Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [143]
Practical translation: If you see it coming, you’re already dead.
A series of unfamiliar symbols rolled across the screen, drawing her eyes away from the warp core. There was a discrepancy in the plasma flow regulation protocols, the ones controlling the matter-antimatter mix.
What in the world?
No wonder Maddie hadn’t been able to nail it down. The alteration was in the base system code, not in the subroutines specifically related to the warp core.
The rest of the room and the people in it fell away as B’Elanna dropped into that same tunnel of adrenal slow-time that had served her ancestors so well in battle.
The altered code changed the computer’s ability to discern certain ratios and relationships. The bad news was that, though she could discern where the modifications had been made, she had no time to input the necessary corrections. Even under the best conditions that would take hours.
If Maddie’s estimate was correct, and hers usually were, B’Elanna had a few minutes, at most, to put things right. She tried to shift control function to auxcon, forgetting for a moment that all of Voyager’s systems were on semi-isolated grids until the subspace variances could be blocked out.
She could write a patch that would reinstate the connections necessary to implement the shift, but not quickly. In the meantime the damned machines were still telling themselves that everything was peachy when her eyes could see they weren’t. There had to be some way to make a quick switch even under these conditions, but what?
“Fry it,” she said softly as the idea came to her.
“Lieutenant?”
She ordered them to strip the protective plates from all the consoles and selected portions of the deck. As they got to it, B’Elanna began tapping in the codes that would fool the computer into thinking a massive rad leak had occurred.
Her chronometer told her that she was down to twenty-five seconds.
“Out! Everybody!” she bellowed. “Now!”
Her people flashed past her in a silent blur of gold and scarlet and black. B’Elanna barely noticed. There was one more thing she had to do. Someone was responsible for this and she wasn’t leaving before she found out who.
She burned five seconds digging, probing deeper until—
When the information finally appeared, she was more surprised than she would have expected.
Plumes of silver gas began to flood the chamber. An eruption of light and sound on her left told her the consoles had begun to short.
“Initiating system transfer,” said the computer. Then, immediately, “Transfer complete.”
B’Elanna dived through the exit even as the silver gas inspired crystals to grow in her lungs and the massive containment doors slammed shut.
Safely outside, she collapsed into a fit of violent coughs as her body purged itself of the gas.
“Computer- ” she rasped between jags. “Report warp-core status.”
Engineering function had successfully been transferred to auxiliary control. The plasma mix rate was already dropping to normal levels. Voyager was out of danger.
All that was left was to apprehend the saboteur. She could almost see Tassoni’s face as he was hauled to the brig.
The turbolift gave out three decks shy of the bridge, obliging B’Elanna to find an access ladder and climb. The lifts were already on her list of Things to Fix but, as their glitches forced only occasional brief stops, they were near the bottom.
She had more on her mind than that anyway. Angelo Tassoni was one of five people aboard Voyager whose throats B’Elanna had to remind herself daily not to cut.
She remembered how she’d begged Captain Janeway not to bring him and his cohorts aboard. Her argument had been fairly straightforward.
“They tried to kill us,” she had said.
In fact Tassoni and the rest of the crew of the U.S.S. Equinox had done a damn sight more than try. They’d come closer to ending Voyager’s journey back to the Alpha Quadrant than anyone short of the Borg.
“We should maroon them somewhere, at least,” B’Elanna had said when Captain Janeway refused her first request.