Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [145]
Something about it was generating the wild and dangerous subspace oscillations that had plagued Voyager since entering this region.
“Why can’t we just blow it up?” said B’Elanna, almost immediately. “I can have antimatter charges ready in an hour.”
The captain had other ideas. There was considerably more to the object than met the eye. Though their accuracy was blunted by the thing’s makeup, some of the scans seemed to indicate geometries hidden under its outer layer that could only be the result of sentient construction.
“You want us to crack it open,” said Chakotay.
“Well,” Janeway said with a wry smile, “it does look a bit like a pinata.”
A ten-person away team seemed apropos, with B’Elanna as the leader. The subspace issues made beaming too dangerous, so the team packed into their EVA suits and then into the two shuttles that would get them there in safety.
B’Elanna would have liked to pick her own team, but she had to admit that the captain’s choices were first-rate.
Seven of Nine and the Doctor were obvious selections, as was Lieutenant Farley, whose coolness under pressure and knack for decrypting alien code hierarchies made him a staple on any tech-centered mission.
The others on Janeway’s list were a little surprising. This wasn’t so much for their presence but for the fact that Janeway’s selection of them indicated an intimacy with the crew’s capabilities that B’Elanna would never have thought her captain possessed.
Jenny Delaney and her twin, Megan, while technically stellar cartographers, had both won highest marks in both xenogeology and minerology at the Academy.
Ensign Black, a woman whose uncommunicative demeanor belied a quick wit and a razor-sharp mind, had grown up on the Hay-Pygram asteroid mining concern, making her well used to the kind of excavation this detail might require.
Crewman Browder, a jolly, inquisitive junior-grade engineer, was responsible for some inspired work in reconfiguring alien tech to work smoothly in concert with Voyager’s own.
Lieutenants Hardy, Cobb, and Edgely were all seasoned, first-class engineers, nearly on par with B’Elanna herself, but it was their off-duty activities that put them on Janeway’s list. Apparently they were all avid climbers and spelunkers, having each clocked scores of holodeck hours fighting to the top of some impossible summit or piercing the depths of an impenetrable cavern.
Nice work, thought B’Elanna, grudgingly. Left to her own devices she probably would have chosen all these people herself. All but one.
“Noah Lessing is a top-level xenobiologist,” Janeway said when B’Elanna protested his inclusion. “The Doctor requested him specifically.”
“You don’t think there’s somebody alive over there, do you?” said B’Elanna. “That thing’s a hundred thousand years old.”
“Lessing’s going, Lieutenant,” Janeway said in a tone modulated to let B’Elanna know that the conversation was already over. “Do I have to say it’s an order?”
“No, ma’am,” said the engineer. “No, you don’t.”
“I think it looks like a reetl fish,” said Ensign Farley as the shuttle wheeled through the final stage of its journey toward the alien artifact.
A soft-spoken man with a slight Texan drawl, Farley had spent time in life sciences before transferring to engineering. He often likened complex alien structures to some familiar animal or another.
“Touching down,” said B’Elanna. “Let’s get those helmets locked on.”
“I’d say there’s more resemblance to the spoon whales of Betazed,” chimed the Doctor as he moved from person to person, double-checking suit seals and chemical mixes on the respiration tanks. “That sloping curve at the front is the giveaway.”
“It’s a roadblock,” said B’Elanna as she reached for her own helmet. The computer could handle the landing on its own. “The sooner we get it out of the way, the sooner we can move on.”
She had the team spread out in a loose grid pattern to save time in searching