The change comes with shocking swiftness. One second I am sitting on my command chair, the next I am sprawling on the deck, and the air is full of sparks and smoke and flickering lights.
I roll and jump to my feet, and I jump too high, my body is too light - the artificial gravity is failing. The ship is shuddering, and there is an ominous groaning sound beneath the crackling of electrical fires and the spasmodic wailing of alarms. "Status report," I say, with as much force and authority as I can muster.
I look around the bridge. Twosani Dezin is there, and working furiously at a functional console; Pascale, the android, is at the helm; Psaz is at the tactical console - but the tactical console is in smoking fragments, and the Tellarite himself is lying motionless on the deck. I move towards him.
"Sir." Twosani's voice is choked with shock. "Sir - we have - " She swallows. Her black Betazoid eyes are twin pits in a paper-white face. "Some sort of massive explosion. Systems offline everywhere - structural integrity reads zero -"
"Evidently a rounding error," I say, kneeling by Psaz. He is unconscious, but still breathing; a developing bruise on his head suggests he has been struck by a piece of the exploding console. "Commander Pascale. When the USS King Estmere suffered critical damage at the Stygmalian Rift, Admiral Shohl was able to effect temporary repairs by cross-circuiting the structural integrity fields and the EPS grid. This required the aid of a crew member with exceptional strength, though. You possess physical strength exceeding the humanoid norm -"
"On my way, sir!" The green-haired android leaves the bridge at a run. Beside me, Psaz stirs; his eyelids flutter, then open, and he utters some weak Tellarite curses. I touch his shoulder. "Remain calm. We will obtain medical assistance as soon as is practicable."
I stand up. In the fluctuating gravity, it is not easy to make my way over the trembling deckplates to where Twosani is working. Her emotional tone is fearful and anguished; unconsciously, she is radiating this into the nearby area. I am the only person close enough to be affected, though, and I steel myself to remember my discipline, to put it from my mind. "What happened?" I ask.
"I don't -" She draws in a deep, ragged breath. "Too many systems are out - I can't get a clear picture - but it looks like there's been a massive explosion in the starboard blade. Drives are out, shields down - no chance of weapons -"
"Sensor contacts?" I peer past her, at the console display, but can make little of the readings.
"Nothing on scan. But something must have hit us - maybe a cloaked ship -"
"Futile to speculate, at this stage." I reach past her to work the control crystals. The Tholian interface flickers and sputters for a moment, but the display stabilizes. It is not telling me anything I am glad to know.
"Drives, as you say, are down. We are no longer maintaining station keeping - we are in free fall, under the influence of the spire's generated gravity. At our current rate of acceleration, we will soon strike the inner surface of the sphere itself. It is extremely doubtful that Tapiola will survive this impact. We must find an alternative, quickly."
"What alternative?" There is an unhealthy, panicky edge to her voice.
"Commander Dezin," I say sternly. "This is a crisis situation, and I require your assistance."
"I -" She stiffens. "Sorry, sir."
It looks as though she is about to say more, but at this point the deck lurches again beneath our feet - and then steadies. Weight presses down on us; the gravity is no longer failing. My combadge chirps at me - the badges have automatic systems which network them peer-to-peer in a disaster situation. "T'Pia," I say.
"Engineering here, sir." Nelson Karas's voice. "We've patched SI through the EPS grid like you suggested, but we're in a lot of trouble, still."
"Specify."
"Whatever hit us wrecked most of the starboard blade. Warp core has scrammed, gone to cold shutdown. Fusion reactor is offline. We still have the auxiliary battery, but that won't get us far. And, sir, our EPS grid isn't reinforced to the same standard as King Estmere's. We have maybe half an hour, at most, before the conduits fuse under the additional load."
"Thank you, Commander. That last factor is not relevant. We will hit the surface of the sphere in substantially less time." Ideas, options are flashing through my mind - mostly, to be dismissed as impractical.
My ship is wrecked. There are very few resources left, with which to survive this. I do not know if I am feeling Twosani's panic, now, or my own.
"Do we still have power for the RCS thrusters?"
