Reap the Whirlwind

Below his feet the horizon flattened into the distance, and the ocean became all that he could see in any direction. Splashdown was only moments away.

No sound but the roar of wind, no light but the glow of two moons over the sea. The pod spiraled down, turning like the bit of a drill as it struck the water. Sudden deceleration hurled Xiong against the bottom of the pod. His impact was cushioned by the extreme density of the atmosphere inside the pod and the protective servomotors and shielding of his EVA gear.

Boiling plumes erupted around the pod as it sank. The distorted surface became distant and faded into blackness. I survived splashdown, Xiong thought as his helmet beacon activated. Then he noted with dismay that the pod remained sealed as it sank into the ocean.

His next dilemma became clear. After all the effort he had gone through to make the pod seal itself and eject from the Tholian ship, he now had to find some way to make it let him out. For a moment he wished that he had kept the monoblade, but then he remembered that in all the turbulence of reentry he would likely have filleted himself, or damaged the pod.

Think like a Tholian, he told himself. You live in a high-pressure environment. You like it really hot. You need your escape pod to keep you alive for days or weeks until you’re rescued. The inevitable conclusion was exactly what he didn’t want to contemplate. They wouldn’t want this thing to open, he realized. Not unless it landed in a Tholian-friendly environment—which is the one thing I’m trying to escape.

Absolute darkness surrounded the pod. He couldn’t tell whether he was looking at its natural obsidian surface or at a faithful representation of the lightless depths outside. Several challenges now demanded his attention: open the pod, return to the ocean’s surface, and survive both events; then find some means of staying alive in a vast expanse of untraveled open water on an uninhabited planet.

All right, time to get creative. He activated his helmet beacon and eyed his surroundings. Seeing no other resources, he began looking at his environment suit. What have I got?

Taking stock of his heavily modified EVA gear, he replayed in his memory the process by which Ilucci and the engineers of the Sagittarius had built the suit around him. They had added several nonstandard components to the suit, in order to make it strong enough to survive inside the Tholian ship. Miniaturized structural integrity fields protected him from the pressure. Myo-electric servos enabled him to move through the dense, semi-fluid atmosphere. Additional power packs had been installed to drive the new components. And a tricorder had been built into the suit’s bulky control block.

His inventory completed, he asked the next question. What do I need to do? Unfortunately, it seemed that the only way to open the pod and get back to the surface would be to blast open its bottom, releasing its superheated atmosphere and causing an explosive decompression whose exhaust would propel the pod upward. Just one problem with detonating something inside the pod, he realized. Any blast strong enough to penetrate the bulkhead will cause an overpressure that’ll turn me into salsa.

He pondered whether a shaped charge might mitigate some of the blast effects before he realized that he still had no idea how to create an explosion in the first place. Come on, Ming, he thought, trying to boost his own morale. First, figure out how to blow this thing open. Then worry about how to survive the blast. Solve one problem at a time.

Of the various components in his suit, the ones that seemed to hold the most promise for generating explosive force were the power cells. They were composed primarily of sarium krellide and had been fully charged when he’d beamed over to the Tholian ship. Even after several hours of use, they were likely still at least half-charged. The key would be releasing all the energy of a power cell at once and directing its force against the bottom bulkhead. Thinking back to the engineering training he’d had at Starfleet Academy, he remembered all the things the instructors had warned him never to do when working with power cells.

Never, they had cautioned, allow an ungrounded conductive wire to contact an exposed sarium krellide power cell.

He searched the pockets of the EVA suit and found that all the standard-issue equipment was still there, including an insulated tether cable of three-ply kelvinium. It was insulated, of course, because kelvinium was superconductive and could be a hazard during EVA operations if left unprotected. Using a small wire cutter from the suit’s repair kit, he stripped the insulation from the kelvinium tether cable and unwound its three-ply wire into separate, delicate filaments. Watching the gossamer-thin wires float in the dense, shimmering atmosphere of the pod, he began thinking about how to dislodge one of the suit’s power cells without compromising the suit itself. The last thing he needed was to fill the inside of his suit with superheated, sulfur-rich gas.

There were only two power cells that he could reach: the ones located just behind each hip of the suit. They powered the servos in its legs. Disabling either one would make it very difficult for him to move until he reached an area of lower pressure. Because that was the cause for which the power cell was being sacrificed, he decided it was a fair trade.

After a few minutes of work, he had almost succeeded in freeing the power cell behind his right hip when the pod jolted to a stop. The impact pi

The power cell detached from his suit. Holding it in his hands, he knew that he had the means of generating a fairly potent detonation. His next challenge was to direct its energy and protect himself at the same time.

You’ve made it this far, Ming. You’re doing great. Reason it out. It’s just physics. Just do the math.

The only thing he could think of was to make a force field. If he could generate a conical subspace field above the power cell before letting it make contact with kelvinium wire, all its explosive force would be directed downward, against the bottom bulk-head—and it would do so without causing an overpressure inside the pod. All I need is a subspace field generator.

The tricorder that the engineers had integrated with the suit contained a fairly powerful subspace transceiver assembly, used for relaying data back to a ship in orbit. Unfortunately, it was nestled in the back of the suit, at a place Xiong couldn’t reach. I wish I had a communicator, he thought—and then he remembered the comm assembly attached to his helmet. Although the speakers and sensing unit were inside, the transceiver components were accessible from the outside. As he reached back and started disco

All-or-nothing time. Guiding his hands by watching his dim reflection on the obsidian bulkhead, he detached the transceiver assembly from his helmet. He kneeled beside the power cell and set the circuit next to it. He powered down the transceiver and attached two filaments of kelvinium to it. He shaped the wires into a crude circle around the transceiver and the power cell.

The key to his plan would be the timing. He twisted the last piece of wire into a loose ball and made a few test drops away from the power cell, to see how long it would take the wire ball to fall from the top of the pod to the bottom; it took just less than three seconds, and he concluded it was because of the density of the pod’s atmosphere.