Synthesis - James Swallow [81]
She actually looked worried. “It might not be enough, Captain. We’re several light-minutes away from the planetoid. Without warp speed—”
“We’ll get there as fast as we can,” Riker replied, and faced White-Blue. “Anything you can tell us about what we’re going to face out there will be useful.”
“Shipframes are already entering the danger zone,” it told him. “The matter will be dealt with by the time the Titan arrives. This vessel’s presence will be redundant.”
“I’ll take that as a no, then,” the captain retorted, and took his place in the center seat. “Let me know if you change your mind. In the meantime, don’t get in the way of my crew.”
White-Blue said nothing and backed into an alcove, watching them intently.
Vale leaned closer to speak so only Riker could hear her. “Run out of patience?”
He didn’t look at her. “Does it show?”
The Null tore through the sky above the ice world like a storm made of sword blades. In the shuttle’s copilot seat, Pava felt a shudder of revulsion go through her as she watched the pulsing, sinuous shapes spin and turn. They resembled nothing she had ever seen, shimmering with a gloss that recalled wet, rust-colored flesh in some places, turning black and glassy in others. Patches of the alien matter distorted, and it nauseated her to look too long into the mad geometries it made.
Tuvok wove the shuttlecraft through the ever-growing cloud of wreckage and ejecta displaced by the attack, and the Holiday shuddered as debris bumped off the deflector envelope.
“Oh, Suns, it’s coming back around!” said Sethe.
The largest of the forms, the long, thin coil, was spiraling outward, flexing into a rough loop as it moved. The Andorian wondered how the thing could propel itself. Was it really some kind of vessel or a bizarre form of subspace cosmozoan? A glowing nimbus of dark energy haloed every piece of the freakish intruders. Perhaps it’s some kind of displacement field or—
“Incoming ships,” called Dakal. “Approaching fast.”
“I see them, Ensign,” replied Tuvok. “Three Sentry vessels, off the port quarter.”
The shuttle’s scanners picked them up, and Pava spared the screen on her panel a glance. It showed a trio of conical craft, and as she watched, they split apart and unfolded, reconfiguring themselves on the move into curved structures, similar to the shape of a Klingon bat’leth stood on one tip. Green rays flared from the craft, raking one of the smaller Null fragments and disintegrating it. The AIs swept in, homing on the larger whiplike form, but this time, the emerald fire from the antiproton weapons was sloughed off in great gouts of black sparks.
The Null reacted. The far end of the massive cord recoiled and lashed out, slamming back and forth in a ricochet between the ships in their tight formation. Thruster nacelles were sliced away, bleeding plasma into the vacuum. Another of the Sentry craft was bifurcated, and the third was stabbed by the tip of the matter strip as it turned solid and punched through the center of the vessel’s mass. The wreckage of the AIs was ignored as the Null shifted again, this time looping into a serpentine aspect, spinning down toward the thin elevator tower that connected the refinery station to the planet below.
The Null struck out and bit into its prey, then shook and twisted with fangs buried deep to rip open the kill.
With a flash of detonation, the space elevator was severed just beneath the disc of the refinery. The Null was already spinning away as the orbital station deformed under the sudden and punishing transfer of kinetic energy. The platform bent and broke, separating into burning shards and great ragged wedges of metal.
“The tether…” breathed Dakal.
Cut loose, kilometers of semirigid material sank away into the ice world’s gravity, parts of it breaking off and burning as it flashed into the thin interface