The Riddled Post - Aaron Rosenberg [20]
“All right, Lieutenant Commander,” she said, reminding Kieran who was first officer here, “we’ve veered off. Now what’s this all about?”
“Set down at the outpost—it’s closer than the da Vinci. I’ll beam down and meet you there.” And he cut off.
“Dammit, Duff, if this is some sort of joke it’ll cost you,” Fabian muttered from the backseat, but Sonya could tell it was an empty threat, and a glance from Fabian confirmed it. Kieran did like to joke around, but they both knew he’d never do it in the midst of a mission, especially under such conditions.
Besides, she knew him more than well enough to know that something had him spooked.
Twenty minutes later they had reached the outpost. Kieran had obviously transported down and beaten them there, because the shield opened for them before they even requested it. Sonya was already undoing her harness. By the time the shuttlecraft’s engines switched off, Sonya was standing by the door.
“All right, what’s this all about?” she demanded when the door slid aside to reveal Kieran waiting.
“Sorry to startle you, Commander—we had to get your attention fast, before you got into range.” Kieran’s hand reached for her, but he visibly fought down the impulse and turned instead, leading her and the others to the outpost’s control room. Pattie and Soloman were already there when they arrived.
“It’s the device,” Pattie explained as they entered. “It really was well-built. Even down to a standby mode.”
“Okay, so it’s got a standby—so what?” That was Corsi, who didn’t look too happy at having her mission aborted. “What difference would that make to us?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” Fabian admitted, wincing. “I should have thought of it myself. Damn! We almost got ourselves killed back there.”
Corsi whirled on Fabian. “Killed? I thought we were just retrieving the damned thing!”
“That was the plan, but we forgot about the standby.” Kieran didn’t look as overwrought now, but his hands still clenched tightly to the back of the chair he was standing behind. “The device shuts itself down if it goes a certain amount of time without finding a deposit—eight hours, to be exact. It conserves its power until either it does detect a deposit or it’s retrieved. It destroyed this place almost fifteen hours ago now, so it’s been inactive for seven. But the minute a sufficient quantity of dilithium comes in range, it’ll wake back up and home in on that source.”
Corsi winced. “And the shuttle’s got a warp engine.” Both the Archimedes and the Franklin were warp-capable.
“Well, I’m glad you called, then,” Sonya admitted, shaking her head to hide the shakes in her hands. “But what do we do now? We can’t go after it in the shuttle, obviously.”
“We could eject the warp core,” Fabian pointed out. “It’d take a while, but we could do it—then we grab it with the shuttlecraft the way we’d planned, bring it back, turn it off, and reinstall the drive.”
Sonya was glad he’d given her something to focus on instead of their near-death. “Workable, but not optimal. Ejecting the core’s easy enough, but it will take time to put it back in, and we’d probably have to do it at a starbase. I don’t think Captain Scott would appreciate our taking the time. It’s an option, but I’d rather save it for a last resort.”
“We could recall it,” Kieran pointed out. “We’d have to set up shield generators.”
“I know, but it’s dangerous. If something goes wrong we could wind up without any shields here, and that means more time to refabricate them and then rebuild them.”
“Suits are out?” Corsi asked.
“Absolutely,” Fabian said. “This atmosphere’d shred them in a matter of minutes.”
“Can we beam it back?”
Shaking her head, Sonya said, “We already thought of that, but it wouldn’t work—the transporter on the outpost isn’t made to reach that far across this interference. It can go up and out, especially with another transporter on the other end, but this is too far and too one-sided. And the da Vinci