Titan 5 - Over a Torrent Sea (16 page)

“Tuvok!”

The lights were gone, only the emergency illumination remaining, but it was enough to let Deanna see that the Vulcan was sprawled motionless on the floor beneath the office table, his head coated in something dark and glistening. She couldn’t see color, but she knew it was green. “Oh, God.” She struck her combadge. “Medical emergency, Counselor Troi’s office!”
Maybe emergencies
, she thought as she felt her insides heave and she vomited up her last meal onto the carpet. She couldn’t tell through the inner turbulence if the baby was still kicking. “Sickbay, acknowledge!”

Nothing. “Computer!” She began dragging herself toward Tuvok. “Where are you, you stupid computer?” But that voice, the one that reminded her so maddeningly of her mother, remained silent. “Somebody!” she yelled. “We need help in here!”

Finally she reached Tuvok and began pulling him toward the door. Her muscles, overtaxed from months of service as a walking baby carriage, strained from the exertion. It felt like that wasn’t all she was straining. “Dammit, Tuvok, wake up! Help me out here! I’ll leave you here if I have to!”

Now her own voice was starting to remind her of her mother’s, in attitude if not in timbre.
So be it,
she thought.
Lwaxana Troi’s sheer cussedness got her through the occupation of Betazed in one piece. And kept her baby boy alive.
She’d never been more glad to be that woman’s daughter.

Finally she reached the door, which shuddered halfway open—better than nothing. Forcing it the rest of the way, she channeled her mother’s sheer vocal volume and began screaming for help.

“Report,” Vale tried to say as the emergency lights kicked in, but her own emergency power hadn’t fully engaged yet. She gathered herself and managed to get out something others could hear. “Somebody report!”

“Shields and main power…down,” Panyarachun said between groans. “We’re drifting.”

“Casualties?”

“Internal communications are damaged,” Dennisar reported from the security station. The hulking Orion hardly seemed shaken up at all. “Internal sensors unreliable. Most of us are alive, at least, but I can’t pinpoint exact numbers.”

“Commander!” Fell turned to catch Vale’s eye. The left side of that gorgeous Deltan face had been badly bruised. “Intense radiation from the asteroid. With shields down…”

“Say no more. Evacuate the bridge. Dennisar, please tell me the alert system is working.”

“Initiating radiation alert now,” he called. The computer began intoning the alert, advising all personnel to evacuate the outer sections of the ship.

“Fell, get to sickbay. The rest of us will reconvene in engineering.”

“I’m fine,” the Deltan insisted as the crew began leaving through the emergency ladder. “I can manage the pain.”

“Peya, you could have a concussion. And this ship doesn’t lack for science officers. That’s an order.”

Fell lowered her head. “Aye, Commander.”

By the time the bridge crew reassembled in engineering, with the Syrath astrophysicist Cethente filling in as science officer and with Ranul Keru taking over from Dennisar as security officer, internal power and communications had been restored. Weapons, propulsion, and shields were still down, though, as were inertial dampers—whose failure was why the debris from the asteroid had inflicted such a damaging blow.
“The good news,”
came Doctor Ree’s reassuring growl from sickbay,
“is that we have no fatalities.”
Vale was profoundly relieved. They’d lost too many to the Borg—she couldn’t tolerate losing any of her crew to some hunk of rock.
“There have been a number of concussions and fractures, all under treatment. Commander Tuvok sustained both, and Counselor Troi suffered a herniation in pulling him to safety. Both should recover in a few hours. The baby suffered minor impact trauma, nothing serious. No radiation sickness reported yet; I’m sending Nurse Kershul around to administer hyronalin shots to key personnel, beginning with you.”

The crew took a moment to absorb the news. The chamber was disturbingly silent with the warp core down; the ship was operating on fusion power. “Can anyone tell me yet what happened?” Vale asked.

Cethente’s wind-chime voice sounded underneath the vocoder-generated translation of its speech.
“Further analysis shows that the asteroid contained sizeable pockets of bilitrium and anicium in addition to yurium,”
the Syrath said. Its tentacles stretched out from under the wide dome of its saucerlike upper body, atop which an array of sensory bulges glowed a pale green as it studied the readings those tentacles brought up on the consoles. A radially symmetrical being whose body tapered below the dome into a fluted trunk with a diamond-shaped bulge on the underside and four arthropod legs extending from just above the bulge, Cethente was able to “face” its console and its crewmates simultaneously.
“All these substances can store large amounts of energy and channel them explosively. Bilitrium in particular is a rare energy amplifier; it cannot create energy, of course, but it can concentrate the energy of a reaction and release it in a tighter, more intense pulse.”

