Chapter 4
By the time Tom returned from the three-hour nap that Shelby had insisted upon, he was grateful for the time. There was not any way that he would be able to navigate the area without the rest he had just had. In an emergency he knew he could have done it but since no one was in danger at the moment he could not see why he should have to push himself to try to do this. Shelby had been right about something else too. Meyran had stayed over, leaving only when Tom had returned to the bridge. She had as detailed a report as anyone could have hoped for, including the most reliable bandwidths for searching for the phase pockets as she named them. The girl had been wrong on one count. The phase shift was different from what she had studied before now. The outward effects were similar enough that Tom figured that anyone in that field would have made a similar assumption. Unfortunately, while keeping Tom from having to answer more questions from the Lieutenant, the actual phenomenon was much more dangerous than anything Rhiannon had predicted in her models. She had been conservative in her estimates on the length of time she expected until it became too unstable to even try to stay in the area. She was sure there would be a major dimensional breach, large enough for entire armadas to come through. She also maintained a staunch hope that it could be stopped. The way she had explained it seemed simple enough, find the epicenter and produce an inverse harmonic to the phase shift in the area. She claimed it should cause everything to revert to normal. At least it had sounded simple until she began to explain what they had to do to actually put the theory into practice. Tom did not pretend to understand much of it. Physics was never a strong suit and it had been way too many years since the Academy. The Captain hadn't had much better of an understanding, although Gleu (the Selevian science head) seemed to get most of what she was talking about. This seemed to please Meyran to no end and she continued to talk avidly to the elf well past when she gave the report.
"Everything is as good as it gets. Ready for some fancy flying Number Two?" Aside from name and rank Eppy had been trying to find a way to address the man. Generally the second officer was XO and the First was Number One. In this case Kat always preferred XO. A couple of years ago she had taken to using Number Two. It seemed to work out well. It was also a sign that she was coming to believe that Tom was actually a good officer, a lot like Will, but then again Will was an excellent officer himself. The two of them didn't get along too well most of the time but that did not mean that he was a bad officer, just different. At this moment Tom was behaving exactly like Will would, cocky and very sure of himself. With Will it usually masked his worry and more than ninety percent of the time the cockiness was merited. Now Eppy just had to figure out where on Tom the cockiness was just that.
"Let's do it." He stepped to the conn. "You're relieved." The ensign at the console simply nodded and stood. Tom looked confident when he took the seat of the conn. He knew he could do this, but everyone seemed to forget the fact that he had never flown a Galaxy-class ship before this moment. He had however gotten his sea legs back on a very similar ship, a Sovereign-class. The two ships were similar enough that he had no problem knowing exactly what did what. As a matter of fact the controls were still almost identical to the ones he had flown back in the day of being a pilot full time. What he would still need to do was get used to this ship's response times, which he would have to do even from one ship to another of the same class. He just wished he had had the opportunity to do it before now.
Eight hours. Tom had been at this for over eight hours now. Ever so slowly moving toward his goal. After all of this time they had barely covered a quarter of the distance. Compounding that was the fact that he had only had three hours of sleep and it explained the reason he was rather testy. This was not a good thing when one took into consideration that his Captain had a reputation for being rather testy and snappy herself. After inching their way through the anomaly both Riker and Shelby had gotten to the point that they were snapping at each other every few minutes. The up side at the moment was they had taken to trying to up one another with the jibes. Most of the crew ignored them, or at least tried to. Currently it had been quiet for the last few minutes.
"Ok Number Two, do you think we are going to get through this?" After twelve hours on the bridge Shelby had become quite irritable. She had a relatively short temper to begin with and with al the tension of trying to fly through what amounted to a mind field with the mines being this small, she kept finding herself wanting to scream. Over the past three or four hours her sentences had gotten shorter, except when it came to her and Tom's banter. They had actually managed to start to get along well enough that she had been going back and forth with him for the entire time he was piloting. They weren't truly insults but more of the lines of two friends having a gripe session with one another.
Now t was Tom's turn to make a wise crack. "Give me about two or three days maybe. Either that you give the word and I punch through this." It wasn't much in the way of wiseass comments but he was getting too tired to care at this point.
"Could we?"
"Meyran would be better to ask. She has had her head buried in the databases and sensor readings since she came back on duty and the entire shift before that."
"Lieutenant," Shelby turned to the over active woman at the sciences, "What do you think? Do we keep dancing or do we sprint for home?"
"If we had the time I would say slow and easy does it. Unfortunately we don't have that luxury. We need to get through this before all the surrounding pockets become unstable enough to begin to form dimensional rifts. We can't just 'tiptoe through the tulips' any more. We have to get through this in the next five or six hours or the rifts closest to us to will begin to shift to another dimension. That will play havoc on us." Granted she had not gone into exactly what would happen. The entire definition would take over an hour and she doubted that the Captain or Commander would understand more than half of it.
"Just what kind of havoc are we talking about Meyran?" Shelby played at a stray lock of her hair, a sure sign that she was getting to the end of what she could tolerate for the moment.
"If we maneuvered only through the youngest of the pockets, we might just blow a few relays. The warp and computer cores are shielded enough to withstand the shift. But if we went through one of the oldest, ones where we were more than fifteen per cent out of phase, all bets are off. The faster we went through the less likely we would be affected by them. If you were going to do this, I would recommend doing it at warp. We would accelerate some of the aging, but right now the pockets don't extend far enough into subspace to cause too much trouble. But I would have engineering ready for just about anything when we did try it." One thing Meyran was glad for, once the Captain had given her the lead on this project she never doubted her abilities. She had been accepting of her opinions as much as any of her senior officers, and in this case she even seemed to accept that her second officer seemed to differ to her at the moment. The silent accolade made her smile slightly.
