Surak's Soul - J.M. Dillard [54]
She said nothing further, merely followed him to the tunnel opening. She went first, easily slinging the unconscious ensign over one shoulder, then climbing down without effort.
For Archer, it was enormously awkward and precarious. He was forced to climb down one-handed—making him feel like he was a cadet undergoing obstacle training. At each rung, he had to let go and quickly grab for the next, leaving an instant where he was completely unstable. The disabled arm swung uselessly at his side; the stabs of pain emanated from the center of Archer’s spine through his shoulder and all the way down to his fingertips, causing him to gasp through gritted teeth.
Somehow, he made it down into the armory, where T’Pol waited, not even breathing heavily. Archer at once moved to the bulkhead where the phase rifles were stored and took one with his good hand.
T’Pol stood, silent and solemn.
“Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to arm yourself,” Archer said. He checked the setting on the rifle awkwardly, then hoisted the weapon to see if he could aim. It wasn’t comfortable, but it would work.
“Captain,” T’Pol says earnestly, “Wanderer is unlike any other life-form we have discovered. It may be the only one of its kind. To destroy it would be tantamount to committing the same crime it committed against the Oanis—genocide.”
“Would you prefer it wiped out everyone on this ship, and on Earth, instead?”
“No. However, I am certain a third solution exists.”
“Look, I don’t want to kill it any more than you do. I doubt a blast from a phase rifle will do anything to it—I’m just hoping it’ll disable the damned thing. But if it does kill it—well, I’m willing to take that chance.” He moved from the armory toward the turbolift as T’Pol followed, the ensign still in her arms.
As he expected, Wanderer was waiting for them in front of the F-deck turbolift.
The sight of the creature evoked in Archer quite the opposite of compassion. He steadied the rifle against the right side of his body. “All right, Wanderer—you don’t like the taste of me right now. How do you like the taste of this?”
He fired.
The brilliant beam bored through the air…and, as Archer had feared, directly through the energy creature, piercing the field of blue-green without effect, just as it would any spaceborne field of radiation or electromagnetic pulses.
The blast sailed through Wanderer so effortlessly, in fact, that it damaged the bulkhead behind the creature, searing through the metal and exposing the circuitry beneath.
Sparks flew. And a single electrical current—a blue-white surge of microlightning—crackled.
The current caught Wanderer’s nebulous periphery. The creature writhed, pulsing forward suddenly in one direction like a reckless amoeba and turning an intense shade of cobalt so dazzling that Archer shielded his eyes from the glow.
“Captain,” T’Pol said, “I believe we can attempt to board the turbolift.”
The two of them hurried through the open doors while a distracted Wanderer continued to spasm and pulsate.
* * *
“Commander!” Hoshi shouted, over the din of an overcrowded engineering. “I’ve got an open channel!”
Trip Tucker looked up from the device he and Malcolm Reed had been working on. It was ridiculously simple, actually, so simple and old-fashioned that they’d had trouble finding parts for it—just a small electricity generator.
Hoshi’s words gave Trip hope; he’d started to worry about the captain—and now, T’Pol. They’d been gone too long, and clearly had encountered Wanderer on their way…But the sudden reclamation of communications made Trip grin. His instincts told him Jonathan Archer was alive and well and giving Wanderer a run for its money.
“Contact Starfleet Command at once,” he ordered cheerfully, rising from where he and Reed had been bent over their old-fashioned device.
“Advise them of our situation.”
“You’ve got it, sir.”
The ride to D-deck, a mixture for Archer of agony and optimism, seemed to take longer than usual—an effect, no doubt, of the shooting pain in his shoulder and