Requiem - Michael Jan Friedman [60]
“I guess,” Geordi agreed. Standing up, he took out his phaser. “But we’ve still got a long way to go.” Adjusting the setting, he aimed the phaser at the platform. Then he activated it.
After all, if—no, when they ever got a fix on the captain, they didn’t want to have to have to transport him with foreign material on the transporter pad.
The stuff burned off in a matter of seconds. When he was finished, La Forge put the phaser away. “Come on,” he said, gesturing for Barclay to follow. “Let’s—”
Suddenly, the energy coils lit up. Only for a second, but enough to make them wary. And before they could comment on it, it happened a second time. Out in the corridor, the light levels dipped—then, just like that, gave way to a darkness punctuated only by the lights they’d brought with them.
“Uh-oh,” said the chief engineer. “I hope that’s not what I think it is.” But even as he uttered the words, he knew his hope wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.
More than likely, there was a fair-sized power surge coming. And if that was the case, this room full of energy-transport coils was the last place he wanted to be.
“Come on,” he urged Barclay, grabbing him by the sleeve. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
The other man didn’t have to be told twice. As Geordi lunged through the doorway, Barclay was right on his heels. No doubt, he remembered what happened when Varley was caught half in and half out of a chamber.
They had barely made the turn toward the control room when they saw a series of light pulses run the length of the bulkheads and back again. If there had been any doubt of what was going on before, there wasn’t any now.
Geordi’s teeth ground together as he ran down the hallway. Not now, he told himself. We were just starting to get to the point where we could bring the captain back. We can’t have come this far only to have to close up shop ahead of time.
The chief engineer beat his companion back to the control room. Fortunately, the lights were still on in there. Planting his hand against the far side of the entrance to stop his forward progress, he wrestled himself inside. O’Connor was busy monitoring his tricorder while Data worked furiously at one of the consoles. The android barely looked up to acknowledge his friend’s entrance.
“How bad is it?” Geordi asked.
O’Connor shook her head. “It’s hard to tell, but it seems to be escalating. And if the trend continues, it could be as bad as the surge that transported Captain Picard.”
The chief engineer bit his lip. They would never make enough progress in the next few minutes to bring the captain back from wherever he’d gone. As much as he hated the idea, what choice did he have … but to evacuate?
“Commander,” said Data, as calmly as if all of eternity were at his beck and call, “I am pursuing an idea that just occurred to me. Though there seems to be no way to prevent the energy surges, perhaps I can coax the station into releasing some of the pent-up energy.”
Geordi thought about it for a moment. Release the energy? Sure … but how? He asked the question out loud. Nor was the android slow in giving him an answer.
“I am attempting,” he said, “to boost the input levels on the aliens’ confinement beam by recycling power through the emitter array.”
Barclay, who had been standing off to the side, shook his head. “But we’re not transporting anything else aboard right now. What’s the point of sending out a beam if—”
And then he stopped himself, no doubt realizing what Data had in mind. By then, Geordi had seen the android’s strategy as well. The confinement beam expended energy—a fair amount of it, too, considering it had to travel through time as well as space. And if they could get energy to leave the station almost as quickly as it was building up, the confinement beam might turn out to be a pretty good safety valve.
At least, that was the theory. In practice, there was no guarantee at all that it would work—other than the knowledge that