Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [161]
Still, they must have some power. Shields, for example. Without them, the Flyer’s hull would’ve crumbled like an old eggshell. So maybe she could nudge a little more and get them moving…. Crawling, she negotiated the length of the cabin, the ramp-and then she found a hand attached to an arm and smelled wet rust. Paris, slumped over his controls.
Patting around with her hands, she activated the lights, took a look. Her breath hissed between her teeth. A thick, bright red sheen slicked Paris’s left cheek and jaw and puddled along the command console. A scalp wound and much worse than hers, and she knew from past experience on Equinox that scalp wounds bled like stink. She checked for his pulse, found one-thready and fast.
Okay, okay; stay calm, or you’re both dead.
She carefully eased Paris to the floor, fumbled out an emergency medical kit and checked him over. She wasn’t a doctor, but she’d picked up a couple of things from the Equinox’s EMH. So she knew in fairly short order that Paris would live but had a very bad laceration, a hairline fracture below that and a nasty concussion. No subdural or epidural hematoma that she could see. A relief; either would’ve killed him for sure. She stopped the bleeding with pressure, bandaged him, and then turned her attention to the Flyer.
At first glance, the vessel wasn’t so badly off. After she’d smeared away Paris’s blood, the console showed they had power, certainly enough for communications, environmental controls, and shields-even the transporter, only there was nowhere to go.
The bad news was the engines. The computer kept coming back with that faintly apologetic unable to comply that always made Marla want to slap the thing silly. (Any moron could’ve figured out that if nothing happened, then the thing’s busted, you stupid machine.) The information made her do a double take, though. The Flyer’s dilithium matrix read virtually no activity on a subatomic level, and dielectric polarization and molecular charge fluctuating simultaneously, like the dilithium’s temp approached absolute zero. No activity, no engines.
Huh. Weird. Well, maybe Voyager might have a suggestion. They sure weren’t going anywhere fast. She opened a channel, and that’s when she got another piece of bad news: dead air. Just sizzle, sputter, pop. Crackle.
Seven did say these columns were sensor-opaque. Yet they’d been in contact. She’d heard Paris talking to Voyager right before she started her sensor sweeps. She remembered because she told Paris to let them know that they needed to concentrate their remodulated multiphasic sensor arrays in sweeps of the same area, the rationale being that two sets of eyes were better than one-especially when looking for a tiny submersible in about twenty-eight cubic kilometers of water. So they’d had communications. They and she had activated sensors…
And then I saw something on the sensors, something moving, gathering itself, like a cloud and then the Flyer bucked, and we went out of control….
Something outside the Flyer. Not an animal, or plant, or anything… living. Her lips went numb. Just… something.
So she did the only thing left she hadn’t tried. Two things, actually: She activated an automatic distress signal and decided to have a look around. See if the something was still there. Her remodulated sensors worked fine; the computer hummed right along and the sound was comforting.
She saw something on the second sweep. She blinked once, twice, not sure. Nothing really coming so much as something intrinsic that was, well, gathering; pulling together. Twenty meters away, and all around. Above, to the side. Below. Closing.
Oh, God, like a cloud! What is that? Marla reared back as if she’d touched a hot phaser. Her head snapped up; her frantic eyes scoured the water outside the viewport; and then she gave a small, inarticulate cry.
Because the lights were there.
Fifteen hours earlier…
Marla’s grandmother had been a native-born Texan. Had the drawl, had the attitude, been older than dirt, and had tongue enough for ten rows of teeth. She was