Star Trek: S.C.E. #13: No Surrender by Jeff Mariotte

Author:Jeff Mariotte [Mariotte, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2002-08-06T22:00:00+00:00

“Progress?” Sonya barked.

Kieran was concerned about her. Sonnie could be all business when she wanted to be, when it was important. But she’d been a little snappish since they’d arrived here. It was more than taking the job seriously—he respected that. But this seemed more like an unhealthy degree of tension revealing itself through her tone, well beyond anything demanded by professionalism.

He didn’t like it—but he also knew that to ask her about it now, while she was exhibiting the behavior, would be asking to have his head bitten off. With Sonnie, you just had to know when to push and when to back off. In getting to know her as well as he did—getting romantically involved with her, again—he had learned that lesson the hard way, more than once.

“Most of this equipment is so old,” Pattie’s voice came back. “I’m making progress, I think, but I still need some time.” The bug-like Nasat had rolled herself into a ball and gone underneath one of the remaining consoles, where she was working on restoring the atmosphere on the station. Kieran didn’t want to take the suit off until the gyrostabilizers were restored as well—it provided some cushioning for the inevitable falling objects and people—but he looked forward to being able to take it off and breathe normally again. The suit felt a bit claustrophobic after a while, and it had already been a while.

Soloman took a moment longer to reply, but the Bynar had been engaged in a verbal dialogue with the computer that controlled the stabilizers. “There has been intentional sabotage,” he said. “Of a crude, but effective, nature.”

“Sabotage?” Sonnie echoed. “How crude?”

“A hammer, apparently,” Soloman answered. “Thrust through some primary processing units and wiggled around. Simple, but very efficient.”

“Surely the broken units can be bypassed,” Sonya offered.

“That is what I’m attempting to do.”

“Sorry,” Sonnie said. “Go back to it.”

Kieran was getting his hands dirty himself—figuratively speaking, since he hadn’t been able to remove his gloves yet. He was on his back underneath yet another bank of computers that controlled the defensive systems. Unlike the others, he was trying to circumvent the computers, not repair them. These had somehow missed the original sabotage and avoided getting crushed by falling debris. But the control panels had been destroyed, so he needed to work them from the inside. He wanted to do the job without resorting to the old stick-a-hammer-through-and-wiggle-it-around technique. Though, if he didn’t make progress soon, he would get around to that. Pattie was right; the stuff was so old it didn’t seem to operate on any principles familiar to him. He had once had a friend who had collected personal computing devices—the very earliest ones of the late twentieth century. The technology he found himself faced with here reminded him of the guts of some of those very primitive devices he’d seen in his friend’s collection. He wished he had dug around more in those early boxes.

Suddenly, though, he felt the station—which was beginning to tilt to his left—stop and turn back the other way.

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