Intellivore - Diane Duane [68]
A line of light shot up, just missing her.
“There we go,” said Ileen. “Jean-Luc was right: it wouldn’t bother shooting until its brain tricks weren’t effective. Target that source. They’re shooting wide—they don’t see Enterprise! I don’t know how long this is going to last; let’s take advantage. Photon torpedoes and all phasers, at your discretion. Fire!”
Marignano dived in behind Enterprise, targeting the big phaser emplacements as they revealed themselves. Picard had been right—they were awesomely powerful. However, they were missing. And when they fired, you could see where they were … with enjoyable results. Let’s just hope Data doesn’t blunder into one of them. And that they don’t anticipate where he’s going to be, Maisel thought.
Pickup took careful aim, fired three photon torpedoes at once, and took one emplaced laser out. She targeted another emplacement, used two torpedoes. The emplacement stopped working. She kept firing, peppering any emplacement that showed any action.
—And suddenly, under them, the planet started to move again.
“Uh-oh,” said Ileen. “Mr. Data! It’s accelerating!”
“Noted, Captain—”
Aboard Enterprise, Data could feel the itching, the tearing at the back of his mind again. Still blind, the planet was trying what had worked on him once before, and trying it with increased force, and it was actually having some effect again because the Enterprise was so close.
Tractors, he thought, and the ship obeyed him, flinging out the most powerful tractor beam it could manage at the planet. At one spot, where the photon torpedoes from Marignano had blown through to substructure, the tractors found purchase and hung on.
Marignano came up fast behind, matching speed. “Point-five-six,” said Pickup down the comm link. “Five-eight. Six—”
“Don’t lose it!” Data heard Ileen say. “Paul?”
“I’m on gunnery, Captain. Targeting live emplacements—”
Data saw one of the emplacements blown right out of the planet’s surface, then another, and another. “Point-six-four,” Pickup was saying. “Point-six-five.”
“Mr. Data,” said Maisel, “what are you going to do?”
“If the planet goes to warp, I shall go with it.”
“Not if he keeps up like that, you won’t.”
And it was true enough. Looking through the scanners’ “eyes,” Data could see that the planet was altering the shape of its prewarp field.
“I hope I didn’t give it that idea,” Captain Maisel said somewhat ruefully. “If you’re going to stay in warp with someone you’ve got a tractor on, you’re going to have to conjoin warpfields. If you can’t—”
“When the planet goes into warp,” said Data, “the Enterprise would certainly be blown loose, possibly destroyed by the warp conflict resonances.”
Not that the Enterprise cared for this treatment in the slightest. Where her prewarp field and the intellivore planet’s intersected and were trying to match phase, ripples of resonance conflict were already propagating out into the adjacent screens and fields. The ride got rough. “Captain,” Data said, “this is going to require all my attention for the moment.”
“Okay,” Maisel said. “You take care of him, and I’ll dig you a nice hole. Any preferred spot?”
“Your scan shows virtual longitude eighteen east, virtual latitude forty-four—that spot is equidistant between four separate antimatter ‘pod’ locations. Here is a diagram of the conduit structure—” He data-streamed it over to one of Maisel’s screens. “I urge you, Captain, not to breach any of those structures when you dig.”
“Mr. Data,” said Maisel, “I’d sooner put a thumbtack on the seat of God’s easy chair.”
“Point-six-five,” said Pickup, “point-six-seven, six-eight—”
“Perhaps you might start digging,