Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [62]
Without her shields to minimize the blows, the Stargazer was at the mercy of the vortices. She absorbed impact after impact, her lights flickering, her bulkheads keening as if in agony.
“Hull breaches on decks five, six, and seven!” Paxton announced. “Also, on decks ten and eleven!”
“Damage control teams!” Ben Zoma commanded.
There would be more breaches, Picard knew. Many more, if they lingered much longer in this confusion of colossal forces.
Get us out of here, he instructed Idun silently.
But the vortices seemed to have other ideas. They battered the ship’s naked hull with assault after magnetic assault, as if they knew this would be their last chance to destroy the intruder.
And it seemed to Picard that it was just that. Never mind the damage they were taking—the ribbon of red had claimed nearly a third of the viewscreen and was claiming more with each passing second.
“Breaches on fourteen, fifteen, sixteen . . . !”
Suddenly, the lights went out and the captain felt the ship wrenched back and forth, shaken like helpless prey in the jaws of some titanic predator. He clung to his seat and watched the zagging image on the viewscreen, hoping Idun could straighten them out somehow.
Then, just as suddenly as the shaking had begun, it stopped. The lights came back on. And the viewscreen showed Picard a path all but free of the vortices.
He felt a single, small tremor, a final sickening reminder of what they had been through. But after that they were home free, sailing into the region of scarlet mist as calmly and effortlessly as if the vortex belt had never existed.
The captain drew a deep breath. Then he turned to his comm officer and said, “Casualties?”
“Nothing serious, sir,” Paxton told him, relaying the latest information he had received from sickbay. “But there are hull breaches on eleven different decks.”
“And we are defenseless,” Gerda added, “until we can restore power to the shields.”
“That too,” said Paxton.
Picard nodded. They had taken a beating, one from which they would need time and considerable effort to recover. And somewhere beyond this placid sea of blood-red mists waited the White Wolf, who knew this system a good deal better than they did and might have come through the vortices a lot better fortified.
But they had made it through. They were alive. And for the moment, Picard reflected, that was all that mattered.
Ensign Jiterica got the news along with the rest of Lieutenant Valderrama’s science section.
The ship had made it through the vortex belt. They had negotiated the system’s second major obstacle without irreparable damage to the ship. It was a significant achievement, a tribute to the expertise of Chief Simenon and his engineers.
What’s more, everyone in the science section seemed to agree with her. They were laughing and patting one another on the back. Expressing jubilation, the ensign observed.
Jiterica was capable of jubilation as well, maybe even more so than her colleagues were. But she wasn’t jubilant at the moment. She was too intent on something that had begun to nag at her a moment earlier, something that lay just under the surface of her consciousness.
An idea. Or at least the beginnings of one.
Jiterica tapped out a command on her keyboard, and the image on her monitor changed, showing her a spectrographic analysis of the wildly churning gases surrounding the Stargazer. It was a different environment than the one that existed on her homeworld, but still . . .
The ensign tapped out another command and brought up a second analysis. It was encouraging enough for her to bring up a third analysis, and then a fourth.
It was still a raw notion, of course. Jiterica would have to examine it further to see if it held any real promise, and that might take a good deal of time. On the other hand, given the simplicity of her assignment here in the science section, time was something she seemed to possess in great abundance.
Chapter Eighteen
Captain’s log, supplemental.
Having completed