The Sky's The Limit Part 7

She administered a painkiller to the last of the four when she noticed a sudden drop in the temperature. A cheer rose and she looked up in time to see the plasma jet flicker and die. Geordi didn't waste time celebrating, though.

"Good work, people, but we have to get that warp core under control. Dennings, stay with this team and ensure that rupture is fixed. Schmidt, al-Fahedi, take your teams and check out the hull breach. Take some security guys with you."

Pulaski wiped her brow and stood up. "Mister La Forge, I need a team over here. You've got some people trapped in this mess."

Geordi wheeled around. "Baker, get the antigrav manipulators. Thomas, Phillips, don't just stand there. Give the doctor a hand."

Pulaski did her best to stay out of the way as engineers and medical staff converged on her position and extricated the four personnel from the rubble. It was only when one of the engineers offered her a hand to step over the remaining debris that her knees began to shake. She was grateful to have someone else to lean on for a second.

Geordi pointed a couple of engineers toward the rear of the compartment and came over to where Pulaski leaned against a bulkhead. "That was pretty gutsy, Doctor. You've won a lot of fans today."

Pulaski smiled, trying to hide how shaky she was. "Just doing my job, Mister La Forge. Thanks for believing in my technique."

"Just doing my job, Doctor."

Once everything was under control, Captain Picard recalled all the senior staff for an after-action review. Pulaski reclined in her familiar chair and noted that the Enterprise's senior staff seemed a lot more relaxed than the last time. Everyone, that is, except Commander Riker, who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else but in the room.

Captain Picard put his cup of tea down on the table and turned to Lieutenant La Forge. "How are repairs coming down in engineering?"

Geordi frowned as he considered the question. "We suffered less damage than I thought. The intruders were surprisingly efficient. We'll have to hit a drydock to make complete repairs, but we've established a temporary patch and we have a localized force field backing that up. I don't antic.i.p.ate any problems unless we're forced to do some fancy maneuvering."

Captain Picard favored him with a small smile. "We'll try to avoid that, Mister La Forge. Doctor Pulaski, status report."

She glanced at her padd and then looked up at the captain. "All things considered, we were very lucky. Fourteen crewmembers seriously injured, most in the explosion in engineering. Fifty-two suffered minor injuries, most during the attack, and there were four reports of allergic reactions to the aerosol used to subdue the attackers. Eleven of the aliens were also injured, none seriously as far as we can tell. Doctor Martin and his medical team were found by security shortly after the fire was contained in engineering. All were treated for concussions and various bruises and returned to duty."

"Speaking of that, Doctor Pulaski, how are you and Mister Data coming along with our uninvited guests?"

Data started to answer and then paused, as though seeking Pulaski's permission. She gave a small motion for him to proceed. Fatigue was setting in now that the crisis was over, and letting Data do the report suited her fine.

The android nodded, then turned to Captain Picard. "We have completed the preliminary examination of this new race, Captain. As best we can tell, they live outside of our time continuum, which is why we have had so much trouble communicating with them."

"I don't understand, Data. They live 'outside our time continuum'?" Counselor Troi's question echoed on many of the faces around the table.

"Our research suggests that something or someone has altered their bodies as well as the materials of their ship. Based on our calculations, their atomic structures vibrate exactly two-point-three-four seconds faster than the universal standards of time. They're literally out of sync with the rest of the universe."

Picard leaned forward in his chair. "How could such a thing be possible?"

"I believe I can answer that, Captain."

Picard turned to his hulking security chief. "Please do so, Mister Worf."

"We have inspected the intruders' ship. Going through their logs, we've determined the beings are known as the Cizinec. We learned that a temporal anomaly struck their planetary system. The survivors found their world altered by the time wave. Unable to communicate or interact with other beings in this sector, they turned to salvage or raiding to survive."

"It is true we have had difficulty communicating directly with them, Captain," Data continued, building on Worf's information. "Indeed, this is what confused not only our sensors but our own eyes. We were seeing where they were two seconds ago. This rendered both our phaser fire and physical attacks ineffective. Thanks to Doctor Pulaski's observations, I have been able to alter the sensors to compensate. It is similar to the technique used to track the movement of stars through s.p.a.ce by watching the blueshift and redshift, which, as you know, is how astronomers see in what direction and how fast a star is moving through s.p.a.ce."

Picard held up a hand to cut off Data's lesson in astronomy. "Very good, Mister Data. Do you believe we'll be able to establish communications with them?"

"We are setting up terminals in the brig in hopes of establishing a way to take the time difference into account. I am certain by the time we reach Starbase 28, I will be able to converse with them, at least digitally."

Jean-Luc smiled at the crew. "With any luck, we'll be able to aid the Cizinec and put an end to their raiding. Mister La Forge, have their ship brought aboard and store it in one of the shuttlebays. Well done, everyone. Dismissed."

