Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [47]
“Captain,” Worf said, breaking the concentration, “MacDougal reports we now have sufficient power for shields, but not stardrive and not much for weapons. She estimates just a few minutes for those.”
Picard nodded without looking.
“I think it’s working, sir,” Riker told him, his voice so low that it hurt his throat. He mentally ticked off the distance between stardrive and the saucer, and the time needed until the saucer section could be considered safe. “Good thinking, Captain.”
“Sir!” Tasha rasped, sudden horror in her voice. “It’s-“
“I see it. Full about. Power up the shields! Get that damned thing’s attention!”
“Powering up,” Tasha said instantly. “Battle shields at full.”
No matter how careful the plan, no matter the amount of hardware, the high-tech physics, the level of mathematics and detailed analysis-no matter any of that, mankind had never been able to second-guess, sideswipe, or overcome plain old bad luck. Who could know how long the thing had been roaming the galaxy, doing what it was doing today? There was no way to know what habits it had developed, what preferences, what impulses it had learned to follow. And who could know what it spotted?
A glint of light off the saucer’s hull … a tiny leak of subatomic particles from the impulse fusion reactor … a high-frequency output from maintenance? These were things that would be completely ignored in the daily running of a starship. But somehow, something told the menace that this was the likeliest source of dinner. Its bug brain got stuck on the idea of that target instead of this one, and so it turned on the saucer.
Picard spun to Worf. “Anything?”
“No change, sir,” the Klingon said clearly and fiercely. “We’re putting out twenty times the energy being emitted from the saucer section right now, but it doesn’t seem impressed.”
“Make a tight pass. We’ve got to draw it off.”
Geordi LaForge fought to keep his hands from shaking on the controls at the idea of sweeping by that mass of ugly. What he saw with his enhanced vision was so vicious a knot of power that he avoided looking at the screen. He would fly on instruments; he would do as ordered. He would push the ship past that nightmare and swing around it on the end of an invisible rope.
Too bad this ship didn’t have a chicken switch.
The ship swung through space, doubling back toward the crackling energy field of its enemy. Now the saucer section was dominant in the viewscreen, and between them and it. A wall of blinding, snapping electrical tongues, a terrible prism to look through.
LaForge increased speed without being told. He knew what he had to do. Give that firecracker a taste of raw antimatter.
For one self-indulgent moment, he looked toward Data. The android was deceptively impassive, a human form wrapped in infrared, a man-figure of hot and cool places, all moving inside a glow. As nothing mechanical could, Data felt the gaze and returned it. He responded only with a significant lifting of his straight brows. Together, at least. Like soldiers should die if they must die at all.
Behind them, Riker held the helm chair more tightly than he meant to. Now the screen before them was ablaze with the closeness. If luck went with them, they’d be in big trouble damned soon. A spear of anger pierced him when he saw the saucer section’s impulse drive come back on. Argyle knew it was following them now, and that they were too hopelessly slow to get away. Even so, like a turtle trying to get off a road in the middle of traffic, the big disk kept surging forward on full sublight. Frustration bent its ugly face over him. He wished Picard had insisted one of them stay. All at once the saucer section needed a real command and not just