"You heard the woman. She thinks flying by the seat of your pants is the best thing to do. Do you think you could manage a warp jump, in system and put us into orbit?" Shelby hoped the man's innate cockiness would prevail, as well as is truly incredible talents.
"I might be tired, but give me a minute or two to run the numbers and I can do it. If it was just the hotshot maneuver every academy cadet tries it would already be done, but I have got to skirt around the worst of the trouble spots."
"Do it." Shelby leaned back into her chair, and tried to show patience.
"Sir, incoming message. For you and Commander Riker. It's marked urgent, but not classified in any way. It's from the Titan." Meyran piped up from where she had just finished sending Riker the best possible course to plot.
"Tom, belay your maneuver. I want to see this first. I have a feeling we need to." Eppy did not have her husband's near supernatural danger sense, but all the years around him had given her one that operated in a similar fashion. This was not going to be good. "On screen."
Both Tom and Eppy expected to see Tom's twin fill the screen. Instead what they say was the Titan's First Officer, a woman that Eppy had only met once, and that was when she had picked up Tom a little over a week ago. "Captain Shelby, I know this is going to sound strange but a situation has come to our attention which concerns both your ship and the Excalibur.
"Earlier this evening, both Captain Riker and Counselor Troi fell into what could only be described as a dreaming fugue state. Both are recovering, although the Captain suffered physiological damage from the state that produced severe burns. Again I assure you they will recover." Tom paled a little; Shelby noticed the change in the man.
"Here is where we get strange. While it is well known that the Counselor is telepathic, it is lesser known that the Captain and both are as well. With the aide of their daughter, who is also a telepath, I was able to see into their dream and help our Chief Medical Officer to bring them out of the state. Both are still unconscious but are out of any danger.
"What I learned from the rapport s why I contacted you. From what we have ascertained both of your ships are in jeopardy. If we have interpreted the language correctly, and we are waiting for the Captain and Counselor to wake to learn more, is that you will fall under attack by something or someone who can be represented by a phoenix the size of a starship, or larger. If you have any clues as to what that would mean please let us know if we can help from here.
"I know this seems a bit far fetched, but one thing I have learned over the years, it is to trust an experience a telepath has, especially Commander Troi. With four of our five telepaths having experienced this now, I figured it was time to do something about it. We are en route of your position, although it will take us six days to reach you. If you feel that it is necessary, contact Starfleet. There should be several vessels within reach. Personally I would rather not have to report this to Jellico. Will still has the footprints from the last time. Be careful. Titan out."
For a long moment there was silence on the bridge. Here was a respected officer telling them to watch out for a flaming bird to attack them, and on nothing more than a dream. For most officers in the fleet a message like this would cause the receiving Captain to call their reporting official and request a mental inquiry. Shelby on the other hand had been at this too long. Strange was such a part of her day that she couldn't even have shore leave anymore without having something out of the ordinary happen. Which was why her outburst seemed so out of character at first. "Is she sane? How could this be happening?" Great Bird of Thallon. The oft-used epithet of Sy Cwan, Mac's resident Thallonian, came to her mind.
"Captain, in the week that I was on board that ship I learned a lot. Not just what Starfleet had become in my absence, but about the ship's crew, especially her most senior officers. Counselor Troi apparently has more precognitive skill than I was ever aware of. Several times she has saved the Enterprise with her talents. On that alone I would give what Commander LeBeau says merit. She is also right that Captain Riker is telepathic. Something happened just after his first year on the Titan, I am not quite sure what. But it left him a full telepath. The Commander is also a telepath, although not as strong as Riker and Troi. Julianna is well o her way to being at least as strong as Will and just as empathic as Deanna." The mentioning of Julie left Riker even tenser than he had been. "I hope the baby is ok." He muttered, but wasn't addressing Eppy.
"Did you say something else Tom?"
"I'm sorry. Deanna is pregnant. LeBeau didn't mention how the baby was and I am a bit worried."
"I will ask when I send a return message. Now as for why I barked a moment ago, I was not truly questioning the Commander's sanity, I have spent too many years as Mac Calhoun's Number One and later as his wife to not take strange sources of information as valid. Her description of what was after us is what I was questioning. Back before the last Excalibur was blown up, as a matter of fact not too long after I signed on as Calhoun's First Officer, the planet of Thallon was destroyed by a hatching creature. The creature was an extremely large phoenix. We were the only Starfleet ship to witness it. She's right about not wanting to report this to anyone else if we can help it. My guess is the Titan is the closest ship anyway. Personally I don't want to talk to Jellico if I don't have to."
"Do you know Admiral Nechayev said pretty much the same thing when she gave me this assignment?"
"I can believe it." Shelby barely heard the remark from behind her.
"I have a bad feeling about this." Meyran muttered just loud enough for most of the crew to hear.
Tom winced at the phrase. She could not have know she had just used what he had learned was Tina's trouble barometer. Every time Tina LeBeau used those words the entire crew prepared for stormy weather. "Elizabeth," Tom used her first name, hoping to impress the sincerity of his worry, "Let's get this over with. I am ready whenever you give the word." He did not address Meyran's remark, but he knew she was bright enough to know that he was just as worried as she was.