"RCS arrays are at about sixty per cent capacity," says Karas. "But with the ship in the shape she's in - we don't have enough to keep us stationary, and we'd shake her apart if we tried -"
"We have sufficient to modify our course." An idea has occurred to me - a very risky one, but there are no others. "Bring as much auxiliary power as possible to supplement the inertial dampers. There is going to be an impact, and we must cushion it as best we are able." I cross the bridge to the helm console. The controls appear still to be operational.
"What are you going to do, sir?" asks Twosani.
"We cannot arrest this fall. And the SI field will fail, which will result in the ship breaking up in flight, or on impact. Logically, we must therefore attempt a soft landing." I consult the helm display. It is shaking and filled with interference, but I can see what I need. The question is, do the thrusters have enough reserves to reach it?
"Sir, this ship was never designed to land! We don't even have landing gear!"
I grasp the control crystals and twist them. Tapiola's girders groan as she responds. "There is a body of water on the surface of the sphere, perhaps thirty kilometres from our current location. I will attempt to splash down in that. If we can protect against the initial impact, the water itself will support the ship to some extent, perhaps for long enough for us to make repairs." A wavering line shows on the course display, marked out with proximity warnings and unacceptable-hazard icons.
"You can't -" Twosani stops, takes another deep breath, then says, "What do you want me to do, sir?"
"Initially, get me a public address channel. Then, download all available data onto a PADD. We have to know how this happened, and we cannot guarantee the computer core will survive. And see if you can get external signals out to the Tempest or to Joint Command."
"Yes, sir." She turns back to her console. There is purpose showing in her mind, now, and I hope it is enough to override her fears. As to my own fears... they are my problem, and I will not make them anyone else's.
The ship shudders again - some random turbulence in the atmosphere, or perhaps a glitch in the RCS arrays. I make the required course correction.
"Channels open, sir," Twosani reports.
I touch my combadge. "Attention." My words echo back at me from the bridge's speakers. "All crew. The ship has suffered critical damage from an unknown source. We are attempting to soft-land in a body of water on the sphere's surface. Personnel should evacuate the lower decks of the ship, which may become flooded. Make pickup on injured crewmates wherever practical, and assist Engineering in making repairs." I glance at the proximity warnings on the helm console. "Do not abandon ship. We cannot safely deploy escape pods, there are too many structures in the vicinity. Otherwise, follow your assigned disaster procedures. I have every confidence we will survive this. T'Pia out." I hope it is enough to calm panic among the crew.
"No communication with Tempest," Twosani reports. "I've sent a message to Joint Command, but I don't know if we can receive an acknowledgement, even.... Sir, I have something. A remote telemetry probe - I can access its sensors, get a visual on this area -"
It might help. "On screen."
The main viewer, which had gone completely blank, glows into life. I see the spire, standing amid the forest of towers on its three legs - I see something beneath the spire, a streak of darkness -
"Magnify sector two seven by three four."
The image expands, and I see my ship.
Orb Weavers like Tapiola consist of three narrow, elongated pyramidal structures - the "blades" - linked to a small engineering hull. The topmost blade contains most of the crew quarters; the longer, larger ones below house warp nacelles and other essential systems. Now, though, black smoke is pouring from Tapiola's starboard blade, and even through it I can see the hull armour is ravaged and shattered. The ship is plunging through the atmosphere, trailing a long line of smoke, like an ancient fighter aircraft being shot down in flames. But Tapiola is no mere aircraft, she is a starship -
Or she was. The image of the ship vanishes behind an obscuring tower.
"The problem of abandoning ship in a built up area," I remark, "has not been fully addressed by Starfleet. It is a matter of some procedural complexity, I think."
"I'm sure it is, sir," says Twosani.
I glance at her. "I intend," I say, "that we should all survive to raise this issue with the appropriate authorities."
Twosani smiles. It is a small, faint smile, but it is undeniably there, and - irrationally - the sight cheers me.
"Data download?" I ask.
"Completed. Sir, what should we -?"
