Finally she reached the door, which shuddered halfway open—better than nothing. Forcing it the rest of the way, she channeled her mother’s sheer vocal volume and began screaming for help.
“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,” Dennisar reported from the security station. The hulking Orion hardly seemed shaken up at all. “Internal sensors unreliable. Most of us are alive, at least, but I can’t pinpoint exact numbers.”
“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. Dennisar, please tell me the alert system is working.”
“Initiating radiation alert now,” he called. The computer began intoning the alert, advising all personnel to evacuate the outer sections of the ship.
“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 Dennisar as security officer, internal power and communications had been restored. Weapons, propulsion, and shields were still down, though, as were inertial dampers—whose failure was why the debris from the asteroid had inflicted such a damaging blow. “The good news,”came Doctor Ree’s reassuring growl from sickbay, “is that we have no fatalities.”Vale was profoundly relieved. They’d lost too many to the Borg—she couldn’t tolerate losing any of her crew to some hunk of rock. “There have been a number of concussions and fractures, all under treatment. Commander Tuvok sustained both, and Counselor Troi suffered a herniation in pulling him to safety. Both should recover in a few hours. The baby suffered minor impact trauma, nothing serious. No radiation sickness reported yet; I’m sending Nurse Kershul around to administer hyronalin shots to key personnel, beginning with you.”
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 channel them explosively. Bilitrium in particular is a rare energy amplifier; it cannot create energy, of course, but it can concentrate the energy of a reaction and release it in a tighter, more intense pulse.”
“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, beginning to deliver the hyronalin shots to the crew. Vale thanked the Edosian after receiving her shot and asked, “So what are our options? Can we repair the tractors and weapons in time to try again?”
“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?”
“Negative,”Cethente said. “The bilitrium would amplify that even worse than the phasers and quantum torpedoes. It’s particularly effective at concentrating and blue-shifting the gamma-ray energy of an antimatter reaction. No, thank you,”it went on, apparently speaking to Kershul now, though it was hard to tell without a head it could turn. “It would have no more effect on me than the radiation.”