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Famous last words.

Chapter 8

And everything had been going so well, too. B’Elanna thought.

The Doctor had let Tom out of sickbay duty so there was time for a proper goodbye before B’Elanna headed down to deck ten and the shuttlebay. When she got there, Clemens was just finishing refastening his preflight and did not give her one of his Why don’t you send your people down here to help me with these things? looks. The engines powered up on the first try, and all the diagnostics looked good. Seven showed up on time (no surprise there, really), but she didn’t recheck all the shuttle’s systems before strapping in. The shuttle’s nav computer successfully downloaded Chakotay’s sensor logs as they passed each other, and, hey, Seven was even fairly quiet and unannoying except for the standard entirely understandable system reports. The ten-minute flight into Monorha’s lower stratosphere was utterly, completely predictable.

Humming something cheerful and tuneless, B’Elanna had just begun to bring the shuttle in below the cloud layer, leveling off, their airspeed just over six hundred klicks per hour, when every single system went into catastrophic failure. Suddenly, the only light in the cabin was the rosy glow of the sun through the port windows. B’Elanna’s pupils snapped open so fast in a frantic attempt to absorb all possible light that she thought she heard them pop. Her bowels contracted, and the adrenaline surge hit her like a brick to the back of the head. Time dilated and slowed.

“Seven…?” she began, and then bit off the word. No point in asking questions, she thought as she pressed the first switch in the restart sequence. Don’t think about what just happened. Don’t think about how you’re in a brick losing altitude damn fast. Don’t even think about the hole that you’re going to make in the landscape. Just start the engines. She touched the second switch in the restart sequence. Time crawled. Why is this taking so long!? One more switch and she would know if the engines were going to fire up. Emergency lights flickered on around her. At least the batteries are working. If the engines didn’t start…well, they had a couple of other options, but, again, no point in getting too far ahead of herself.

Beside her, Seven said, “Lieutenant…”

“Not now, Seven!”

The shock wave crashed into the shuttle like a tsunami rolling into a paper boat. G forces crushed B’Elanna toward the stern, forcing her hands away from the console. Around her, lights flickered as the shuttle began to spin, sun flashing past the viewports. B’Elanna’s internal organs were smashed up against her trunk’s interior walls, and she would have vomited if the centrifugal force hadn’t been shoving everything down. I’m going to black out, she thought.

The shuttle stopped spinning as suddenly as it began, jerking B’Elanna painfully against the harness straps, making her gag and retch.

“Inertial dampeners on,” Seven announced. Somewhere behind B’Elanna, a panel burst apart in a shower of sparks. She looked back over her shoulder to see if the fire-control systems were functioning. Chemical extinguishers deployed out of the walls and two seconds later shut off.

“Battery couplings,” B’Elanna said. “You just blew them out.”

“It was that or die, Lieutenant.”

Glancing out the window, B’Elanna could see that they were still spinning, but with the inertial dampeners on, they were not subject to the effect. Switching the dampeners on had been a brilliant idea, but such systems weren’t designed to turn on without having the engines turning over. She didn’t reply to Seven’s comment, but said instead, “We’re falling up.”

“The shock wave,” Seven said, calmly checking her systems console. “We will begin to fall again in fourteen seconds. I suggest you restart the engines.”

Biting back a suggestion of her own, B’Elanna began to work the console again. The shock had rescrambled all the shuttle’s systems, so she had to begin the sequence from zero. This time, she made it through, but when she hit the last control,