On the helm console, I can see the water. Part of the landscaping of the sphere, a small sea. I do not know if it is deep enough to support us - or deep enough to drown us all - I do not know if the ship will survive the splashdown -
There are many things I do not know. I must trust to random factors at this point. I touch my combadge again. "All hands. Splashdown imminent. Brace for impact." I turn to Twosani. "Channel all available power into the forward deflector. We must lengthen the period of deceleration as much as possible." My hands reach for the helm controls. "Firing all retros now."
Still trailing black smoke, Tapiola hurtles out from between the towering buildings, towards the glittering surface of the water. Flames shoot from her RCS arrays as I expend the last of the reaction mass.
On the main viewer, the telemetry probe is still relaying images of our descent. I have a brief glimpse of white water, rooster-tails thrown up as the edges of our blades touch the surface -
The impact rumbles through the whole of the ship. The deck lurches. I am improperly braced, and am thrown forwards, my head striking a glancing blow on the helm console. The noise is indescribable - a compound of crashing and roaring as we slide into the water, mixed with explosions and alarms from all our remaining systems. Sparks are shooting from the consoles, from access points to the EPS grid - the deckplates are thrumming with vibrations -
I stand, and am knocked down again by another sudden jolt. There is blood running down my forehead, into my eyes - I blink it away. I stand. This time, I do not fall again.
Tapiola's deck is canted sharply to one side. The main viewer is blank. The helm console is dead. The only illumination on the bridge comes from dying fires and a few remaining red emergency lights.
I touch my combadge again. "Splashdown completed. Commence evacuation, immediately."
---
Tapiola has just enough positive buoyancy that the upper blade is clear of the water. The ship is listing to starboard at an angle of some fourteen degrees - with its hull breached in many places, the starboard blade flooded almost as soon as we hit the water.
Now, a makeshift flotilla stretches between the ship and the nearby shore. We do not have watercraft in any quantity, the replicators are offline, and the shuttlebay doors are under water, even if we had power to open them. So, we have commandeered lightweight sheeting, empty cargo containers, anything that will float - and made rafts, to carry our people off the ship, towards the gently shelving artificial shoreline.
I am standing in an open airlock, watching them go. Beside me are Twosani Dezin and Nelson Karas. The crop-haired human engineer is haggard and exhausted.
We are the last.
"That repair lash-up held - as long as it needed to," says Karas. "But -"
"But?" I say.
He holds up a PADD. "Complete readouts are on here, sir, but... the EPS grid was breached like everything else, when the starboard blade blew open. When we touched down - water was driven into it. And this damned stuff is salt water, sir. We're talking about mineral content, impurities of all sorts - vaporized and blasted through every centimetre of the EPS conduits. Sir, even if we could pump it out, we'd have to replace the entire grid to be operational again. It's a job for a shipyard, sir, if it's even possible at all."
Tapiola, then, is... dead. My ship is wrecked. The thought unsettles me in ways I had not thought possible.
"The warp core is contained, though?" I say.
"Scrammed to cold shutdown. Its own residual power is keeping the antimatter bottled." Karas shakes his head. "One thing we don't have to worry over...."
I reach out, run my fingers along the cold ceramic-metal composite of Tapiola's hull. Twosani can no doubt read my emotional tone. She says nothing. I am grateful for that.
"Well," I say. "There is nothing to be gained by further delay."
The last of the rafts is a simple affair, a floor panel from the nearby corridor lashed in place over two empty deuterium canisters. There is room for the three of us and a small pile of emergency supplies. We clamber cautiously down the slanting hull, onto the raft. I pick up the paddle - another improvisation, a tray from the galley welded onto a length of metal tubing.
"Sir -" says Twosani.
"I will paddle. I have greater physical reserves than either of you."
"You're injured, sir."
I touch the cut on my forehead. "Superficial only. Scalp wounds invariably bleed disproportionately to the severity of the injury." She reaches for the paddle. I show no intention of letting go of it. "If you wish to be useful, please review the data download while I propel us."
Twosani's hand drops to her side. She sighs. "Yes, sir." Nelson Karas sits down cross-legged on the raft. He looks exhausted. He has worked prodigiously, of course.
I push off from the Tapiola, following the procession of rafts on its way to the shore. Above us, the shrunken sun shines down in its perpetual noon.
