The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [88]
DeSeve walked past the mingled frustration and respect on Lieutenant Worf’s ridged face.
“You’d better suit up!” ordered La Forge.
Could he spare the time? Engineers swarmed him and thrust him into the protective suit as if they valued him. Making what haste he could in unfamiliar gear, DeSeve lumbered away.
The Jefferies tube that led toward the nacelle, the grenade, and the fail safes was a maelstrom of small explosions, white shading past a livid purple off the spectrum, and the whoops of alarms. In here, the vibrations of the endangered ship seemed to take possession of him and shake him through and through.
Time until the warp core breach was running out, but he knew his personal time would run out even faster unless he made haste. He bent double, a tall man in a small space, and crawled faster than he had even in the grueling Romulan basic training they had insisted he undergo. He had entertained them mightily, but, in the end, he had passed their tests. He would pass this one too.
The protective gear got in his way, wedging him for precious seconds. He thought he heard something tear. No time to check, to make any repairs. He wrestled free and moved forward again, trying for as much speed as he could, as if this were a Romulan live-fire exercise.
As much as the explosions and shrieks of deranged systems, the radiation was a palpable thing. It was a light-filled mist in the air, a burning sensation on his skin, and it grew harder to bear the closer he got. Enterprise lurched hard, hurling him against the side of the tube and wedging him in firmly against panels that had buckled. As time ticked down to warp core breach, it would become harder and harder to control. He struggled away from the panels and felt his suit tear, slipped on one hand and went down. Frantically tearing free, he righted himself and clambered even faster through the tube. This was his one chance to redeem a life that had been one long dishonor.
A red light blinked on his heads-up display. That last fight to extricate himself had torn his suit, all right. Torn the back and one glove.
He looked down. His injured hand had left a smear of blood on the metal. There would be more. He pushed himself to move faster, before the rising levels of radiation stopped him. By now, the first stigmata of radiation poisoning were forming, spreading and growing darker on his skin. Was that sweat he felt, or blood as capillaries weakened and then broke?
By the time DeSeve reached the nexus where the cloaked Romulan weapon was probably lodged, his hand had begun to ooze blood within the torn glove. He braced himself up on his knees and groped ahead. Now he could feel the small, deadly object. Cloaked, all right, and he could not manipulate its triggers in the heavy gloves that had failed to protect him.
Well, it wasn’t as if he had ever expected to make it out of here alive, he told himself and ignored the spike of fear that followed. He was used to fear. He could live with it—just a little longer.
He ripped off both gloves, the torn, useless one and the one that still afforded him protection. The heads-up display pointed to almost exponential radiation hikes, but he needed both hands to manipulate the weapon. First, though, he had to see it.
Blood dripped from both hands. It splashed and spread out over an invisible, roughly spherical object. The thing was burning hot. No time to cry out or find the med-delivery system in his useless gear. He caught up the gloves again and grabbed at the object. They began to smolder. He smelled smoke along with his own blood and sweat. But they would last long enough. Long enough for him to find the tiny, secret switches that were Romulan engineers’ protection against intrusive political officers.
His helmet had clouded with sweat or worse. Half crazed from the pain, he ripped it off. Stories he remembered from his brief, unlucky Starfleet career came back to him. Hadn’t they whispered that Spock once lost a battle with radiation yet lived to fight another day? Could DeSeve dare