Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [153]
“Net it down, Lieutenant,” said Janeway grimly. “I’d like to get another hour of sleep if possible.”
“If I’m right,” said B’Elanna, “a single firing should get us to within six-hundred light-years of Federation space.”
“And all you have to do is reconfigure Voyager’s shields to resonate with the Moyani drive’s energy field?”
“Yes, Captain,” said B’Elanna. “That’s all.”
“All” turned out to be a complex balancing of several factors. The Moyani systems had to be programmed to project the subspace field around Voyager rather than itself.
Voyager’s own deflectors and warp systems had to be recalibrated to accept the influx of gravitons and other esoteric particles that made up the Moyani carrier field. This was delicate, painstaking work. If only a single line of code was miswritten it would spell disaster for them all.
B’Elanna assigned these duties to teams led by Seven of Nine and Maddie Synge, respectively, limiting her own involvement to that of occasional supervisor.
The job she set herself was the design and construction of Voyager’s version of the Moyani field resonators. She might not be able to cannibalize the devices, but she sure as hell could build her own.
She became like a ghost to her crewmates, appearing briefly to check progress or give corrections, only to vanish again into one of the workspaces she’d set aside on either ship. She logged so much time in the transporter that she’d begun to feel a bit unreal herself, as if incorporeality were her natural state and solidity only some sort of weird dream.
The only others B’Elanna saw with any real regularity were Noah Lessing’s life sciences team. They too seemed to be spending excessive amounts of time aboard the Moyani ship.
She was unhappy about Lessing’s presence there. The Equinox survivors really shouldn’t be allowed access to any alien tech, in her opinion, but as long as his team confined themselves to their biological surveys, there wasn’t much mischief for him to get up to.
She completed her final scan of the Moyani resonator and compared it with the schematic of the ones she’d built for Voyager.
Seven’s team had been waiting for the upload order for hours. Maddie Synge had reported that the recalibrated systems were “good to go” only moments before.
B’Elanna’s tricorder display was all green bars, indicating that her homemade resonators had checked out. As soon as they were positioned, Voyager would be only one last step away from home.
“Janeway to Torres,” said the captain’s voice.
Irritated, B’Elanna dropped the hyperspanner and wiped a layer of sweat from her brow.
“With all due respect, Captain,” she said. “This would go faster without all these interruptions.”
“We’ve hit a snag, Lieutenant,” said Janeway.
“A snag?” said B’Elanna, already getting hot. “What the hell kind of- ?”
“Briefing room. Ten minutes,” said the captain, cutting her off. “Janeway out.”
“What do you mean, it’s alive?”
Having suffered through the engineer’s first attack, the Doctor deferred to Noah Lessing to reiterate the unhappy news.
“The Moyani vessel is organic,” said Lessing.
“It’s made of sprocking clay!” said B’Elanna. It had taken her four hours to position the resonators and two more to get them in sync. She was in no mood for more roadblocks or for Lessing.
“To an engineer,” he said. Gods, how she hated him in that moment. “To a biologist, it’s clear. The material is made of billions of individual woven strands of something analogous to DNA.”
B’Elanna listened, aghast, as Lessing laid out the many discoveries of the life sciences team.
While the Moyani construct was a vessel, it was not, strictly speaking, a ship. The interconnectivity of its devices was not unlike that found between the organs in a living being.
“Remove a lung,” said Lessing, “you hurt the heart. Damage the heart, you hurt the brain.”
The crust that had covered the thing was not a random accumulation of interstellar dust,