Mosaic - Jeri Taylor [118]
The iceberg. She'd stared at it for the longest time, confused, trying to decide if it were an iceberg. Why had that seemed so crucial? Why had there been doubt?
Now, in her memory, she was facing away from the iceberg, and she began to doubt that it was actually there. She had to turn and make sure it was-but she was frightened. Terrified, in fact. She was equally compelled to turn, and not to turn.
A dreadful minute passed as she was pulled on this rack, agonizing, paralyzed. On the one hand, what did it matter if she turned and looked at the iceberg? It would be there-and if it weren't, what did it matter? This was a memory, nothing more.
But it was a memory she'd kept behind a closed door for a long, long time. What did that mean? Why was the iceberg so potent an image? What gave it that power?
The only way to incapacitate it was to turn and look at it. Demystify it. Turn, Kathryn, turn...
Slowly, slowly, a millimeter at a time, she forced herself, in her mind's eye, to turn and look at the iceberg. The turn seemed to take forever, during which time she began to realize something would be vastly different when she completed the turn.
And so it was no great surprise when she looked into the middle of the dark sea-the frozen sea which had been cruelly penetrated by a flaming object from the heavensand saw no iceberg.
She saw the shape of an iceberg. An object jutting from the sea which might have resembled an iceberg if it were made of ice, if it had in fact broken from a glacier and floated, shards sticking out, through the alien sea. But of course no icebergs floated in the alien sea because it was frozen over, except for the dark gash which had been rent in it by the plummeting spaceship.
It was that ship whose fuselage now projected from the watery bed, nose up, violated and broken, looming out of the water like a huge and formidable iceberg. It was that ship in whose cabin she could clearly see her father and Justin, dazed and bloody, but alive.
She had immediately gone into action. Of course, she would-she was accustomed to pressure, to emergencies, to disasters. They were simply challenges, and Kathryn Janeway had always risen to the challenge. She had figured out how to multiply elevens and derive the distance formula, she had become a good tennis player and she'd saved Hobbes Johnson from drowning, she'd convinced Admiral Paris to mentor her and she'd saved Justin from death once before, at the hands of the Cardassians. She would not fail to save the two people she loved most in life. A console was flickering in the section of the cabin in which she'd ridden to the surface. There was still power, something was working. She flew to the controls and began entering commands; to her relief, they responded. She might be able to transport her father and Justin from the shell of the ship's cabin.
She focused intently on the console, quickly realizing she'd have to cobble together several circuits in order to have enough power for a site-to-site transport. To transport two people she'd need eight hundred megawatts. Their patterns would already be encoded within the ship's systems, of course, standard practice for the crew of any vessel.
She glanced over her shoulder to take a visual sighting of their positions, and made a mind-numbing discovery: the ship's fuselage was sinking. It was almost a meter lower in the sea than when she'd begun working, though the two men in the cockpit were still safely above the yawning pit of black water.
She turned back, working quickly. Two emergency microfusion generators were still on-line. They could be routed to the primary energizing coils. She brought the targeting