Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [106]
“Same speed and heading, sir!” Wesley called out.
More importantly, Geordi noted, the shields were maintaining their shape, despite the forces imposed on them. The drain on the engines was tremendous, but they were doing their job—and doing it well.
Behind Worf, Morgen was helping Simenon to his feet. The Gnalish had hit his head on something; he was bleeding. But he refused to leave the bridge.
La Forge didn’t blame him. Under the circumstances, he wouldn’t have left either.
As he got another grip on his console, Geordi exchanged looks with the captain again. Picard looked a little rumpled; he must have fallen as well. But he seemed no less resolute than before.
“Decks Twenty-two and Twenty-three evacuated,” Worf growled.
The captain nodded. Geordi nodded back.
Turning to his monitor, the chief engineer manipulated the shields. Ten degrees more. That’s thirty altogether—pretty much an average of what the models said it would take. On the screen, it looked like a lot. But would it be enough to free them?
Or just enough to tear them apart?
He called out: “Hang on, folks.” Then, bracing himself, he pressed “enter.”
Idun Asmund hadn’t said a word to the two security officers outside her cell since they started their shift an hour or so ago. Nor had she spoken to any of the guards on the shifts before that.
A cool customer. That’s how one of them had put it, thinking she hadn’t heard. Well, she’d heard all right. And though she hadn’t corrected the woman, she was anything but cool.
She was hot. She was seething. Just as any Klingon would have seethed, penned in like an animal.
Of course, this time it was more than her breeding that made her crave freedom so intensely. She had a job to do—a job that couldn’t wait. And she couldn’t do it from the brig. It ate at her, that while she sat, helpless, blood-justice went unsatisfied.
But she had long ago learned to contain her Klingon-bred tendencies to vent emotion. So well, in fact, that those on the Stargazer and elsewhere had seen her as some sort of iron maiden—highly disciplined, highly controlled. A cool customer indeed. She savored the bitter irony of it.
When the captain’s announcement came over the intercom, the goldshirts exchanged brief remarks. But she remained silent—even though she had an idea of the risks they had to be incurring. The last set of maneuvers had blacked out parts of the ship—and they hadn’t accomplished a thing. She didn’t know much about warpspace engineering, but she knew this—any serious attempt to escape the slipstream would place an even greater strain on the Enterprise. A strain that would put them all in jeopardy.
If her guards hadn’t fully appreciated that fact, the first jolt gave them an inkling of what was to come. She noted the look of alarm that crossed both their faces.
“Huh,” one of them muttered—a big man whose hair was as pale as hers. His first name was John—she’d overheard that. “The captain wasn’t kidding.”
His companion was smaller, dark and bearded; name unknown. “That’s all right,” he said. “Let’s just hope it does the trick.”
The second shock was worse. The blond man was thrown to the floor. The dark one managed to keep his feet by clutching at the bulkhead behind him.
And even then, it wasn’t over. There were aftershocks that made the ship tremble unnervingly.
“Damn.” John picked himself up, despite the continuing disturbances. “What’s going on up there?”
The other man just shook his head. He was looking at the light that indicated the barrier was still in effect.
Though Asmund couldn’t see it from her bunk, or indeed from anywhere in her cell, she gathered that the light was still on. Otherwise, her guards would have reacted to the fact. But the dark one was still scrutinizing it.
“What’s the matter?” asked the blond man, noting the direction in which his colleague was staring.
“I thought I saw the light flicker.”
John considered it himself. “It’s not flickering now,” he said.
“No. It’s not.” He shrugged. “My imagination, maybe.” He turned to his companion. “I guess that was it. My