Flashback - Diane Carey [52]
Paris let his head rest back against the bulkhead beside his useless helm. "What's that supposed to mean? Is this your fault somehow? Tell me how."
"I'm an engineer. I should be able to come up with alternatives. There just aren't any in a situation this simple. There are only so many twists a system can take. A mechanical problem becomes my fault. That's how it is."
"In Starfleet, you mean?"
"I guess that's what I mean." She sank back in her seat, trying to avoid the ceiling as fumes began to gather up there. She came to life for one more instant and threw the scanner into the bulkhead, then settled back again. "I feel like I've fallen through ice and there are a hundred people standing around the hole, but nobody can get to me."
Rubbing his hastily tied arm wound, Paris pondered. "How much fuel do we have?"
"Not much. I had this shuttle only a quarter fueled because it's volatile and I knew we wouldn't need it on the way back. There's hardly any left."
"Uh-huh . . . okay, no fuel. So what else?"
"Five tanks full of sirillium," she said roughly. "You want to make soup and have a last meal?"
Paris stared at the ceiling above Torres's head. "What if we jettisoned the atmosphere?"
She screwed a nasty look through his sweat-glazed brow. "We'd exhale ourselves to death."
He leaned forward with cramping effort. "No, wait-if we vent the atmosphere out the right ducts and turn the shuttlecraft so we're pretty much facing Voyager, then blow the sirillium out the back end and ignite it-"
"So we blow off the back end of the sh-" Torres felt as if her brain were exploding, and she stood up
so sharply that she thrust her head into the growing cloud of pink poison. "We'd shoot straight out to them! It could work! I thought I'd thought of everything!"
"I thought you had too. Luckily, you have me."
"It'll blow out the back end." She thought aloud, trying to keep her breathing shallow. "Probably buckle the plates . . . and the impact'll probably kill us ... but it'll punch us forward, if we can hold our heading with momentum from the vented atmosphere to rotate us in the right direction. I like this. It'll take me a few minutes to weld the aft plates shut so we'll have a sliver of a chance of surviving-"
Paris nodded. "Ah, optimism."
"You get the vents ready. Can you?"
"I'll try. I mean, of course I can."
She paused and peered out the forward port, though she could see nothing there but flashing sirillium and other chemicals going wild with the phaser reaction. "Maybe we should inform Chakotay."
"Hmmm . . . that's a tough one. We should at least try, shouldn't we?"
"Fine." She leaned forward and keyed the comm system. "Voyager, this is Torres. We've got an idea."
She waited for a response, but none came.
"Try another channel," Paris suggested.
"I know." She did, but still nothing came through the static that remotely sounded like a voice. "Communications are down. I can't get through."
"So . . . what do we do?"
"We ignite the tanks and hope Voyager's sensors
are on-line without interference and they can pick us up. Otherwise we'll spin off into the other side of the nebula and they'll never find us in time. Not that it matters. When we blow the sirillium, the impact'll probably kill us anyway."
With effort, Paris turned and wagged a finger. "You said 'probably.'"
"That's what I said." Favoring a knee she suddenly realized was very sore and twitching, Torres limped to the amidships starboard bosun's locker and dug around for what should have been standard equipment-a relatively simple phaser torch used for mending gashes in the inner bulkheads and struts.
"I'll weld the cargo bay shut," she told him, realizing