Progenitor - Michael Jan Friedman [55]
“Stay where you are!” mimicked Ben Zoma, “I’ll get it!” And with that, he incited another wave of laughter.
“Thank you,” said the engineer, stoically watching his superior guffaw at his expense. “Thank you very much. I’ll remember your compassion next time you’re injured.”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Greyhorse told him. He grabbed hold of Simenon’s tail and took a look at it. “It barely broke the epidermis. I’ll bandage it and you’ll be fine.”
By then, the laughter had begun to die down. Joseph and Ben Zoma had to wipe tears from their eyes as they made an uphill attempt to recover their sobriety.
The security officer took in a deep breath. “Now that,” he said, “was worth the price of admission.”
“Twice the price,” Greyhorse decided as he delved into his pack for a plastiskin bandage and a dressing.
“Don’t let anyone ever tell you you’re not a good host,” Ben Zoma chipped in.
Simenon scowled. “I’m glad I had the opportunity to provide you with some entertainment.”
The doctor managed to keep his expression deadpan as he approached his colleague with the bandage he had found. “So am I. Now stand still. I can’t treat a moving tail.”
And they started laughing all over again.
Wu leaned back in Captain Picard’s chair in the captain’s ready room and pondered what she had learned from Lt. Kastiigan.
The Belladonna’s descent into the sinkhole was slower than she would have guessed. Assuming the research vessel’s shields continued to hold up, it probably had a few hours before it was lost forever.
That was good news. It gave her some breathing room, some time to come up with an option she and her officers hadn’t considered yet. If there is one, she found herself adding.
There is, she insisted. There had to be.
But there were only so many methods of getting a crew off an endangered ship. She ran down the list again in her mind, hoping to somehow find something she had missed.
One way was to beam them off. However, she and her bridge officers had already ruled out that possibility because of the conditions that prevailed inside the accretion bridge.
The other method was to put them in a shuttlecraft. But that was an impossibility as well because a shuttle couldn’t escape the pull of the sinkhole.
Wu leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She had always found it easier to think with her eyes closed, even as a little girl back at the Aramis III agricultural colony. Her younger sister, Victoria, had made fun of her for that all the time. Then Victoria saw some of the things her sister was accomplishing in school and she secretly began to close her eyes as well.
Wu sighed. Her accomplishments in school had meant a lot to her—much more than they might have to other children her age. They had paved the way for her to realize her dream of joining Starfleet, of ascending the chain of command—of reaching a moment like this one, when people depended on her for their survival.
I can’t let those scientists down, she told herself stubbornly. I’ve got to get them out of there. Any other outcome is unacceptable.
Of course, there was a third way; there had been one all along. If the Belladonna could generate enough thrust, and the Stargazer brought her tractors to bear at the right moment, they might be able to wrench the research ship free of the sinkhole.
But that required a willing partner in the Belladonna, not to mention a considerable contribution from her impulse drive. And so far, they had been unable to obtain a response to their hails, much less any evidence that the Belladonna’s engines were still in working order.
Wu frowned to herself. If not for those two small problems, the plan couldn’t miss.
If only Ensign Paris’s idea had proven workable. They would already have sent out a shuttlecraft on a tractor beam, offering the crew of the Belladonna a lifeline. The survivors might have been boarding it at that very moment.
But Dubinski’s calculations had thrown a wrench into the ensign’s plan. Too much mass on the end of the beam. Too