why I don’t mind if you speak freely. I like to know your opinion, whether or not it offers me any insights. I know it will not affect the performance of your
duties. So, speak up. That’s an order, if it makes you feel easier about being critical of the praetor.”

“The purpose of the assignment . . . Does it sit easy with you?”

“To risk trouble with the Federation? No.” Varaan laughed. “We’ve been at odds, on and off, for two centuries. Why should—”

“I don’t mean that side of it.”

“Ah.” Now Varaan understood. “The half-blood.” He would never dare say the words aloud when the chairman of the Tal Shiar was alive. She had ears everywhere.

“Yes . . . If the Federation had killed you, or Tomalak, or any of a horde of others, that would be one thing, but to avenge the half-blood . . .”

“You don’t think the chairman of the Tal Shiar should be avenged?”

“And the
Stormcrow
’s crew, yes. But she was not Romulan, was she?”

“Her father was Romulan.” Varaan nodded to himself. “I understand where you’re coming from, Tornan. So much of her mother in her. The hair color. The stubbornness. But so much of her father too. Her loyalty, her service . . .”

“I just wonder if it’s enough to make her worth the effort.”

“I thought about that myself, when our orders came in. Don’t think I didn’t have a few doubts.”

“What did you think?”

“At first I thought as you did. She was a half-blood, she didn’t count. Then again, she did her duty, and died for the Empire. That makes her death worth something.”

“Worth honoring.”

“Yes. It certainly makes her Romulan enough for her death to be worth avenging.”

“When you put it like that, Commander, yes, it does make sense to me.”

“If you hear anyone in the crew express dissatisfaction with our assignment, pass that interpretation on to them. It may make them feel a little easier about risking their lives.”

“As you say.”

F
our and a half million metric tons of metal, plastics and ceramics floated alone in a blackness deeper than she had ever traversed before. No light shone from
Challenger
. Her Bussard collectors and warp core were dark and cooling, and there wasn’t so much as a gleam from a single window.

Guinan awoke in darkness so complete that, for a moment, she thought she hadn’t actually opened her eyes. She blinked a couple of times, focusing on the slightly sticky feeling of her eyelids parting. Then at least she knew that they were open.

The darkness around her was utter and total, and so, she realized after a moment, was the silence. Nothing she could hear was mechanical in nature. None of the sounds were of the ship. She could hear breathing and voices, the rustle of clothing, the scrape and thud of limbs moving against the floor or walls, or even the ceiling.

People were being sick, unaccustomed to the sudden lack of gravity. The fluids in the inner ear behaved very differently in zero-
g,
ruining people’s sense of balance, and making them feel as if they had permanent vertigo. It was
dizzying and nauseating for a lot of people who weren’t used to it.

Guinan didn’t mind it so much, but the smell of vomit was another matter. Globules of it touching her skin made her retch, and her recently healed ribs burned with a fire she had never expected. Maybe they seemed worse because of the lack of sensory stimuli to distract from the agony.

“Is anybody hurt?” she called out. “Sound off!”

That was when people began to scream.

La Forge woke up in a totally dead bridge, lit only by a couple of hand-held beacons. Luckily, his cybernetic eyes didn’t need the light. He could see warm figures trying to keep themselves stable in a green fog generated by his eyes. “What happened?”

“Something hit us . . . ?” Carolan’s voice, La Forge thought, steady but dizzy.

“The Romulans . . .” Qat’qa spat. “They must have done something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know . . . sabotage. They must have done something to the inertial dampeners.”

Geordi tried flexing his muscles. It was agonizing, but they all moved and he didn’t seem to have broken anything more than maybe a toe or two from the feel of things. “Whatever happened, I don’t think it was the Romulans Report.”

“Officially?” Leah asked. “I haven’t a clue. Unofficially, my gut says we found one of those trans-slipstream wakes we were looking for.” Her voice sounded strained, as if she was in pain, and her face was tense.

“You’re probably right.”

“Your gut tell
you
that?” Leah asked.

“My gut’s telling me it wants out through the nearest orifice,” Barclay said.

“Yeah, I get that as well,” Nog added.

“The first order of the day is always survival,” Carolan said firmly, “and that means getting systems back online. We have to prioritize which systems we want to concentrate on first.”

“Life support, obviously.”

“Actually, that’s not so obvious. As long as we’ve no hull breaches we should have breathable air for a day or two.”

“What about temperature and radiation?”

“The hull insulation is enough to keep the temperature within tolerances, and to protect us from solar or cosmic radiation.”

“For how long?”

“Well, long enough that we’ll asphyxiate before needing to worry about it.”

“Oh, that makes me feel so much better.”

La Forge wedged himself between a seat and the rail that held the tactical console. Nog had lost a few teeth, and Qat’qa had broken her left arm. Barclay was bleeding from both ears, and his nose.

“The
Enterprise
once hit a quantum filament, and lost main power, computer control, and life support, but even then . . . We still had auxiliary power, lighting, and gravity.” A thought struck him. “Antimatter containment! If we’ve lost everything here, then what’s happened to antimatter containment?”

“It must still be on, or we’d be dead,” Nog pointed out.

Making assumptions wasn’t good enough for La Forge or Leah. “We need to check on it,” they said as one.

“None of the consoles are working.”

