And everything had changed. Despite the fact that her continued development was far from assured within the incubator, odds were good that she would survive. And Kim was going to do everything in his power to see that she had that chance. It didn’t matter that she was currently little more than a tiny mass of cells. In his mind, she was already snuggled in his lap as he read to her stories of Timmy and the Targ.
Of course, that wasn’t going to happen if he didn’t find a way to restore power to the incubator.
First things first.
“It’s going to be okay,” Kim said.
Nancy started to weep softly.
“Please, no,” she murmured. “I can’t…”
Bracing himself for the pain this time, Kim again placed his hands on the side of the bulkhead next to the door. He fumbled in the darkness until he found the panel he sought. Digging into its edges with numb fingers, he pried the panel from its housing and found the manual release lever. It took every ounce of determination at his disposal to wrap his hands around the lever and pull. His rational brain told him that he could not endure the pain of holding a bar-shaped block of ice any longer.
Fortunately for Kim, he was well beyond rational already.
With a groan, the lever began to move, and finally, the door. When enough space existed for him to pass his hands through it, Kim released the lever and attacked the door itself.
Strength born of desperation coursed through him. A gasp escaped Nancy’s lips and moments later she was beside him, tugging at the door with all her might.
Don’t let go, Harry thought.
Finally, enough space was created to allow Kim to step beyond it, inching sideways through the opening.
“Power cells,” Conlon cried out. “As many as you can find.”
“I’ll be right back,” Kim assured her. “Stay here.”
Emergency lights along the corridor were out—another terrible sign—but at the end of the hall, which opened into the Galen’s main medical bay, flickering orange and red motes beckoned.
As soon as Kim passed into the main bay, illuminated intermittently by a few panels that seemed to have a little life left in them and randomly distributed SIMs beacons, his estimation of his current predicament downgraded from bad to we’re all going to die, aren’t we?
The biobeds were filled and the area around them was standing room only for many in desperate need of medical attention. Harry didn’t remember how many organic crew members the Galen had, but it seemed likely that at least half of them were all occupying this relatively small space. Several of them were wrapped in silver emergency blankets but no one seemed to be tending to their injuries.
Where is the Doctor?
He assumed he wasn’t the only person there who wanted an answer to that question, but like so many others, it would have to wait.
Weaving through the dazed and terrified officers, Kim made his way to the bay’s supply cabinets and jerked them open. The first two contained medical stocks. It was in a small cabinet near the floor that he discovered a stack of emergency power cells.
Grabbing a handful, along with a couple of SIMs beacons, he rushed back to the private room he had just escaped. Nancy was still there, her hands hovering over the incubator as if she were willing it to remain functional for just a few more minutes.
“I got them,” Kim said. “The power cells, I mean.”
“Hurry,” Conlon pleaded.
Hands trembling, Kim managed to find the power input and attach the first emergency cell as Conlon activated the small handheld lights and positioned them to cast their illumination on his work area. The incubator’s panel responded almost instantly to the new power source, moving out of the red into a yellow status.
“Power partially restored,” Kim said.
“Yeah, but it’s not going to last more than a few hours,” Conlon reminded him.
“Can you string these together to extend the time?” Kim asked as he passed her the other six cells he had acquired.
“Yes, yes,” Conlon said, and went to work immediately opening their control interfaces and exposing their internal leads.
“What happened?” Kim finally thought to ask.
Conlon looked at him, her face racked with fear.
“I have no idea,” she replied.
Lieutenant Reginald Barclay refused to panic, not that there weren’t ample reasons.
His ears were ringing and he was pretty sure that the liquid substance he was wiping from his right eye every few minutes was blood, but none of that mattered. Twenty-seven minutes earlier, the Galen had suffered a catastrophic loss of power, and while he fervently hoped that he was only moments away from at least a partial emergency reset that would bring some percentage of the medical bay’s systems back online, every second that passed fed his fear that even if he succeeded, this might be the least of the problems now before him.
The current power problem would have been significantly more challenging had Barclay not been one of the engineers responsible for designing the Galen and her unique holographic systems.
Normally, a starship’s fusion reactors provided emergency power, but even in the event of their destruction, discrete emergency backups existed to provide short-term energy supplies. The Galen had more of those than most starships, multiple redundant cells attached to the main grid to supplement the ship’s unusual holographic needs. Fully a third of the ship’s crew complement was holographic and had they been powered as most holodecks were, by their own separate grid, the loss of that grid would have been disastrous. It had been Barclay’s notion to desegregate Galen’s hologrid, linking it to Galen’s main power supplies, a design innovation many, including Lewis Zimmerman, had fought against. But Barclay had held his ground and if he succeeded now in figuring out why the ship’s systems were not accessing the emergency power cells, his foresight was going to be responsible for saving this terrible day. Or at least
