Reap the Whirlwind

17

Finding tools aboard the Tholian battleship had been both more and less difficult than Xiong had expected.

Several compartments off the main engineering deck were packed with a variety of devices, all formed of substances very similar to the glasslike compound of which the bulkheads were made. Large tools and small tools, some shaped like levers and others like hooks or forks, lined the bulkheads. Locating them had taken less than an hour.

Since then, Xiong had spent three hours trying to figure out what any of the devices did or how he might activate them. Pressing their surfaces at various points had been ineffectual. Touching them against bulkheads or machinery or each other had proved equally futile. He had tried pulling them apart, to no avail. In a moment that had been half inspiration and half desperation, he had probed the bulkheads of the engineering deck seeking apertures into which one or more of the devices might be inserted, only to find them solid, smooth, and unyielding.

Though he had long considered himself to be handy with tools, he had begun to realize that in his hands the Tholian gadgets were little more than a collection of exotic clubs. I give up, he decided, and he left the engineering deck.

After slogging up to the passageway intersection on the main deck above, he checked his air gauge. It showed less than five hours remaining. As much as he tried to convince himself that five hours would be plenty of time to find a way off the ship and safely to the planet’s surface, he found it impossible to forget that he had already been there for five hours without making any significant progress whatsoever.

Stay calm, he told himself. Keep it together. Keep moving.

He worked his way aft, checking each open compartment for any sign of loose equipment. In the aft quarter of the ship he found another intersection that led to a higher deck, and he followed it. The obsidian bulkheads on the upper deck were dotted at irregular intervals with asymmetrical fixtures of corrugated metal. Xiong scrutinized one closely but was unable to determine what purpose, if any, it served.

Most of the compartments he inspected while passing by were packed with blocky crystalline pedestals, which were arranged around the rooms’ perimeters or grouped in trilateral formations. He suspected that these might be analogous to any of several duty stations aboard a Federation starship, such as a fire-control center or an environmental support office. One extremely large compartment was heavily partitioned and seemed designed for quarantine procedures. Either a sickbay or a science lab, Xiong concluded, and he kept moving.

Then he passed a nondescript chamber. After doing a quick double-take he stopped and backed up. He entered slowly, as if sensing that there was something special about this place. It had the focused design and economical aesthetic that he knew Tholians associated with rituals. In its center were two wide crystalline platforms that appeared to be melded with the deck. On each platform was a meter-wide hexagon of a different kind of crystalline substance. To Xiong’s surprise, the hexagon was only an empty frame with what appeared to be a handle attached to its central cross-brace. He extended one finger and tried to push it through the empty space in the frame. A flash-crackle of energy repulsed his hand and knocked him backward as it sent a loud burst of static over his helmet’s transceiver.

Shake it off, he thought, staggering forward toward the platform once again. You’re all right; get it together, Ming.

On his second approach he avoided the hexagons and focused on the peculiar, slender objects beside them. He crouched to examine the closer one. It appeared to be made of the obsidian bulkhead substance; roughly twenty-five centimeters long, it looked like a handle for a tool. As he tilted his head to look at it from a slightly lower angle, a glint of light on a microthin blade emanating from the object pierced the shimmering haze of the Tholian ship’s superheated, hyperdense atmosphere.

Now he understood. It was a sword.

A difference of a few degrees could render the blade all but invisible. After studying it for a few minutes, Xiong deduced that it was likely composed of monofilaments. Its meter-long edge was likely so atomically fine that it could cut through nearly anything.

On a hunch, he grasped the haft of the weapon with great care, turned it in his grip so that the edge was poised to cut, and lowered its tip slowly to the deck. He barely felt the vibration of contact. Pivoting slowly, he watched a gouge appear in the black perfection of the obsidian floor. The glimmer of the blade came and went from his vision as he inscribed the cut in a half circle around himself. Lifting the monoblade from the deck, he gri

Carrying it back to the escape pod he had found was more nerve-racking than he had expected. Every time the unfamiliar atmosphere of the Tholian ship caused a slight wobble in his step, he worried that he might amputate a digit or a limb or his head with one careless turn of his wrist. Most of the time he couldn’t really see the blade he was carrying, which made navigating corners and portals hazardous.

He stopped when he reached the hexagonal entrance to the escape pod. Space inside the pod was limited. One careless turn of the monoblade inside there could rupture its hull and render it useless. Worse, the interior of the pod was a zero-gravity environment, which would make it difficult to get the necessary leverage to control the blade’s movement while cutting. It would take only one fumble to cut himself in half while using the blade to access the systems inside the pod’s bulkhead.

He decided it was time for a change of strategy. Even if he could open the bulkhead, he had no reason to think he would be able to fathom its i

A flicker of anger drove him to fantasize about skewering the pod with the monoblade. Then he stopped and considered the sorts of features that were often found in escape pods, regardless of the species for which it was made. Most relied on manual operation for launch, but on many ships there were conditions that would trigger the automatic release of escape pods. On Starfleet ships, some self-destruct sequences ejected escape pods as part of their protocol. In many cases, an ejection sequence could be triggered by fire…or by a sudden loss of hull integrity and air pressure.

Xiong set the monoblade on the deck between his feet and climbed carefully into the pod. Then, clinging to the edge of the portal, he reached out and picked up the sword. He looked around until he saw a part of the Tholian ship’s hull that could be easily perforated without harming the escape pod—and he thrust the monoblade into it.

A groan of wrenching metal, the roar of escaping high-pressure fluids, the shattering of obsidian. Xiong fought the blowout effect caused by the explosive decompression and pushed himself back inside the escape pod. Grabbing any hand-holds he could find, he wedged himself inside the tiny space as the thunder of the disintegrating bulkhead was drowned out by the screech of venting gases.

An iris snapped shut over the pod’s portal. Sudden acceleration hurled Xiong against the iris as the pod was blasted away from the Tholian battle cruiser. Seconds later its inertial dampeners kicked in, and he was once again floating freely inside the pod. Looking toward its far end, he saw that its black surface had become almost transparent, showing him the curve of the planet as it spread wide beneath him.

He was about to congratulate himself for his ingenuity when he realized that he had absolutely no means of controlling the pod’s descent or landing. As a vast ocean rolled into view, Xiong hoped that the pod’s automated features extended to more than just its ejection sequence.