As one, the officers rose and headed toward the door, except for Commander Riker, who rose only when Pulaski reached his seat on her way out. "Doctor, could I speak to you for a moment?"

Pulaski tensed, but she sensed Riker didn't want a fight. "Of course, Commander."

Will waited for the room to clear and then spoke. "I'd like to congratulate you on your actions today. I've recommended you to the captain for a commendation both for your personal bravery and for the actions of your emergency team."

Pulaski bit back her usual caustic response. No sense in making this any harder than it already is. "I'm flattered, Commander, but it's not necessary. If anything, it should go to Lieutenant La Forge for having the foresight to prepare those reserve batteries."

Riker swallowed and then pushed on with what was obviously a prepared speech. "Ah, I also wanted you to know there's a poker game at my room this evening. We'd love to have you join us."

That, Pulaski hadn't been expecting. She took a breath to compose herself and then replied, "Thank you again, Commander, but I'll have to take a rain check. I promised to meet Lieutenant La Forge in Ten-Forward. We'll be discussing creating an elite damage control team similar to my medical teams, and then I'm going to get some much-needed rest."

"Another time, then?"

"I'll check my calendar."

Before Riker could reply, she turned and slipped out of the conference room. She headed toward the turbolift, her smile growing with every step she took.

Among the Clouds

Scott Pearson

Historian's note:

This tale is set during the latter half of Star Trek: The Next Generation's third season.

SCOTT PEARSON.

Scott Pearson was first published in 1987 with "The Mailbox," a short story about an elderly farming couple. Over the last twenty years he has published a smattering of humor, poetry, nonfiction, and short stories, most recently his first mystery story, "Out of the Jacuzzi, Into the Sauna," in the anthology Resort to Murder. A Star Trek fan for thirty-five years, Scott has had two previous Trek stories published, "Full Circle" in Strange New Worlds VII and "Terra Tonight" in Strange New Worlds 9. He's grateful to Marco Palmieri for the chance to join this anthology with his first solicited sale. Scott also tips his hat to Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter, who imagined animal life in Jovian clouds way back in 1976, providing inspiration for some of the creatures herein. Scott makes his living as an editor for Zenith Press, a military history publisher in St. Paul, Minnesota, and X-comm, a regional history publisher in Duluth. He lives in St. Paul with his wife, Sandra, and daughter, Ella. Please visit him on the web at www.yeahsure.net. "Among the Clouds" is in memory of Scott's cousin, Kevin Zegan, who loved science fiction.

"GEORDI, BEHIND YOU!" WORF'S URGENT SHOUT SEEMED TO echo inside the helmet of La Forge's environmental suit. It was not something you expected to hear while aboard an orbital elevator stopped in the lower stratosphere of a Jovian planet.

La Forge adjusted his precarious position atop the elevator's drive unit, several pairs of powered rollers on both sides of the support tether. The relatively thin ribbon stretched hundreds of kilometers up into s.p.a.ce and down into Askaria's mostly hydrogen atmosphere. Extending from the drive unit on one side of the tether was an oval pa.s.senger platform with twenty seats, while an aerodynamic stabilizer and counterweight extended from the other side.

Billowing ammonia ice clouds, red with sulfur compounds, prevailed at this alt.i.tude, but La Forge had no trouble seeing the danger. Just a dozen meters away, a swarm of hundreds of scarflike creatures, some more than three meters long, undulated toward the away team. Railings around the platform and lap belts on the seats were the lift's only safety features. Worf and Deanna Troi remained belted in, but La Forge, placing a communication relay, was perched a few meters above the railings, his safety line bonded to the tether by phased molecular adhesion.

If they had not had a couple hundred kilometers of bone-crushingly dense atmosphere below them, La Forge would have found it difficult to be concerned about the approaching life-forms. Joyfully fluttering along the strong winds, they looked like brightly colored Argelian silks. He wondered what they used for blood; up here a hundred below Celsius was a warm day.

"Thanks for the warning," La Forge said, bracing for the swarm of flutters (as he found himself calling them). The leading edge soon reached him, but he barely noticed. The creatures, floating up here at about half of Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level, were paper-thin. But they acc.u.mulated on him and writhed with surprising strength as they tried to free themselves. Dozens stuck to the faceplate of his EV suit, and soon he couldn't see. He slipped, banging his helmet on the tether, and felt his safety line tug at its harness.

Troi, unlike Worf, had a calming influence. "Are you all right up there?"

"Yeah, I think so." La Forge pushed his estimate of the size of the swarm up into the thousands. "How about you?"

"Most of them are flying over our heads."

La Forge felt himself being pushed sideways by the sheer number of flutters impacting him. The wind had shifted a bit, and he felt the platform twist slightly. "I'm starting to get a little worried. Are they almost-" He stopped talking as his stomach lurched. He couldn't see what was happening.

