Collective Hindsight (Book 1) - Aaron Rosenberg [15]
“You have capped the release?”
“Affirmative.” Fabian checked the displays again, just to be sure. “It won’t vent enough to destabilize the sun.” Part of him wondered why the original crew hadn’t done the same thing—they could have limited the vent’s capacity and bled off a little energy at a time. But maybe they hadn’t thought of it, or hadn’t had the time to let it vent in stages.
“Good work, Stevens. Report to the engine room to assist Duffy and Blue.”
“Roger that.” Fabian clambered to the nearest airlock and swung himself back inside. Then he shucked off his space suit and trotted down the hallway to where Pattie and Kieran were moving among the racks of collectors.
“Hey, need a hand?”
Kieran glanced up and grinned. “Back from your walk already? Sure, pick up a tool. We’ve got most of it running, actually—this ship really was built to with-stand just this sort of radiation, so most of the important stuff wasn’t too badly damaged. A few bypasses and some new components and the engine’s back online.”
“Great. Well, I’ve got the guns working, such as they are.”
“The shields are up, too,” Kieran admitted, then shook his head. “Sad, really. Here’s this great ship, built without any need for attack or defense. And we come along and, in less than an hour, turn it into a warship.” It was true—the shields had also been modifications from the ship’s original design, taking smaller vents all along the exterior and syncing them together to provide a cohesive bubble of protective fire. The little vents had actually been designed to function as smaller thrusters, for fine-tuning the ship’s movement.
Fabian shrugged. “It’s a shame we have to do that to this baby, sure. And that we can so easily turn anything into a weapon. But better that than let the Cardassians do it. And definitely better than letting them hurt us, or the people on that outpost.”
They worked silently for a few minutes, each of them going over an area of the engine room before moving to the next location. Finally, they met back near the central column.
“And here we come to the heart of the matter,” Kieran muttered, and Fabian smacked him lightly on the shoulder. Even with Cardassians heading their way there was no call for a joke that bad. “Sorry. But it is.” Kieran showed him and Pattie his padd. “Do you see what I see?”
Pattie nodded. “Definitely.” She hit her communicator. “Commander, we have a problem.”
“It’s the engine, sir, she’s gonna blow!”
Salek, having joined the team in the engine room, ignored Duffy’s passable impersonation of Captain Scott and studied the tricorder instead. “Yes, I see.” Then he spoke into his own communicator. “Captain, the team’s estimates are correct. This ship is powering back up, and will reach danger levels again in approximately two-point-four hours. We had failed to realize that the exterior collection array was still active, and that Randall V’s sun produces an unusually high amount of energy due to its own instabilities.”
“So you’re saying we have less than three hours before we’ve got the same problem that killed its first crew?”
“Affirmative, sir.” Salek closed his eyes to concentrate. Two-point-four hours there, point-four hours until the Cardassians arrived, plus volume squared…yes, it would work. He opened his eyes and stood, tapping several new commands into the padd before returning it to Duffy.
“Captain, I have formulated a plan. Blue, you will disconnect the collector array immediately. Stevens, you will assist her; 110 and 111, you will return to the da Vinci and stand by the communications systems. Once the Cardassian vessel is in range, record their communications and decode their ship’s identification signal. Duffy, you will accompany them. I have sent a series of commands into your tricorder, which