Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [41]
“If you mean do I see the pattern closing in,” Worf said with ominous certainty, “yes. Our odds are dropping with every minute we wait to take action. They won’t get better. They’ll just get worse. The cage is tightening.”
Tasha struck off a few steps of useless pacing, a pitiful echo of the huge cage that was closing around the ship. “What if that thing gets an adrenaline surge or something and bites down harder than it did before? Even if we get shields up to power, we might not be able to take it. At least, not like we are now. Not with shields taxed to protect the whole ship, I mean.”
Worf’s large brown face pivoted up from the small monitor he’d been glaring at. From beneath his Klinzhai skull and the two downturned lances of his eyebrows, his eyes bored through her. “You’re not going to suggest-“
She chewed her lip for a few beats, but her eyes showed none of the vacillation she felt. She shifted from one foot to the other, then, as if braced, to both feet. At her sides, small fists knotted.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “Oh, yes I am.”
“Do you have the slightest perception of the danger of your proposal, Lieutenant Yar?”
Tasha took refuge in standing at attention as Picard paced around her. Around them the glockenspiel of bridge noise provided little respite. She drew in a long breath and tried not to feel too small as she stood beside Worf. It took all her restraint to keep from snatching a fortifying glance at the Klingon before she could begin.
“Yes, sir. I do. But I feel it’s-” She stopped, gulping back her voice, as Picard suddenly turned and coiled his lariat of dare around her. She couldn’t talk while he was glowering at her like that.
“Let’s hear it,” he snapped, as though he didn’t know what her problem was at all.
She refused to flinch, but her stomach shrank anyway. “Yes, sir. We’ve-that is, I’ve been calculating-“
“Never mind the blasted calculations and give me the bottom line.”
“As the ship is, I put our odds for escape at less than fifty percent and shrinking. I’ve made an analysis of the last attack and it looks like the thing attacked only the high-energy portions of the ship. The warp engine chambers, the high-gain condensers on the weaponry, the sensors, and the shields.”
“Your point, please?”
“Um … is that the saucer section by itself may not attract the thing’s attention.”
Picard’s glare was molasses, but somewhere in it Tasha was sure she saw a tiny flicker of hope that she could walk away with her head and at least one arm.
“Separate the ship’s hulls?” he murmured.
“That’s … my suggestion, Captain.”
“Realizing, of course, that would leave the saucer section with only rudimentary shielding and no appreciable weaponry if the stardrive section were to be destroyed. You do add that into your equation, do you not, Lieutenant?”
Tasha actually broke attention and turned toward him. “The saucer section’s chances of sneaking away on very low impulse power go up to almost ninety percent, sir, especially if we run some power through the stardrive section and distract the thing.”
“Not counting any unknown variables.”
She backed into attention again and focused her eyes on the bulkhead over the main viewer. “Correct, sir. But also, if stardrive doesn’t have to put out a shield envelope around the entire saucer section too, we’ll be able to pump more power into our shields and maybe withstand another attack. Long enough to fight it, I mean, sir.”
Picard also turned, but to eye the glowing, pulsing, fuming, flat wall of electrokinetic power that searched for them in the upper range of the screen. “And stardrive’s chances of escape in your scenario?”
Tasha now took that glance from Worf, and held it like a lifeline. “Less … than eighteen percent, sir.”
Jean-Luc Picard circled his two personal hotheads, came around behind them, saw their shoulders twitch, one set narrow and braced by the gold tabard, the other set broad and tall, making a field of