“Acknowledged,” he said as he kept one eye on the sensor scans of the battle. Titanhadn’t yet been discovered by the Orishans; there was too much blasting going on in the region for even that awful crash to have been noticed by more than a few. The readings of the warp core, if they could be trusted, were stable enough. If they held, Modan would easily shut the thing down, lift out the flux regulators, and return. They could be off the planet inside two hours.
“Done,”she said softly. There had been a tense moment when the primkeys had jammed instead of opening the manual shutdown plates, but he had talked her through the use of the link glove to get them open. After that it was a simple matter to perform a manual shutdown.
Jaza talked her through it, step-by-step, and she did precisely as she was told.
The entire process took ten minutes. After another ten, she was a good way toward pulling the first of the flux regulators free of its housing. As she worked in silence, he continued to scan periodically for signs that the deuterium suspension was still becoming solid or that the antimatter was not securely held by the thickening plasma.
Eventually the entire core would cool and go essentially dormant. Nothing short of a solar flare at close proximity might restart it. Such a flare would also wipe all life from Orisha, so the subsequent matter/antimatter explosion would be redundant.
“Najem,”she said, almost too softly for him to hear. “There’s a problem.”
“What is it?”
“ I think my suit is failing,”she said. “I’m becoming visible.”
Jaza swore. It was so obvious he should never have missed it. The rad levels around the core were high enough to kill a humanoid in short order, so it wasn’t unlikely they would play hob with an energetic system as delicate as the stealth field.
“You have the flux regulator?” he said, trying to keep the tension out of his voice.
“One,”she said. “But not the backup.”
“Good enough,” he told her. “Get back here, now.”
“ Najem,”she said in a voice so small he was surprised the badge was able to broadcast it. “Two Orishan soldiers have entered the crash site.”
He had a vague image of her position in his head. To get at the manual step-down controls she would have had to climb to the top of the core, some ten meters above the ground. If she was still there, the Orishans might walk beneath without ever looking up.
“Be still,” he said. “Let them pass.”
There was silence for longer than he liked, enough time for him to mouth a silent prayer that the boon the Prophets had provided him might extend to Modan for just a bit longer.
The clock ticked in his mind. The Ellington’s sensors and defensive systems hummed dispassionately around him. If he didn’t look out the forward viewport, if he ignored the aches that remained from his recently healed injuries, he might be back in Titan’s shuttlebay running an odd but simple survival scenario.
Of course he saw very well the giant vermillion fronds draping over the front of the vessel and caught tiny glimpses of the copper-colored sky through the breaks between. This wasn’t Titan. Titanwas dead.
The clock ticked. Jaza waited and meditated. A full three minutes passed and he found himself eyeing the remaining isolation suit and the phasers. He didn’t know what the stun setting might do against the Orishans’ dense chitinous exoskeletons, but he knew the kill setting could not be employed under any circumstance.
If he was forced into a choice between saving her life and killing one of these beings, he knew what it would have to be. He prayed that it wouldn’t come to letting Modan die to preserve the timeline. The Orishans, of course, were under no such proscriptions.
“They’ve gone,”she whispered suddenly.
“Good,” he said. “Come back.”
“ Not yet,”she said. “I think I can get the backup unit.”
“Modan,” he said, suddenly more nervous for her than when she had been silent. “Come back now. Right now.”
“You sent me for both units, Najem,”she said. “What if this one fails?”
“Ensign Modan,” he said. “I am ordering you to come back now. Now.”
“One moment,”she said. “It will take only a few more seconds to-”
She never finished. At that moment the sensors all went haywire and the ship begin to scream multiple alarms simultaneously.
“Warning,”it said. “Unquantifiable energetic field effect in proximity. Take evasive action. Gravitic conditions in flux.”
“Computer,” he yelled over the din. “Record all sensor data for analysis.”
“Acknowledged,”said the voice.
There was the sound of thunder overhead, as if two impossibly massive hands had been clapped together, sending ripples of concussive force in all directions. All around him the ground began to shake violently.
The shuttle continued its attempt to smash him into the bulkheads, but he held fast. As the data came through he began at last to understand what had happened. He wasn’t sure of the how, and the whywas completely obscure, but he felt he now knew what.
Time, he thought. Of course.
The revelation distracted him enough that he relaxed his grip on the control console. The shuttle lurched violently, hurling him to the floor. He groaned from the impact and immediately thought of Modan.
“Jaza to Modan!” he yelled. “Ensign Modan! Report!” Maybe she tried. There was the awful grating sound of static with what could have been her voice underneath. Or maybe he imagined it in the chaos.
The quake stopped abruptly, and for a moment, the entire world, within the shuttle and without, was unnaturally still and silent. It was, he thought, as if the entire universe had held its breath for fear that the release would inspire another of the violent temblors.
It never came. Jaza let himself relax by degrees, pulling himself back into the pilot’s cradle. He watched as the shuttle’s systems recalibrated themselves and performed the analyses he’d ordered.
“Modan,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“ Najem?”she said after a terrible moment. Her voice was distressingly weak and her speech was slurred. “I fell. Hit my head.”
He tried not to picture her lying there in the wreck of the starship, perhaps with a broken appendage, perhaps with something worse, unable to move or-
Her scream cut through the cabin like a laser through a sheet of silk. She had obviously meant to continue talking, leaving their channel open, and now, because of that, he could hear her grunting and perhaps growling as if in the midst of some struggle.
“The soldiers,”she managed to say before the link died. “They’ve come-”
It was obvious what had happened and just as clear what he had to do. He snatched up the remaining isolation suit, a phaser, and a tricorder by which to track her comm signal.
I’m coming, Modan, he thought. Just hang on.
He slid down the ladder from the crew cabin into the hold and grabbed a second phaser as he made for the rear access hatch.