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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 cha
“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,” De
“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. De
“Initiating radiation alert now,” he called. The computer began intoning the alert, advising all perso
“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 De
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 cha
“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, begi
“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?”