There are a great many improvised rafts. It is one consolation. Twenty-three crew members died in the initial explosion and its immediate aftermath. A further sixteen were unable to escape when the lower compartments flooded. Drowned, aboard a starship. It is possibly not unprecedented, but it is certainly unusual.
But I cannot dwell on those casualties. I must think, instead, of the more than eleven hundred crew who survived, and who continue to be my responsibility.
I move the paddle through the water with the figure-eight motion necessary to provide regular straight-line motion.
"This is weird, sir." Twosani is poring over the PADD. Evidently the data is not susceptible of easy interpretation. I make no comment.
"Massive tetryonic field... and not like those signals we spotted before. This was more powerful by several orders of magnitude. And the parameters...." Twosani frowns and mutters to herself.
"A deliberate attack, then." Tetryon fields do not occur in nature, certainly not at magnitudes sufficient to devastate a starship.
"Must be, sir. There are some sensor readings, maybe suggesting a cloaked ship nearby - and then, this huge tetryon pulse. But tetryon fields usually suppress energy, and this was a tremendous energy release -"
"Possibly it was modified or converted somehow?"
Nelson Karas suddenly snaps his fingers. "That's it! Sir, the explosion - the centre - it was where we'd installed that Nukara particle converter."
"That makes some sort of sense," says Twosani. "The Nukara converter is designed to channel tetryon fields - but this one was way, way above its design specs. It overloaded. Blew out."
I raise one eyebrow. "Effectively, converting an exotic tetryon field to a blast of conventional energies. What would have happened if it had not been converted?"
"Don't know, sir -" Twosani draws in a sharp breath. "But I think we might find out." Her face has turned white again.
"Explain."
"The field was a narrow ellipsoid in shape. We were at one focus of the ellipsoid. The Tempest was at the other."
"The Tempest was not equipped with a Nukara particle converter." And we have heard nothing from Fallon's ship - even if our distress call failed to get through, they must surely have seen us burst into flames and fall out of the sky -
"It has to have been a deliberate attack," says Twosani. "It was aimed at our ships. But who by?"
"The most likely immediate possibility," I say, "would appear to be the occupant or occupants of the spire. It is even more urgent, then, that we regain some form of communications. The Timor is inside the spire, and must be presumed to be in grave danger."
"So are we, sir," says Twosani.
I dig the paddle into the water, perhaps more forcefully than is strictly necessary. "Our attackers will presumably consider us little or no threat, with our ship neutralized." Though there are additional dangers to consider... wildlife, both Voth-modified and natural... and the remnants of the Solanae sphere's defensive mechanisms... these are common hazards on the surface of the sphere. "I intend to prove them wrong on that score."
"How, sir?"
I thrust with the paddle again. "Unknown at this time."
---
It does not take much longer before we reach the shore. The shoreline is an artificial construct, of course, but over the millennia a substantial deposit of natural-looking mud has built up on it. It squelches beneath my boots as I step off the raft.
I am tired, and hurt, and I can feel the presence of my dead ship, looming out of the water behind me. We are stranded in hostile territory, close to a murderous and unknown enemy.
My crew has spread out along the shoreline. Medics have already erected some portable shelters, and are tending to the many injured. Others are sorting through the gear that we have salvaged from the Tapiola. In the short time since the first raft came ashore, the beginnings of a refugee camp have started to take shape.
Nearby, a long concrete breakwater runs down into the water. I clamber up onto it. I turn to face my crew.
"May I have everyone's attention!" I shout at the top of my voice.
Heads turn towards me. They gather closer, looking up at me, a sea of expectant faces. I take a deep breath.
"Our position is serious, but by no means hopeless." I am projecting my voice as loudly as I can - and trying to project, too, a feeling of determination, of purpose. "We must, first, see to the immediate needs of our injured crewmates. Then, we must find more resources. The sphere has facilities. We will find and secure a defensible location, we will access the sphere's replicators and communications systems. We will contact Joint Command, and the Timor. Perhaps we will be rescued, perhaps we will rescue ourselves." I search their faces with my gaze. "There will be obstacles, there will be dangers. But we will meet them and overcome them. We will prevail. You will prevail. Thank you all."
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