Star Trek: The Original Series: The More Things Change (7 page)

For a second, Chapel didn’t realize the sharp echo she heard in the cabin was the harsh curse she herself had screamed. The lights went off, came back on. She wondered why the lights were on the deck now, then figured out the artificial gravity had gone out of alignment and the field was only slowly reorienting. Finally the deck corresponded with down again, and the bucking bronco ride was over. Chapel undid her restraints and crossed the cabin to Dax, staggering a little bit as the impulse engines engaged.

Dax, still clinging to her restraints, looked a little pale but otherwise appeared fine. “I never liked carnival rides.”

Chapel was looking at the monitor above the bed. “I wouldn’t get back on line for that one either.” It appeared the rough ride hadn’t harmed Audrid, the symbiont, or the bond, for which she was relieved. “Try to relax. I need to check on Spock.”

As the door slid open she was momentarily frozen by the sight of the Jovian planet practically filling the forward port. Spock glanced back at her. “I see you are well. Is the commissioner all right?”

The laceration on his forehead, and the green blood running freely from the wound down the side of his nose, shook her out of it. She got a medkit and began running the dermal regenerator over the cut. “We’re fine. What happened up here?”

Careful to keep his head still while she treated him, he said, “I underestimated the instability of the maneuver as I apportioned the inertial damper adjustments. On the positive, the warp shutdown propelled us even faster and farther into the system than I expected, and the impulse engines are operating at full power.”

Chapel was listening, but she was focused on sealing the laceration. As she gave his forehead a few more passes of the regenerator for good measure, she tried to replay what he’d said in her mind. She furrowed her brow. “What was that about apportioning the adjustments? What do you mean?”

“I prioritized the aft cabin for power distribution to ensure the commissioner’s safety.”

“And mine.” Chapel dropped the regenerator back into the medkit before she threw it across the room. She couldn’t believe Spock had done this. “You risked the safety of the pilot. That sounds like a command-level decision to me, and one I would not agree with.”

Spock’s eyes widened just slightly at the accusation. “I was protecting the mission and our passenger.”

“Does that change my assessment of the situation?”

He hesitated, then said, “No. You are correct.”

“Damn right I am. And what would have happened to our passenger and me if you’d been seriously injured?” She didn’t give him time to attempt a response. “I don’t say this lightly: Don’t do that again, not while I’m in command.”

Spock was sitting ramrod straight. “Understood.”

Chapel exhaled and softened her tone. “Okay, at ease, Spock. Give me a status update.”

Before he could answer, multiple alarms went off and the emergency lighting came on as all the displays flickered and went dark.

Chapter 7

“We have entered RF III’s magnetosphere. Our limited sensors did not detect the intensity of the charged particles and plasma we would encounter when crossing the bow shock.” Spock was almost pounding at the sluggish controls. “Attempting to route additional power to shields.”

Chapel wanted to help but didn’t know what to do as she stared at the powered-down displays in front of her. Finally, they came to life. She brought up some additional data and didn’t like what she saw. “We’re losing power in the impulse engines, and the planet’s pulling us in. We’re accelerating!”

“Maneuvering thrusters are on-line. I am adjusting our approach to get out of the plasma torus created by the largest moon. With less electromagnetic interference, I should be able to get impulse engines functioning properly.”

“
Should?
Can we overcome the planet’s gravity with just thrusters?”

“That is unlikely under the circumstances.”

As Spock struggled to maneuver the
Copernicus
, Chapel began turning off the cacophony of alarms that filled the cockpit. At this point, they really didn’t need reminding of the deep trouble they were in. She reviewed the alerts before deactivating them, making sure Spock was aware of the problems first. Her approach was somewhat random, as the controls continued to function erratically due to interference from the magnetic field. Chapel moved to another alarm and felt her stomach turn.

“I’ve got a proximity alert.” RF III had numerous small satellites, little more than captured asteroids, in erratic orbits. Chapel looked through the port, expecting to see a large chunk of rock spinning toward them. Spock spared a quick glance toward her display, but the shuttlecraft lurched violently to one side. Chapel, who hadn’t belted in, gripped her seat to keep from falling to the deck, aided by the strength brought on by fear. In shuttles the inherent dangers of the harsh environment of space were immediate and visceral, not like on a starship, where you could almost forget you weren’t working in a planetside hospital. Her survival instincts urged her to hold her breath in case they started venting atmosphere, but the calm, diagnostic part of Chapel’s mind noted she hadn’t heard the grinding shriek of stone on metal.

“That was not an impact,” Spock said as he fought to regain control of the malfunctioning propulsion system.

She was grateful for his even tone, his determined expression. Chapel refocused on her displays, trying to think like a science officer. “Confirming the nature of the alert.”
That even sounded like something Spock would say.

