Reap the Whirlwind

The tropics, he mused as the pod fell. Assuming I survive the splashdown, this might be the start of a nice vacation.

Niwara stood at the river’s edge as Commander Terrell waded out into the rapids. An orange safety line from her pack was tied around his torso and secured to a thick tree trunk several meters behind her. She controlled the slack of the line as he moved into deeper water, anchoring him so that the current didn’t sweep him away as it had Theriault. The bright orange rope chafed the pads of her paws as she fed out a few more meters of it to Terrell.

He called back to her, “How much farther?”

She glanced down at the screen of her tricorder, which lay flat on the ground by her feet. “Two more meters,” Niwara said. “Then dive.” Paying out some more line for the first officer, she wondered how he would find anything in the churning murk of muddy water. Opening his eyes underwater would be all but impossible. In every practical sense, he would be diving blind.

Terrell took a deep breath and submerged. Niwara monitored the slack in the line by touch while she watched her tricorder screen. It was centered on the signal from Theriault’s communicator, which lay unmoving on the river bottom. Slowly the first officer’s bio reading closed in on it, then stopped. A few seconds later he surfaced and gasped for breath while fighting to tread water against the current. “Am I close?” he asked.

“Half a meter more to your left when you dive,” she said.

He nodded, took a few quick breaths, then ducked back under the water. When he surfaced again half a minute later, he had Theriault’s communicator in his hand. “Reel me in,” he said.

Hand over hand, Niwara helped pull Terrell back to the riverbank. He dragged himself out of the water and slumped to a sitting position. His body, bare except for some regulation-issue dark gray underwear, was covered in dirty water that dried quickly in the warm air, leaving him coated with sandy grit. His close-cropped wiry hair was packed with silt. He untied the safety line from his body.

Niwara asked, “Was there any sign of her?”

“No,” Terrell said, shaking his head. “Just her communicator.” He looked out at the river. “Probably got knocked loose when she went over those rocks.” Niwara nodded and began undoing the knots that held the safety line to the tree trunk. As she expected, Terrell tried to put a positive spin on his discovery. “I’m just glad she wasn’t down there,” he said. He gazed into the distance, following the river’s path into the jungle. “That means there’s a chance she’s still alive, somewhere downriver.”

Although Niwara always hoped for the best, she made a point of preparing for the worst. Theriault could be dead, she admitted to herself. Floating away, a slave to the current. She knew not to say so aloud. Terrell had no patience for pessimism.

Terrell stood up and brushed off as much of the water and dirt from his body as he could. He retrieved his clothes, which he had placed in a neat pile several meters from the water. In less than a minute he was dressed. He rejoined Niwara, who coiled the last few meters of the safety line, knotted it around its middle, and stowed it in her pack. “We’ve got about an hour of daylight left,” Terrell said. “We’ll continue downriver till it gets dark. Then we’ll make camp for the night.”

“Aye, sir,” Niwara said, putting on her pack. The first officer was right to recommend halting their trip downriver when darkness fell. Niwara could only hope that Theriault had found the opportunity to do likewise.

The top deck of the U.S.S. Sagittarius looked like a junkyard.

Master Chief Ilucci and his engineering team were surrounded by the disassembled components of several different systems, ranging from shield emitters to plasma conduits. Several pieces were scorched; a few had been warped by intense heat. Kneeling in the middle of it all was Threx. The brawny Denobulan poked and prodded the item in his hand with various tools and sensors, then he chucked it over his shoulder. “Well, that one’s dead,” he said. “Toss me another.”

Karen Cahow lobbed an identical component to him. “If we don’t find a working regulator soon, we can forget about fixing the shields,” she said.

“Two more pieces, and I can build a new one,” Threx said.

Torvin stood with one of his enormous Tiburonian ears pressed against the impulse reactor and glared at the other engineers. He pressed his index finger to his lips in a shushing gesture. Cahow gri

After several seconds he pulled back from the machine. “It’s the vectored exhaust director,” he said despondently. “The i

“All right,” Ilucci said. “We can’t fix that. Realign the warp-core EPS taps instead. I want to be ready to hook up the new fuel pod as soon as it gets here.” If it gets here, he prevented himself from adding.

“You got it, Master Chief,” Torvin said. He picked up his tools and went to work.

Ilucci kneeled beside the transporter emitter. The entire engineering team had taken half an hour to decouple it from its housing beneath the cargo deck and transfer it with antigravs to the top deck. Moving it back belowdecks and resecuring it was just one of many labor-intensive tasks the engineers had to look forward to this evening. First, however, Ilucci had to find some way to fix it. “Cahow,” he called out. “We got any spare imaging sca

“No,” said the blond engineer. “But I can rig you one if you let me raid the dorsal sensors for parts.”

It wasn’t the answer he was hoping for; ca

“At least eight hours,” she said.

He sighed. “Okay, get on it.” She nodded, grabbed a box of tools, and disappeared into the starboard forward crawlspace.

Ilucci walked over and joined Threx, who removed the housing from a metallic shaft the size of his forearm. Studying the cables and circuitry inside, the Denobulan said, “This one looks like it might be okay.” He pointed at an oddly shaped device near Ilucci’s right foot. “Can you hand me that, Master Chief?” Ilucci picked up the object and passed it to Threx, who test-fitted it against the cylinder in his other hand. “Yeah, that’ll do. I can make a new regulator with these. Have the shields back by morning.”

“A hundred percent?” Ilucci asked.

Threx cocked his head sideways. “More like sixty-five.”

“All right,” Ilucci said. “Keep me posted.” He watched Threx shamble away with half-disassembled machine parts in each hand and prepared himself for what promised to be a long night of jury-rigged repairs.

One crisis at a time, he told himself. That’s how we do it.

The escape pod was sheathed in fire. Plunging like a stone through the atmosphere, it shook and spun around Xiong. He ricocheted off the bulkheads, despite his best efforts to brace himself with his outstretched arms and legs.

Images of the view outside the pod rippled over its every interior surface, creating the impression that the pod was little more than a capsule of clear gelatin inside a flame. Then the fire dissipated and faded away, yielding to a seascape that was half day and half night.

Xiong saw the image distort where his hands and feet touched the bulkhead. Must be some kind of holographic projection, he realized, amazed at the total panoramic visibility. Though some aspects of Tholian technology had seemed inferior when compared to that of the Federation, this was one achievement at which he marveled.