Foundations Book One Read online

  For what could probably have been the hundredth time, he glanced down at the compact control panel mounted to his left wrist. A series of small displays communicated information about his suit’s operation to him, continuously updating the status of his oxygen, internal temperature, and other annoying data such as his heart rate, which the suit dutifully informed him was accelerated. Catching himself in the mostly involuntary action, Scott forced his hand down to his sides and returned his full attention to the task at hand.

  True to his word, Captain Okagawa had seen to the transfer of environmental suits for al-Khaled and himself only moments after severing communication with them, along with the standard tool-kit that the younger man had requested. While the pair of engineers had busied themselves preparing for their sojourn out onto the asteroid’s surface, a team of two additional crewmembers had been dispatched from the Lovell in a shuttlecraft, towing the Mole down from the larger ship with a tractor beam.

  Displaying yet another quality Scott admired in officers of any rank or position, al-Khaled had notified the captain that he himself would be overseeing the drilling. Scott could hear the confidence in the man’s voice when he had relayed that, noting the determination that he would not stand idly by as another member of his team risked potential injury or death while digging down to the reactor. Okagawa must have heard it, too, for he said nothing except to acknowledge the report his lieutenant had given him and to wish the team luck.

  “Okagawa to landing party,” the captain’s voice abruptly called out through Scott’s suit communicator. “We’ve beamed everyone that we can reach with transporters up to the ship. That still leaves the eighteen down there that we couldn’t get to. Everyone else from our team is back up here, as well, so that just leaves you four.” There was a significant pause before Okagawa added, “I expect that head count to be the same when you’re done down there, Mahmud.”

  With about ninety minutes left to them before the outpost reactor was predicted to reach overload, the team was making excellent time. A tunnel more than six meters in diameter was being excavated most efficiently thanks to the firing sequence programmed into the onboard computer controlling the Mole’s drilling array. Eight individual drilling lasers, working in rapid alternating succession, were boring and disintegrating the rock so quickly that Scott and al-Khaled were able to walk at an almost normal pace alongside the rig. Inside the vehicle’s compact cab, the two engineers who had flown the shuttlecraft down from the Lovell were at the Mole’s controls.

  “How are we doing, Ghrex?” al-Khaled asked.

  At the Mole’s piloting controls, the female Denobulan ensign responded, “All systems are nominal, sir. We are proceeding on schedule.”

  Sitting next to Ghrex, Lieutenant Paul LeGere was monitoring the rig’s drilling apparatus. “At this rate, Mahmud, we should be able to break through into the reactor room inside of thirty minutes.”

  Nodding in satisfaction, Scott consulted his tricorder. Though the dense mineral deposits scattered throughout the asteroid were still disrupting scans, he could already see a marked improvement in the unit’s sensor returns since they had started drilling.

  “I’ve got a faint readin’ on the reactor room,” he reported. “No sign of any coolant leaks that I can find. We might be in luck, at least as far as that’s concerned.” Checking the tricorder’s display again, he added, “Reactor temperature is continuin’ to rise, though. The damage to the coolin’ system is too much for it to keep up. Even if we get down there in time to fix the bloody thing, there canna be enough coolant left to do any good.” Without the necessary amount of coolant to assuage the unchecked heat put out by the reactor, there would be no stopping the building overload.

  Grasping one of the handholds mounted along the side of the Mole’s frame, Scott could feel the powerful vibrations generated by the machine as it continued to excavate the solid rock ahead of it. The reverberations allowed him to feel the variety of sounds of the Mole rolling across the uneven path it was creating as it moved forward. He could also make out the hum of the drilling lasers’ synchronized firing sequence and even the pulses of maneuvering thrusters as Ensign Ghrex kept the rig on a straight, precise course down through the interior of the asteroid.

  Then the asteroid moved.

  It was a sudden jarring movement, nearly throwing Scott off his feet and overriding the series of attitude thrusters built into his suit and which had been giving him a limited ability to walk even in this low-gravity environment. Throwing his arms out instinctively was the only thing that saved him from being thrown headlong into the wall of the tunnel.

  “What the devil—?”

  Almost immediately another shock wave slammed him into the unyielding rock wall, forcing the air from his lungs. He rebounded off the wall and was tossed back in the direction of the Mole, flailing for something to grab onto as his suit’s thrusters fought to bring his momentum under control.

  The drilling rig wasn’t faring much better, bouncing off the sides of the tunnel despite the best efforts of Ghrex to compensate with the vehicle’s own maneuvering thrusters. As Scott managed to get his own body under control, he realized that there was a very real danger of his being crushed between the walls and the Mole itself.

  “Mahmud!” he shouted into his helmet communicator as he saw his companion encountering similar difficulty on the other side of the vehicle. “Be careful of the rig!” He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw al-Khaled maneuver safely out of the Mole’s way.

  “Lovell to landing party,” Captain Okagawa called out. “We’re registering explosions from within the outpost. Are you all right?”