“So it took the energy of our weapons and tractors and threw it back in our faces.”

“Those of you who have faces,”
Cethente replied.
“Actually I found the energy surge rather appetizing.”

Vale blinked, reflecting on how poorly Federation science understood Syrath anatomy. Cethente looked so fragile in construction that it seemed it should have been shattered by the impact, but the asexual astrophysicist was probably the most durable member of the crew, a semicrystalline life form evolved on a Venus-like world of hellish temperatures and pressures.

“Status of the asteroid?” Vale went on.

“Still on an impact trajectory with Droplet. The explo
sion was not sufficiently directional to achieve the desired course change.
”

Nurse Kershul arrived, beginning to deliver the hyronalin shots to the crew. Vale thanked the Edosian after receiving her shot and asked, “So what are our options? Can we repair the tractors and weapons in time to try again?”

“Unlikely,” said Mordecai Crandall, the thin-faced human ensign commanding engineering in Ra-Havreii’s absence. “We’ve got, what, five and a half hours to impact? It will probably take most of that to get the warp core and shields back. Unless you want us to shift priorities.”

Vale shook her head. “No, shields have to come first.” The bulk of the ship could protect the crew against the radiation for only so long, and she needed to get them all back to their stations if they were to function at peak efficiency. “Other options, people?”

“The shuttles,” Panyarachun said after a moment. “What if we jettisoned their warp cores and detonated them against the asteroid?”

“Negative,”
Cethente said.
“The bilitrium would amplify that even worse than the phasers and quantum torpedoes. It’s particularly effective at concentrating and blue-shifting the gamma-ray energy of an antimatter reaction. No, thank you,”
it went on, apparently speaking to Kershul now, though it was hard to tell without a head it could turn.
“It would have no more effect on me than the radiation.”

“But Tasanee may be on to something with the shuttles,” Keru said. “What if we use them to push on the asteroid? No energy beams to destabilize it further, just sheer brute force. Could their engines push it far enough to miss Droplet?”

“There’s a problem there,” Crandall said. “The energy surge fried the hangar bay’s force field and power systems. We can’t open the doors, and we’d lose a fair chunk of atmosphere if we did. And we’d need radiation suits to work in the hangar under these conditions—it would slow repairs.”

“What about the captain’s skiff?” Keru said. “Is the
La Rocca
in working order?”

Crandall checked a console. “Some system damage, mostly to sensors, com arrays, transporters. But it was powered down, so its main systems are still intact. It would need a few swapouts, but it could be ready to go in…two hours?”

“I want it sooner, Crandall. Top priority along with shields. That skiff may be all we’ve got.” Vale sighed. “What about communications? Can we use the shuttles’ systems to contact our teams at Droplet, let them know what’s happened?”

“Not through this interference,” Kuu’iut said.

“But they have a shuttle monitoring us optically from orbit,”
Cethente chimed.
“They should have observed the event by now, and should be able to determine fairly soon that the asteroid’s course has not materially changed.”

“Will they be all right?” Panyarachun asked.

“Probably, as long as they stay far enough from the impact site,” Vale said. “But I can’t say the same for the squales. They may be in for major loss of life if we can’t fix this.”

Keru moved in closer and spoke softly. “Chris…technically the Prime Directive says not to interfere in natural disasters on pre-warp planets. And impacts like this proba
bly happen on Droplet more often than on most worlds. We didn’t cause this, and we may even have made it worse.”

“Maybe, Ranul. But we’ve already disrupted their lives enough without meaning to. Besides, we’re already committed. If we stop now, then hundreds, maybe thousands of squales could die because of our choice to stop. That’s as bad as if we’d chucked the asteroid at them ourselves.”

“I can accept that,” Keru said. Then he leaned still closer. “Just between you, me, and the warp core, I think it’s crazy to let people die because we’re afraid of damaging their culture. I’m always happy to find a loophole around that part of the Directive.”

