Pattern enhancers,she thought. She raced into the shuttle’s rear compartment and pulled open the compartment doors in the port bulkhead. Several environmental suits sat within, all intact. Prynn took out two of the full-body suits, along with a pair of helmets. She could use an old test pilot’s trick, she had realized, and reconfigure the suits to function as pattern enhancers. That might increase the transporter range significantly.
Prynn spent an hour working on the suits, another idea occurring to her as she did so. She had not quite completed the task she had set herself, though, before exhaustion took firm hold of her. Reluctant to stop, but knowing that she would accomplish nothing by pushing herself too far beyond her limits, she headed back to the encampment. She considered using a stimulant from the medkit, but decided that the best thing would be to get a few hours’ sleep and then resume her work.
As she walked, Prynn swung the beacon out along her path in wide arcs. There really was little need to light her way, she reflected, considering that the ground here lay so completely flat and featureless. She wondered about the land that Vaughn’s journey had taken him across, and about how far he had gotten.
Vaughn.To Prynn’s aggravation, her thoughts had come back again and again to her father today, and not just with respect to the mission here. Her mind had continued conjuring up the image of him walking away from the camp yesterday, which in turn had inexplicably engendered feelings of abandonment in her. It made no sense. Vaughn’s attempt to reach the source of the pulse on foot had been the proper command decision, and leaving her behind to work on the transporter and to tend to Shar had also been right. And still, she could not seem to reel in her thoughts and emotions. In her mind’s eye, she repeatedly saw him deserting the camp.
Notdeserting, she chastised herself. Departing.She found it strange and disconcerting that she should be fixated on something that she did not even believe to be true. But then, the pulse, this planet, the crew’s experiences here—all of it had been nothing if not strange and disconcerting.
A memory from earlier today occurred to Prynn. While she had been working on the transporter, she had vividly recalled lying wounded on Defiant’s bridge, back during the attack by the Jarada. Except that she could not have recalled such a thing; the explosion and the extent of her injuries had knocked her unconscious, and Dr. Bashir had explained to her how it would have been impossible for her brain to imprint and retain memories of the event. And yet today, she had remembered lying on her back beside the captain’s chair, and remembered somebody touching her shoulder and midsection. That person would have been Dr. Bashir, of course, who had treated her on the bridge—except that she kept feeling somehow that it had been Vaughn there, and not the doctor. And the sense she had gotten from Vaughn had been one of intense guilt and sadness, and the memory—or daydream, whichever it had been—had left her temporarily feeling sorry for her father.
Prynn passed the shuttle’s forward section and headed for the camp. She slowed her pace, trying to be quiet so that she would not wake Shar. He had come to this afternoon, and had been sheepish and apologetic for his outburst this morning. She had waved the incident away, then checked his injuries and provided him what little care she could. He had at least been able to eat and drink, which she hoped would allow him to retain whatever strength he had right now.
Prynn put down the beacon, stripped off her jacket, and flopped down onto her bedroll. Fatigue affected her both physically—she had spent a lot of effort digging through the shuttle wreckage—and mentally—the reconstitution of a working transporter had been far from a trivial matter. And she also supposed that she had been taxed emotionally, with the—
“Prynn?” Shar’s voice sounded very small in the night.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you?”
“No…well, yes, actually,” he said. “I’ve been lying here falling in and out of sleep, thinking and dreaming.” Shar’s voice, though low, sounded fairly strong. Prynn squinted through the darkness in his direction. She had not yet extinguished her beacon, and he was just visible in the fringes of its illumination. He lay on his back, his head turned toward her, and though she could not tell anything about his complexion in the dimness, he eyes appeared more alive than she had seen them in the last day and a half.
She reached over to where she had set the beacon down. “I’m going to turn the light out,” she warned Shar.
“Would you leave it on?” he asked. “For a few minutes?”
“Oh,” she said, surprised at the request. “Sure.” She pulled a blanket over her body.
“Did you have any success with the transporter?” Shar asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I actually got it working, but because of the interference from the energy, the range is limited.” She told him the distances to which she had successfully been able to beam objects. “I’ve started to reconfigure the environmental suits as pattern enhancers in order to address that,” she continued. “It should help, but I’m not sure how much.”
“You’re trying to use the environmental suits as pattern enhancers?” Shar asked. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“It’s not a common practice outside of flight testing,” she explained. “I also have another idea. I’ll need your help with it, though.”
“What do you want me to do?” Shar said.
“The primary power cell for the shuttle’s internal systems was destroyed,” she said. “The backup’s intact, but it’s not working, either. Fortunately, the secondary backup is working, and that’s what I’m currently using to power the transporter.”
“All right,” Shar said.
“If we can get the primary backup cell to function,” she went on, “then I think I might be able to construct another working transporter out of what’s left of the primary, its backups, and the environmental suits.”
“If one transporter won’t help us,” Shar asked, “then what good will a second one be?”
“We can beam ourselves and the second transporter and power cell,” she explained, “and then use the second system to beam the first one to our new location. Then we can keep doing that, sort of skipping across the planet until we reach the far side, where there are breaks in the cloud cover.”
Shar seemed to think about that for a moment—Prynn wondered whether he might have drifted back to sleep—and then he said, “That could work.” Even though his voice remained quiet, Prynn thought she heard some excitement in it.
“I think so too,” she said. “But the problem is that primary backup cell. I can fix it, but it’s going to take me a while to finish modifying the suits and piecing together a second transporter. I won’t have time.”
“I can do that,” Shar said. “If you tell me how to reconfigure the environmental suits, I can help with that too.”
“Good,” she said. “We’ll start on it first thing in the morning.”
Shar said nothing more, and the silence of this empty world pushed in on them. After a few minutes, Prynn reached out from beneath her blanket and switched off the beacon. The darkness descended at once, nearly suffocating in its completeness. Prynn closed her eyes, anxious for sleep to welcome her into its fold. To her surprise, though, she was still awake fifteen minutes later when Shar spoke.
“I wonder how Commander Vaughn is doing,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Prynn responded, and she heard a coldness in her voice she had not intended. “I don’t know,” she said again, holding her tone level.
“Whatever happened between you and your father,” Shar said, “I’m sorry. I know what it’s like to be at odds with a parent.”
Prynn laughed, a loud, ugly sound that she regretted at once. It seemed as though the tension of their circumstances had caused her to lose the full control of her emotions. “I’m sorry, Shar,” she said. “I didn’t really mean to laugh.”