  Scott was too busy scrambling away from the Mole to respond. Even as he managed to put distance between himself and the rig he could see Ghrex bringing it under some semblance of control. Instead of bouncing off the sides of the tunnel the Mole was now hovering in place, its treads only a handful of centimeters above the rock floor as the ensign at the controls finally managed to stabilize the rig.

  “Are ye all right, lad?” Scott called to al-Khaled as he tried to bring his breathing under control.

  Nodding inside his helmet, al-Khaled responded shakily. “Fine. You?” Scott indicated the same, and a quick check with Ghrex and LeGere revealed that they too had avoided injury, strapped as they were into the pilots’ seats of the Mole’s cockpit. Al-Khaled reported as such to the Lovell.

  “From what our sensors are telling us,” Okagawa said, “it sounds as though you were luckier than other parts of the outpost. We’re reading other tunnel cave-ins and some of the compartments have suffered hull breaches. Contact with the remaining station personnel has been cut off, Mahmud, so we have no idea whether or not they’ve suffered any casualties.”

  “Do ye have any idea what caused the explosion, sir?” Scott asked.

  “We think it may have been an overloaded power distribution relay in a compartment that suffered a ruptured coolant conduit,” the captain replied. “There’s no way to be certain at this point, and we won’t have time to investigate the matter if you don’t complete your mission. What is your status?” According to Ghrex and LeGere, the rig hadn’t suffered any appreciable damage.

  “Less than a hundred meters remain before we reach the reactor chamber,” al-Khaled reported. “We are recommencing drilling now, Captain.”

  “Excellent,” Okagawa replied. “Keep me informed, Mahmud. You haven’t much time left to pull off this minor miracle.”

  Though his own tricorder had not survived their ordeal, Scott had retrieved another one from a storage compartment built into the side of the Mole’s hull. Adjusting the unit’s sensors, he felt a sudden knot form in his stomach as he reviewed the scan results. “He’s putting it mildly, laddie. According to these readings, our problems have just gotten worse.”

  “Don’t tell me,” al-Khaled replied. “The cooling system?”

  Scott could only nod grimly. “Aye. It’s given up the ghost, I’m afraid. It’s totally
off-line.” No coolant whatsoever was flowing through the system and compensating, even in a limited fashion, for the reactor’s rapidly building heat. “The buildup is increasing,” he added. “It’ll reach overload long before we can hope to have the cooling system repaired.”

  Once the Mole had finished drilling the remaining distance through the rock and succeeded in breaking through into the reactor chamber, a visual inspection of the damaged coolant system only confirmed the cold facts relayed by Scott’s tricorder. What had once been a finely tuned, efficiently functioning series of components was now nothing more than a useless, mangled heap.

  It was very much in keeping with the rest of the room, which had suffered no small amount of damage from the ion storm and its effects. Basically nothing more than a large hollowed-out cavern within the belly of the asteroid, the entire room was enshrouded in a green haze, coolant that had billowed from ruptures all along the vast network of conduits running from the reactor to the cooling system. Explosions had ripped through both sets of machinery, to Scott looking not all that different from the type of damage a starship’s hull might encounter during a fierce battle.

  “The master control console,” al-Khaled called out to Scott, the younger man wasting no time mourning the loss of the critical system and instead moving for the small room at the far end of the chamber. “Ghrex, LeGere, check out the reactor’s manual overrides. If I can’t execute a controlled power-down, then you’re going to have to throw the emergency shutoff.” Intended for use only in situations where there were no other options and the reactor’s continued operation was a danger to the outpost, the emergency override would instantly deactivate the massive generator. Doing so, however, would almost certainly result in widespread internal systems damage requiring extensive repair work if not outright replacement.

  But it’s better than lettin’ the damned thing blow up, Scott thought.

  He and al-Khaled reached the sealed door to the control room, and al-Khaled tapped a control set into the wall, allowing the door to slide open. As he moved to enter the room, though, he stopped short.

  “My Lord,” he whispered.

  Moving alongside his companion, Scott felt a lump form in his throat as he beheld the gruesome sight of three bodies lying on the floor of the room.

  “The reactor detail,” al-Khaled said quietly. As feared, the two men and one woman assigned to this section had been trapped down here when the storm hit, cut off from the outpost’s upper levels. When the coolant ruptures had started, the engineers had sought refuge in the small control room, but there had been no escaping the coolant’s lethal effects.

  Allowing al-Khaled a moment to gather his emotions, Scott then placed a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder. “C’mon, lad, we have work to do.”

  Nodding inside his suit’s helmet, al-Khaled resolutely led the way into the room, focusing his attention on the bank of consoles and deliberately keeping the bodies of the three engineers from his line of sight. He took a few moments to familiarize himself with the controls before tapping a series of commands into one keypad. Watching the results of his actions on one set of display monitors, he shook his head.

  “No response from the control computer,” he said. “I can’t access the deactivation protocols.”

