Synthesis - James Swallow [10]
But then everything was swept away as the deck pivoted without warning beneath her feet, throwing cards and coins and everything not bolted down up into the air.
A metallic moan echoed through the bulkheads as superluminal velocities were abruptly canceled out, shock waves of kinetic energy backwashing through tritanium panels and duranium spaceframes. The starship shuddered along its length, internal lighting flashing out, then returning in jagged strobes. Somewhere, an electroplasma conduit popped and shorted as breakers kicked in.
Pava shot out an arm to snag the lip of the table, her other hand unceremoniously catching hold of Torvig’s tail as he fell upward. The Choblik gave a lowing cry of surprise that turned into a grunt as the Titan’s artificialgravity generators caught up to the shock and reasserted control.
Loose items clattered back to the deck in a rain, and Pava landed awkwardly, hissing as she banged her leg against a chair.
Y’lira blinked. “We… we’re out of warp?”
“Yes,” managed Torvig, shaking his head. Anything else he was going to say was drowned out by the blare of the alert sirens.
Tuvok was already racing for the mess-hall door. “Stations!” he shouted.
Coins and cards abandoned, the other officers sprinted after him.
TWO
“What the hell was that?” demanded Vale, wincing at the pain in her right shoulder. When Titan had bucked, she’d grabbed the arm of the command chair to stop herself from being flung to the deck of the bridge. She was thinking maybe she’d wrenched something. “Full stop!” The order seemed a little redundant, but she gave it anyway. On the forward viewscreen, a fizzing plane of static cast hard, sharp-edged shadows.
“Sandbank,” muttered Lieutenant Lavena, leaning close over the helm.
“Spare me the oceangoing metaphors, Aili.” The first officer got to her feet and surveyed the bridge with a grimace, waving a hand in front of her face to waft away a drift of thin smoke. Panels around the engineering console flickered and spat fat sparks as a junior officer worked to stabilize the system.
The Pacifican pilot turned in her chair. “Force of habit, Commander, sorry.” She tapped her panel. “We struck a pocket of spatial distortion. It caught us out of nowhere. It must have blown the warp bubble, knocked us back to sublight.”
To Lavena’s right, Lieutenant Sariel Rager was pushing stray hair out of her face from where it had come loose, her dark eyes still wide with the shock. “Confirming that, ma’am. Close-range sensors are reading dissipating tetryon discharges, consistent with a distortion effect. Titan sailed right through the middle of a zone of collapsing subspace instability.”
Vale cursed under her breath. “I thought Melora was feeding you nav data on these…” She frowned. “These sandbanks.” The commander walked forward. “You’re supposed to go around them, not through them.”
“We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Rager.
Lavena’s face colored slightly. “With all due respect, this sector is so choked with spatial distortion, there’s hardly anywhere we can go where we’re not passing through them. But it’s mostly low-level, not enough to affect the ship.”
Zurin Dakal glanced up from behind the bowed sciences console. “That didn’t feel like ‘low-level’ to me,” said the Cardassian. Lavena frowned back at him, and he looked away. His gray fingers ran across the panel, working furiously. “Confirming Lieutenant Rager’s readings. The distortion zone must have gone through a sudden expansion-contraction event. It’s a million-to-one chance we were even nearby. Without temporally desynchronized sensors, there’s simply no way we could have avoided it.”
“Status report?” As Vale asked the question, she turned to see Tuvok enter the bridge through the port turbolift and move swiftly to his post behind the tactical horseshoe behind