Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [63]
Troi explained about the subspace weapon, pulling up the data Casciato had forwarded to the command station. Picard absorbed the basics, then turned to Heyes. “Do we have any specifics about their ship?”
“Coming up.” Heyes punched a series of controls and routed the tactical display to the center seat display. To the naked eye, the attacking vessel looked like nothing more than a wedge-shaped chunk of ice. According to sensors, the “ice” was actually some unknown form of ablative armor, thickly layered over what appeared to be a dense tritanium hull.
Picard frowned, then asked, “Weapons?”
“Two systems that we’ve seen: standard disruptors, somewhat more powerful than the Romulan version and the waveform gun.” She shifted the view to the sensor display and showed them a time-lapsed playback of the five seconds when the ship emerged from subspace. The discharge spike of the wavefront was impressive and Picard grunted appreciatively.
“Have they responded to our hails?”
“No, sir,” Troi said. “We’ve tried standard hails in all languages.”
Strange, Picard mused. Who are they? Why are they attacking, and what, if anything, do they have to do with Vaslovik and the missing android? The captain knew that these questions and a score of others racing through his mind would have to wait. His first priority was to neutralize the current threat.
“They’re gone again,” Heyes cried out. “Disappeared into subspace!”
Troi activated the shipwide and announced, “All hands, brace for impact!” Two seconds later, the ship bucked under their feet and the main lighting flickered out. Troi tumbled to the deck, wrenching her wrist while attempting to break her fall. Picard barked, “Phasers and quantum torpedoes, full spread! Fire!” But there was no response from Heyes.
Climbing up off the deck, Troi could make out the tactical station through the smoke and haze, but couldn’t see Heyes. Coughing, she stumbled toward the tactical console and almost tripped over Heyes’s prostrate form. She found the torpedo control interface and fired the spread Picard had ordered, but the phasers were offline.
Troi twisted her hair into a knot and pulled it away from her face, then wiped her hands on her uniform. They were sticky with blood, but whether her own or someone else’s, she didn’t have time to check. “One torpedo hit, Captain, but I can’t judge the level of damage.”
“Prepare for the next pass.”
Troi did as she was ordered and programmed another spread of torpedoes, but half the launcher indicator lights read yellow. She checked her panel and saw that the computer had successfully reinitialized the phaser arrays. They still had teeth.
Seeing that the bridge crew was more or less recovering, Troi took a moment to check on Heyes and was relieved to see that the woman was breathing. Two corpsmen emerged from out of the hazy air and lifted the commander onto a stretcher.
“Status report!” Picard snapped.
“Shields down to thirty percent.” The quantum torpedo board flickered, then reset with new indicators. “Aft torpedo launchers are now offline,” she read, “but main phasers are functional, though firing them would drain our reserves.” The ship rocked again, though not so fiercely as the last two attacks.
“Disruptors?” Picard asked.
“Affirmative,” Troi replied. “Shields are down to twenty-seven percent.”
“Picard to engineering.”
“La Forge here. Sorry about that, Captain. We weren’t ready for them.”
“Let it happen again and you’re fired, Mr. La Forge.”
“Understood, sir. That last one shook us up pretty badly. I’ve got coolant leaks everywhere and we had to eject one of the torpedo launchers. We had a live one in the breach and no firing mechanism.”
“What about secondaries?”
“Ten minutes minimum; more if they keep peppering us with disruptors.” The Enterprise shuddered again. “Like that,” La Forge finished. “Is there anything we can do to keep them off for a few minutes?”
“No promises, Mr. La Forge. Shields are low, so see what you can do there.