String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [110]
“Nothing here, Captain. That’s coming through B’Elanna’s comm signal.”
“Enemy ships approaching!” Seven of Nine said, her tone uncharacteristically enthusiastic. “Energizing weapons!”
“Patience, Seven,” B’Elanna replied. “There’s no way they can catch us.”
Seven barked, “But they were rude to me!”
“Seven! Relax!”
Janeway and Chakotay exchanged confused looks. “Are you two all right?” Chakotay asked.
“Fine!” the pair answered in unison, but then B’Elanna took control of the conversation. “Get ready to fire your torpedo. I’ve got to ditch these guys first or maybe let Seven shoot at them a little first.” Pause. “She has a scary glint in her eye.”
Within seconds of signing off, B’Elanna realized that her problem was more complex than she had anticipated. The Monorhans, she discovered, had developed sophisticated high-altitude combat aircraft, and two were close on her tail. The desire to engage in an aerial dogfight was almost overwhelming, probably spurred on by Seven’s yearning for revenge. Several confusing seconds ticked past until the sensible solution occurred to her. “Strap in, you two,” she called to her passengers. “And make sure the console is secure.”
“It isn’t!” Kaytok said. “It’s on these antigravity things!”
“Then it will be fine,” Seven said, her cool aloofness reasserting itself. She helped Kaytok with his buckles and belts, then settled into the seat directly behind B’Elanna.
We are ready.
The first fighter fired an air-to-air missile, which burst harmlessly on the shuttle’s shields. The sensors informed her that the second craft had a lock on them and was about to do the same, so B’Elanna did the most efficient thing she could conceive: she cut the shuttle’s engines. The fighter craft cruised past the shuttle at five hundred kilometers per hour and were twenty kilometers away before either pilot could realize what had happened. By then, B’Elanna had spun the shuttle one hundred eighty degrees and was racing for the ionosphere.
“Well done,” Seven said. “Though I would have enjoyed some shooting.”
Tuvok was pleased with how quickly Ensign Kim assembled the torpedo mechanism, but was troubled when he saw the calculations for how much trilithium to use. “These are approximations,” Tuvok observed.
Kim looked up from his workbench and slid the HUD goggles up onto his forehead. Both heard another shock wave ripple through the ship, but did not feel its effects. Tuvok made his weapons teams work in zero-gravity environments since so many of the materials used in phaser systems and quantum torpedoes were sensitive to jostling. Starfleet had made training for the technique available to crews only a short time before he had left on his undercover mission to the Maquis, but as soon as he returned to Voyager he had initiated his teams in the practice.
“That’s true,” Kim said. “All the captain and I had to work with are the rough models. It’s not like this has been done very often.”
“How many tests were completed?”
Kim shrugged, then glanced nervously down into the torpedo’s inner workings. He had just finished infusing the trilithium compound into the quantum core. “Maybe a dozen,” he said uncertainly.
“Maybe fewer,” Tuvok said, “if these are all the results.”
“Maybe fewer, then,” Kim said irritably. “Tuvok, what’s your point? That we don’t know exactly what we’re doing? I concede that, but I haven’t heard any suggestions for better ideas. Don’t you trust me?”
“If I did not trust you, Ensign, we would not be having this conversation. The question is, do you trust yourself? Will this work?”
The corners of Kim’s face