Pathways - Jeri Taylor [1]
Captain Janeway had deposited an away team, including the ship’s senior officers, on an unoccupied M-class planet that promised abundant foodstuffs as well as time off their starship, Voyager. She then took the ship on a diplomatic mission to a nearby system where she hoped to secure safe passage through a part of space rumored to be rife with danger.
Tom had requested shuttle time during the away mission, not an unusual request. Logging shuttle time was required duty for every pilot, a necessary means of keeping one’s skills honed. First Officer Chakotay hadn’t hesitated when Tom suggested he use this downtime to log a few hours on his file.
The request was legitimate, of course, and Tom had no pangs about making it, even if he did have an agenda that had gone unspoken. The two functions weren’t mutually exclusive, and he saw nothing wrong with combining them.
Now, at the controls of the Starship Voyager’s shuttle Harris, he saw the planet looming before him. It was a watery sphere, much like Earth, and the marbled blue-and-white orb gave him a few pangs of nostalgia—a fact which surprised him, for he usually found himself far happier in the Delta Quadrant than he had been at home. He shoved the feelings aside and made the necessary preparations for entering the atmosphere, which, his instruments told him, would first be encountered some thirty thousand meters above the surface.
First would come the mesosphere, where molecular structure was thin and porous, bleeding into the stratosphere, where atmospheric pressure heightened and friction became a genuine concern; finally, the descent into the full oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and the landing. The Yeager maneuver was accomplished just at the transition from mesosphere to stratosphere.
Atmospheric flight was always done under thruster power, and as such was accomplished much as it had been with pre-warp vehicles. There were safety mechanisms in place now, of course, that hadn’t been available to earlier craft, but safety systems could always be taken off line. That was the first thing Tom did as the image of the planet filled the window of his ship, growing larger by the minute.
At the point where gravity began to exert a substantial pull on the shuttle, Tom tilted up the nose of the vessel and cut the thrusters, so that the ship began sinking toward the surface tail first, without power.
And that’s when his body went into an autonomic response: pulse rate increased, blood pressure heightened, and adrenaline was released. These systemic reactions were biochemical and as old as man’s earliest ancestors, but to Tom Paris they provided a state of crystalline awareness that was almost hallowed. All his senses sharpened as endorphins flowed into the brain, creating a mix of fear and pleasure that were mysteriously and inextricably linked.
He stared only briefly into the black sky, which, he knew, would soon begin to change color, becoming more blue as the atmosphere thickened. From now on he had to keep his eyes down, locked on the control panel. Because very soon the shuttle would be pulled into a violent spin, and a glimpse out the window would produce instant and disabling vertigo. Then he’d be doomed.
The only way to restart the thrusters now was to get the ship into a dive, nose-down, so that air was forced through the intake manifolds, which would start the magnaturbines spinning and build up the RPMs. Atmospheric oxygen would then combine with fuel from the shuttle’s tanks in a supersonic combustion chamber, providing power for the thrusters.
The ship snapped into a flat spin, whirling right over its center of gravity, like an ancient pinwheel. The force of the spin drove Tom back against the seat, his head on the outer edge of the circle.
This was the moment he’d waited for.
He could pull out of this if he functioned perfectly. He needed every sense, every instinct keen and chiseled, responding with diamondlike clarity. And that’s what the fear gave