"Geordi!"

The fear in Troi's voice told him what he feared was true-he was in free fall. All the flutters pressing against him must have hit the tab that deactivated his safety line's adhesion plate. He flailed his arms, trying to grab something, anything, the tether, the railings. Then the flutters cleared off his faceplate.

He was almost below the level of the platform, falling backward. Worf and Troi, up and out of their seats, leaned against the railing, their arms outstretched as they tried to grab him on his way down. They missed as the wind carried him away. Ignoring the panic welling up in him, La Forge rolled into an orbital skydiving pose and attempted to steer back to the lift.

"I'll lower the platform," Worf said.

"I'm trying to reach the tether." La Forge adjusted his outstretched arms and legs. His VISOR allowed him to see temperature variations in the atmosphere and predict winds and sheers, but four-hundred-kilometers-per-hour gusts minimized that advantage. The upper anchor for the tether, far above them, orbited in the direction of the wind; being on the platform was like drifting down a fast river in a boat, but now he was overboard in the river itself.

Above him he could hear the platform descending, but not as fast as he was. Even under these circ.u.mstances, the engineer in him was making calculations: The acceleration of gravity on Askaria is about twenty-two meters per second squared. At this alt.i.tude I'll be at terminal velocity, almost eight hundred kilometers per hour, in under ten seconds. The EV suit could protect him at that speed, but not at the crushing pressures he would eventually plummet to. He directed himself toward the tether, even though he was falling too fast to grab it. Reaching down to his waist, he drew out more slack in his safety line. If he could reattach it to the tether, the harness mechanism would automatically reduce his rate of descent. He'd probably break a few ribs when he hit the end, but it beat the alternative.

He raced toward the tether and reached out with the safety line, activating the phased adhesion plate. But moving his arms forward altered his course. The fingers of his left hand brushed the tether, but the safety line was in his right hand. The tether shot by in a blur. Before he could try to turn around for another pa.s.s, he was caught in an eddy, roughly spun around, and thrown in a different direction. With a concentrated effort of arms and legs, he came out of the nauseating tumble, completely disoriented, tired in just seconds from fighting the wind.

"On your right." He'd never heard Worf's voice sound so gentle.

Spinning to his right he saw the tether. Bending backward to raise his head, he caught a last glimpse of Troi and Worf, standing at the edge of the descending platform looking down at him. At this distance he couldn't see their faces. Then they disappeared into an ammonia ice cloud.

As La Forge continued to fall, he found that it wasn't his whole life that flashed before his eyes-just the last few days. The events leading to his perilous descent into the deeps of Askaria had begun on the bridge, while he'd been overseeing some system diagnostics.

"Captain, I've picked up a distress call," Lieutenant Worf said.

At the aft engineering station, La Forge paused the diagnostic program he was running and faced forward.

Worf didn't look up as he continued to work his controls at tactical. "Now I've lost it. It's light speed, sir-radio frequency. We will need to drop from warp to pick it up again."

Captain Picard exchanged a surprised look with Commander Riker, who scratched thoughtfully at his beard. Picard said, "Mister Crusher, take us out of warp. Get the heading from Lieutenant Worf."

"Aye, sir." Crusher dropped the Enterprise to sublight and came about. He transferred the coordinates Worf had sent him into the helm. "We should be able to pick it up soon. I'll plot a triangulation course."

La Forge turned back to his panel and started tapping in commands. "Captain, I'm maximizing the sensors for the radio frequency spectrum."

"Good." Picard leaned forward. "Let's see if we can help."

Lieutenant Commander Data looked over his shoulder from the ops station. "Captain, it is likely we are too late to answer a light speed distress call. And, as I learned with Sarjenka, even an RF broadcast brings the Prime Directive into play."

"Quite right," Picard said.

Ostensibly, Data didn't have emotions, but La Forge still thought he could see a hint of sadness on his friend's pale face. La Forge gave Data a sympathetic look. The engineer had no regrets about his part in violating the letter of the noninterference policy to save the Dreman civilization by tectonically stabilizing their planet. After hearing the little girl whom Data had been communicating with via low-level RF signals, Picard had chosen a course of action La Forge felt was true to the spirit of the law. But that had also required erasing Sarjenka's memories of Data, almost as if the Sarjenka Data had befriended had died anyway.

"But we were able to save the Dremans nevertheless," Picard added. "Let's reserve judgment until we have more information."

As Data nodded hopefully and turned back to his station, Worf spoke up. "I've picked up the signal, Captain. It's a recorded loop. The translation is coming up."

"Let's hear it." Because there was no video component, Picard glanced upward at the speakers in the ceiling.