Automated alerts were set off under many conditions and needed to be reviewed by a crew member to determine what triggered them and to weed out false alarms. Chapel tried to get more information, a task complicated by her limited knowledge of sensor operations and the rocking of the shuttle. She quickly realized she’d made a mistake, but she liked the real answer even less. “It’s a warp signature,” she said, working at the panel. She looked over at Spock. “Did they spot us?”

The rocking subsided, and some of the secondary displays popped back on-line. Spock nodded with satisfaction at the results. “I was able to move us into a less energetic region, and I altered the shield frequency to more fully protect us. Impulse engines should be back on-line soon.” He leaned over to look at Chapel’s display and tapped a few controls. “There are no indications that they noticed us. Remember, sensors are barely operational within the magnetosphere. Automated subspace scans detected the warp trail as a ship passed by the system. The strength of the frequency is consistent with the size of the ship that attacked us. They appear to have fallen for my misdirection, but for how long is uncertain. I must make repairs.”

The thought of Spock going back into the crawlspace unnerved her, but they had no alternatives.

“I could attempt the repairs in space with little additional risk, but in this orbital environment—” He was interrupted by an alarm from the diagnostic bed, easily heard even though muffled by the wall separating the cockpit and the aft cabin.

Chapel rushed to her patient’s side. Dax’s brainwaves were deteriorating again, and she had gone into a deep sleep, at the edge of losing consciousness. As Chapel watched the patterns move across the monitor, she could see that the changes were subtly different than before. Skimming through the scans prior to when the alarm was triggered, Chapel could pinpoint the relapse to when the
Copernicus
crossed the bow shock into the magnetosphere of RF III; from that point onward the bond between Trill and symbiont declined in strength until it reached the threshold that set off the alarm. Something in this highly charged environment was exacerbating Dax’s condition.

Chapel reached under the covers to put her palm on Dax’s abdomen, hoping to feel the staticky sensation caused by the symbiont’s neural energy. Even after a few minutes there was nothing. Chapel couldn’t try to stabilize the bond as she had before. She just had to hope that Spock could make the necessary repairs to get them out of this environment as soon as possible. That meant she had to help him as much as she could, taking her away from her patient. The situation just got worse and worse.

Spock’s voice crackled over the intercom.
“May I enter?”
Chapel flinched, startled.

Great, now what?
“I’ll be there in a second.” She turned off the monitor so that Spock wouldn’t see the brainwaves and went to the door. Spock was standing patiently in the cockpit, outside the area that would trigger the door to open. His calm demeanor made her feel better, but it didn’t change the facts of their situation. “Commissioner Dax has had a setback. I think it’s because of the electromagnetic field. We need to move fast.”

“I concur. But I need to use the crawlspace in the aft cabin. My access from this side is hampered by the emergency sealant you had to use. It would be best if you remained in the cockpit to monitor hazards in our orbit.”

“But what am I supposed to do about them? I’m a doctor, not a shuttle pilot.”
I can’t believe I just said that. Too many years serving with Leonard.
She was grateful Spock let the use of the phrase pass without comment.

“I trust you will do your best. Our extremely limited options leave us little choice.”

Chapel sighed and checked Dax’s vitals one more time with a tricorder. There was no change. Dax was essentially stable aside from the weakening bond. Chapel linked the bed’s diagnostic systems to her tricorder so she could easily monitor Dax’s condition from the cockpit, then left the aft cabin.

Spock briefed her on the displays. The short-range sensors and navigation systems were working and largely automated. Anything that crossed their orbit would be indicated on the tactical display, along with automatic minor course corrections. If the situation got complicated, the navigation computer would present her with course options, and she would have to make a judgment call, as Spock would be unable to break away from his repairs. However, if something really unexpected happened, requiring significant manual adjustments, Spock would return as quickly as he could.

“That’s a lot of
ifs
, but we just need to get through this.” She looked back up at Spock. With a smile, she added, “What are you waiting for? Get to work.”

He tipped his head. “Aye, aye, sir.” He entered the aft cabin, locking the door open.

She watched him for a moment as he lifted an access panel in the center of the deck and kneeled beside it, considering his next step. But then she had to turn away as an alert tone sounded from the pilot’s controls. The display indicated in red an asteroid about the size of a briefing-room table tumbling toward their orbital path. The nav computer made a course alteration so minute Chapel could feel no change, but the tactical display of the asteroid turned green. With that taken care of, she took a look at the tricorder, which she had placed nearby on the console. Her patient was stable. Chapel could only hope that things continued like this.

