Star Trek Read Free

dubbed the EVA pod, was designed to operate in space. Which meant the sensors could accurately assess the molecular makeup of the densely packed, fibrous, organic material in which she was suspended, but the computer was not programmed with the vocabulary to give it a name.
    Whatever it was filled a basin over a kilometer in diameter with a mean depth of two hundred and thirty meters. Which meant if the peat beneath her caught fire she could conceivably sink another one hundred and ninety meters.
    Pattie had thought the peat basin was a dry lake bed coming in. Not that she’d had a good look at it. She’d just had a momentary impression of a clearing in the forest that looked softer than the volcanic mountains she was streaking toward.
    Whatever it was had looked like her best chance for survival. She’d rotated the pod, retrofiring thrusters never meant to combat a gravity well, in a desperate attempt to bring herself down before mashing into the rock face.
    She’d succeeded, plowing stern first into what she expected to be—comparatively—soft ground. Only instead of gouging a trench along its surface, the EVA pod had plunged underground at a shallow angle. The shuddering stop had been nothing like the savage bounce and tumble she’d been braced for, but it was still the roughest landing she had ever walked away from.
    Or would walk away from if she could figure out a way to get out of here.
    The escape hatch was on the side, pressed firmly against a solid wall of presumed peat. If the hatch had opened inward instead of out, she might conceivably have dug her way through the fibrous vegetable matter to the tunnel proper. Though it would be tough going with nothing approximating a shovel available.
    Actually, she had no tools available. There had been several attached to the outside of the EVA pod. Though they were designed for satellite repair, several of them could be adapted for digging. If they were still out there after her rough descent. And if Waldo Egg still had its arms.
    At the moment her escape depended on either rotating the pod so its hatch faced the tunnel or making a hole in the transparent aluminum viewport big enough for her to crawl through.
    Pattie opened the emergency repair locker, extracting all of its contents and arraying them as best she could on the deck of the pod. There were a half-dozen spare isolinear chips, opti-cables of various refractions and lengths, a universal spanner, a first-aid kit appropriate for a variety of soft-bodied races, and a selection of hull patches. After a moment she removed her combadge and Klingon engineering dagger and added them to the collection.
    At first glance the collection of mismatched items did not look to Pattie like the tools she needed to break out of the buried EVA pod. However, being part of the S.C.E. meant learning to think outside the box, to see solutions that weren’t obvious at first glance.
    Pattie rearranged the materials, grouping them by function, and considered how she could combine their applications. In several minutes of intense thought, she brought all of her structural engineering knowledge, along with a few tricks from the other disciplines she’d picked up along the way, to bear on the problem. At last she realized she was right.
    These were not the tools she needed to break out of a buried EVA pod.
    She looked again at the frame of the viewport. Perhaps….
    The tunnel was collapsing.
    Not rapidly, and not by much, but there was a definite sway to the roofline. As she watched, a clump of material fell.
    â€œSo the choices are sit in the dark for a week until the da Vinci comes looking for us or try rotating with the attitude thrusters,” she said. “Which might ignite the peat and maybe burn a hole down another hundred and ninety meters. Then I could sit there in the dark for a week.”
    There was no water or food aboard the pod; she’d only intended a three-hour duty tour, but