"We come from Narsosia, the second planet of seven around a white-yellow star." The computer rendered the voice as forceful, but La Forge thought it sounded sad as well. "Our clouds, infused with centuries of pollution, are opaque to infrared, causing global temperatures to soar. All of Narsosia is dying. A handful of our population is traveling to the fifth planet, Askaria, a gas giant with several moons that we hope are habitable. While many of us believe in the possibility of sentient alien life, we have no evidence of it. Still, in our desperation, we have invested our failing resources in constructing this distress beacon. Please help us if you can."

After the playback stopped, there was a moment of quiet on the bridge. Troi looked stricken but didn't indicate she had sensed anything with her empathic abilities. La Forge shook his head. As Data had explained, this catastrophe had probably already happened, and they were hearing the voice of someone long dead, like a ghost. But La Forge didn't want to believe that.

Softly, Riker broke the silence. "Have we located the source yet?"

"I believe I have, sir," Data said with a glance at Worf. Worf gave a respectful nod as the ever-polite Data continued. "I have cross-referenced the points of triangulation with scans of nearby s.p.a.ce. There is an uncharted system within the possible broadcast cone that matches the description in the message." Data turned to face the screen as he brought up a tactical schematic of the region. "The system is only four days away at warp." He turned back to face Picard. "Unfortunately, that indicates an RF travel time of nearly fifty years for the distress call."

"Captain," La Forge said. "Environmental disasters like this can take hundreds of years to develop. Terraforming technology, like we used at Browder IV, could reverse the effects of even an advanced greenhouse effect."

Picard turned to look up at his chief engineer. "That may be, but fifty years is only a minimum age for the message. We have no way of knowing how long it's been broadcasting."

Troi added, "Or how long the Narsosians waited before sending it."

"But they were still fighting their fate," said Worf with a warrior's glint in his eye. "Even if driven to ask for help."

La Forge nodded his head. "That's right, and I'm not ready to give up hope. As far as the Prime Directive goes, simple baristatic filters might be closer to their tech level and-"

"Relax, Geordi," Picard said, holding up a hand in surrender. "No one has given up. Mister Crusher, set a course for Narsosia, best possible speed."

"Aye, sir." He looked over his shoulder with a grin. "It's been plotted and laid in since Data located the system."

"Then, by all means, engage."

La Forge had been falling for just over thirty kilometers. It's only taken four minutes, he thought. Since I'm moving at a body-bruising average speed of 475 kilometers per hour, I'm actually decelerating as I fall. Increasing atmospheric pressure is decreasing terminal velocity. The heads-up display in his helmet indicated he was now at one and a half Earth atmospheres, the equivalent of about fifteen meters underwater. The HUD also showed that the temperature had risen to fifty below Celsius. The clouds had changed to ammonium hydrosulfide, the colors subdued tans. Lightning frequently lit up the sky, forking through the clouds around him. He contemplated just putting his legs together, his arms forward, and diving to his death below. No, I won't give up. There could be a shuttle heading for him right now, almost close enough for its transporter to cut through the ionized atmosphere. He had been determined to help any survivors on Askaria, and now he had to hope he would be a survivor himself.

La Forge entered the bridge and came to a halt as he looked at the viewscreen. Enterprise was still one day out from Narsosia, but he'd been summoned from engineering to see the ship they were approaching-the source of the distress call. Comparable to human technology of the late twenty-first century, it was definitely built for atmospheric flight: about one hundred meters long, thin from top to bottom, and its V-shaped body tapering out gracefully into wings. As the silver craft tumbled slowly along, he saw booster engines in its tail and, on either side of the main engine intake, what appeared to be chemical rocket engines on the underside of the wings, which seemed out of place on the sleek craft.

"Mister Worf," Picard said, "why don't you bring Commander La Forge up to speed."

La Forge stood beside Worf to look at the sensor readouts as Worf filled him in.

"Aye, sir." Worf glanced down at La Forge. "There are no life signs. The interior is at ambient temperature and at low pressure." He looked back at his readings. "The main engines have few moving parts, relying on supersonic atmospheric speeds to compress the intake air for combustion with fuel-"

"It's a scramjet," La Forge interrupted. "They've jury-rigged a suborbital craft with chemical rockets to take it into s.p.a.ce as a last-chance lifeboat. But they're out of the ecliptic plane. They must have gone off course. And to be this far out of the system..." He trailed off as he realized the implication.

Data turned to face him. "At this ship's maximum speed, it would have taken approximately six hundred years to reach this distance."

"So we are too late," said La Forge, his shoulders slumping.

Data tilted his head. "There is still the chance that other ships made it to the moons of Askaria according to their plans."

"Perhaps we can get some answers on that ship," Picard said. "Worf, stabilize it with a tractor beam." He turned toward Riker. "Take an away team over there and see what you can find."