Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [156]
“Want to tell me what you’re doing here, crewman?” said B’Elanna Torres, her voice soft and menacing. “Not planning a little solo trip home, are you?”
Lessing’s answer was to bring up his shoulder suddenly, and spin, which sent the phaser flying. As it skittered along the curved crystalline floor, he dropped into a crouch and swung out a leg, hoping to catch her behind the ankles and knock her on her ass.
She was too fast for him. She leaped backward, avoiding the sweep, landing a few meters away.
The phaser lay where it had fallen, midway between them. B’Elanna expected Lessing to make a grab for it but he didn’t.
Instead he vaulted into the air, his powerful legs forcing him out of the range of the grav field that made the wall a floor. He passed through the null space at the center of the room, flipped over, and landed, feet first, on the far side. Beside him was a bit of Moyani machinery that B’Elanna hadn’t seen before. It reminded her, oddly, of food replicators, though on a much larger scale.
As Lessing fretted over the device, B’Elanna scooped up the phaser. She was just about to fire when Lessing slapped his palm onto an access facet and said, “Initiate local surge control.”
She squeezed the trigger but the weapon didn’t discharge. Some sort of energy dampening field had obviously been activated. Grudgingly she allowed that his tactic had been smart, as far as it went. Unfortunately for him, he had not accounted for B’Elanna’s skill with ballistics.
The phaser, having lost none of its velocity to its trip through the zero-g area at the center of the room, smashed into the back of Lessing’s skull even as he worked feverishly over the controls of the alien device. He fell to the floor, stunned, and then she smashed into him as well.
“What is this thing?” she said, wrenching his arm back with one hand and pressing his face to the floor with the other. “What the hell are you doing?”
Whether Lessing meant to answer or not, she never learned. Before he could say a word, facets all over the room began to glow with a faint, almost ethereal light.
“No,” said B’Elanna in a harsh whisper. “No.”
She had no idea what it was Lessing was up to, but she did know that, whatever it was, it was already draining precious ergs from the ship’s power core.
The glow from the facets increased, and inside the nearest ones B’Elanna thought she could just discern the same almost-faces she’d seen in the tunnel, peering out like children with their cheeks pressed to winter glass.
Dismissing them as some trick of the increasing light, she wrenched Lessing to his feet and pressed his face hard into the nearest wall.
She felt a bone crack inside him-his cheek or shoulder, she wasn’t sure-and let him slump to the floor. He’d keep for the few moments it would take to figure out what the hell he was up to.
Lessing groaned some unintelligible warning as she bent over the alien device. At first it was just a mosaic of small facets, similar to the ones that made up the walls and the floor, but soon it resolved itself into something she understood.
It was drawing power from the primary core and using it to construct… something. She could see representational codes for that something combining, resolving themselves into a pattern she felt she should recognize but, as yet, did not.
Not knowing what else to do and terrified that his actions had already bled too much power away, B’Elanna leaned heavily on a control facet and said, “Suspend tool function.”
She wasn’t sure the command would stop the AI from completing whatever it was Lessing had set in motion, but it was all she had.
Almost instantly the glow subsided in the surrounding facets and the strange, mask-like faces seemed to recede once more into the crystal depths.
“Stop,” said Lessing through what sounded like several broken teeth.