“Aye, sir,” Troi said.
“Yes, Commander,” Vaughn added.
Garrett’s proviso made perfect sense to Troi. After all, it didn’t do any good to find something and not be able to report it. “Proceeding forward.”
The ship shook again, and this time a console exploded.
“Damn,” Troi said. “Damage control response systems are offline.” That meant that, if there was a hull breach, force fields would not engage to seal the breach until it could be physically repaired. “And we’ve got a plasma leak back there.”
“I’ve got it,” Vaughn said, unstrapping himself from his seat and moving for the emergency toolkit.
“Be careful back there, Lieutenant,” Garrett said, still looking down at her console. “I don’t want— braking thrusters, now! All stop!”
Troi’s hands moved to stop the Hoplite’s forward motion before his brain registered Garrett’s sudden order. Even as he fired the braking thrusters, he discovered the reason for the order: the proximity detector had picked up a huge mass only a few kilometers away. Had Troi not applied the thrusters when he did, there was a very good chance that the Hoplitewould by now be flattened across the surface of that mass.
“Can you get a decent scan of that, Mr. Troi?”
“Working on it, sir,” Troi said as he tried to coax some kind of reading out of the sensors and the proximity detector. He managed to get an image of at least part of the shape—the mass extended beyond the range of either scanning device—and ran it through the computer for analysis. When it gave him an answer, he swallowed. I was sure I was right, but I don’t think I really wanted to be,he thought. “According to what we can detect, there’s a sixty-five percent chance that we almost crashed into a Cardassian Akril-class vessel.”
From the aft, even as he operated the tools necessary to seal the plasma leak, Vaughn said, “Dammit. Commander, this is exactly what I thought we’d find in here, and fulfills the very fears that led Starfleet to send me along. The Cardassians have no more interest in negotiating in good faith here than they did on Vulcan last year—they’re just trying to find ways to improve their own position, in this case probably by gathering additional intelligence on us and the Klingons before they strike.”
“Unless, of course, there’s only the one ship,” Garrett said.
Vaughn continued to focus on the leak. “Unlikely. Cardassians are like wolves, Commander—they often travel in packs.”
“Either way, I don’t want to be anywhere near them.” Garrett gazed down at her console. “SIF is down to forty percent. Bring us about, Mr. Troi, and set course back for the Carthage.”
“Yes, sir.”
Even as Troi entered the course change into the Hoplite’s navigation computer, the shuttle shook again. “You okay back there, Elias?” he asked as he turned the Hoplitearound and engaged the new course.
“Just fine, thanks, Ian,” came Vaughn’s steady voice from the aft compartment. “Leak is sealed and I’ve bypassed the fried circuitry on the damage control systems. You should be able to reactivate them.”
Troi checked his status board, and saw that the power flow was uninterrupted. He moved to activate the system—
—just as the hull-breach alarm rang out. The noise of the alarm was loud enough that Troi could feel it in his rib cage, but that wasn’t the worst sensation. His ears popped from the sudden change in pressure even as his chair lurched backward, the explosive decompression trying to pull Troi and his chair toward the hole that had opened in the aft section of the Hoplite.
Garrett grabbed his wrist before he could activate the damage-control system. Troi turned around. Vaughn had apparently been standing very close to where the charged particles had torn through the Hoplitehull and was now literally hanging on for life. Each of his hands gripped the ragged edges of the breach, and that tenuous hold was all that kept Elias Vaughn from a rather unpleasant death. Unfortunately, most of his body was outside the perimeter of the hull, so if Troi did activate the damage control systems, the force field would slice through Vaughn’s arms at the wrists and consign his handless body to a quick grave.
Of course, if Troi didn’t seal the breach, they’d all die in about a minute when the air was gone.
The shuttle carried very little excess material, and it was all secure, so there was, at least, little danger of something hitting Vaughn on its way to being blown into space. That still left them with minimal options.
Either him or Garrett unstrapping themselves to try to physically retrieve the lieutenant wasn’t possible, since that would most likely result in Vaughn’s would-be rescuer suffering the same fate.
Then he remembered the recent upgrades Starfleet had made to their shuttlecraft—including emergency transporters. Unfortunately, the controls were on one of the side consoles, a meter away.
However, the armbands that activated the transporters were in a cabinet just to the left of Troi’s feet. He reached down, the straps from his restraints biting into his ribs, and opened the cabinet. The armbands were programmed to transport whoever wore them to the center of the shuttle upon activation. They had a total of ten armbands, so if Vaughn wasn’t able to catch one, they had nine more chances. I just hope he figures out what I’m doing,he thought as he tossed one armband toward Vaughn.
“Toss” turned out to be an inaccurate verb, as all Troi had to do was let go of the armband after he took it out of the cabinet and it, like Vaughn and the air in the shuttle, followed the scientific law that molecules will tend toward an area of lesser pressure from an area of greater pressure.
Turning in his chair, his hand hovering over the control that would activate the force field, Troi watched as Vaughn abandoned fifty percent of his lifeline by releasing his right hand’s grip on the edge of the breach. He figured it out,Troi thought with relief. Vaughn’s bloody fingers managed to catch the strap of the armband. Using his fingers in manner impressively nimble given the copious amount of blood covering them, not to mention the intense rush of air plowing into his body, Vaughn managed to shift his grip to the metal circle in the center of the armband that contained the activation control.
He then dematerialized. As soon as the transporter effect took him away, Troi activated the damage control systems.
Four things happened in rapid succession. Troi’s chair rocked forward as the pull of the decompression ceased with the activation of the force field. The hull breach alarm also ceased, though the vibrating in Troi’s teeth did not. He heard the sound of a transporter in the shuttle, which placed Vaughn’s form upright in the center of the Hoplite,the armband still in the grip of his blood-covered fingers. And he heard the sounds of the environmental system laboring to restore the cabin’s lost atmosphere.
“Very well done, Mr. Troi,” Garrett said, unstrapping herself, then reaching down and grabbing the shuttle’s medikit. “Get us out of here before we have to do it again.” To Vaughn, she said, “Let me take a look at those hands, Lieutenant.”
They managed to get the rest of the way out of the nebula without incident, though the SIF was down to fifteen percent by the time they made it past the nebula’s edge. Vaughn’s hands were deemed adequately cared for until he could go to the Carthagesickbay, but that trip wasn’t immediately called for, at least.
“Set course back to the Carthage?”Troi asked, preparing to do that very thing.
“No.”
Troi shot his commanding officer—now back in the copilot’s seat—a look. “Sir?”
“I want to test a theory first.”
Vaughn, who now had Starfleet-issue bandages around his hands, and whose brown-and-gray hair was now flying in several directions, lending a comic air belied by the serious tone of voice he always had, leaned forward. “Commander, with all due respect, we need to return to the Carthageimmediately. Captain Haden—and Ambassador Dax—need to be informed. So does Starfleet. We’re going to need reinforcements, and also—”