“No comment,” Vale said, though her smile belied it. “But there’s more. Theory says our people should be safe so long as they keep their distance. But theory’s only as good as the data plugged into it. We didn’t know about that bilitrium and anicium. This system keeps throwing surprises at us.” Her gaze turned outward. “Who knows what else we might have overlooked?”

DROPLET

Ensign Lavena had actually managed, after hours of cajoling, to persuade the senior members of the squale pod (for that seemed to be their basic social unit) to approach close enough to the scouter gig that they could meet Riker and converse with him directly, with Aili interpreting between English and Selkie. Normally Riker’s combadge translator could do that; without a translation matrix for squale, it would default to the language of the next nearest indi
vidual, Lavena. But Aili had recommended against that, for the squales would be uneasy with a technological mediator. He had the gig’s systems and all their equipment powered down or on standby.

Even so, the squales had approached only reluctantly, the chromatophores in their skin blushing a mottled blue, camouflaging themselves in an instinctive fear reaction. Aili had done a fine job reassuring them, but some deep-rooted anxiety remained. Riker tried to imagine how inanimate matter would seem to beings who had never encountered stone or metal. It was hard to understand why their reaction was so extreme. Even living things had inert components, such as the shells of the floater polyps and the local arthropods. He would have thought that at least a few of the squales might show enough curiosity to want a closer look, but Lavena couldn’t coax them to come closer than a few meters. In the name of diplomacy, Riker finally stripped down to swim briefs and paddled out from the gig a short distance, trailing a length of line behind him so he wouldn’t be separated from it by a powerful swell or other unexpected event. Even on a leash, it was not normally a wise idea to leave a boat untended; he would have preferred it if Huilan or Ra-Havreii could have been along too. But the gig was a catamaran design, able to remain afloat even if capsized. Plus, this was Lavena’s element; if something untoward did occur, he trusted her to get him safely back to the gig.

Riker did his best to try to participate in the language lesson that followed. The squales needed to hear from him directly, at least enough to establish his authority, so he needed to use what Selkie he remembered, plus what
Lavena helped him brush up on, to get his ideas across. But airborne Selkie was a different dialect than aquatic Selkie. “Umm, that’s not the problem,” Lavena said when it seemed he wasn’t getting through. “The squales have a keen grasp of sound patterns and linguistic structure—the dialect difference doesn’t bother them. And they can hear fine out of the water,” she finished, seeming reluctant to say it.

“My accent’s that bad, huh?”

Her crests flushed. “I don’t know if accent is the word. More a matter of pitch and rhythm…”

He sighed. “I wish I had my trombone. I’m not much of a singer.”

Once past the usual “We come in peace” material, Riker tried to get across the idea of
Titan
’s exploratory purpose and their intense curiosity about this world and the squales’ remarkable technology. He had observed, both in first contacts and dating, that it usually helped break the ice to show interest in the other party and get them talking about themselves. And since the squales had been monitoring the away teams from afar with their living probes, Riker assumed they were an inquisitive people as well, despite their oddly inflexible fear of inanimate technology. He hoped to connect with their species through that common interest in discovery.

Besides which, he hadn’t thrown the Prime Directive completely out the window. Getting the squales talking about themselves was a good way to avoid revealing too much about the galaxy beyond.

But at this stage, there was little that he or Lavena could ask coherently about the really intriguing questions: how the squales bred their living tools, how the planet’s
life got enough minerals to survive. They were only able to establish the basics. The squales lived in pods of flexible size and composition, not unlike Earth cetaceans. Some pods consisted of mothers and their young offspring, others of adolescents banding together under the tutelage of unrelated adult males. Although it was more complicated than that. For one thing, like many Dropletian chordates, the squales had four sexes, two that were roughly male (in that they only donated gametes) and two that were hermaphroditic, exchanging gametes with each other and both bearing and raising young. (Pazlar’s people theorized this was a hedge against mutation; with four copies of each chromosome, defective genes would be overridden by the majority. Given the frequent infall of asteroids rich in heavy, potentially toxic elements, it was a valuable adaptation.) The squales seemed amused when Riker and Lavena explained that the two of them represented the whole range of biological sexes their respective species possessed. (He didn’t tell them about the Andorians for fear of looking deficient in comparison.)