Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [171]
She opened her eyes and stared out the Flyer’s viewport. “Because there were lights.”
She was really feeling the carbon dioxide now. Janeway worked hard, taking big gulps like a hooked fish suffocating on a dock. Her lungs weren’t just burning. They were on fire. She was so dizzy, the room whirled like a drunken top. A bright, keen edge of pain knifed the space between her eyes all the way down her skull, pulping her brain, and her pulse was going double-quick, her heart banging against her caging ribs, trying to move oxygen to her shrieking cells.
Not much time. Exhausted, she let her head loll against a bulkhead. Sweat pearled her face, trickled rivulets down her back. She was drenched through. She thought about checking for Chakotay’s pulse and then decided she didn’t want to know. Didn’t matter.
Because it’s hopeless. They’ll never find us….
Hopeless. Not a word in her lexicon; regulations, the only language she knew-until, maybe, now when regulations were pointless. She wanted to laugh but managed only a tortured wheeze that racked her bones.
Her eyes rolled to the water. Still there. That black. Those eyes. Someone? She tried to remember, but it hurt to think. Her mind wouldn’t work. No air. Thoughts came dull and slow, with effort.
The water. Her father, his eyes… the way he’d looked when they’d pulled his body from the icy water: bloated, blue with cyanosis. Hair streaming like seaweed.
But she’d seen him again. Not just in her dreams. Long after, on Voyager when the shuttle crashed and she died… and what she’d told it, the alien who wanted her: I’m not ready.
“But…” She stopped, reeled in another breath then marshaled all her will and every ounce of her energy because each word used up that much more air. But she had to say it. She had to hear these words because she knew, suddenly, what she would do; what she’d staved off all these years. It had followed her in her depressions, her dreams and now there it was, just beyond the forcefield: the water that waited on her. So patient. So cold. So final.
Where I belong. Where I should have gone before.
“I’m… ready,” she said. She spoke to the water. “You win.”
It was one of those no-win situations, the kind they liked at the Academy. Only they kept expecting space and knowing what you were dealing with. Her teachers would never, ever have foreseen this.
Her eyes flicked over the Flyer, beyond the ramp and twin consoles and all the way to the transporter bay. If her calculations were on the button, the entire Flyer contained almost fourteen hundred cubic meters of air plus reserve in tanks. If she was going to get the Flyer off the bottom without hurting anybody, she had to get the thing a lot lighter and reduce its resistance to the medium-in this case, the water. (Or reduce the medium’s resistance. She could do that; she had phasers. Heat the water, reduce the density. But she couldn’t. It would be Equinox all over again.) Couple two, three ways to play it: say, transport out seats and consoles for starters. The problem was Paris had put all that stuff in here for a reason. She couldn’t see that chucking it would do diddly.
Or she could make a balloon. Their air was pressurized. Their air was heavy-just like compressed air in a tank. How to make that work for her: evacuate most of the air. Not all. Just enough. Then heat it. The remaining air would get lighter; less mass per square meter. But she’d have to correct for convective loss. Couldn’t heat the water the same way she couldn’t phaser it to death. So, extend the shields, contain the heat.
A piece of luck-finally: they had three environmental suits, and they all worked. Getting Paris into a suit had taken some work. He was heavy, and he’d started bleeding again.