Reunion - Michael Jan Friedman [85]
Through it all, Data’s voice was as calm and matter-of-fact as ever. “Shield surfaces pitched ten degrees,” he said. Picard let go of his chair, which he’d used to steady himself. Straightening to his full height, he looked around. “Mister Worf?” The Klingon’s answer was a second or two in coming. “Minimal damage, sir.” Another pause. “No serious injuries.”
The captain nodded. “Good.” He turned to Wesley. “Velocity? Bearing?”
“No change,” the ensign told him.
Picard cast a glance in Geordi’s direction. The chief engineer looked back, and a wordless communication passed between them. Continue? Continue.
Adjusting the blue lines on his monitor another ten degrees, LaForge input the change. And hung on.
It didn’t help. The ship bucked so badly that he found himself on the floor anyway. And it didn’t stop bucking comn completely-though the echoes weren’t nearly as vicious as the original jolt. “Shield surfaces-was Data began.
But Worf’s cry drowned him out. “Structural damage
to decks twenty-two and twenty-three. Evacuating affected areas and sealing off!”
Could have been worse, Geordi mused, lifting himself up off the carpet. Twenty-two and twenty-three were engineering decks which were less than crucial at the moment. And since they were sparsely populated, it would only take a few moments to clear them. “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 alt—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