String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [57]
Sighing, she became aware of the coating of fine silicate particles in her mouth and trachea. Seven willed nanoprobes to lubricate her throat, but their resources were needed elsewhere, so she chose an alternative method to alleviate her discomfort. “May I have some water?” she asked.
“Are we…Oh, sure,” Torres said and handed her the canteen. “I thought your suit reprocessed sweat and other fluids and kept you rehydrated that way.”
“When all is working optimally,” Seven replied, “yes. But I was injured and have not been able to regenerate.”
“Hmph,” Torres said, taking the canteen back and replacing the cap. “Interesting.” Looking up at the sky, she asked, “Sun will be up soon. If it’s this bad now, we’ll want to be under cover by the time it rises. How much farther do we have to go?”
“Approximately three-quarters of a kilometer,” Seven replied.
Torres smiled. “That’s not bad. We can do that in a half-hour if we keep up this pace.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised at how reasonable Torres sounded.
“As long as we’re going in the right direction.”
“If you’re so afraid I’m taking us in the wrong direction, please check your tricorder.”
“I don’t want to waste the batteries,” Torres said, starting again. “And it’s okay. I trust you. Well, your nanoprobes. But, wait, didn’t you say they were getting tired?”
“I said nothing of the sort,” Seven said, following the engineer.
“I’m going to power up the secondaries now, Captain,” Joe Carey said, but before he did, he walked up behind the captain and tried to draw her away from the couplings. “I’d feel better if you stepped away from them.”
The captain started when he touched her, but otherwise did not move. “I’m okay here, Joe. The coupling will hold.”
Carey sighed and backed away. She was probably right. Hell, not probably. Of course she was right. In all his years in the service, he had never known a commanding officer who knew so much about her ship’s engine room. While most captains had a working knowledge of their ship’s power plant, few, if any, knew their way so intimately around the engine’s guts as Kathryn Janeway. If Carey hadn’t known for a fact that she had been a science officer before she was a captain, he would have bet holodeck time that Janeway had been a microspanner-wielding, atom-crunching, antimatter-pushing, lubricant-stained engineer.
“It’s just the way this radiation is degrading the bioneural systems, Captain,” Carey said, then let the thought trail off. He was finding it difficult to focus, though the captain had explained that was due to the rads coming in through the shields. Refocusing, he finished, “If another circuit blows out, we’re going to lose the secondaries again.”
“I know, Joe,” the captain said, not taking her eyes off the coupling. “Harry told me half the packs on the bridge and the Montpelier burst. But if we get shields up to full power, the bio-neurals won’t be vulnerable.” She flicked her eyes up to Carey’s. “So throw the switch.”
“Aye, Captain,” Carey said and was grateful when she broke her gaze away. When she was like this, looking into the captain’s eyes was like staring into the engine core without filters: beautiful, yes; thrilling, even, but the fire would burn right through you. He turned back to the console—another one of Chief Torres’s jury-rigged masterpieces—and triggered the sequence. A moment later, indicators showed power pulsing through the secondaries.
“How’s it looking, Joe?”
Carey studied the flow and, even