Twilight

“I read you.”Shar’s voice sounded ti

“All right,” she said. “I’m going to check the equipment.”

Pry

That, along with the environmental suits,she thought. When she and Shar had awoken this morning, she had used the first makeshift transporter to beam him to Chaffee’s aft section; with Shar’s leg so badly broken, neither one of them had wanted to risk moving him any other way. The two had then worked on the plan they had devised last night, with Shar attempting to repair another power cell and to finish rigging the environmental suits, and Pry

Now Pry

“Acknowledged,”Shar said.

Pry

“You did it,”he told her, the thin sound of his voice still echoing slightly inside her helmet.

“Wedid it,” she said, knowing that Shar’s part in their accomplishment could not be understated. Despite the painkillers and medication she had given him, his injuries still left him uncomfortable and weak. She found it remarkable that he had been able to concentrate long enough to do the detailed work he had done this morning. “How’s your leg?” she asked him now. The process of getting him into an environmental suit had been an arduous one, and even with the anesthetics, she knew, it had been painful for him.

“I’m all right,”Shar said.

Pry

An electronic thrum interrupted Pry

Above, an object descended toward them. With only the churning clouds as a backdrop, Pry

Pry

The object had soft-landed five meters from where she and Shar had been with their improvised transporter equipment. It sat lengthwise on the ground, about a half-meter tall, a meter wide, and three meters long. White letters and numbers in Federation Standard marked the black casing in several locations, identifying it as one of Defiant’s probes. A gouge penetrated one end of the outer shell, the edges of the gash seared, as though made by an energy weapon.

Pry

Pry

“We have to get the explosives to the site,” she said when the messages had finished. She wondered whether they should attempt to skip-transport them to the source of the pulse, but Shar answered the question before she even asked it.

“With these type of devices, designed to shift into subspace and other dimensions, I wouldn’t recommended transporting them,” he said. “The phase change could detonate them.”

“All right. Then we’ll have to get the probe back in the air,” she said. “We’ll just have to hope that Commander Vaughn has reached the site, or that we can beam there ourselves.”

Pry

She rejoined Shar, and the two of them waited for the probe to launch. A minute passed, but nothing happened. Pry