Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [172]
“But he’ll thank me when he’s not parboiled,” she muttered, swiping gore from her hands on her uniform trousers. “Maybe Torres will, too.” Though she doubted that.
She keyed the translator. “And you’re sure you can disaggregate long enough for my communications to clear once I get closer to the surface?”
The answer came after a pause as the translator macerated, digested, then spat out something unintelligible into English, short and sweet: Yes.
“What about the engines?”
Too many we are. Too much fire thin.
Translators were crummy with syntax not to mention words. Some species’ language sounded like the maunderings of a blithering idiot: Ugh. Me good, you bad. But she’d parsed it. Too much kinetic energy and you can kiss our asses goodbye. Well, this also explained why the water was so cold. High saline as a lattice, like a framework, and the cold to keep kinetic energy at a minimum. Couldn’t use her engines either way; the dilithium was shot.
In the end, it was an appallingly simple few steps. Get in her suit. Bleed most of her air. (That was hard, watching those bubbles rise, knowing she was committed now.) Extend the shields and make a bubble. Raise the internal temperature and shush up that squawk box of a computer that kept yapping that she was exceeding operational parameters. Yeah, and it’s hot, too. And wait to see if they would move. Or not.
In her mind’s eye, she still saw the lights, though not the ones here-and what you really are, they’ll never believe this report; thank God, I got it all down-but the shimmering lights of her youth when Karl still lived and she was safe…
She gasped as a shudder rippled through the Flyer’s deck, into her feet, up her legs, and into her teeth. The metal might’ve groaned, but the air was so thin she couldn’t tell. But she felt a hesitation, and then a lurch that flung her forward. Her hands shot out to brace herself against the console.
The Flyer began to move.
Kneeling, Janeway white-knuckled the console. It had taken a very long time to crawl to the controls. She’d lost her balance twice, smacked her head against an edge of metal, and nearly lost consciousness right then and there. Struggled back from the brink. Because she had to do this, and it had to be now.
On my terms.
She avoided looking at the eyes now. They had… changed. Not long ago. Become more… interested?
She had trouble making her fingers work. She mis-keyed the commands three times, wasn’t sure she had the right ones. Think, damn you, think! Eight, there were eight commands to bring the forcefield up and take it down. She put her weight into toggling the commands again, slowly. No mistakes, can’t… make… mistakes.
Two steps into her fourth repetition, she remembered Chakotay. She hesitated. Looked over her shoulder. He hadn’t moved. Probably dead. Nothing had changed. But her vision blurred.
Can’t say sorry. And I need… what’s left… in a few minutes… won’t… matter…
She turned away. She put in the third command. Five more. Not so many. The forcefield would fall. The water would claim her. Then, death. Rest, finally. Her fingers dragged over the controls. She was so tired.
She input the fourth command-and that’s when her ears pricked with a faint gabble, like someone over a combadge-and she paused. Voice? She looked around. Saw water. Saw eyes. No voice. Her mind, playing tricks. Dogged, she put in the fifth command….
Dad. Justin. I’m… almost…
The sixth.
Almost…
“No,” Marla said when no one acknowledged her hail, “I know you see them. What I’m asking is: Are they alive?”
They-the Nimtra, as best her translator could make out-took a long time with that one. She waited, sweated, wishing like hell she could scratch her nose. Couldn’t with the helmet, and that just made the itch a hundred times worse. It occurred to her then that beings which had existed as information stored in quantum spin states for millions of years might not really, well, remember what alive was. On the other hand, they understood extinction. When the ice caps had melted, the added heat had caused