Barclay coughed and spat blood, which tumbled across
the bridge in slow motion, making La Forge glad for the sake of the others that they couldn’t see it. “Just a minute, though . . . we’re asking ourselves the wrong question.”

“How do you mean, Reg?”

“If we’ve lost all power we would have lost antimatter containment, but since that hasn’t happened . . .”

La Forge understood. “The question is how come we’re still alive, and, more or less, in one piece.”

Vol felt as if he was back home in the clouds of the gas giant where his species had evolved. He had no problem keeping himself oriented in zero-
g,
and, in fact, felt more comfortable and more agile than usual. He also, however, recognized the problems that the lack of gravity foisted upon the other species aboard, and their difficulty was something he wanted to deal with as quickly as possible. His one great eye was receptive to thermal images in the visible spectrum.
All the better to see through the methane clouds,
he thought.

He flew across to Scotty, who was lying against the underside of the upper balcony around the inactive warp core. The man was still breathing, but his heat pattern looked different than normal, and Vol’s first instinct was to call for a medical team. He stopped himself from wasting the time, knowing that, under these conditions, internal communication would be down.

Even the alarms that should be sounding weren’t doing so. Vol carried Scotty down to the floor and secured him between two consoles, so that he wouldn’t fall if and when the gravity was restored. Then he turned his attention to the darkened warp core, and the matter-antimatter intermix chamber. “Right, then. What are you playing at, eh? Why aren’t we all dead?”

Doctor Alyssa Ogawa woke to the sounds of hoarse screams and, more chillingly, the hollow and depressed moans of those who were past the screaming stage.

A couple of the nurses had managed to get emergency lights out of a locker before Ogawa had woken, and the lamps illuminated enough of the chaos in sickbay to guarantee her nightmares for weeks to come. Overly bright blue-white beams picked out drawn and pain-twisted faces floating at different orientations, and turned them into bloodless ghosts.

Globules of blood and vomit sailed lazily through the beams, providing startling color for a moment before vanishing into the blackness.

“Use the restraints,” Ogawa ordered. “We need to get the patients secured into beds. And get hold of some magnetic boots. We can’t treat anyone while we’re floating around.”

Carolan had already raided the emergency storage compartment secreted in one wall of the bridge and found EV suits and magnetic boots. The suits weren’t yet needed even with life support down, but the boots and lights were immediately useful, so she had doled them out. Nog, Barclay, and Qat’qa all took boots and lights, which made assessing the situation a lot easier.

She had, quite sensibly, offered the captain and Dr. Brahms magnetic boots, but they had refused. The ability to stick to a surface would have impeded the journey that La Forge had decided to make.

It would have been a long and tiring climb through the Jeffries tubes for the pair, but the lack of gravity made it quicker and easier. They simply swam through the air in whichever direction was necessary.

Vol was waiting for them when they got to engineering,
announcing his presence with a hearty cheer of “Ow, turn that bloody light away, you donut!” He blinked his huge eye several times.

“Sorry, Vol,” La Forge called back. He directed the light toward the floor, seeing Scotty there, secured between two consoles of the main console ring that had replaced the chief engineer’s office. His heart skipped several beats. “Is Scotty—”

“Still ticking,” Vol said.

“First question,” La Forge said, as it was the most urgent matter, “how come we’re still here if there’s no antimatter containment power?”

“He happened.” Vol pointed the tip of a tentacle at Scotty. “He’d installed a stator backup for the intermix and antimatter storage chambers. I just found out myself two minutes ago, when I looked at them.”

“Then we do have warp power?”

“We have the capability to generate it, but we don’t actually have it.”

“What happened to the gravity grid? The stator should have given us a good four hours of at least three quarters gravity even with the EPS grid dead.”

“Six hours, with our current upgrade, not that it matters.”

“Could we have been unconscious for six hours?” Leah asked.

“Not unless the chronometer in my tricorder stopped for the same length of time. That’s not why the gravity went down. The containment fields have a stator backup—so instead of keeping the gravity on, the stator is maintaining antimatter containment.”

Leah was incredulous. “For six hours?” It might take days to get power back.

“Yep. Sorry, mate.”

La Forge said, “Okay, Here are our priorities. We
need life support and gravity back online. We also need to be able to inform everyone when we get the gravity grid back.”

“I’d have thought they’d notice.”

“I don’t want to drop everyone on their heads without warning.” La Forge thought about where they might find some power. “The portable generators we used to power up the
Intrepid.
Where are they?”

“Cargo bay one,” Leah replied.

“I’m thinking that if we can patch them into EPS grids to power the containment fields, life support, communications, and the gravity grid, that’ll buy us time to find a more permanent solution to the rest of our problems without worrying that the ship will explode in six hours.”

“I’ll see to it,” Vol promised, and he flew off into the darkness.

Leah and La Forge looked first at each other, then at the unconscious Scotty. Maybe it was the color his eyes generated to compensate for the lack of light, or the effects of the lack of gravity, but Scotty looked frail, for the first time that La Forge could think of.

Leah voiced the thought that was in his mind. “Let’s get him to sickbay.”

In the guest quarters Voktra shared with a couple of other Romulan officers, Sela wedged herself in the corner between a bulkhead and a structural support. “What happened, Voktra?”