“I read you.”Shar’s voice sounded tinny in her helmet, with a slight reverb.
“All right,” she said. “I’m going to check the equipment.”
Prynn turned to her left. On the ground there sat the mass of machinery she had patched together. Two circuitry modules, each about the size of her torso, sat beside each other. Bundles of fiberoptic lines emerged from each in several places, some routing back into the same module, some into the other one. Isolinear optical chips jutted out all across the upper surfaces, sitting amid numerous other components. The tangled collection of technology looked to Prynn like the wreckage of the shuttle itself—twisted, broken, beyond repair—but the modules actually composed the second rudimentary transporter that she had pieced together.
That, along with the environmental suits,she thought. When she and Shar had awoken this morning, she had used the first makeshift transporter to beam him to Chaffee’s aft section; with Shar’s leg so badly broken, neither one of them had wanted to risk moving him any other way. The two had then worked on the plan they had devised last night, with Shar attempting to repair another power cell and to finish rigging the environmental suits, and Prynn trying to improvise a second transporter. Both had been successful.
Now Prynn set her tricorder to sensor mode. She scanned the extemporized transporter machinery, then executed a diagnostic of it. When she had finished, she told Shar, “The equipment looks good. I’m going to beam you over now.”
“Acknowledged,”Shar said.
Prynn reset the tricorder to function as a control interface for the transporter, then energized the unit. She lifted her gaze from the display just in time to see the fading sparkle of dematerialization where Shar had been. Several meters in front of her, the white streaks of light reappeared, depositing both Shar and the other heap of transporter machinery on the ground. Shar lay on his back, also clad in an environmental suit.
“You did it,”he told her, the thin sound of his voice still echoing slightly inside her helmet.
“Wedid it,” she said, knowing that Shar’s part in their accomplishment could not be understated. Despite the painkillers and medication she had given him, his injuries still left him uncomfortable and weak. She found it remarkable that he had been able to concentrate long enough to do the detailed work he had done this morning. “How’s your leg?” she asked him now. The process of getting him into an environmental suit had been an arduous one, and even with the anesthetics, she knew, it had been painful for him.
“I’m all right,”Shar said.
Prynn nodded, a movement that felt awkward in the confines of her helmet. “Okay,” she said. Shar was far from all right, she knew, but she respected his desire to forge ahead in their mission. “I guess we should get started then.” They had decided to “skip-transport”—as they had begun referring to it—toward the site of the pulse. Failing that, they would do what Vaughn had ordered: they would use the transporters to get as far away as possible. Although the use of the environmental suits as pattern enhancers had doubled the ranges of the transporters in both directions, they suspected that the amount of interference from the energy at the site would prevent them from getting all that close to it. They could not really know that, though, until they attempted it. They also had no way of knowing whether her father had been able to reach the site by now, and so she and Shar might actually be the last hope for the Vahni. Of course, if they could even get to the location, there remained the matter of just what they could do to—
An electronic thrum interrupted Prynn’s thoughts, and she thought at first that it might be feedback in her suit’s comm system. She raised her forearm up so that she could see and work the controls there, but as she did, she saw Shar point upward. “Look,”he said. Prynn tilted her head back, the movement clumsy because of her helmet. She reached up and unlocked the seals, then twisted the helmet to release it. As she pulled it off, the foreign sound increased in volume. She peered skyward.
Above, an object descended toward them. With only the churning clouds as a backdrop, Prynn could not immediately tell its size. But as it drew closer, she recognized the shape. It looked like a quantum torpedo.
Prynn stood over the object, a sense of optimism growing within her for the first time since the crash. She had set to the tasks she had taken on with determination, but she understood now that, even with the successes she and Shar had managed with the transporters, she had never really believed that they or her father would be able to stop the pulse—or that they would be able to escape this place. Normally confident that she could accomplish anything, solve any problem, she was surprised to realize that she had lacked that confidence for the past few days.
The object had soft-landed five meters from where she and Shar had been with their improvised transporter equipment. It sat lengthwise on the ground, about a half-meter tall, a meter wide, and three meters long. White letters and numbers in Federation Standard marked the black casing in several locations, identifying it as one of Defiant’s probes. A gouge penetrated one end of the outer shell, the edges of the gash seared, as though made by an energy weapon.
Prynn bent and released the locks in the probe’s casing, then lifted the upper section of it open. Shar had removed his helmet, and she narrated for him what she saw. She could identify the guidance and propulsion systems—which seemed to have taken some damage from whatever had sliced through the outer casing—but where she would have expected sensor equipment, she saw only two small modules, surrounded by a pair of bags that held caches of unfamiliar objects twice as large as her fist. In the center of the probe sat a rectangular container with three words printed on it: VAUGHN CH’THANE TENMEI.
Prynn pulled out the container and opened it. Inside, she found a padd. She carried it back to where Shar still lay on the ground, and sat down beside him. Together, they listened to Lieutenant Dax and Lieutenant Nog describe what the crew of Defianthad learned about the pulse, and the solution they had devised to stop it. Prynn could not interpret the movements of Shar’s antennae, but if they expressed emotion, then she guessed that they displayed excitement right now; that was how she felt.
“We have to get the explosives to the site,” she said when the messages had finished. She wondered whether they should attempt to skip-transport them to the source of the pulse, but Shar answered the question before she even asked it.
“With these type of devices, designed to shift into subspace and other dimensions, I wouldn’t recommended transporting them,” he said. “The phase change could detonate them.”
“All right. Then we’ll have to get the probe back in the air,” she said. “We’ll just have to hope that Commander Vaughn has reached the site, or that we can beam there ourselves.”
Prynn walked back to the probe and found the control interface for the guidance system. Reviewing the settings, she saw that the Defiantcrew had programmed the remaining sensors to scan for human and Andorian life signs, and if unable to find any, then to scan for the energy interference at the source of the pulse. She added a command now to ignore the present location, then set the probe to lift off in one minute. She quickly loaded the container with the padd back inside, then closed and locked the upper casing.
She rejoined Shar, and the two of them waited for the probe to launch. A minute passed, but nothing happened. Prynn used her tricorder to scan the probe, and found that all of its systems had gone dead. Immediately, her optimism faded.