The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [43]
Troi, unlike Worf, had a calming influence. “Are you all right up there?”
“Yeah, I think so.” La Forge pushed his estimate of the size of the swarm up into the thousands. “How about you?”
“Most of them are flying over our heads.”
La Forge felt himself being pushed sideways by the sheer number of flutters impacting him. The wind had shifted a bit, and he felt the platform twist slightly. “I’m starting to get a little worried. Are they almost—” He stopped talking as his stomach lurched. He couldn’t see what was happening.
“Geordi!”
The fear in Troi’s voice told him what he feared was true—he was in free fall. All the flutters pressing against him must have hit the tab that deactivated his safety line’s adhesion plate. He flailed his arms, trying to grab something, anything, the tether, the railings. Then the flutters cleared off his faceplate.
He was almost below the level of the platform, falling backward. Worf and Troi, up and out of their seats, leaned against the railing, their arms outstretched as they tried to grab him on his way down. They missed as the wind carried him away. Ignoring the panic welling up in him, La Forge rolled into an orbital skydiving pose and attempted to steer back to the lift.
“I’ll lower the platform,” Worf said.
“I’m trying to reach the tether.” La Forge adjusted his outstretched arms and legs. His VISOR allowed him to see temperature variations in the atmosphere and predict winds and sheers, but four-hundred-kilometers-per-hour gusts minimized that advantage. The upper anchor for the tether, far above them, orbited in the direction of the wind; being on the platform was like drifting down a fast river in a boat, but now he was overboard in the river itself.
Above him he could hear the platform descending, but not as fast as he was. Even under these circumstances, the engineer in him was making calculations: The acceleration of gravity on Askaria is about twenty-two meters per second squared. At this altitude I’ll be at terminal velocity, almost eight hundred kilometers per hour, in under ten seconds. The EV suit could protect him at that speed, but not at the crushing pressures he would eventually plummet to. He directed himself toward the tether, even though he was falling too fast to grab it. Reaching down to his waist, he drew out more slack in his safety line. If he could reattach it to the tether, the harness mechanism would automatically reduce his rate of descent. He’d probably break a few ribs when he hit the end, but it beat the alternative.
He raced toward the tether and reached out with the safety line, activating the phased adhesion plate. But moving his arms forward altered his course. The fingers of his left hand brushed the tether, but the safety line was in his right hand. The tether shot by in a blur. Before he could try to turn around for another pass, he was caught in an eddy, roughly spun around, and thrown in a different direction. With a concentrated effort of arms and legs, he came out of the nauseating tumble, completely disoriented, tired in just seconds from fighting the wind.
“On your right.” He’d never heard Worf’s voice sound so gentle.
Spinning to his right he saw the tether. Bending backward to raise his head, he caught a last glimpse of Troi and Worf, standing at the edge of the descending platform looking down at him. At this distance he couldn’t see their faces. Then they disappeared into an ammonia ice cloud.
As La Forge continued to fall, he found that it wasn’t his whole life that flashed before his eyes—just the last few days. The events leading to his perilous descent into the deeps of Askaria had begun on the bridge, while he’d been overseeing some system diagnostics.
“Captain, I’ve picked up a distress call,” Lieutenant Worf said.
At the aft engineering station, La Forge paused the diagnostic program he was running and faced forward.
Worf didn’t look up as he continued to work his controls at tactical. “Now I