String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [9]
“All right. I’ll be ten minutes.”
“Make it five, Lieutenant.”
Nodding (and biting his tongue), Tom stepped around the first officer. He was headed for the turbolift door when the deck seemed to abruptly spasm under his feet, pitching him headlong into midair.
Proximity alarms blared in tandem with the red-alert Klaxon. Janeway picked herself up off the deck and felt the metallic tang of blood in her mouth. Bit my tongue, she thought while wiping her mouth on her sleeve. Pressing herself back into her chair, she felt the ache of a torn ligament in her shoulder, but forced the pain from her mind. All around her, the bridge crew was responding to emergency calls from around the ship, every member of the command center skillfully dealing with the most pressing situations, alternately reassuring rattled crewmen and barking orders. Meanwhile, at the security console, Tuvok was performing quick scans and feeding data to Janeway’s command station.
Pulling up the status report, Voyager’s captain confirmed what her instincts had told her only moments after the event: The ship’s sensors had suddenly detected an object on a collision course, and, reacting faster than a human could have, the navigational computer had engaged the thrusters to shove them out of the path of whatever it was. Glancing up from the display in her chair, she saw that the main viewscreen was trying to resolve an image, but the thing—the object, the intruder, the whatever-it-was—was too near for a clear view.
Reviewing the raw data, Janeway glanced over at Tuvok, who, not surprisingly, was looking directly at her. She raised an eyebrow, an expression her old friend would correctly interpret as Am I reading this correctly? The Vulcan nodded.
The only thing Janeway knew for sure from the readings she was seeing was that her ship had barely avoided ramming (or being rammed by) a gigantic object. But where had the object come from? Seconds ago, space in every direction had been clear. A cloaking device? Janeway wondered, but speculation without data was worse than useless; it was a waste of time. Janeway wanted facts. “Tuvok, launch a remote! We need to see what…”
“Launched, Captain. We will have a feed in three, two, one…”
The main viewscreen shimmered, and an image abruptly snapped into focus. A hush of awe fell over the bridge, and in the sudden silence Janeway became aware that Chakotay was kneeling over the prone figure of Tom Paris, muttering and apparently administering first aid. Then she heard Paris speak, and that moment of reassurance was enough that she could tear herself away from the prospect of an injured crewman and again try to take in the astonishing sight upon which they all gazed.
Shining like an opal in the lower left-hand corner of the viewscreen hung a tiny dot that, Janeway knew, would be no wider than the tip of her thumb if she lifted her hand and held it before her at arm’s length. An icon floating near the dot told her that this fragile blip represented the shell that held her life and the lives of her 156 crewmen.
The other ninety-eight one-hundredths of the screen was filled by…what could she call it? Could it, as the preliminary scans said, truly be an artificial object? The most rational part of Janeway’s mind said, yes, of course it could, but some more primitive part rebelled at the idea. However, as her eye focused first on one part of the vessel, then on another, scale became less and less important. Janeway began to perceive the sense of the builders’ design and found that she was admiring its cool elegance. Awe gave away to curiosity about the vessel’s makers.
A flattened sphere as large as an orbital starbase was foremost, and as the image resolution became sharper it became evident that the hull was composed of large, uneven metallic plates welded in overlapping curves one on top of another. The bow curve was peppered with dozens of shallow openings that Janeway quickly decided must be some form of ramscoop for collecting