  Moving to an adjacent console, Scott attempted to coax cooperation out of the computer terminal but received similar results. “There’s probably been some damage to the system between the computer and here,” he offered. “We’ll have to find where the connection’s been severed and repair it.”

  “No time for that,” al-Khaled replied. Activating his suit’s communicator he called out, “Al-Khaled to Ghrex. What have you found?”

  The Denobulan’s reply was quick and clipped, as though she were talking while engaged in work requiring more attention than she wanted to devote to conversation. “We’ve found the manual overrides, Lieutenant, but they’ve been fused. It appears they were hit by debris from an explosion. We’re preparing to open the panel now and see if we can repair the controls.”

  Scott shook his head as he stole a look at the chronometer built into his suit’s wrist control panel. “We dinna have time for that. At this rate the reactor will go in about seventeen minutes. All that’s left is to pull the beastie out of here before she blows.”

  Occam’s razor, indeed.

  Chapter

  7

  Removing the damaged reactor from its mounting frame was an easy enough task, as was using the Mole’s tractor beam to maneuver the unwieldy PXK unit out of the chamber and into the tunnel created by the rig just for this purpose. The near absence of gravity in the asteroid’s interior made the task of pushing the reactor back up the tunnel far easier than the team of engineers had any right to expect, given the luck they had experienced to this point.

  They had cut it close. Because of the scattering effects of the asteroid’s dense mineral deposits, it had been necessary to push the reactor more than halfway back the way they had originally descended from the surface before the Lovell’s tractor beam could lock on and pull it the remaining distance. Scott had been unnerved the entire time, able to feel the oppressive heat being cast off by the reactor in spite of his suit’s heavy insulation. Though the chronometer on his tricorder told him they had plenty of time, he couldn’t help but worry that the damaged power unit’s output would continue to escalate at a rate that would ultimately find the engineers without the time needed to remove it.

  With barely more than three minutes remaining to them before overload, the Lovell was able to direct its tractor beam far enough into the tunnel to latch onto the reactor. Drawing the doomed unit from the depths of the asteroid, the ship pulled it far enough from the outpost that when it finally exploded, it did so at a safe distance.

  Too bad we canna call it a day after all that, Scott mused.

  Instead, he was standing with al-Khaled and his engineering team in Outpost 5’s control center, consulting the master system’s displays and debating a new course of action.

  “Battery backup systems are functioning normally,” al-Khaled reported as he reviewed one monitor, “the ones that weren’t damaged, that is.” He shook his head in frustration. “Even if we cut all unnecessary expenditures, the available power will only last eighteen hours or so.”

  “And a replacement reactor that can handle the outpost’s power requirements is weeks away,” Scott said. Without sufficient power, the station and its vital subspace communications relay equipment would be effectively dead in less than a day, and the worst-case scenario first postulated by Commander Burke at their initial briefing would come to fruition. There would be no way to effectively communicate sensor and intelligence information gathered by the Federation outposts back to Starfleet. The entire region of space would be open to exploitation, not only by the Romulans but also by anyone with the resources to take advantage of the situation.

  “Our only alternative is to create a substitute power source that can meet the outpost’s requirements until a replacement reactor arrives,” Captain Okagawa said over the control center’s communications circuit. “Surely there’s something on the station that you can make use of?”

  “We’ve got the shuttlecraft we brought down from the Lovell,” Ensign Ghrex said. “Could its engines be used somehow?”

  Scott shook his head. “It can’t produce the amount of power we’d need.” Then a thought struck the engineer. “Mahmud, how many shuttles does the Lovell carry?”

  “Three,” al-Khaled replied, already smiling at the rest of Scott’s unspoken thought. “If we remove the engines from all of them, we could string them together and hook them right into the outpost’s power distribution network.”

  Scott wasn’t convinced, though. “The outpost’s power requirements would be more than even the engines from three shuttles could produce.” Considering the problem for a moment, he added, “Still, perhaps we can scrounge some additional power out of them.”

  His smile grow
ing wider at the unconventional idea taking shape before them, al-Khaled said, “Scrounge? Remember who you’re talking to, Scotty. The Corps of Engineers are masters of that particular art form.”

  Montgomery Scott had encountered more than a few unorthodox and rapidly improvised schemes designed to solve various problems he had faced as a Starfleet engineer. Therefore, it was easy for him to accept the idea of a fellow engineer adopting an unusual solution for an unusual challenge.

  But working with Lieutenant Mahmud al-Khaled and his team was something else entirely.

  Donning their environmental suits once more, they had put their irregular plan into motion, with al-Khaled ordering the two other shuttlecraft brought down from the Lovell. That accomplished, he and his team of engineers had expeditiously carried out the task of removing the engines from each of the three small ships. The assistance of the Mole and its tractor beam had made transporting the engine components to the outpost’s reactor chamber a simple operation. Now, with nearly six hours remaining before the station’s battery power was exhausted, all that was left was to reconfigure the engines’ power flow to be compatible with the station’s distribution network.