“Sensors are unreliable, sir,” said the Vulcan, clearly having difficulty. “I am attempting to recalibrate.”
“Aili,” said the captain. He couldn’t think about them now. He couldn’t think about her. “What’s the status on the port strut?”
“Nominal for now, sir,” she said, obvious relief in her voice. He could see the same expression on her face even through the distortion of the water in her drysuit. “But I don’t recommend any more shakes like that last one.”
“No promises,” said Riker. “Good work, Rossini.”
“ It wasn’t really me, sir,”he said. “It was Torvig.”
At first sight, main engineering looked as it had for the last few days: battered and patched as if it was under perpetual repair, which, of course, it was.
Access plates hung off the walls; cables and chipsets hung from the openings as if some impossibly gigantic octopus had been trapped behind the paneling.
The engineers themselves looked only slightly better than their domain. The humans were bruised, bleary-eyed, and spotted with the lubricants that had belched free during the recent unpleasantness. Riker wasn’t sure what the normal state of some of the nonhumans was, but if drooping antennae and orange-ringed eyes were any indication, they had been pulled through the same wringer.
Worse than the sight of the engineers, worse than the ongoing pitch and roll of the ship as it continued to be battered by the forces outside, was the vision of Ensign Torvig splayed out on the floor beneath the main control console mumbling to himself as if in a trance.
Riker had always found the ensign to be more sturdy than his appearance might imply. The Choblik’s seeming delicacy had always been offset by the many cybernetic enhancements he bore. Now it was those very mechanical bits that drew attention to just how frail and helpless Torvig was without them.
Data cables ran from the control console to exposed nodes on every one of Torvig’s cybernetic parts. Some were translucent, pulsing with light at intervals in time with the convulsions of the ensign’s body.
“What is he doing?” asked the captain at last.
“He’s talking to the computer, sir,” said Rossini.
“Is he,” said Riker, stopping as another shudder ran through the ensign’s body. “Is he all right?”
As if in response, all the overhead lights blinked once, briefly but distinctly.
“That means ‘yes,’ sir,” said Rossini, looking a bit sheepish. “Until he’s done, that’s the only way he can respond.”
It seemed, after Torvig had been laid low by the effects of the initial pulse, his backup processors had kicked into high gear, rewriting the codes that allowed his body to interface with its cybernetic parts.
It had never occurred to the little engineer that those same codes could be used to help Titanreestablish communications between its own systems. It hadn’t until the second destructive wave had washed over them and sent him plummeting to the floor.
“It is sound,” said Tuvok, looking up from his analysis of Torvig’s code modifications. “Ship’s systems are returning to normal.”
“Shields?” asked Riker, happy to have even the smallest amount of good news. “Weapons?”
Tuvok shook his head slowly. “No, sir,” he said. “The same local conditions are still in effect. However-I believe, after seeing Mr. Torvig’s solution, that there may be a way to modify the shields as well.”
“But not the phasers?” Riker hated to harp on the same subject, but the phasers were more reliable than either form of torpedo. If there was martial trouble, they could swing outcomes in Titan’s favor.
“No, sir,” said Tuvok. “That is currently beyond my abilities.”
Riker quickly calculated the number of torpedoes, quantum and photon, in the ship’s armory. He then began bringing to the front of his mind all the battle scenarios involving phaserless combat between starships.
Though it had been closer to the source of this destructive wave, there was no guarantee that the alien vessel that had been menacing the shuttle had not also survived.
Another thought of the shuttle brought with it those of its fate, and of Deanna’s as well. They’d survived a lot together, enough for him to cling to the hope that they might yet come through this, but then he’d never been so completely severed from contact with her before. There had never been that yawning emptiness inside him that was shaped like her.
“Sir,” said Tuvok. “Are you well?”
“Fine,” said Riker, resuming his poker face. He doubted he fooled Tuvok’s telepathic sensibilities, but he didn’t have the luxury of showing the junior officers how deeply her loss affected him. He told Tuvok to take who he needed and get the shields up ASAP.
“Yes, Captain,” said the Vulcan, and turned to go.
“Incoming vessel,”said Kesi’s voice over the comm. “Captain and tactical officer to the bridge.”
The alien ship had survived after all. The sensors still had a hard time keeping a fix on it, but now that it was close enough, they could use the midrange viewers to get a look.
No one present was happy with the sight. Whether intentionally by its makers or simply as a result of an unfortunate esthetic, the vessel resembled, at least to Riker, some sort of bizarre mixture of a predator insect and the head of a trident.
They had registered the thing discharging a massive amount of energy when it had first appeared, and everyone had assumed it to be a weapon. They couldn’t be sure, with the sensors malfunctioning, but the power of the device, whatever it was, dwarfed their own phasers.
This in itself wouldn’t necessarily have given Riker much pause-he’d smacked down enemies possessed of superior weaponry before. But those had mostly been in stand-up fights where he or his allies had been in possession of the full range of offensive and defensive accessories.
Now, with Titanwobbling in the marsh of bizarre energies, made even worse by the recent eruption, with her shields failing and her weapons mostly offline or untrustworthy, he knew this would be anything but a stand-up fight.
“That seems unfair,” said Bohn, watching the alien ship glide easily and ominously toward them through the soup. “How are they getting away with that?”
“I am endeavoring to ascertain the answer to that exact question,” said Tuvok.
“Are those warp nacelles?” said Riker.
“Something similar, sir,” said Tuvok. “Scanning is difficult with so much distortion, but it seems they are somehow compensating for local conditions with some sort of external field buffers.”
“Can we do the same?” said Riker.
“I think not,” said Tuvok, pensive. “Though there is a large margin of error, current scans indicate the approaching vessel to be out of phase with normal space.”
Under normal circumstances this news would have soured Riker’s mood. Years before he had been indirectly associated with a former C.O.’s ambition to create a cloak that could make a ship into a virtual ghost, able to pass through matter and energy without damage. Such a vessel would be the perfect weapon, capable of horrible destruction and at the same time totally immune to counterattack.
The results of Starfleet’s abortive work had been both disastrous and tragic, leaving several officers dead and those in charge of the project with years’ worth of guilt over their actions.
All the Alpha Quadrant’s major powers had since tried to make the cloak work. Thus far none had succeeded, for which Riker was always grateful. He’d had a bellyful of war over the last decade, and the conflict ensuing from the successful development of the phased cloak was something he didn’t want to entertain.
There was one upshot that, in spite of everything, brought a very slight smile to Captain Riker’s face.