String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [47]
She shook her head. “The nanoprobes in my system are already at work repairing most of the damage, thank you.” She held up her hand and B’Elanna saw a small, gradually fading pinkish patch.
“Must be nice,” B’Elanna commented, but did not add having a bunch of little robots crawling around in your bloodstream.
“It has its advantages” Seven acknowledged. “We should attempt to contact Voyager. I find it troubling that they have not hailed us yet.”
“Agreed.” B’Elanna checked the shuttle’s comm system. Green bars on all displays. She smiled. All things considered, the shuttle self-repair systems were doing their job. Chief Clemens would be pleased. “Voyager, this is the shuttle Montpelier. Please respond.” No one replied. She checked the system again, but found no problems.
Seven was already working the sensors, but her knit brow told B’Elanna she was getting no satisfaction. “We’re approximately seven hundred kilometers from our intended destination,” she announced. “We’ve landed in what appears to be a dry lake bed and the sun will be setting locally in approximately twenty-two minutes.”
“Wonderful. What exactly does this have to do with Voyager?”
“Nothing, Lieutenant. I just thought you’d enjoy some irrelevant chatter while I worked. I assumed you would find it soothing.”
B’Elanna closed her eyes and rubbed them, realizing she must still be in some light form of shock, because the only thought going through her head was Please, Tom. Please still be out there, because if she’s the only one left I may just have to kill myself. Or her.
Seven continued to work for several more minutes until she finally announced, “Voyager is not there.”
“Can you tell where she went? Did she leave orbit? If so, why? Did she attempt to land? Or…did something else happen?”
Seven shook her head. “There is insufficient information, Lieutenant. Also, the local radiation levels…”
“…Make it very hard to scan. Right. But is there any evidence of a matter-antimatter explosion? That would show up no matter what.”
“None.”
“Well, that’s something. She didn’t blow up.”
“The core did not blow up,” Seven corrected. “The ship might have been destroyed without the core being damaged.”
“All right,” she snapped. “Fine. It could have happened. But probably not. So let’s focus on the most likely possibilities. What are they?”
“That Voyager was forced to leave orbit in order to avoid the shock wave is the most likely scenario,” Seven reasoned. “A secondary possibility is, as you said, the ship was forced to land, perhaps on some other part of the planet. If that happened, communication may be difficult to achieve without an orbital relay—”
B’Elanna pointed at the Borg, then turned back to the communication console. “Good!” she said. “Very good! I should have thought of that!”
“We do not have communication satellites, Lieutenant. Unless Chief Clemens has been working overtime.”
“Was that a joke?”
“Not intentionally.”
“Didn’t think so,” she said, and pulled up a map of the sky directly overhead. Squinting to keep her eyes focused, B’Elanna scanned the heavens for several minutes. “Hello,” she said at last.
“You have found a communications satellite?”
“Not exactly. It’s some kind of low-orbit surveillance drone, I think. Somebody obviously doesn’t trust somebody else. Maybe it recorded what happened to Voyager.”
“What leads you to believe it was not pointed at the planet?”
B’Elanna paused to stare at her. “If an alien starship suddenly appeared in the sky above your world, what would you do with your spy satellites?”
Seven considered, then said, “I concede the point.”
Wow, B’Elanna thought as she absentmindedly punched through the spy satellite’s laughable encryption software and accessed the playback routines. Something is finally going right today.
Harry Kim bent double, gently touched his forehead to the long-range sensor console, and begged, begged his stomach to continue to play nice with the tomato soup he had for lunch. Please, he thought. I do not want to have to explain to B’Elanna why she needs to