String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [140]
At the same time, the central core of the Betasis reached critical mass, and the finest technological achievement of Monorha’s Fourteenth Tribe exploded, taking with it the docking bay where it had rested for fifty years, and vaporizing the upper ring’s stabilization field controls.
Voyager careened to starboard.
“Can we go to impulse?” Chakotay barked.
“Not yet, sir,” B’Elanna replied. “We haven’t cleared the…”
But the end of her statement was lost as the ship jutted abruptly to port, and the tractor net blinked out of existence.
Suddenly, the intertial dampers were pushed to the brink of their capacity as the ship skidded along the edge of the event horizon. The ops and engineering consoles erupted in a shower of sparks, and those who were able to keep their seats or their footing did so only by holding on for dear life to whatever was nearest.
“Shields at sixty percent,” Tuvok called from tactical.
The chain reaction that Seven had predicted was swift. Like falling dominoes, each bay to the right and left of that which had housed the Betasis crumpled in upon itself. Huge shards of metal were pulled free and plunged into the inexorable gravity of the singularity. Within seconds, the lower ring was also affected. The perfect circles were ripped from their orbit as the first sections to collapse were pulled first toward the center, then caught in the singularity’s gravity and plucked like petals from a flower and sucked into oblivion.
Massive pieces of shrapnel flew before the main viewscreen as B’Elanna nudged the impulse engines from one-quarter to one-half, silently becoming one with the ship as she gently did her best to find the ever-narrowing course to safety.
She managed to avoid the event horizon by less than a hundred kilometers and for a heart-stopping second dropped the nose forty-five degrees, heading straight toward one of the only sections of the array that was still relatively intact.
“Shields at forty percent,” Tuvok said.
Chakotay saw it rushing toward them and silently cursed himself for waiting too long. Their rapidly disintegrating shields would never protect them from head-on impact.
“B’Elanna?” he called shrilly.
“Don’t worry,” B’Elanna said softly. At the same time she had been entering one slight course correction after another, the rest of her brain had been calculating trajectories for the array’s debris. Though she couldn’t have given Chakotay the odds to the decimal point, as Seven of Nine would no doubt have done in her place, she was fairly certain that in six out of ten possible permutations, the mass of metal they were soaring toward, which began spitting plasma as they approached, would not be in the same position in less than two seconds.
“Come on,” she hissed under her breath.
One of the struts that had extended from the array shot past them like a spear.
One second.
B’Elanna closed her eyes… and thought of Tom.
They had spent four years as chief engineer and conn officer debating and testing the limits of Voyager’s flying capabilities. She wondered for a fraction of a second if he would have chosen the same course.
It doesn’t matter now.
As Voyager reached the last obstacle separating them from relatively open space, the cumulative gravitational pull of the singularity upon the remaining solid fragment of the array forced the section out of their path and B’Elanna punched the engines to full impulse.
The main viewscreen was filled with calm star-filled space.
As the ship hurled itself toward safety, bucking under the protests of the singularity’s residual gravitational field, Tuvok called up optical controls at his station and the entire bridge crew watched in awe as the swirling mass of particles that had been the stable sight of the singularity was lit by the final death throes of the exploding array. For a few seconds, it erupted into a