Time stretched out as the
Copernicus
orbited the planet. The sounds of Spock’s work were reassuring—soft tapping, the electronic tones of diagnostic scans, the hum of systems coming back to life. Even when something went wrong, with the lights flickering or a screech of metal on metal, there was no outburst of angry profanity—as she so often heard from McCoy in the lab—but instead, at most, a deep sigh and then more quiet sounds as Spock redoubled his efforts.

She was grateful for that quiet, productive atmosphere, which helped her through her increasingly difficult assignment in the cockpit. More and more small rocks pinged against their shields. Every impact caused a flash on her readouts, which in turn caused her to flinch. She would have turned off that display, but often a burst of small impacts indicated a larger, more dangerous asteroid on its way, and she appreciated the additional warning.

The instrument feedback was bad enough, but when those small impacts were against the forward shields—and Chapel could see the flashes directly through the forward port—it was even more disconcerting. Her mind filled in the sound of an explosion with each burst, as she squinted against the blue flare of the energized shield. It felt like she was being forced to walk through a minefield, knowing there was no pattern to the mines: a field of random death, expecting at any moment her next step would be her last.

Her eyes darted between those unnerving displays of orbital debris and her tricorder. Dax’s bond, as indicated by the divergent brainwave patterns, continued to weaken, although there remained little Chapel could do. In contrast, her pulse was elevated, her breathing just a little too fast. Working under this kind of constant stress was not conducive to doing the job at hand. The more nervous she got as she monitored the constant pelting of the shields, the more likely she was to miss something, to be caught off guard when an alarm suddenly squealed for attention, to hesitate when immediate action was required.

She glanced back over her shoulder. Although she could hear an oddly melodious clanking from beneath the deck as Spock worked, she could no longer see him. He was too far into the crawlspace, which reminded her of his first near deadly repair attempt. Chapel’s unease intensified as the clanking stopped. She sat up a little straighter. Although she told herself he had probably just finished one task and was now turning to another, Chapel couldn’t help but consider other, darker possibilities. Nevertheless, she refocused on her assigned task, turning back to the display on the pilot’s console. In that second or two she had looked aft, three large asteroids, all in red, had appeared.

Her eyes widened as she leaned closer, trying to sort through the complicated graphics of orbital mechanics. When observed from within an artificial gravity field, the movements of objects in a micro-g environment seemed particularly counterintuitive. Two of the tumbling asteroids, each bigger than the
Copernicus
, looked like they would collide with each other close to their nearest approach to the shuttle’s course. Automated sensor scans were bringing up geological details of the asteroids on a separate display, analyzing whether they would break apart or just ricochet off each other. The closer the asteroids approached, the more accurately the exact point of impact could be predicted, and the angles of the surfaces that would touch, increasing the accuracy of predicting the degree to which the asteroids might shatter and the resulting courses of the pieces.

There was a sudden proliferation of red and green lines as the navigational computer plotted all this information, and then the display started flashing various lines to underscore their uncertainty. The computer was essentially shrugging its shoulders and giving up. A sharp beeping was accompanied on-screen with the flashing words
PILOT INTERVENTION REQUIRED
. The moment she’d been hoping to avoid had arrived.

Chapel looked up from the display. The view through the port was overwhelming. While focusing on the major problems, she hadn’t noticed the corresponding increase in minor impacts. The forward deflector screen was lighting up like a fireworks display.
Too distracting.
She put her head back down, looking only at the tactical display.
PILOT INTERVENTION REQUIRED
flashed with increasing frequency as the moment of collision neared. She had to do this. There was no time to get Spock up here. She tried imagining the tumbling asteroids as billiard balls, envisioning them caroming around as they rebounded from each other, but the two-dimensional nature of the billiard metaphor didn’t quite fit. Then she thought of performing remote surgery, manipulating medical instruments within the three dimensions of a patient. Somehow she combined that concept in her mind with billiards, as if operating on an organ while ducking around tumors moving freely within the abdominal cavity. It was a ridiculous notion, but she seized upon this way of applying her own experience to what she had to do.

Chapel laid her hands on the controls and began making adjustments. At first it seemed like they were still moving toward certain impact, especially as the two larger asteroids collided and each burst into several smaller threats, but then—after what seemed like hours but could only have been seconds—she watched as more and more objects and course projections turned from red to green. Before the full weight of what she was attempting to do had settled on her shoulders, she had threaded the needle, and the
Copernicus
was past the threat.

As she slumped back in her seat and tried to catch her breath, her hands began shaking. She looked back through the open door in the aft cabin but still couldn’t see Spock. There was nothing but silence from below the deck. The exhilaration of her accomplishment mixed with a sinking feeling in her gut.

“Doctor?”
Spock’s sudden call, unbearably loud in the silent cockpit, seemed to emanate from nowhere. Chapel leaped to her feet in surprise, barely restraining a startled yelp, spinning around as if she expected to find him hiding under the copilot’s seat.