“Unless the Betazoid was a Changeling as well.”
Troi’s nod showed she conceded the point.
A turbolift door opened and Worf emerged, instantly making the bridge feel smaller.
Picard was not the only one who stared at Worf as he strode to the chair that had once been Will Riker’s. Picard’s new first officer wore the full uniform of a Klingon battle-group commander, and his metal-clad boots rang out as he crossed the deck.
Worf returned Picard’s stare. “I was relaxing. On the holodeck. Your summons did say, ‘At once.’”
Picard nodded. “The uniform suits you.” He gestured to the back of the bridge. “Let’s adjourn to the ready room.” He included Troi in his invitation. “Counselor, I would very much appreciate your input.”
“Certainly, sir.”
But before any of the officers had reached the ready room door, Lieutenant Commander Kadohata changed their plans.
“Captain-the subspace interference around Earth is intensifying.”
Picard turned back to the bridge. “Can you tell what’s causing it?”
Kadohata’s hands expertly played over her console as she brought up the science sensor readings being used by department heads throughout the ship.
“Multiple subspace distortions…” She looked back at her captain. “Sir, the energy signatures are consistent with warp-core explosions.”
Picard felt his stomach tighten. “Raise Command again.”
The viewscreen showed stars. Only stars.
“Command is not responding,” Kadohata said.
“Find any channel,” Picard ordered. “Focus on Jupiter, any signal.”
At last the stars disappeared, replaced by a visual sensor image.
Picard focused his attention on the image, saw that it originated from a navigational beacon near Jupiter Station, one of the largest research platforms in the system. The station supported a permanent population of almost ten thousand.
In the upper right quadrant of the viewscreen, an oasis of lights was clearly visible against the deep black of Jupiter’s nightside clouds. The station itself spread out like a snowflake with each branch five kilometers long.
Many of the lights were moving away from the main structure, as if the snowflake were breaking apart at the edges.
“What’s happening?” Troi asked.
Worf had the answer. “The ships docked to the station… they’re withdrawing.”
“There shouldn’t be so many doing it at the same time,” Kadohata said. “Regulations prohibit– ” She gasped.
One of the small points of light moving from the station suddenly flared like a nova.
Then another.
“Their warp cores…” Picard said, barely believing the disaster unfolding before him.
The time for reasoned, thoughtful consideration of options had passed. Picard issued his new orders crisply.
“Conn, set a course for Jupiter Station. Mister Leybenzon, release the Titan from the tractor beams.” Picard looked to the hidden com system in the bridge’s overhead. “Picard to engineering.”
“La Forge here, Captain.”
“Geordi, I want maximum warp right now. Consider this a priority emergency.”
The veteran engineer knew better than to ask questions. Within seconds, Picard could feel the deep thrum of his ship’s warp coil as it ramped up to maximum output. The Enterprise waited on his command, and he gave it.
“Engage.”
10
JUPITER
STARDATE 58562.5
It took twenty-three minutes for the Enterprise to arrive in orbit of Jupiter. In that same time, thousands died.
Even those ships that remained intact offered little in the way of protection for their crew and passengers. As close to Jupiter as the major research platforms were, the planet’s radiation field was lethal within minutes of exposure. When the ships lost their warp cores, they invariably lost their shields until auxiliary generators or batteries could come online. That delay was fatal.
The Enterprise swept her sensors over ship after ship tumbling in erratic orbits. While many had survived- their warp cores safely ejected before disaster struck-their shields had clearly faltered. Even now, though shields had recovered and were once again working perfectly, on dozens of vessels they protected only corpses.
Other ships were prowling the primary orbital planes-impulse-powered transports for the most part, spared from whatever phenomenon wreaked such havoc on warp technology.
One hour after the wave of core detonations had devastated the Jupiter installations, the Enterprise was the de facto command focus of the rescue efforts. Lieutenant Leybenzon and a relief crew coordinated the efforts of more than eighty smaller vessels from the Enterprise’s battle bridge-in Picard’s estimation, a much worthier use of that particular backup facility than the one for which it was intended.
But on the main bridge, it was Picard who spearheaded the most critical phase of the recovery operations- saving Jupiter Station itself.
The vast orbital platform had taken damage when docked ships had been destroyed. Though its shields were holding, the station’s thrusters were inoperative, and almost at once it had begun its slow fall to the bottomless clouds of the system’s largest planet.
There were too many crew and workers and visitors on board the falling station to be beamed off or evacuated by shuttle or escape pod. The only way to save the lives of almost ten thousand was to save the station, though not even the Enterprise’s tractor beams could move such a mass.
But that didn’t stop Picard from trying.
He had La Forge operate the tractor beams from engineering, using technical readouts of the station’s superstructure to find those points that could take the strain of a beam’s contact. With no time to describe the problem to the ship’s computers, La Forge worked mostly by intuition, applying a beam here, a beam there, grabbing hold at an anchor point just long enough for some of the station’s momentum to bleed back over the beam to be absorbed and compensated for by the Enterprise.
Picard could hear his ship creak, feel it tremble as its structural-integrity field was taxed to its limit. But gradually, over the course of another hour, Jupiter Station did cease its slow roll and errant tumble. It was still falling toward Jupiter in a decaying orbit, but it was stable again.
For what Picard planned to do next, that stability was essential.
It was a maneuver only a student of history could conceive of-something that stretched back to the dawn of the space age, when nations applied all their resources and humans risked their lives just to reach low Earth orbit.
Picard himself took the conn for what had to be done now. He could not, would not, shift the burden of the risky attempt to any of his crew.
Gracefully, Picard’s ship banked above the clouds of Jupiter, to settle into an orbit only tens of meters lower than the station. Then, at a velocity of no more than a few meters per minute, the Enterprise rose, coming up beneath the station until the ship’s main hull was directly beneath the station’s center of mass.
Worf handled the shield settings for the maneuver, aware that they had to be tuned to provide full protection from radiation and any fast-moving orbital debris, yet still allow low-velocity objects to pass and make contact with the ship’s hull.
