Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [1]
“Amazing,” said Gardenhire, his redheaded ops officer.
Tarasco grunted. “You can say that again.”
Sommers, the curly-haired brunette who was sitting next to Gardenhire at the helm controls, cast a glance back at the captain. “You still want to go through it, sir?”
“Do we have a choice?” Tarasco asked her.
The helm officer recognized it as a rhetorical question and returned her attention to her monitors. With her slender fingers crawling across her control dials like an exotic variety of insect, she deployed additional power to the propulsion system.
“Ready when you are, sir.”
Was he ready? The captain drew a deep breath.
The phenomenon had puzzled him ever since it came up on the viewscreen earlier that day. Their optical scanners registered what looked like the universe’s biggest light show, but there was nothing there as far as their other instruments were concerned.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t merely a matter of scientific curiosity. Tarasco and his crew of eighty-eight had set out from Earth years earlier, aiming to chart a stretch of space from their home system to the farthest reaches of the Milky Way galaxy—part of a sector that Terran astronomers had labeled the Alpha Quadrant.
They had almost completed their assignment when they encountered an unexpectedly powerful magnetic storm. At first, it seemed that they might be able to outrun the thing. Then they found out otherwise.
The storm caught them up and flung them light-years off course, well past what Tarasco’s cartography team reckoned was the outer edge of the galaxy. If not for the readings their scanners took along the way, they wouldn’t even have known which way was home.
But knowing the way was only half the battle. The storm had wrecked both their warp and nuclear impulse engines, forcing them to drift on emergency power until the crew could get them up and running.
Finally, after weeks of languishing under the glare of alien stars, Tarasco and his people got underway again. They knew that their trip back to Earth had been lengthened by nearly eleven months, but no one griped. They were just glad to be heading home.
And all had gone well from that point, the captain reflected. Until now, that is.
He couldn’t be sure if the phenomenon had been there when the storm threw them so precipitously in the other direction, or if it had sprung up since that time. Certainly, their computer hadn’t made any record of it.
One thing was for sure—they weren’t going to get back to Earth without passing through the thing.
Tarasco glanced at Sommers. “Let’s do it.”
He could feel a subtle hum in the deck below his feet as the Valiant accelerated to the speed of light. The phenomenon loomed in front of them, a gargantuan, red maw opened wide to swallow them up.
“Still no sign of it on sensors,” said Hollandsworth, his tall, dark-skinned science officer.
“Deflectors are registering something,” reported Gardenhire. He turned to the captain. “A kind of pressure.”
“So we’re not just seeing things,” Tarasco concluded. “I guess we can take some comfort in that.”
“Maintain heading?” asked Sommers.
“Affirmative,” said the captain.
The closer they got, the more tumultuous the phenomenon appeared. The ruby light within it began to writhe and shimmer, giving birth to monstrous caverns and towering eruptions.
It was beautiful in the way a stormy, windblown sea was beautiful. And like a stormy sea, it was frightening at the same time.
“All available power to the shields,” Tarasco ordered.
“Aye, sir,” said Gardenhire.
Suddenly, the ship jerked hard to starboard. Caught by surprise, the captain had to grab hold of his chair back for support. He turned to his operations officer, a question on his face.
“We’re all right,” Gardenhire reported dutifully. “Shields are holding fine, sir.”
Tarasco turned back to the viewscreen. They seemed to be entering a deep, red-veined chasm, pulsating with forces that baffled him as much as they did his scanning devices. Before he knew it, the phenomenon wasn’t just in front