He decided it was time for a change of strategy. Even if he could open the bulkhead, he had no reason to think he would be able to fathom its inner workings. He chided himself, What do you expect to find, Ming? Duotronic cables?
A flicker of anger drove him to fantasize about skewering the pod with the monoblade. Then he stopped and considered the sorts of features that were often found in escape pods, regardless of the species for which it was made. Most relied on manual operation for launch, but on many ships there were conditions that would trigger the automatic release of escape pods. On Starfleet ships, some self-destruct sequences ejected escape pods as part of their protocol. In many cases, an ejection sequence could be triggered by fire…or by a sudden loss of hull integrity and air pressure.
Xiong set the monoblade on the deck between his feet and climbed carefully into the pod. Then, clinging to the edge of the portal, he reached out and picked up the sword. He looked around until he saw a part of the Tholian ship’s hull that could be easily perforated without harming the escape pod—and he thrust the monoblade into it.
A groan of wrenching metal, the roar of escaping high-pressure fluids, the shattering of obsidian. Xiong fought the blowout effect caused by the explosive decompression and pushed himself back inside the escape pod. Grabbing any hand-holds he could find, he wedged himself inside the tiny space as the thunder of the disintegrating bulkhead was drowned out by the screech of venting gases.
An iris snapped shut over the pod’s portal. Sudden acceleration hurled Xiong against the iris as the pod was blasted away from the Tholian battle cruiser. Seconds later its inertial dampeners kicked in, and he was once again floating freely inside the pod. Looking toward its far end, he saw that its black surface had become almost transparent, showing him the curve of the planet as it spread wide beneath him.
He was about to congratulate himself for his ingenuity when he realized that he had absolutely no means of controlling the pod’s descent or landing. As a vast ocean rolled into view, Xiong hoped that the pod’s automated features extended to more than just its ejection sequence.
The tropics, he mused as the pod fell. Assuming I survive the splashdown, this might be the start of a nice vacation.
Niwara stood at the river’s edge as Commander Terrell waded out into the rapids. An orange safety line from her pack was tied around his torso and secured to a thick tree trunk several meters behind her. She controlled the slack of the line as he moved into deeper water, anchoring him so that the current didn’t sweep him away as it had Theriault. The bright orange rope chafed the pads of her paws as she fed out a few more meters of it to Terrell.
He called back to her, “How much farther?”
She glanced down at the screen of her tricorder, which lay flat on the ground by her feet. “Two more meters,” Niwara said. “Then dive.” Paying out some more line for the first officer, she wondered how he would find anything in the churning murk of muddy water. Opening his eyes underwater would be all but impossible. In every practical sense, he would be diving blind.
Terrell took a deep breath and submerged. Niwara monitored the slack in the line by touch while she watched her tricorder screen. It was centered on the signal from Theriault’s communicator, which lay unmoving on the river bottom. Slowly the first officer’s bio reading closed in on it, then stopped. A few seconds later he surfaced and gasped for breath while fighting to tread water against the current. “Am I close?” he asked.
“Half a meter more to your left when you dive,” she said.
He nodded, took a few quick breaths, then ducked back under the water. When he surfaced again half a minute later, he had Theriault’s communicator in his hand. “Reel me in,” he said.
Hand over hand, Niwara helped pull Terrell back to the riverbank. He dragged himself out of the water and slumped to a sitting position. His body, bare except for some regulation-issue dark gray underwear, was covered in dirty water that dried quickly in the warm air, leaving him coated with sandy grit. His close-cropped wiry hair was packed with silt. He untied the safety line from his body.
Niwara asked, “Was there any sign of her?”
“No,” Terrell said, shaking his head. “Just her communicator.” He looked out at the river. “Probably got knocked loose when she went over those rocks.” Niwara nodded and began undoing the knots that held the safety line to the tree trunk. As she expected, Terrell tried to put a positive spin on his discovery. “I’m just glad she wasn’t down there,” he said. He gazed into the distance, following the river’s path into the jungle. “That means there’s a chance she’s still alive, somewhere downriver.”
Although Niwara always hoped for the best, she made a point of preparing for the worst. Theriault could be dead, she admitted to herself. Floating away, a slave to the current. She knew not to say so aloud. Terrell had no patience for pessimism.
Terrell stood up and brushed off as much of the water and dirt from his body as he could. He retrieved his clothes, which he had placed in a neat pile several meters from the water. In less than a minute he was dressed. He rejoined Niwara, who coiled the last few meters of the safety line, knotted it around its middle, and stowed it in her pack. “We’ve got about an hour of daylight left,” Terrell said. “We’ll continue downriver till it gets dark. Then we’ll make camp for the night.”
“Aye, sir,” Niwara said, putting on her pack. The first officer was right to recommend halting their trip downriver when darkness fell. Niwara could only hope that Theriault had found the opportunity to do likewise.
The top deck of the U.S.S. Sagittarius looked like a junkyard.
Master Chief Ilucci and his engineering team were surrounded by the disassembled components of several different systems, ranging from shield emitters to plasma conduits. Several pieces were scorched; a few had been warped by intense heat. Kneeling in the middle of it all was Threx. The brawny Denobulan poked and prodded the item in his hand with various tools and sensors, then he chucked it over his shoulder. “Well, that one’s dead,” he said. “Toss me another.”
Karen Cahow lobbed an identical component to him. “If we don’t find a working regulator soon, we can forget about fixing the shields,” she said.
“Two more pieces, and I can build a new one,” Threx said.
Torvin stood with one of his enormous Tiburonian ears pressed against the impulse reactor and glared at the other engineers. He pressed his index finger to his lips in a shushing gesture. Cahow grinned with amusement at the boyish engineer’s brazen rebuke of his superiors. Ilucci rolled his eyes; Threx simply glowered and turned away. They all stopped talking, however, giving Torvin a few moments to listen for whatever was going wrong inside the delicate reactor assembly.
After several seconds he pulled back from the machine. “It’s the vectored exhaust director,” he said despondently. “The inner and outer vanes are totally misaligned.”
“All right,” Ilucci said. “We can’t fix that. Realign the warp-core EPS taps instead. I want to be ready to hook up the new fuel pod as soon as it gets here.” If it gets here, he prevented himself from adding.
“You got it, Master Chief,” Torvin said. He picked up his tools and went to work.
Ilucci kneeled beside the transporter emitter. The entire engineering team had taken half an hour to decouple it from its housing beneath the cargo deck and transfer it with antigravs to the top deck. Moving it back belowdecks and resecuring it was just one of many labor-intensive tasks the engineers had to look forward to this evening. First, however, Ilucci had to find some way to fix it. “Cahow,” he called out. “We got any spare imaging scanners?”